13,183 research outputs found
Application of serious games to sport, health and exercise
Use of interactive entertainment has been exponentially expanded since the last decade. Throughout this 10+ year evolution there has been a concern about turning entertainment properties into serious applications, a.k.a "Serious Games". In this article we present two set of Serious Game applications, an Environment Visualising game which focuses solely on applying serious games to elite Olympic sport and another set of serious games that incorporate an in house developed proprietary input system that can detect most of the human movements which focuses on applying serious games to health and exercise
Localization of Eigenfunctions in the Stadium Billiard
We present a systematic survey of scarring and symmetry effects in the
stadium billiard. The localization of individual eigenfunctions in Husimi phase
space is studied first, and it is demonstrated that on average there is more
localization than can be accounted for on the basis of random-matrix theory,
even after removal of bouncing-ball states and visible scars. A major point of
the paper is that symmetry considerations, including parity and time-reversal
symmetries, enter to influence the total amount of localization. The properties
of the local density of states spectrum are also investigated, as a function of
phase space location. Aside from the bouncing-ball region of phase space,
excess localization of the spectrum is found on short periodic orbits and along
certain symmetry-related lines; the origin of all these sources of localization
is discussed quantitatively and comparison is made with analytical predictions.
Scarring is observed to be present in all the energy ranges considered. In
light of these results the excess localization in individual eigenstates is
interpreted as being primarily due to symmetry effects; another source of
excess localization, scarring by multiple unstable periodic orbits, is smaller
by a factor of .Comment: 31 pages, including 10 figure
The Inhibition of Mixing in Chaotic Quantum Dynamics
We study the quantum chaotic dynamics of an initially well-localized wave
packet in a cosine potential perturbed by an external time-dependent force. For
our choice of initial condition and with small but finite, we find that
the wave packet behaves classically (meaning that the quantum behavior is
indistinguishable from that of the analogous classical system) as long as the
motion is confined to the interior of the remnant separatrix of the cosine
potential. Once the classical motion becomes unbounded, however, we find that
quantum interference effects dominate. This interference leads to a long-lived
accumulation of quantum amplitude on top of the cosine barrier. This pinning of
the amplitude on the barrier is a dynamic mechanism for the quantum inhibition
of classical mixing.Comment: 20 pages, RevTeX format with 6 Postscript figures appended in
uuencoded tar.Z forma
Meta-analysis of insulin aspart versus regular human insulin used in a basal-bolus regimen for the treatment of diabetes mellitus
Background: The objective of the current study was to compare the efficacy of two different insulin formulations, insulin aspart (IAsp) and regular human insulin (RHI), for prandial insulin coverage with neutral protamine Hagedorn (NPH) insulin as basal insulin using a meta-analysis approach. The primary endpoint was change in A1c over time. Secondary endpoints included incidence of hypoglycemia and postprandial glycemic control.
Methods: Clinical trials (Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes) complying with Good Clinical Practice, and with individual patient data, were included in the meta-analysis. Trials were randomized, consisting of (at least) two treatment arms and had a minimum duration of 12 weeks. Estimates were calculated using fixed-effects and random-effects models. Heterogeneity was assessed for each analysis. The effect of baseline parameters on A1c was analyzed in extended simultaneous models.
Results: The mean difference in A1c was 0.1% (95% confidence interval [CI] [−0.15; −0.04], P < 0.001) in favor of IAsp. Higher accumulated dose of IAsp, higher age and increased rates of hypoglycemia were associated with improved A1c outcome. Fasting plasma glucose was not significantly different between regimens. Postprandial glucose was significantly lower after treatment with IAsp compared with RHI, but the analysis did present a significant level of heterogeneity (P < 0.001). The overall rate of hypoglycemia was the same with both regimens, but nocturnal hypoglycemia was significantly lower with IAsp.
Conclusions: A basal–bolus regimen with IAsp as bolus insulin provided minimal, but statistically significant, improvement in overall glycemic control with a lower rate of nocturnal hypoglycemic episodes, compared with a corresponding regimen with bolus RHI
Visual tracking of a GPS target within a FieldLab
The monitoring and videoing of a user’s movement within a “FieldLab” recreational facility is required to study the
effectiveness of innovative equipment designed to increase physical activity. A low cost alternative to current tracking systems based around the Global positioning system (GPS) was trialed for use within the Sheffield FieldLab. This low cost tracking system is based around a typical AndroidTM smartphone, which was used as a wearable tracking sensor. The system was combined with a bespoke video surveillance system, which takes positional data
and outputs appropriate camera parameters. In pilot work, participants’ GPS positional data was converted in real time to a pan tilt and zoom value. This allowed the targeted participant to be viewed in the centre of the video stream. Positional data was updated every second, allowing the camera to move and track the participant by keeping them at the centre of the video frame as
they moved around the site. The effectiveness of the system was gauged and limitations noted. It was found that the Sony
Xperia-S gave the most accurate GPS positional data, out of the three smartphones tested in this study. Other potential uses as well as enhancements to the system have also been commented on
Classical bifurcations and entanglement in smooth Hamiltonian system
We study entanglement in two coupled quartic oscillators. It is shown that
the entanglement, as measured by the von Neumann entropy, increases with the
classical chaos parameter for generic chaotic eigenstates. We consider certain
isolated periodic orbits whose bifurcation sequence affects a class of quantum
eigenstates, called the channel localized states. For these states, the
entanglement is a local minima in the vicinity of a pitchfork bifurcation but
is a local maxima near a anti-pitchfork bifurcation. We place these results in
the context of the close connections that may exist between entanglement
measures and conventional measures of localization that have been much studied
in quantum chaos and elsewhere. We also point to an interesting near-degeneracy
that arises in the spectrum of reduced density matrices of certain states as an
interplay of localization and symmetry.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Reliability Testing of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs Under Multiple Stressors
We performed an experiment on AlGaN/GaN HEMTs with high voltage and high power as stressors. We found that devices tested under high power generally degraded more than those tested under high voltage. In particular, the high-voltage-tested devices did not degrade significantly as suggested by some papers in the literature. The same papers in the literature also suggest that high voltages cause cracks and pits. However, the high-voltage-tested devices in this study do not exhibit cracks or pits in TEM images, while the high-power-tested devices exhibit pits
Scaling behavior of quark propagator in full QCD
We study the scaling behavior of the quark propagator on two lattices with
similar physical volume in Landau gauge with 2+1 flavors of dynamical quarks in
order to test whether we are close to the continuum limit for these lattices.
We use configurations generated with an improved staggered (``Asqtad'') action
by the MILC collaboration. The calculations are performed on
lattices with lattice spacing fm and on lattices
with lattice spacing fm. We calculate the quark mass function,
, and the wave-function renormalization function, , for a
variety of bare quark masses. Comparing the behavior of these functions on the
two sets of lattices we find that both and show little
sensitivity to the ultraviolet cutoff.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Influenced of Fe buffer thickness on the crystalline quality and the transport properties of Fe/Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2 bilayers
The implementation of an Fe buffer layer is a promising way to obtain
epitaxial growth of Co-doped BaFe2As2 (Ba-122). However, the crystalline
quality and the superconducting properties of Co-doped Ba-122 are influenced by
the Fe buffer layer thickness, dFe. The well-textured growth of the Fe/Ba-122
bilayer with dFe = 15 nm results in a high Jc of 0.45 MAcm at 12 K in
self-field, whereas a low Jc value of 61000 Acm is recorded for the
bilayer with dFe = 4 nm at the corresponding reduced temperature due to the
presence of grain boundaries
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