7,966 research outputs found
Evaluation of the Job Outcome Target Pilots: findings from the qualitative study
This report presents the results of a qualitative evaluation of the pilot of the Job Outcome Target (JOT) in seven Jobcentre Plus Districts, covering the first six months of the pilot's operation from January to July 2005. The research comprised interviews and focus groups with Jobcentre Plus managers and staff, employers, providers and customers in the JOT pilot districts in three stages, beginning one month before the start of the pilots. The evaluators' conclusion is that the qualitative evidence supports the view that JOT is a feasible alternative approach to the Job Entry Target (JET) as a system for performance measurement and management for Jobcentre Plus. Many of the desired behavioural changes among Jobcentre Plus staff were observed, including greater team working, an enhanced focus on the quality rather than quantity of interventions with customers and encouragement of appropriate customers to use self-help channels. In addition, JOT led almost immediately to the reduction or discontinuation of activities that were felt to be wasteful of resources under JET, notably the extensive use of the Adviser Discretion Fund and speculative submissions to ensure that job entries are validated. No evidence was found of negative impacts of JOT on customers, providers or employers, a finding corroborated by quantitative analysis. The report suggests that, should JOT be rolled out nationally, a programme of communication, training and support, building on the lessons of the pilot, would be necessary in order to ensure that behavioural changes associated with JOT develop into more deep-seated cultural change within Jobcentre Plus
Deep Projective 3D Semantic Segmentation
Semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds is a challenging problem with
numerous real-world applications. While deep learning has revolutionized the
field of image semantic segmentation, its impact on point cloud data has been
limited so far. Recent attempts, based on 3D deep learning approaches
(3D-CNNs), have achieved below-expected results. Such methods require
voxelizations of the underlying point cloud data, leading to decreased spatial
resolution and increased memory consumption. Additionally, 3D-CNNs greatly
suffer from the limited availability of annotated datasets.
In this paper, we propose an alternative framework that avoids the
limitations of 3D-CNNs. Instead of directly solving the problem in 3D, we first
project the point cloud onto a set of synthetic 2D-images. These images are
then used as input to a 2D-CNN, designed for semantic segmentation. Finally,
the obtained prediction scores are re-projected to the point cloud to obtain
the segmentation results. We further investigate the impact of multiple
modalities, such as color, depth and surface normals, in a multi-stream network
architecture. Experiments are performed on the recent Semantic3D dataset. Our
approach sets a new state-of-the-art by achieving a relative gain of 7.9 %,
compared to the previous best approach.Comment: Submitted to CAIP 201
Prevalence of Avian-Pathogenic Escherichia coli Strain O1 Genomic Islands among Extraintestinal and Commensal E. coli Isolates
Escherichia coli strains that cause disease outside the intestine are known as extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) and include pathogens of humans and animals. Previously, the genome of avian-pathogenic E. coli (APEC) O1:K1:H7 strain O1, from ST95, was sequenced and compared to those of several other E. coli strains, identifying 43 genomic islands. Here, the genomic islands of APEC O1 were compared to those of other sequenced E. coli strains, and the distribution of 81 genes belonging to 12 APEC O1 genomic islands among 828 human and avian ExPEC and commensal E. coli isolates was determined. Multiple islands were highly prevalent among isolates belonging to the O1 and O18 serogroups within phylogenetic group B2, which are implicated in human neonatal meningitis. Because of the extensive genomic similarities between APEC O1 and other human ExPEC strains belonging to the ST95 phylogenetic lineage, its ability to cause disease in a rat model of sepsis and meningitis was assessed. Unlike other ST95 lineage strains, APEC O1 was unable to cause bacteremia or meningitis in the neonatal rat model and was significantly less virulent than uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) CFT073 in a mouse sepsis model, despite carrying multiple neonatal meningitis E. coli (NMEC) virulence factors and belonging to the ST95 phylogenetic lineage. These results suggest that host adaptation or genome modifications have occurred either in APEC O1 or in highly virulent ExPEC isolates, resulting in differences in pathogenicity. Overall, the genomic islands examined provide targets for further discrimination of the different ExPEC subpathotypes, serogroups, phylogenetic types, and sequence types
The use of metabonomics to uncover differences between the small molecule profiles of eggs from cage and barn housing systems
