53,419 research outputs found
Design Parameters in Multimodal Games for Rehabilitation
Published under the Liebert "Open Option"Objectives: The repetitive and sometimes mundane nature of conventional rehabilitation therapy provides an ideal opportunity for development of interactive and challenging therapeutic games that have the potential to engage and motivate the players. Certain game design parameters that may encourage patients to actively participate by making the games more enjoyable have been identified. In this article, we describe a formative study in which we designed and evaluated some of these parameters with healthy subjects. Materials and Methods: The ‘‘operant conditioning’’ and ‘‘scoring’’ design parameters were incorporated in a remake of a classic labyrinth game, ‘‘Marble Maze.’’ A group of participants (n = 37) played the game twice: Once in the control condition without both modalities and then with either one of the parameters or with both. Measures of game duration and number of fails in the game were recorded along with survey questionnaires to measure player perceptions of intrinsic motivation on the game. Results: Longer playtimes, higher levels of interest/enjoyment, and effort to play the game were recorded with the introduction of these parameters. Conclusions: This study provides an understanding on how game design parameters can be used to motivate and encourage people to play longer. With these positive results, future aims are to test the parameters with stroke patients, providing much clearer insight as to what influences these parameters have on patients un- dergoing therapy. The ultimate goal is to utilize game design in order to maintain longer therapeutic interaction between a patient and his or her therapy medium.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
NLTE analysis of Sr lines in spectra of late-type stars with new R-matrix atomic data
We investigate statistical equilibrium of neutral and singly-ionized
strontium in late-type stellar atmospheres. Particular attention is given to
the completeness of the model atom, which includes new energy levels,
transition probabilities, photoionization and electron-impact excitation
cross-sections computed with the R-matrix method. The NLTE model is applied to
the analysis of Sr I and Sr II lines in the spectra of the Sun, Procyon,
Arcturus, and HD 122563, showing a significant improvement in the ionization
balance compared to LTE line formation calculations, which predict abundance
discrepancies of up to 0.5 dex. The solar Sr abundance is log A = 2.93 \pm 0.04
dex, in agreement with the meteorites. A grid of NLTE abundance corrections for
Sr I and Sr II lines covering a large range of stellar parameters is presented.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Astrophysic
Energy Dependence of Breakup Cross Sections of Halo Nucleus 8B and Effective Interactions
We study the energy dependence of the cross sections for nucleon removal of
8B projectiles. It is shown that the Glauber model calculations with
nucleon-nucleon t-matrix reproduce well the energy dependence of the breakup
cross sections of 8B. A DWBA model for the breakup cross section is also
proposed and results are compared with those of the Glauber model. We show that
to obtain an agreement between the DWBA calculations, the Glauber formalism,
and the experimental data, it is necessary to modify the energy behavior of the
effective interaction. In particular, the breakup potential has a quite
different energy dependence than the strong absorption potential.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
Investigation of Polymer–Plasticizer Blends as SH-SAW Sensor Coatings for Detection of Benzene in Water with High Sensitivity and Long-Term Stability
We report the first-ever direct detection of benzene in water at concentrations below 100 ppb (parts per billion) using acoustic wave (specifically, shear-horizontal surface acoustic wave, SH-SAW) sensors with plasticized polymer coatings. Two polymers and two plasticizers were studied as materials for sensor coatings. For each polymer–plasticizer combination, the influence of the mixing ratio of the blend on the sensitivity to benzene was measured and compared to commercially available polymers that were used for BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene) detection in previous work. After optimizing the coating parameters, the highest sensitivity and lowest detection limit for benzene were found for a 1.25 μm thick sensor coating of 17.5%-by-weight diisooctyl azelate-polystyrene on the tested acoustic wave device. The calculated detection limit was 45 ppb, with actual sensor responses to concentrations down to 65 ppb measured directly. Among the sensor coatings that showed good sensitivity to benzene, the best long-term stability was found for a 1.0 μm thick coating of 23% diisononyl cyclohexane-1,2-dicarboxylate-polystyrene, which was studied here because it is known to show no detectable leaching in water. The present work demonstrates that, by varying type of plasticizer, mixing ratio, and coating thickness, the mechanical and chemical properties of the coatings can be conveniently tailored to maximize analyte sorption and partial chemical selectivity for a given class of analytes as well as to minimize acoustic-wave attenuation in contact with an aqueous phase at the operating frequency of the sensor device
The instantaneous shear modulus in the shoving model
