1,178 research outputs found
International Research Symposium on Talent Education, Part 5: The challenges of offering group class
This is the fifth installment in a series of articles reporting on a largeâscale demographic survey of North American Suzuki teachers. The last article in this series examined some of the perceived benefits of group class. In this article, we will review participantsâ perceptions of the challenges of group class. Participating teachers were asked to respond to the openâended question, "What is the greatest challenge of group class?" Their responses were coded and analyzed for important themes
International Research Symposium on Talent Education, Part 6: Parent education in Suzuki studios
This is the sixth installment in a series of articles reporting on a largeâscale demographic survey of North American Suzuki teachers. The previous article in this series examined some of the perceived challenges of group class. In this article, we will review teachers' descriptions of the parent education offerings within their studios. Teachers were asked to provide information about the structure, content, and intensity of their parent education programs. The survey questions included both initial education for new families entering their studios, as well as ongoing education for returning families
International Research Symposium on Talent Education, Part 4: The joys and benefits of Suzuki group class
This is the fourth article in a series reporting the findings of a large-scale demographic study of Suzuki teachers in Canada and the United States. Previous articles introduced the research, reporting on basic demographic statistics, teacher training, studio size, and structure of group classes. In this article we report on the results of an open-ended response question regarding the benefits of student participation in Suzuki group class
International Research Symposium on Talent Education, Part 3: What do Suzuki studios look like?
This is the third article in a series reporting the findings of a large-scale demographic study of 1128 North American SAA member teachers. The first article introduced the International Research Symposium on Talent Education and the group's current research interests. The second installment in the series focused on Suzuki teachers and included basic demographic information and information on teachers' training. In this article, we will explore what Suzuki studios look like, examining data such as studio size and structure of group classes
Capacitated Vehicle Routing with Non-Uniform Speeds
The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) involves distributing
(identical) items from a depot to a set of demand locations, using a single
capacitated vehicle. We study a generalization of this problem to the setting
of multiple vehicles having non-uniform speeds (that we call Heterogenous
CVRP), and present a constant-factor approximation algorithm.
The technical heart of our result lies in achieving a constant approximation
to the following TSP variant (called Heterogenous TSP). Given a metric denoting
distances between vertices, a depot r containing k vehicles with possibly
different speeds, the goal is to find a tour for each vehicle (starting and
ending at r), so that every vertex is covered in some tour and the maximum
completion time is minimized. This problem is precisely Heterogenous CVRP when
vehicles are uncapacitated.
The presence of non-uniform speeds introduces difficulties for employing
standard tour-splitting techniques. In order to get a better understanding of
this technique in our context, we appeal to ideas from the 2-approximation for
scheduling in parallel machine of Lenstra et al.. This motivates the
introduction of a new approximate MST construction called Level-Prim, which is
related to Light Approximate Shortest-path Trees. The last component of our
algorithm involves partitioning the Level-Prim tree and matching the resulting
parts to vehicles. This decomposition is more subtle than usual since now we
need to enforce correlation between the size of the parts and their distances
to the depot
Bounded-Angle Spanning Tree: Modeling Networks with Angular Constraints
We introduce a new structure for a set of points in the plane and an angle
, which is similar in flavor to a bounded-degree MST. We name this
structure -MST. Let be a set of points in the plane and let be an angle. An -ST of is a spanning tree of the
complete Euclidean graph induced by , with the additional property that for
each point , the smallest angle around containing all the edges
adjacent to is at most . An -MST of is then an
-ST of of minimum weight. For , an -ST does
not always exist, and, for , it always exists. In this paper,
we study the problem of computing an -MST for several common values of
.
Motivated by wireless networks, we formulate the problem in terms of
directional antennas. With each point , we associate a wedge of
angle and apex . The goal is to assign an orientation and a radius
to each wedge , such that the resulting graph is connected and its
MST is an -MST. (We draw an edge between and if , , and .) Unsurprisingly, the problem of computing an
-MST is NP-hard, at least for and . We
present constant-factor approximation algorithms for .
