Reimagining career guidance: towards a pluralistic perspective

Difficulties concerning the identified mis-match between supply and demand sides of the labour market are discussed. The variability of career guidance services for young people across Europe is illustrated together with policy initiatives in some cases leading to problems of professional identity and limited support to clients of the service. The risks associated with a monoculture of ‘one size fits all’ approach to guidance practice are discussed. The principles of pluralistic approaches to counselling are discussed with the suggestion that this might prove to be a fertile way forward for career guidance practice

Clinical efficacy and safety of buyang huanwu decoction for acute ischemic stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 19 randomized controlled trials

Buyang Huanwu Decoction (BHD) is a well-known traditional Chinese herbal prescription for treating stroke-induced disability. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of BHD for acute ischemic stroke. A systematic literature search was performed in 6 databases until February 2012. Randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) that evaluate efficacy and safety of BHD for acute ischemic stroke were included. Nineteen RCTs with 1580 individuals were identified. The studies were generally of low methodological quality. Only one of the trial included death or dependency as a primary outcome measure. Only 4 trials reported adverse events. Meta-analysis showed the clinical effective rate of neurological deficit improvement favoring BHD when compared with western conventional medicines (WCM), P < 0.001. There is significant difference in the neurologic deficit score between the BHD treatment group and the WCM control group, P < 0.001. In Conclusion, BHD appears to improve neurological deficit and seems generally safe in patients with acute ischemic stroke. However, the current evidence is insufficient to support a routine use of BHD for acute ischemic stroke due to the poor methodological quality and lack of adequate safety data of the included studies. Further rigorously designed trials are required.published_or_final_versio

The low velocity impact response of curvilinear-core sandwich structures

The low velocity impact response of lightweight aluminium sandwich panels, based on a curvilinear aluminium alloy core, has been investigated to evaluate their energy-absorbing characteristics and to identify the associated failure mechanisms. Finite element models are then developed to predict the dynamic response of these lightweight structures. Here, an elasto-plastic model, capable of accounting for strain-hardening effects, material rate-dependence, as well as the relevant damage criteria, was employed to predict the dynamic response of the targets. The finite element models were then validated by comparing their predictions against the corresponding experimental results. Good agreement was obtained, indicating that the models are capable of predicting the dynamic behaviour of these all-metal sandwich structures under low velocity impact conditions. Once the finite element model had been validated, it was used to assess the effect of varying key test parameters, such as the projectile diameter, the material properties of the metal substrate as well as the angle of obliquity on the impact response. Here, it has been shown that the perforation energy increases as the impact angle is increased and also as the projectile diameter increases. An investigation of seven different all-metal sandwich structures has shown that an aluminium alloy offers the highest specific perforation resistance under conditions of low velocity impact loading

Evaluating the accuracy of a functional SNP annotation system

Many common and chronic diseases are influenced at some level by genetic variation. Research done in population genetics, specifically in the area of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is critical to understanding human genetic variation. A key element in assessing role of a given SNP is determining if the variation is likely to result in change in function. The SNP Integration Tool (SNPit) is a comprehensive tool that integrates diverse, existing predictors of SNP functionality, providing the user with information for improved association study analysis. To evaluate the SNPit system, we developed an alternative gold standard to measure accuracy using sensitivity and specificity. The results of our evaluation demonstrated that our alternative gold standard produced encouraging results

Invertible Zero-Shot Recognition Flows

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Deep generative models have been successfully applied to Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) recently. However, the underlying drawbacks of GANs and VAEs (e.g., the hardness of training with ZSL-oriented regularizers and the limited generation quality) hinder the existing generative ZSL models from fully bypassing the seen-unseen bias. To tackle the above limitations, for the first time, this work incorporates a new family of generative models (i.e., flow-based models) into ZSL. The proposed Invertible Zero-shot Flow (IZF) learns factorized data embeddings (i.e., the semantic factors and the non-semantic ones) with the forward pass of an invertible flow network, while the reverse pass generates data samples. This procedure theoretically extends conventional generative flows to a factorized conditional scheme. To explicitly solve the bias problem, our model enlarges the seen-unseen distributional discrepancy based on a negative sample-based distance measurement. Notably, IZF works flexibly with either a naive Bayesian classifier or a held-out trainable one for zero-shot recognition. Experiments on widely-adopted ZSL benchmarks demonstrate the significant performance gain of IZF over existing methods, in both classic and generalized settings

