5,718 research outputs found
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Children as partners with adults in their medical care
Aims: To investigate the seldom published views of children with type 1 diabetes about their condition and ways in which they share in managing their medical and health care with adults.
Methods: Semi-structured, tape recorded interviews, during 2003, with a purposive sample of 24 children aged 3–12 years who have type I diabetes and who attend two inner London hospitals and one hospital in a commuter town.
Results: The children reported high levels of understanding, knowledge, and skill gained from their experience of living with diabetes and constantly having to take account of the condition and their paediatrician’s guidance. Their key goals were to be “normal” and “just get on with their lives”.
Discussion: The interviews showed that children’s experiences of diabetes tended to enable them to make informed, “wise” decisions in their own best interests, even at a young age. They achieved a complicated balance between the sometimes competing goals of social health “being normal” and physiological health in controlling glycaemia. Their competence supports approaches in children’s rights and in policy makers’ aims that people with diabetes—including children—gain more knowledge, skills, and responsibility for their own care in partnership with healthcare professionals. Consent is usually considered in relation to surgery; however the children showed how they constantly dealt with decisions about consent or refusal, compliance with, or resistance to their prescribed treatment. Their health depends on their informed commitment to medical guidance; more research is needed about the daily realities of children’s committed and responsible co-management of their chronic illness
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Automated verification of refinement laws
Demonic refinement algebras are variants of Kleene algebras. Introduced by von Wright as a light-weight variant of the refinement calculus, their intended semantics are positively disjunctive predicate transformers, and their calculus is entirely within first-order equational logic. So, for the first time, off-the-shelf automated theorem proving (ATP) becomes available for refinement proofs. We used ATP to verify a toolkit of basic refinement laws. Based on this toolkit, we then verified two classical complex refinement laws for action systems by ATP: a data refinement law and Back's atomicity refinement law. We also present a refinement law for infinite loops that has been discovered through automated analysis. Our proof experiments not only demonstrate that refinement can effectively be automated, they also compare eleven different ATP systems and suggest that program verification with variants of Kleene algebras yields interesting theorem proving benchmarks. Finally, we apply hypothesis learning techniques that seem indispensable for automating more complex proofs
Kink Chains from Instantons on a Torus
We describe how the procedure of calculating approximate solitons from
instanton holonomies may be extended to the case of soliton crystals. It is
shown how sine-Gordon kink chains may be obtained from CP1 instantons on a
torus. These kink chains turn out to be remarkably accurate approximations to
the true solutions. Some remarks on the relevance of this work to Skyrme
crystals are also made.Comment: latex 17 pages, DAMTP 94-7
High Q BPS Monopole Bags are Urchins
It has been known for 30 years that 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles of charge Q
greater than one cannot be spherically symmetric. 5 years ago, Bolognesi
conjectured that, at some point in their moduli space, BPS monopoles can become
approximately spherically symmetric in the high Q limit. In this note we
determine the sense in which this conjecture is correct. We consider an SU(2)
gauge theory with an adjoint scalar field, and numerically find configurations
with Q units of magnetic charge and a mass which is roughly linear in Q, for
example in the case Q=81 we present a configuration whose energy exceeds the
BPS bound by about 54 percent. These approximate solutions are constructed by
gluing together Q cones, each of which contains a single unit of magnetic
charge. In each cone, the energy is largest in the core, and so a constant
energy density surface contains Q peaks and thus resembles a sea urchin. We
comment on some relations between a non-BPS cousin of these solutions and the
dark matter halos of dwarf spherical galaxies.Comment: LaTeX, 25 pages, 4 figure
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Spiral Growth Manufacturing (SGM) – A Continuous Additive Manufacturing Technology for Processing Metal Powder by Selective Laser Melting
Spiral growth manufacturing is a new innovative powder based rapid manufacturing
technique. The innovation exists in the methodology in which powder layers are deposited.
