4,930 research outputs found
Decision Making Skill and Complex Problem Solving in Team Sports
This thesis aimed to enhance understanding of the nature of knowledge bases possessed by elite sports performers which underpin perceptual-cognitive and decision making skills. Two main theories were considered; Active Control of Thought (ACT*) and Representational Redescription (RR). The purpose of Study 1 was to examine the anticipatory ability of elite and non-elite players in football and hockey. The results indicated that elite players in both sports were quicker and more accurate in their expectation of pass destination. Study 2 aimed to understand the extent to which knowledge is transferable. The results indicated that elite playersâ knowledge is relatively domain specific although some elements of underlying task strategy may transfer. The objective of Study 3 was to explore the means by which elite and non-elite players in football and hockey identify and differentiate between possible decisions. Results showed elite playersâ rationale was based on deeper theoretical principles whilst non-experts utilised relatively superficial information and naĂŻve theories. Study 4 focussed on problem representations of elite and non-elite football players. Results revealed elite playersâ representations were more pertinent, connected and articulated in a more effective manner. Overall, the findings from the current thesis provide advanced understanding of the knowledge bases responsible for perceptual-cognitive and decision making skill, and such understanding may assist attempts to enhance athletesâ performance and support future research
Irregular Satellites of the Planets: Products of Capture in the Early Solar System
All four giant planets in the Solar system possess irregular satellites,
characterized by large, highly eccentric and/or inclined orbits that are
distinct from the nearly circular, uninclined orbits of the regular satellites.
This difference can be traced directly to different modes of formation. Whereas
the regular satellites grew by accretion within circumplanetary disks the
irregular satellites were captured from initially heliocentric orbits at an
early epoch. Recently, powerful survey observations have greatly increased the
number of known irregular satellites, permitting a fresh look at the group
properties of these objects and motivating a re-examination of the mechanisms
of capture. None of the suggested mechanisms, including gas-drag, pull-down,
and three-body capture, convincingly fit the group characteristics of the
irregular satellites. The sources of the satellites also remain unidentified.Comment: 51 pages, 17 figures, 5 tables, to appear in ARAA 200
Analysis and clinical findings of cases positive for the novel synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonist MDMB-CHMICA
Context: MDMB-CHMICA is a synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonist which has caused concern due to its presence in cases of adverse reaction and death. Method: 43 cases of suspected synthetic cannabinoid ingestion were identified from patients presenting at an Emergency Department and from post-mortem casework. These were subjected to liquid-liquid extraction using tertiary-butyl methyl ether and quantitatively analysed by Electospray Ionisation Liquid Chromatography â tandem Mass Spectrometry. For positive samples, case and clinical details were sought and interrogated. Results: 11 samples were found positive for MDMB-CHMICA. Concentrations found ranged from <1 â 22 ng/mL (mean: 6 ng/mL, median: 3 ng/mL). The age range was 15 â 44 years (mean: 26 years, median: 21 years), with the majority (82%) of positive results found in males. Clinical presentations included hypothermia, hypoglycaemia, syncope, recurrent vomiting, altered mental state and serotonin toxicity, with corresponding concentrations of MDMB-CHMICA as low as <1 ng/mL. Duration of hospitalisation ranged from 3 â 24 hours (mean: 12 hours, median: 8 hours). Discussion: The concentration range presented in this case series is indicative of MDMB-CHMICA having a high potency, as is known to be the case for other synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists. The age range and gender representation were consistent with that reported for users of other drugs of this type. The clinical presentations observed were typical of synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists and show the difficulties in identifying reactions potentially associated with drugs of this type. Conclusion: The range of MDMB-CHMICA concentrations in Emergency Department presentations (n=9) and post-mortem cases (n=2) was reported. No correlation between the concentration of this drug and clinical presentation or cause of death was reported in this sample. However, the potential for harm associated with low concentrations of MDMB-CHMICA and the
symptoms of toxicity being non-specific was highlighted
Coupled Electron Ion Monte Carlo Calculations of Dense Metallic Hydrogen
We present a new Monte Carlo method which couples Path Integral for finite
temperature protons with Quantum Monte Carlo for ground state electrons, and we
apply it to metallic hydrogen for pressures beyond molecular dissociation. We
report data for the equation of state for temperatures across the melting of
the proton crystal. Our data exhibit more structure and higher melting