Bayesian network approach to fault diagnosis of a hydroelectric generation system

This study focuses on the fault diagnosis of a hydroelectric generation system with hydraulic-mechanical-electric structures. To achieve this analysis, a methodology combining Bayesian network approach and fault diagnosis expert system is presented, which enables the time-based maintenance to transform to the condition-based maintenance. First, fault types and the associated fault characteristics of the generation system are extensively analyzed to establish a precise Bayesian network. Then, the Noisy-Or modeling approach is used to implement the fault diagnosis expert system, which not only reduces node computations without severe information loss but also eliminates the data dependency. Some typical applications are proposed to fully show the methodology capability of the fault diagnosis of the hydroelectric generation system

Comparative study of nonlinear properties of EEG signals of a normal person and an epileptic patient

Background: Investigation of the functioning of the brain in living systems has been a major effort amongst scientists and medical practitioners. Amongst the various disorder of the brain, epilepsy has drawn the most attention because this disorder can affect the quality of life of a person. In this paper we have reinvestigated the EEGs for normal and epileptic patients using surrogate analysis, probability distribution function and Hurst exponent. Results: Using random shuffled surrogate analysis, we have obtained some of the nonlinear features that was obtained by Andrzejak \textit{et al.} [Phys Rev E 2001, 64:061907], for the epileptic patients during seizure. Probability distribution function shows that the activity of an epileptic brain is nongaussian in nature. Hurst exponent has been shown to be useful to characterize a normal and an epileptic brain and it shows that the epileptic brain is long term anticorrelated whereas, the normal brain is more or less stochastic. Among all the techniques, used here, Hurst exponent is found very useful for characterization different cases. Conclusions: In this article, differences in characteristics for normal subjects with eyes open and closed, epileptic subjects during seizure and seizure free intervals have been shown mainly using Hurst exponent. The H shows that the brain activity of a normal man is uncorrelated in nature whereas, epileptic brain activity shows long range anticorrelation.Comment: Keywords:EEG, epilepsy, Correlation dimension, Surrogate analysis, Hurst exponent. 9 page

Performance enhancement of a GIS-based facility location problem using desktop grid infrastructure