One of our major results is a surprising theorem for ,
which, besides being interesting from a geometric point of view, has important
applications. For example, the theorem guarantees that given any set of
points in the plane and any partitioning of the points into triplets,
one can orient the wedges of each triplet {\em independently}, such that the
graph induced by is connected. We apply the theorem to the {\em antenna
conversion} problem
A Detailed Investigation into Low-Level Feature Detection in Spectrogram Images
Being the first stage of analysis within an image, low-level feature detection is a crucial step in the image analysis process and, as such, deserves suitable attention. This paper presents a systematic investigation into low-level feature detection in spectrogram images. The result of which is the identification of frequency tracks. Analysis of the literature identifies different strategies for accomplishing low-level feature detection. Nevertheless, the advantages and disadvantages of each are not explicitly investigated. Three model-based detection strategies are outlined, each extracting an increasing amount of information from the spectrogram, and, through ROC analysis, it is shown that at increasing levels of extraction the detection rates increase. Nevertheless, further investigation suggests that model-based detection has a limitationâit is not computationally feasible to fully evaluate the model of even a simple sinusoidal track. Therefore, alternative approaches, such as dimensionality reduction, are investigated to reduce the complex search space. It is shown that, if carefully selected, these techniques can approach the detection rates of model-based strategies that perform the same level of information extraction. The implementations used to derive the results presented within this paper are available online from http://stdetect.googlecode.com
Patient-Reported Outcomes in Cancer Clinical Trials: Measuring Symptomatic Adverse Events With the National Cancer Institute's Patient-Reported Outcomes Version of the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (PRO-CTCAE)
Systematic capture of the patient perspective can inform the development of new cancer therapies. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are commonly included in cancer clinical trials; however, there is heterogeneity in the constructs, measures, and analytic approaches that have been used making these endpoints challenging to interpret. There is renewed effort to identify rigorous methods to obtain high-quality and informative PRO data from cancer clinical trials. In this setting, PROs are used to address specific research objectives, and an important objective that spans the product development life cycle is the assessment of safety and tolerability. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Office of Hematology and Oncology Products (OHOP) has identified symptomatic adverse events (AEs) as a central PRO concept, and a systematic assessment of patient-reported symptomatic AEs can provide data to complement clinician reporting. The National Cancer Institute's Patient-Reported Outcomes version of the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (PRO-CTCAE) is being evaluated by multiple stakeholders, including the FDA, and is considered a promising tool to provide a standard yet flexible method to assess symptomatic AEs from the patient perspective. In this article, we briefly review the FDA OHOP's perspective on PROs in cancer trials submitted to the FDA and focus on the assessment of symptomatic AEs using PRO-CTCAE. We conclude by discussing further work that must be done to broaden the use of PRO-CTCAE as a method to provide patient-centered data that can complement existing safety and tolerability assessments across cancer clinical trials
Isospin-Violating Meson-Nucleon Vertices as an Alternate Mechanism of Charge-Symmetry Breaking
We compute isospin-violating meson-nucleon coupling constants and their
consequent charge-symmetry-breaking nucleon-nucleon potentials. The couplings
result from evaluating matrix elements of quark currents between nucleon states
in a nonrelativistic constituent quark model; the isospin violations arise from
the difference in the up and down constituent quark masses. We find, in
particular, that isospin violation in the omega-meson--nucleon vertex dominates
the class IV CSB potential obtained from these considerations. We evaluate the
resulting spin-singlet--triplet mixing angles, the quantities germane to the
difference of neutron and proton analyzing powers measured in elastic
scattering, and find them commensurate to those computed
originally using the on-shell value of the - mixing amplitude.
The use of the on-shell - mixing amplitude at has been
called into question; rather, the amplitude is zero in a wide class of models.
Our model possesses no contribution from - mixing at , and
we find that omega-meson exchange suffices to explain the measured
analyzing power difference~at~183 MeV.Comment: 20 pages, revtex, 3 uuencoded PostScript figure
Minimizing the stabbing number of matchings, trees, and triangulations
The (axis-parallel) stabbing number of a given set of line segments is the
maximum number of segments that can be intersected by any one (axis-parallel)
line. This paper deals with finding perfect matchings, spanning trees, or
triangulations of minimum stabbing number for a given set of points. The
complexity of these problems has been a long-standing open question; in fact,
it is one of the original 30 outstanding open problems in computational
geometry on the list by Demaine, Mitchell, and O'Rourke. The answer we provide
is negative for a number of minimum stabbing problems by showing them NP-hard
by means of a general proof technique. It implies non-trivial lower bounds on
the approximability. On the positive side we propose a cut-based integer
programming formulation for minimizing the stabbing number of matchings and
spanning trees. We obtain lower bounds (in polynomial time) from the
corresponding linear programming relaxations, and show that an optimal
fractional solution always contains an edge of at least constant weight. This
result constitutes a crucial step towards a constant-factor approximation via
an iterated rounding scheme. In computational experiments we demonstrate that
our approach allows for actually solving problems with up to several hundred
points optimally or near-optimally.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, Latex. To appear in "Discrete and Computational
Geometry". Previous version (extended abstract) appears in SODA 2004, pp.
430-43
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