temperatures of the proton crystal than Car-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics
results. This method fills the gap between high temperature electron-proton
Path Integral and ground state Diffusion Monte Carlo methods
Structure of the Mycobacterium smegmatis alpha-maltose-1-phosphate synthase GlgM
Mycobacterium tuberculosis produces glycogen (also known as alpha-glucan) to help evade human immunity. This pathogen uses the GlgE pathway to generate glycogen rather than the more well known glycogen synthase GlgA pathway, which is absent in this bacterium. Thus, the building block for this glucose polymer is alpha-maltose-1-phosphate rather than an NDP-glucose donor. One of the routes to alpha-maltose-1-phosphate is now known to involve the GlgA homologue GlgM, which uses ADP-glucose as a donor and alpha-glucose-1-phosphate as an acceptor. To help compare GlgA (a GT5 family member) with GlgM enzymes (GT4 family members), the X-ray crystal structure of GlgM from Mycobacterium smegmatis was solved to 1.9 angstrom resolution. While the enzymes shared a GT-B fold and several residues responsible for binding the donor substrate, they differed in some secondary-structural details, particularly in the N-terminal domain, which would be expected to be largely responsible for their different acceptor-substrate specificities
Identifying prognostic structural features in tissue sections of colon cancer patients using point pattern analysis
Diagnosis and prognosis of cancer is informed by the architecture inherent in cancer patient tissue sections. This architecture is typically identified by pathologists, yet advances in computational image analysis facilitate quantitative assessment of this structure. In this article we develop a spatial point process approach in order to describe patterns in cell distribution within tissue samples taken from colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. In particular, our approach is centered on the Palm intensity function. This leads to taking an approximate-likelihood technique in fitting point processes models. We consider two Neyman-Scott point processes and a void process, fitting these point process models to the CRC patient data. We find that the parameter estimates of these models may be used to quantify the spatial arrangement of cells. Importantly, we observe characteristic differences in the spatial arrangement of cells between patients who died from CRC and those alive at follow-up
A latent capture history model for digital aerial surveys
Funding: This work was part-funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden grant UOA-1418, Leverhulme grant RF-2018-213\9 and EPSRC IAA grant âHigh Definition digital aerial survey softwareâ.We anticipate that unmanned aerial vehicles will become popular wildlife survey platforms. Because detecting animals from the air is imperfect, we develop a markârecapture line transect method using two digital cameras, possibly mounted on one aircraft, which cover the same area with a short time delay between them. Animal movement between the passage of the cameras introduces uncertainty in individual identity, so individual capture histories are unobservable and are treated as latent variables. We obtain the likelihood for markârecapture line transects without capture histories by automatically enumerating all possibilities within segments of the transect that contain ambiguous identities, instead of attempting to decide identities in a prior step. We call this method âLatent Captureâhistory Enumerationâ (LCE). We include an availability model for species that are periodically unavailable for detection, such as cetaceans that are undetectable while diving. External data are needed to estimate the availability cycle length, but not the mean availability rate, if the full availability model is employed. We compare the LCE method with the recently developed cluster captureârecapture method (CCR), which uses a Palm likelihood approximation, providing the first comparison of CCR with maximum likelihood. The LCE estimator has slightly lower variance, more so as sample size increases, and close to nominal coverage probabilities. Both methods are approximately unbiased. We illustrate with semisynthetic data from a harbor porpoise survey.PostprintPeer reviewe
Scale Setting in QCD and the Momentum Flow in Feynman Diagrams
We present a formalism to evaluate QCD diagrams with a single virtual gluon
using a running coupling constant at the vertices. This method, which
corresponds to an all-order resummation of certain terms in a perturbative
series, provides a description of the momentum flow through the gluon
propagator. It can be viewed as a generalization of the scale-setting
prescription of Brodsky, Lepage and Mackenzie to all orders in perturbation
theory. In particular, the approach can be used to investigate why in some
cases the ``typical'' momenta in a loop diagram are different from the
``natural'' scale of the process. It offers an intuitive understanding of the
appearance of infrared renormalons in perturbation theory and their connection
to the rate of convergence of a perturbative series. Moreover, it allows one to
separate short- and long-distance contributions by introducing a hard
factorization scale. Several applications to one- and two-scale problems are
discussed in detail.Comment: eqs.(51) and (83) corrected, minor typographic changes mad
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