This paper presents the integration of desktop grid infrastructure with GIS technologies, by proposing a parallel resolution method in a generic distributed environment. A case study focused on a discrete facility location problem, in the biomass area, exemplifies the high amount of computing resources (CPU, memory, HDD) required to solve the spatial problem. A comprehensive analysis is undertaken in order to analyse the behaviour of the grid-enabled GIS system. This analysis, consisting of a set of the experiments on the case study, concludes that the desktop grid infrastructure is able to use a commercial GIS system to solve the spatial problem achieving high speedup and computational resource utilization. Particularly, the results of the experiments showed an increase in speedup of fourteen times using sixteen computers and a computational efficiency greater than 87 % compared with the sequential procedure.This work has been developed under the support of the program Formacion de Personal Investigador, grants number BFPI/2009/103 and BES-2007-17019, from the Conselleria d'Educacio of the Generalitat Valenciana and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.García García, A.; Perpiñá Castillo, C.; Alfonso Laguna, CD.; Hernández García, V. (2013). Performance enhancement of a GIS-based facility location problem using desktop grid infrastructure. Earth Science Informatics. 6(4):199-207. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-013-0119-1S19920764Anderson D (2004) Boinc: a system for public-resource computing and storage. Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing. IEEE Computer Society, Washington DC, pp 4–10Available scripts webpage: http://personales.upv.es/angarg12/Campos I et al (2012) Modelling of a watershed: a distributed parallel application in a grid framework. Comput Informat 27(2):285–296Church RL (2002) Geographical information systems and location science. Comput Oper Res 29:541–562Clarke KC (1986) Advances in geographic information systems, computers. Environ Urban Syst 10:175–184Dowers S, Gittings BM, Mineter MJ (2000) Towards a framework for high-performance geocomputation: handling vector-topology within a distributed service environment. Comput Environ Urban Syst 24:471–486Geograma SL (2009). Teleatlas. http://www.geograma.com . Accessed September 2009GRASS Development Team (2012) GRASS GIS. http://grass.osgeo.org/Hoekstra AG, Sloot PMA (2005) Introducing grid speedup: a scalability metric for parallel applications on the grid, EGC 2005, LNCS 3470, pp. 245–254Hu Y et al. (2004) Feasibility study of geo-spatial analysis using grid computing. Computational Science-ICCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 956–963Huang Z et al (2009) Geobarn: a practical grid geospatial database system. Adv Electr Comput Eng 9:7–11Huang F et al (2011) Explorations of the implementation of a parallel IDW interpolation algorithm in a Linux cluster-based parallel GIS. Comput Geosci 37:426–434Laure E et al (2006) Programming the grid with gLite. CMST 12(1):33–45Li WJ et al (2005) The Design and Implementation of GIS Grid Services. In: Zhuge H, Fox G (eds) Grid and Cooperative Computing. Vol. 3795 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10. Springer, Berlin, pp 220–225National Geographic Institute (2010) BCN25: numerical cartographic database. http://www.ign.es/ign/main/index.do . Accessed April 2010Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc (2012) Open GIS Specification Model, http://www.opengeospatial.org/Openshaw S, Turton I (1996) A parallel Kohonen algorithm for the classification of large spatial datasets. Comput Geosci 22:1019–1026Perpiñá C, Alfonso D, Pérez-Navarro A (2007) BIODER project: biomass distributed energy resources assessment and logistic strategies for sitting biomass plants in the Valencia province (Spain), 17th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition Proceedings, Hamburg, Germany, pp. 387–393Perpiñá C et al (2008) Methodology based on Geographic Information Systems for biomass logistics and transport optimization. Renew Energ 34:555–565Shen Z et al (2007) Distributed computing model for processing remotely sensed images based on grid computing. Inf Sci 177:504–518Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, fisheries and food (2009). http://www.magrama.gob.es/es/ . Accessed March 2009Spanish Ministry of Environment (2008). http://www.magrama.gob.es/es/ . Accessed May 2008University of California. List of BOINC projects. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.phpXiao N, Fu W (2003) SDPG: Spatial data processing grid. J Comput Sci Technol 18:523–53

Lack of association of two common polymorphisms on 9p21 with risk of coronary heart disease and myocardial infarction; results from a prospective cohort study

Background: Recent genome wide association (GWA) studies identified two Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) (rs10757278 and rs10757274) in the region of the CDK2NA and CDK2NB genes to be consistently associated with the risks of coronary heart disease (CHD) and myocardial infarction (MI). We examined the SNPs in relation to the risk of CHD and MI in a large population based study of elderly population. Methods: The Rotterdam Study is a population-based, prospective cohort study among 7983 participants aged 55 years and older. Associations of the polymorphisms with CHD and MI were assessed by use of Cox proportional hazards analyses. Results: In an additive model, the age and sex adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) (95% confidence interval) for CHD and MI were 1.03 (0.90, 1.18) and 0.94 (0.82, 1.08) per copy of the G allele of rs10757274. The corresponding HRs were 1.03 (0.90, 1.18) and 0.93 (0.81, 1.06) for the G allele of rs10757278. The association of the SNPs with CHD and MI was not significant in any of the subgroups of CHD risk factors. Conclusion: We were not able to show an association of the studied SNPs with risks of CHD and MI. This may be due to differences in genes involved in the occurrence of CHD in young and older people