Comparative study of the work load between one-man buses and two-man buses.

The differences in physiological and safety conditions of one-man buses and two-man buses were examined from the view point of occupational fatigue. This survey consisted of a work load study which included a time study, study of subsidiary behavior, auditory task, memory test, Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and physiological function tests and a self-administered questionnaire which involved items concerning safety and subjective fatigue complaints. The visual and postural restrictions in the one-man bus were greater than in the two-man bus. The mental capacity of the one-man bus drivers was found to be less. Greater mental fatigue and stress were observed in the one-man bus. More subjective fatigue complaints were observed in the one-man bus. More cases of near accidents were observed in the one-man bus. From these results it was concluded that the one-man bus caused bus drivers a greater mental and physical work load.</p

Recent Results from LHD Experiment with Emphasis on Relation to Theory from Experimentalist’s View

he Large Helical Device (LHD) has been extending an operational regime of net-current free plasmas towardsthe fusion relevant condition with taking advantage of a net current-free heliotron concept and employing a superconducting coil system. Heating capability has exceeded 10 MW and the central ion and electron temperatureshave reached 7 and 10 keV, respectively. The maximum value of β and pulse length have been extended to 3.2% and 150 s, respectively. Many encouraging physical findings have been obtained. Topics from recent experiments, which should be emphasized from the aspect of theoretical approaches, are reviewed. Those are (1) Prominent features in the inward shifted configuration, i.e., mitigation of an ideal interchange mode in the configuration with magnetic hill, and confinement improvement due to suppression of both anomalous and neoclassical transport, (2) Demonstration ofbifurcation of radial electric field and associated formation of an internal transport barrier, and (3) Dynamics of magnetic islands and clarification of the role of separatrix

Why Are Outcomes Different for Registry Patients Enrolled Prospectively and Retrospectively? Insights from the Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD-Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD-AF).

Background: Retrospective and prospective observational studies are designed to reflect real-world evidence on clinical practice, but can yield conflicting results. The GARFIELD-AF Registry includes both methods of enrolment and allows analysis of differences in patient characteristics and outcomes that may result. Methods and Results: Patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and ≥1 risk factor for stroke at diagnosis of AF were recruited either retrospectively (n = 5069) or prospectively (n = 5501) from 19 countries and then followed prospectively. The retrospectively enrolled cohort comprised patients with established AF (for a least 6, and up to 24 months before enrolment), who were identified retrospectively (and baseline and partial follow-up data were collected from the emedical records) and then followed prospectively between 0-18 months (such that the total time of follow-up was 24 months; data collection Dec-2009 and Oct-2010). In the prospectively enrolled cohort, patients with newly diagnosed AF (≤6 weeks after diagnosis) were recruited between Mar-2010 and Oct-2011 and were followed for 24 months after enrolment. Differences between the cohorts were observed in clinical characteristics, including type of AF, stroke prevention strategies, and event rates. More patients in the retrospectively identified cohort received vitamin K antagonists (62.1% vs. 53.2%) and fewer received non-vitamin K oral anticoagulants (1.8% vs . 4.2%). All-cause mortality rates per 100 person-years during the prospective follow-up (starting the first study visit up to 1 year) were significantly lower in the retrospective than prospectively identified cohort (3.04 [95% CI 2.51 to 3.67] vs . 4.05 [95% CI 3.53 to 4.63]; p = 0.016). Conclusions: Interpretations of data from registries that aim to evaluate the characteristics and outcomes of patients with AF must take account of differences in registry design and the impact of recall bias and survivorship bias that is incurred with retrospective enrolment. Clinical Trial Registration: - URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov . Unique identifier for GARFIELD-AF (NCT01090362)

Risk profiles and one-year outcomes of patients with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation in India: Insights from the GARFIELD-AF Registry.

BACKGROUND: The Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD-Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD-AF) is an ongoing prospective noninterventional registry, which is providing important information on the baseline characteristics, treatment patterns, and 1-year outcomes in patients with newly diagnosed non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF). This report describes data from Indian patients recruited in this registry. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 52,014 patients with newly diagnosed AF were enrolled globally; of these, 1388 patients were recruited from 26 sites within India (2012-2016). In India, the mean age was 65.8 years at diagnosis of NVAF. Hypertension was the most prevalent risk factor for AF, present in 68.5% of patients from India and in 76.3% of patients globally (P < 0.001). Diabetes and coronary artery disease (CAD) were prevalent in 36.2% and 28.1% of patients as compared with global prevalence of 22.2% and 21.6%, respectively (P < 0.001 for both). Antiplatelet therapy was the most common antithrombotic treatment in India. With increasing stroke risk, however, patients were more likely to receive oral anticoagulant therapy [mainly vitamin K antagonist (VKA)], but average international normalized ratio (INR) was lower among Indian patients [median INR value 1.6 (interquartile range {IQR}: 1.3-2.3) versus 2.3 (IQR 1.8-2.8) (P < 0.001)]. Compared with other countries, patients from India had markedly higher rates of all-cause mortality [7.68 per 100 person-years (95% confidence interval 6.32-9.35) vs 4.34 (4.16-4.53), P < 0.0001], while rates of stroke/systemic embolism and major bleeding were lower after 1 year of follow-up. CONCLUSION: Compared to previously published registries from India, the GARFIELD-AF registry describes clinical profiles and outcomes in Indian patients with AF of a different etiology. The registry data show that compared to the rest of the world, Indian AF patients are younger in age and have more diabetes and CAD. Patients with a higher stroke risk are more likely to receive anticoagulation therapy with VKA but are underdosed compared with the global average in the GARFIELD-AF. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION-URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT01090362

