Annual report

Empresa coneguda per l'acrònim: IB

Movement Kinematics and their Relationship with Performance in Target Acquisition Task Using a Mouse

Movement kinematics has been shown useful for characterizing the process of aiming movement in target acquisition tasks. There are multiple kinematic measures reported in the literature, but their relationship to eventual performance is not well documented. To determine the relationship between various kinematic measures and movement performance, data were collected from participants aged 21 to 90 years with a wide range of psychomotor ability. When computed across age groups, time to peak velocity (TPV), time to peak acceleration (TPA), and time from peak velocity until the end of movement (TPVEND) were found to correlate with movement performance. However, the relationships diminished when the correlations were computed within age groups (except for TPVEND). More interestingly, despite the extensive report, certain kinematic measures such as peak velocity were found to be uncorrelated with performance. Thus, when performance is the focus, improvement should be made to reduce TPV, TPA, and TPVEND.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Optimizing the Performance of Streaming Numerical Kernels on the IBM Blue Gene/P PowerPC 450 Processor

Several emerging petascale architectures use energy-efficient processors with vectorized computational units and in-order thread processing. On these architectures the sustained performance of streaming numerical kernels, ubiquitous in the solution of partial differential equations, represents a challenge despite the regularity of memory access. Sophisticated optimization techniques are required to fully utilize the Central Processing Unit (CPU). We propose a new method for constructing streaming numerical kernels using a high-level assembly synthesis and optimization framework. We describe an implementation of this method in Python targeting the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer's PowerPC 450 core. This paper details the high-level design, construction, simulation, verification, and analysis of these kernels utilizing a subset of the CPU's instruction set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by implementing several three-dimensional stencil kernels over a variety of cached memory scenarios and analyzing the mechanically scheduled variants, including a 27-point stencil achieving a 1.7x speedup over the best previously published results

Morphology and motion of the interface between amorphous and crystalline cobalt disilicide

Amorphous CoSi{sub 2} films were prepared by codeposition onto electron transparent silicon nitride window substrates. The deposits were crystallized in situ without further processing. Two sets of experiments were done: thermal crystallization and thermal crystallization with additional ion irradiation treatments before or during crystallization. The interface between the amorphous and crystalline material is rough on the scale of 20 nm with some tendency to facet. Irradiation by 1.5 MeV Kr ions stimulates both nucleation and growth at room temperature. Prior ion irradiation followed by heating in the absence of an ion-flux also enhances the nucleation and growth kinetics relative to a purely thermal treatment. 14 refs., 4 figs

The nursing work environment and quality of care: A cross-sectional study using the Essentials of Magnetism II Scale in England

Aims and objectives. To explore the structure of the Essentials of Magnetism II (EOMII) scale using data from nurses working in England; and to describe the impact of different aspects of the nursing work environment on nurse assessed care quality (NACQ). Background. The EOMII Scale was developed in the United States to measure nursing work environments. It has been widely used in the United States and in a number of other countries, but has not yet been used in the United Kingdom. Design. Cross-sectional study. Methods. Registered nurses (n=247) providing direct patient care in two National Health Service hospitals in England completed the EOMII scale and a single-item measuring NACQ. Principal Components Analysis was used to assess the structure of the scale. Correlation and regression analyses were used to describe the relationships between factors and NACQ. Results. A solution with explanatory variance of 45.25% was identified. Forty items loaded on five factors, with satisfactory consistency: i) ward manager support; ii) working as a team; iii) concern for patients; iv) organisational autonomy; and v) constraints on nursing practice. While in univariate analyses each of the factors was significantly associated with NACQ, in multivariate analyses, the relationship between organisational autonomy and NACQ no longer reached significance. However, a multiple mediation model indicated that the effect of organisational autonomy on NACQ was mediated by nurse manager support, working as a team, and concern for patients but not constraints on nursing practice. Conclusions. Subscales of the EOMII identified in an English sample of nurses measured important aspects of the nursing work environment, each of which is related to NACQ. Relevance to clinical practice. The EOMII could be a very useful tool for measuring aspects of the nursing work environment in the English Trusts particularly in relation to the quality of care

CBESW: Sequence Alignment on the Playstation 3

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The exponential growth of available biological data has caused bioinformatics to be rapidly moving towards a data-intensive, computational science. As a result, the computational power needed by bioinformatics applications is growing exponentially as well. The recent emergence of accelerator technologies has made it possible to achieve an excellent improvement in execution time for many bioinformatics applications, compared to current general-purpose platforms. In this paper, we demonstrate how the PlayStation^®3, powered by the Cell Broadband Engine, can be used as a computational platform to accelerate the Smith-Waterman algorithm.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>For large datasets, our implementation on the PlayStation^®3 provides a significant improvement in running time compared to other implementations such as SSEARCH, Striped Smith-Waterman and CUDA. Our implementation achieves a peak performance of up to 3,646 MCUPS.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results from our experiments demonstrate that the PlayStation^®3 console can be used as an efficient low cost computational platform for high performance sequence alignment applications.</p

Perceived Stress, Thinking Style and Paranormal Belief

Paranormal beliefs often become stronger in times of stress. Such beliefs have also been found to vary in accordance with thinking style, whereby stronger beliefs are often observed in experiential thinkers. Little research, however, has explored the interaction between perceived stress and thinking style. 82 males and females aged 18 to 62 years (mean = 29.96 ± 12.53 years) completed measures of perceived stress, thinking style (rational and experiential) and paranormal belief. The results revealed stronger beliefs in experiential thinkers, compared with those with a rational thinking style. Perceived stress alone, was not a prominent predictor of belief but the combination of stress and thinking style, specifically high perceived stress with a rational thinking style, significantly predicted greater global paranormal belief, belief in superstition, traditional religious belief, and belief in psi. High perceived stress appeared to facilitate belief in rational thinkers as conversely, belief was lowest in rational thinkers under conditions of low-perceived stress. These findings suggest that stress may lower the propensity for rational thinking and consequently, encourage belief in scientifically unsubstantiated phenomena. This interaction may have implications for coping during stressful situations

Does organizational creativity always drive market performance?

This study develops and tests arguments that the relationship between organizational creativity and market performance is channeled through new product development (NPD) capability, and that the indirect effect of creativity on performance, via NPD capability, is conditional upon levels of environment dynamism and market responsiveness. The proposed relationships are tested on a sample of 221 small- andmedium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a major sub-Saharan Africanmarket. Findings from the study indicate that process and product NPD capabilities partially mediate the effect of novelty and usefulness elements of organizational creativity on market performance. The study further finds that while environment dynamism weakens the indirect effects of novelty and usefulness of organizational creativity, via process and product NPD capabilities, on market performance, the effects are strengthened under conditions of greater responsiveness to target market needs.A theoretical contribution from this study is the finding that how organizational creativity dimensions drive market performance is more complex than previously thought: it depends on whether or not organizational creativity components are first used to develop an organization's process and product innovation capabilities, and whether target market environment conditions are dynamic and an organization has ability to respond to target market demands