We point out that the instantaneous shear modulus of the shoving model for
the non-Arrhenius temperature dependence of viscous liquids' relaxation time is
the experimentally accessible high-frequency plateau modulus, not the idealized
instantaneous affine shear modulus that cannot be measured. Data for a large
selection of metallic glasses are compared to three different versions of the
shoving model. The original shear-modulus based version shows a slight
correlation to the Poisson ratio, which is eliminated by the energy-landscape
formulation of the model in which the bulk modulus plays a minor role
Optimized Effective Potentials in Finite Basis Sets
The finite basis optimized effective potential (OEP) method within density
functional theory is examined as an ill-posed problem. It is shown that the
generation of nonphysical potentials is a controllable manifestation of the use
of unbalanced, and thus unsuitable, basis sets. A modified functional
incorporating a regularizing smoothness measure of the OEP is introduced. This
provides a condition on balanced basis sets for the potential, as well as a
method to determine the most appropriate OEP potential and energy from
calculations performed with any finite basis set.Comment: 23 pages, 28 figure
A functional approach to the Van der Waals interaction
Based on a microscopic model, we use a functional integral approach to
evaluate the quantum interaction energy between two neutral atoms. Each atom is
coupled to the electromagnetic (EM) field via a dipole term, generated by an
electron bound to the nucleus via a harmonic potential. We show that the
resulting expression for the energy becomes the Van der Waals interaction
energy at the first non-trivial order in an expansion in powers of the fine
structure constant, encompassing both the long and short distance behaviours.
We also explore the opposite, strong-coupling limit, which yields a result for
the interaction energy as well as a threshold for the existence of a vacuum
decay probability, manifested here as an imaginary part for the effective
action.
In the weak-coupling limit, we also study the effect of using a general
central potential for the internal structure of the atoms.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, LaTe
Coarse-graining diblock copolymer solutions: a macromolecular version of the Widom-Rowlinson model
We propose a systematic coarse-grained representation of block copolymers,
whereby each block is reduced to a single ``soft blob'' and effective intra- as
well as intermolecular interactions act between centres of mass of the blocks.
The coarse-graining approach is applied to simple athermal lattice models of
symmetric AB diblock copolymers, in particular to a Widom-Rowlinson-like model
where blocks of the same species behave as ideal polymers (i.e. freely
interpenetrate), while blocks of opposite species are mutually avoiding walks.
This incompatibility drives microphase separation for copolymer solutions in
the semi-dilute regime. An appropriate, consistent inversion procedure is used
to extract effective inter- and intramolecular potentials from Monte Carlo
results for the pair distribution functions of the block centres of mass in the
infinite dilution limit.Comment: To be published in mol.phys(2005
A universal velocity distribution of relaxed collisionless structures
Several general trends have been identified for equilibrated,
self-gravitating collisionless systems, such as density or anisotropy profiles.
These are integrated quantities which naturally depend on the underlying
velocity distribution function (VDF) of the system. We study this VDF through a
set of numerical simulations, which allow us to extract both the radial and the
tangential VDF. We find that the shape of the VDF is universal, in the sense
that it depends only on two things namely the dispersion (radial or tangential)
and the local slope of the density. Both the radial and the tangential VDF's
are universal for a collection of simulations, including controlled collisions
with very different initial conditions, radial infall simulation, and
structures formed in cosmological simulations.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; oversimplified analysis corrected; changed
abstract and conclusions; significantly extended discussio
Burst avalanches in solvable models of fibrous materials
We review limiting models for fracture in bundles of fibers, with
statistically distributed thresholds for breakdown of individual fibers. During
the breakdown process, avalanches consisting of simultaneous rupture of several
fibers occur, and the distribution of the magnitude of
such avalanches is the central characteristics in our analysis. For a bundle of
parallel fibers two limiting models of load sharing are studied and contrasted:
the global model in which the load carried by a bursting fiber is equally
distributed among the surviving members, and the local model in which the
nearest surviving neighbors take up the load. For the global model we
investigate in particular the conditions on the threshold distribution which
would lead to anomalous behavior, i.e. deviations from the asymptotics
, known to be the generic behavior. For the local
model no universal power-law asymptotics exists, but we show for a particular
threshold distribution how the avalanche distribution can nevertheless be
explicitly calculated in the large-bundle limit.Comment: 28 pages, RevTeX, 3 Postscript figure
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