163 research outputs found
GRADUATING PHYSIOTHERAPISTS' PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR CAREER CHOICE
A survey of 72% of final year physiotherapy students at Cumberland College found that they were very satisfied with their career choice, few considered changing their occupation and changes in students' conceptions of physiotherapy had mostly been in a positive direction. They said that the most valued aspects of their career choice were the opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile, the friendliness of the people they worked with, and the opportunity to develop skills and abilities. Few students planned to leave the workforce but 69% hoped to be employed part-time during early childrearing. Some implications of such anticipated work patterns are discussed
Assistive listening headsets for high noise environments: Protection and communication
© 2015 IEEE. In industrial noise environments, the use of assistive listening headsets is a means to provide adequate access to voice communication while wearing hearing protection. This paper presents a performance evaluation and comparison of two different methods to provide the binaural speech enhancement in real industrial noise scenarios. The investigated binaural methods based on differential beamforming and multichannel Wiener filter show different strengths and weaknesses. A transient noise suppression algorithm is also proposed and evaluated. Performance evaluation shows that this algorithm, together with the binaural multi-channel Wiener filter approach, can successfully reduce the hammering noise. This can be observed from the PESQ scores and the signal characteristics
Nasal localization of a <i>Pseudoterranova decipiens</i> larva in a Danish patient with suspected allergic rhinitis
Incorporation of excluded volume correlations into Poisson-Boltzmann theory
We investigate the effect of excluded volume interactions on the electrolyte
distribution around a charged macroion. First, we introduce a criterion for
determining when hard-core effects should be taken into account beyond standard
mean field Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) theory. Next, we demonstrate that several
commonly proposed local density functional approaches for excluded volume
interactions cannot be used for this purpose. Instead, we employ a non-local
excess free energy by using a simple constant weight approach. We compare the
ion distribution and osmotic pressure predicted by this theory with Monte Carlo
simulations. They agree very well for weakly developed correlations and give
the correct layering effect for stronger ones. In all investigated cases our
simple weighted density theory yields more realistic results than the standard
PB approach, whereas all local density theories do not improve on the PB
density profiles but on the contrary, deviate even more from the simulation
results.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl
Realtime implementation of a particle filter with integrated voice activity detector for acoustic speaker tracking
Abstract-In noisy and reverberant environments, the problem of acoustic source localisation and tracking (ASLT) using an array of microphones presents a number of challenging difficulties. One of the main issues when considering real-world situations involving human speakers is the temporally discontinuous nature of speech signals: the presence of silence gaps in the speech can easily misguide the tracking algorithm, even in practical environments with low to moderate noise and reverberation levels. This work focuses on a realtime implementation of the ASLT algorithm proposed in [1], which circumvents this problem by integrating measurements from a voice activity detector (VAD) within the tracking algorithm framework. The algorithm is here optimized for low computational complexity, and is implemented on a PC based real-time system. The resulting computational load is calculated and is presented along with real measurements of the true execution speed for the considered algorithm implementation. The results show that the algorithm is suitable for implementation in currently existing low-power embedded systems
Statistical Mechanics of Membrane Protein Conformation: A Homopolymer Model
The conformation and the phase diagram of a membrane protein are investigated
via grand canonical ensemble approach using a homopolymer model. We discuss the
nature and pathway of -helix integration into the membrane that results
depending upon membrane permeability and polymer adsorptivity. For a membrane
with the permeability larger than a critical value, the integration becomes the
second order transition that occurs at the same temperature as that of the
adsorption transition. For a nonadsorbing membrane, the integration is of the
first order due to the aggregation of -helices.Comment: RevTeX with 5 postscript figure
Dynamics of ions in the selectivity filter of the KcsA channel
The statistical and dynamical properties of ions in the selectivity filter of the KcsA ion channel are considered on the basis of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the KcsA protein embedded in a lipid membrane surrounded by an ionic solution. A new approach to the derivation of a Brownian dynamics (BD) model of ion permeation through the filter is discussed, based on unbiased MD simulations. It is shown that depending on additional assumptions, ion’s dynamics can be described either by under-damped Langevin equation with constant damping and white noise or by Langevin equation with a fractional memory kernel. A comparison of the potential of the mean force derived from unbiased MD simulations with the potential produced by the umbrella sampling method demonstrates significant differences in these potentials. The origin of these differences is an open question that requires further clarifications
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