1,938 research outputs found
Functional agro biodiversity in Dutch arable farming: results of a three year pilot
A pilot on 400 ha of Dutch arable farms during 2004-2007 perennial grassy field margins and functional annual flower strips were created on potato and wheat fields. Monitoring information on pests and natural enemies was directly communicated to the farmers to support pest management decisions. Due to the increasing numbers of natural enemies and the gradually reducing peak densities of aphids, the farmers could refrain from insecticide applications against aphids in these crops. The pilot has yielded great public awareness on possibilities for functional agro biodiversity in arable crops
Crew Rostering for the High Speed Train
At the time of writing we entered the final stage of implementing the crew rostering system Harmony CDR to facilitate the planning of catering crews on board of the Thalys, the High Speed Train connecting Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Harmony CDR optimally supports the creation of crew rosters in two ways. Firstly, Harmony CDR contains a powerful algorithm to automatically generate a set of rosters, which is especially developed for this specific situation. As the user has some control over the objectives of the algorithm, several scenarios can be studied before a set of rosters is adopted. An important feature of the automatic roster generator is that it respects requirements, directives, and requests stemming from legal, union, and/or company regulations and/or from individual crew. Secondly, Harmony CDR provides user-interface data manipulation at various levels of detail. The user interface enables the planner to easily obtain many different views on the planning data and to manipulate the planning manually. So again, the planner gets optimal support from the system while he or she is still in control. Also, violating a requirement, directive, or request is detected and displayed, but can be accepted by the planner. In this paper we describe the crew rostering problem for the catering crews of the High Speed Train and the Harmony CDR solution in more detail.decision support systems;railways;crew rostering
Crew Rostering for the High Speed Train
At the time of writing we entered the final stage of implementing the crew rostering system Harmony CDR to facilitate the planning of catering crews on board of the Thalys, the High Speed Train connecting Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Harmony CDR optimally supports the creation of crew rosters in two ways. Firstly, Harmony CDR contains a powerful algorithm to automatically generate a set of rosters, which is especially developed for this specific situation. As the user has some control over the objectives of the algorithm, several scenarios can be studied before a set of rosters is adopted. An important feature of the automatic roster generator is that it respects requirements, directives, and requests stemming from legal, union, and/or company regulations and/or from individual crew. Secondly, Harmony CDR provides user-interface data manipulation at various levels of detail. The user interface enables the planner to easily obtain many different views on the planning data and to manipulate the planning manually. So again, the planner gets optimal support from the system while he or she is still in control. Also, violating a requirement, directive, or request is detected and displayed, but can be accepted by the planner. In this paper we describe the crew rostering problem for the catering crews of the High Speed Train and the Harmony CDR solution in more detail
Hyperparameter Importance Across Datasets
With the advent of automated machine learning, automated hyperparameter
optimization methods are by now routinely used in data mining. However, this
progress is not yet matched by equal progress on automatic analyses that yield
information beyond performance-optimizing hyperparameter settings. In this
work, we aim to answer the following two questions: Given an algorithm, what
are generally its most important hyperparameters, and what are typically good
values for these? We present methodology and a framework to answer these
questions based on meta-learning across many datasets. We apply this
methodology using the experimental meta-data available on OpenML to determine
the most important hyperparameters of support vector machines, random forests
and Adaboost, and to infer priors for all their hyperparameters. The results,
obtained fully automatically, provide a quantitative basis to focus efforts in
both manual algorithm design and in automated hyperparameter optimization. The
conducted experiments confirm that the hyperparameters selected by the proposed
method are indeed the most important ones and that the obtained priors also
lead to statistically significant improvements in hyperparameter optimization.Comment: \c{opyright} 2018. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
Publication rights licensed to ACM. This is the author's version of the work.
It is posted here for your personal use, not for redistribution. The
definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 24th ACM
SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Minin
Effect of exercise after a deep venous thrombosis:A systematic review
Post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS) is a common complication after deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and has a major impact on physical symptoms, quality of life (QoL) and economic costs. Relatively simple lifestyle interventions as physical exercise might reduce PTS severity and increase QoL. To evaluate the direct and long-term effects of physical activity in patients with an acute or previous DVT. We conducted a systematic review through an additional search from 2007 up to March 2022, to complement the comprehensive systematic review of Kahn et al. Articles evaluating the effect of exercise after a DVT including symptoms, QoL and the incidence and severity of PTS, were included. Quality of the studies was assessed using a GRADE-like checklist and results were reported according to the PRISMA Statement. Ten studies were included, seven randomized controlled trials and three cohort studies. We identified three types of physical activity based on timing and duration; (1) early mobilisation in the acute phase of the DVT; (2) short duration exercise 1 year after DVT and (3) prolonged exercise during follow-up after a previous DVT. Early mobilisation showed improvement in QoL and pain reduction and after 2 years it resulted in a significant reduction of PTS severity. Prolonged supervised exercise resulted in improvement of QoL. In addition, positive effects on symptoms of venous insufficiency and muscle functions were observed. None of the included studies reported an increased risk of PTS or worsening of symptoms due to physical activity. Physical exercise after a DVT is safe, improves QoL, reduces pain and decreases PTS severity. Lifestyle intervention such as guided individualized training programs can be a useful supplementary therapy for patients after a DVT or for PTS patients. Optimal training programs may be identified by further studies that improve patient-oriented outcomes for both adults and children after a DVT.</p
UK childrenâs sleep and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic
\ua9 2022, The Author(s).Background: Sleep and mental wellbeing are intimately linked. This relationship is particularly important to understand as it emerges over childhood. Here we take the opportunity that the COVID-19 pandemic, and resulting lockdown in the UK, presented to study sleep-related behaviour and anxiety in school-aged children. Methods: Parents and children were asked to complete questionnaires towards the start of the UK lockdown in April-to-May of 2020, then again in August of that year (when many restrictions had been lifted). We explored childrenâs emotional responses to the pandemic and sleep patterns at both time points, from the perspectives of parents and children themselves. Results: Childrenâs bedtime anxiety increased at the start of the lockdown as compared to a typical week; however, by August, bedtime anxiety had ameliorated along with childrenâs COVID-19 related anxiety. Bedtime anxiety predicted how long it took children to fall asleep at night at both the start and the end of the lockdown. Bedtime and wake-up time shifted at the start of lockdown, but interestingly total sleep time was resilient (likely owing to an absence of early school start times) and was not predicted by child anxiety. Conclusions: These findings further support calls for sleep quality (in particular, time taken to fall asleep) to be taken as a key indicator of mental health in children, particularly under usual circumstances when schools are open and sleep duration may be less resilient
What is said or how it is said makes a difference: role of the right fronto-parietal operculum in emotional prosody as revealed by repetitive TMS
Emotional signals in spoken language can be conveyed by semantic as well as prosodic cues. We investigated the role of the fronto-parietal operculum, a somatosensory area where the lips, tongue and jaw are represented, in the right hemisphere to detection of emotion in prosody vs. semantics. A total of 14 healthy volunteers participated in the present experiment, which involved transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in combination with frameless stereotaxy. As predicted, compared with sham stimulation, TMS over the right fronto-parietal operculum differentially affected the reaction times for detection of emotional prosody vs. emotional semantics, showing that there is a dissociation at a neuroanatomical level. Detection of withdrawal emotions (fear and sadness) in prosody was delayed significantly by TMS. No effects of TMS were observed for approach emotions (happiness and anger). We propose that the right fronto-parietal operculum is not globally involved in emotion evaluation, but sensitive to specific forms of emotional discrimination and emotion types
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