Query by example for geographic entity search with implicit negative feedback

We propose a method of searching for geographic entities in an unknown place with a query by example in a known place. Geographic entity searches are installed in many Web sites such as those for shopping and restaurants. Most of the sites hold classic attribute-based or keyword-based interfaces for entity retrieval; however, specifying each attribute users want is time-consuming, and keywords are not effective for representing users’ complex intentions. The proposed query by example method in a map interface allows users to intuitively query by selecting entities in places they know well. The most similar entities to an input are returned based on the similarity varying with individuals. Our proposed method is robust for estimating the similarity using not only selected examples, but also implicit negative feedback, which is predicted by how the user selects examples as a query in the map interface. Experimental results proved the effectiveness of our method, and the performance exceeded that of a previously proposed method

Search as if You were in Your Home Town : Geographic Search by Regional Context and Dynamic Feature-space Selection

We propose a query-by-example geographic object search method for users that do not know well about the place they are in. Geographic objects, such as restaurants, are often retrieved using an attribute-based or keyword query. These methods, however, are dif- ficult to use for users that have little knowledge on the place where they want to search. The proposed query-by-example method allows users to query by selecting examples in familiar places for retrieving objects in unfamiliar places. One of the challenges is to predict an effective distance metric, which varies for individuals. Another challenge is to calculate the distance between objects in heterogeneous domains considering the feature gap between them, for example, restaurants in Japan and China. Our proposed method is used to robustly estimate the distance metric by amplifying the difference between selected and non-selected examples. By using the distance metric, each object in a familiar domain is evenly assigned to one in an unfamiliar domain to eliminate the difference between those domains. We developed a restaurant search using data obtained from a Japanese restaurant Web guide to evaluate our method

Evaluating Significance of Historical Entities Based on Tempo-Spatial Impacts Analysis Using Wikipedia Link Structure

We propose a method to evaluate the signi cance of his- torical entities (people, events, and so on.). Here, the sig- ni cance of a historical entity means how it affected other historical entities. Our proposed method rst calculates the tempo-spacial impact of historical entities. The impact of a historical entity varies according to time and location. His- torical entities are collected from Wikipedia. We assume that a Wikipedia link between historical entities represents an impact propagation. That is, when an entity has a link to another entity, we regard the former is in uenced by the latter. Historical entities in Wikipedia usually have the date and location of their occurrence. Our proposed iteration al- gorithm propagates such initial tempo-spacial information through links in the similar manner as PageRank, so the tempo-spacial impact scores of all the historical entities can be calculated. We assume that a historical entity is signi - cant if it in uences many other entities that are far from it temporally or geographically. We demonstrate a prototype system and show the results of experiments that prove the effectiveness of our method

Extraction and Geographical Navigation of Important Historical Events in the Web

We propose techniques for achieving the geographical navigation of historical events described in Web pages as “Virtual History Tour”. First, we develop a method for extracting information on the historical events from the Web and organizing it into a chronological table. Our method can effectively handle ambiguous cases – homonyms and multiple location names in a sentence – by using the number of co-occurrences among events, person names, location names, and addresses in the Web. Next, we propose a method for ranking historical entities according to their impacts at specific time and location. We extend the PageRank algorithm to calculate the temporal and spatial impacts of entities. Finally, we introduce our concrete application demonstrating how users can browse historical events through timeline and map interfaces

Supporting Analysis of Future-related Information in News Archives and the Web

A lot of future-related information is available in news articles or Web pages. This information can however differ to large extent and may fluctuate over time. It is therefore difficult for users to manually compare and aggregate it, and to re-construct the most probable course of future events. In this paper we approach a problem of automatically generating summaries of future events related to queries using data obtained from news archive collections or from the Web. We propose two methods, explicit and implicit future-related information detection. The former is based on analyzing the context of future temporal expressions in documents, while the latter relies on detecting periodical patterns in historical document collections. We present a graph-based visualization of future-related information and demonstrate its usefulness through several examples