Metabonomic techniques have been used to observe differences in the small molecule profiles of chicken eggs, to work towards the detection, and thus prevention, of fraud regarding the misrepresentation of egg farming systems. High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Quadrupole-Time-of-Flight-Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-Q-ToF-MS) was used to obtain profiles of the small molecules found in the yolks of eggs that were laid by hens in enriched cage systems, and in barn systems. Statistical analysis of these small molecule profiles, including the use of XCMS Online and multivariate statistics, was able to uncover differences between the yolks of cage and barn eggs. Several unidentified compounds were found to be present in significantly different abundances between cage and barn egg yolks and one of these compounds was tentatively identified, through the use of METLIN, as 1,2-dipalmitoyl-glycero-3-phosphocholine
Aspectos que se deben considerar cuando se van a elaborar o a cambiar los estándares de calidad de semilla
3DFeat-Net: Weakly Supervised Local 3D Features for Point Cloud Registration
In this paper, we propose the 3DFeat-Net which learns both 3D feature
detector and descriptor for point cloud matching using weak supervision. Unlike
many existing works, we do not require manual annotation of matching point
clusters. Instead, we leverage on alignment and attention mechanisms to learn
feature correspondences from GPS/INS tagged 3D point clouds without explicitly
specifying them. We create training and benchmark outdoor Lidar datasets, and
experiments show that 3DFeat-Net obtains state-of-the-art performance on these
gravity-aligned datasets.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures. Accepted in ECCV 201
Does free-living physical activity improve one-year following total knee arthroplasty in patients with osteoarthritis : a prospective study
Objective Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is the gold-standard treatment for end-stage knee osteoarthritis, and the primary expectations are reduced pain and improved function. However, there is conflicting evidence regarding functional changes post-TKA. Commonly, functional changes are measured using Oxford Knee Score (OKS). No previous study has investigated physical behaviour (PB) changes in terms of volume and patterns post-TKA. The aims of this study were to explore volume and pattern changes in PB following TKA using an objective tool and to assess the correlation between this and OKS.
Design An activPAL measured the PB of individuals on a waiting list for TKA for a period of 7–8 days pre-TKA, and for the same length of time at 12 months post-TKA. OKS was completed at similar follow-up time points.
Results Thirty-three individuals completed the study, where stepping time, the number of steps and the time spent on moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) (>100 steps/minute) improved significantly post-TKA p = 0.0001. Steps at 12 months post-TKA improved by 45.6% (from 4,240 to 6,174) and stepping time increased by 38.8% (from 0.98 to 1.36 hours). MVPA improved by 35 minutes at 12 months (from 6.6 to 41.7 minutes).
There were no significant correlations between PB and OKS.
Conclusion This is the first study to explore PB volumes and event-based patterns post-TKA. Activity improved in terms of volume and patterns. No correlation was found between OKS and ActivPAL, which emphasises the need to use objective methods in addition to patient reported outcome measures
Topological descriptors for 3D surface analysis
We investigate topological descriptors for 3D surface analysis, i.e. the
classification of surfaces according to their geometric fine structure. On a
dataset of high-resolution 3D surface reconstructions we compute persistence
diagrams for a 2D cubical filtration. In the next step we investigate different
topological descriptors and measure their ability to discriminate structurally
different 3D surface patches. We evaluate their sensitivity to different
parameters and compare the performance of the resulting topological descriptors
to alternative (non-topological) descriptors. We present a comprehensive
evaluation that shows that topological descriptors are (i) robust, (ii) yield
state-of-the-art performance for the task of 3D surface analysis and (iii)
improve classification performance when combined with non-topological
descriptors.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, CTIC 201
Melanosomes or microbes: Testing an alternative hypothesis for the origin of microbodies in fossil feathers
Microbodies associated with fossil feathers, originally attributed to microbial biofilm, have been reinterpreted as melanosomes: pigment-containing, eukaryotic organelles. This interpretation generated hypotheses regarding coloration in non-avian and avian dinosaurs. Because melanosomes and microbes overlap in size, distribution and morphology, we re-evaluate both hypotheses. We compare melanosomes within feathers of extant chickens with patterns induced by microbial overgrowth on the same feathers, using scanning (SEM), field emission (FESEM) and transmission (TEM) electron microscopy. Melanosomes are always internal, embedded in a morphologically distinct keratinous matrix. Conversely, microbes grow across the surface of feathers in continuous layers, more consistent with published images from fossil feathers. We compare our results to both published literature and new data from a fossil feather ascribed to Gansus yumenensis (ANSP 23403). 'Mouldic impressions' were observed in association with both the feather and sediment grains, supporting a microbial origin. We propose criteria for distinguishing between these two microbodies
- …