Unlike other pre-placed powder systems, the deposited layers move relative to the location at
which they are processed. This is made possible by a rotating build drum into which powder is
deposited, in spiralled layers, from a stationary hopper. With this configuration powder can be
continuously deposited and levelled and simultaneously processed, eliminating delays in the
build cycle. Stainless steel and cobalt-chrome powder is selectively melted using a 100W flash
lamp pumped Nd:YAG laser. This paper reports on factors affecting build rate and on build
strategies for creating a number of axis-symmetric thin and thick walled cylinders. Experimental
results suggest that build rate for thin walled structures bonded to a substrate will ultimately be
governed by tangential movements of the powder particles when frictional forces are not
sufficient to accelerate the particles along a curved path, provided that enough laser power is
available for melting. Even melt pool balling, which is evident when melting one layer at high
speeds, diminishes in multiple layer builds due to re-melting and infilling.Mechanical Engineerin
VELO Module Production - Final Module Metrology
This note describes in detail the procedures used in the metrology of the completed modules on the Wenzel CMM machine
Drape optimization in woven composites manufacture.
This paper addresses the optimisation of forming in manufacturing of composites.
A simplified finite element model of draping is developed and implemented. The
model incorporates the non-linear shear response of textiles and wrinkling due
to buckling of tows. The model is validated against experimental results and it
is concluded that it reproduces successfully the most important features of the
process. The simple character of the model results in low computational times
that allow its use within an optimisation procedure. A genetic algorithm is used
to solve the optimisation problem of minimising the wrinkling in the formed
component by selecting a suitable holding force distribution. The effect of
regularisation is investigated and the L-curve is used to select a
regularisation parameter value. Optimised designs resulting from the inversion
procedure have significantly lower wrinkling than uniform holding force
profiles, while regularisation allows force gradients to be kept relatively low
so that suggested process designs are feasible
The moduli space metric for tetrahedrally symmetric 4-monopoles
The metric on the moduli space of SU(2) charge four BPS monopoles with tetrahedral symmetry is calculated using numerical methods. In the asymptotic region, in which the four monopoles are located on the vertices of a large tetrahedron, the metric is in excellent agreement with the point particle metric. We find that the four monopoles are accelerated through the cubic monopole configuration and compute the time advance. Numerical evidence is presented for a remarkable equivalence between a proper distance in the 4-monopole moduli space and a related proper distance in the point particle moduli space
Substorm onset identification using neural networks and Pi2 pulsations
International audienceThe pattern recognition capabilities of artificial neural networks (ANNs) have for the first time been used to identify Pi2 pulsations in magnetometer data, which in turn serve as indicators of substorm onsets and intensifications. The pulsation spectrum was used as input to the ANN and the network was trained to give an output of +1 for Pi2 signatures and -1 for non-Pi2 signatures. In order to evaluate the degree of success of the neural-network procedure for identifying Pi2 pulsations, the ANN was used to scan a number of data sets and the results compared with visual identification of Pi2 signatures. The ANN performed extremely well with a success rate of approximately 90% for Pi2 identification and a timing accuracy generally within 1 min compared to visual identification. A number of potential applications of the neural-network Pi2 scanning procedure are discussed
Automated Reasoning and Presentation Support for Formalizing Mathematics in Mizar
This paper presents a combination of several automated reasoning and proof
presentation tools with the Mizar system for formalization of mathematics. The
combination forms an online service called MizAR, similar to the SystemOnTPTP
service for first-order automated reasoning. The main differences to
SystemOnTPTP are the use of the Mizar language that is oriented towards human
mathematicians (rather than the pure first-order logic used in SystemOnTPTP),
and setting the service in the context of the large Mizar Mathematical Library
of previous theorems,definitions, and proofs (rather than the isolated problems
that are solved in SystemOnTPTP). These differences poses new challenges and
new opportunities for automated reasoning and for proof presentation tools.
This paper describes the overall structure of MizAR, and presents the automated
reasoning systems and proof presentation tools that are combined to make MizAR
a useful mathematical service.Comment: To appear in 10th International Conference on. Artificial
Intelligence and Symbolic Computation AISC 201
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