The effect of adding a home program to weekly institutional-based therapy for children with undefined developmental delay: A pilot randomized clinical trial

AbstractBackgroundEarly rehabilitation for children with developmental delay without a defined etiology have included home and clinic programs, but no comparisons have been made and efficacy is uncertain. We compared a weekly visit for institutional-based therapy (IT) to IT plus a structured home activity program (HAP).MethodsSeventy children who were diagnosed with motor or global developmental delay (ages 6-48 months and mean developmental age 12.5 months) without defined etiology were recruited (including 45 males and 23 females). The outcomes included the comprehensive developmental inventory for infants and toddlers test and the pediatric evaluation of disability inventory.ResultsChildren who received only IT improved in developmental level by 2.11 months compared with 3.11 months for those who received a combination of IT and HAP (p = 0.000). On all domains of the comprehensive developmental inventory for infants and toddlers test, except for self-help, children who participated in HAP showed greater improvements, including in cognition (p = 0.015), language (p = 0.010), motor (p = 0.000), and social (p = 0.038) domains. Except on the subdomain of self-care with caregiver assistance, the HAP group showed greater improvement in all the pediatric evaluation of disability inventory subdomains (p < 0.05).ConclusionEarly intervention programs are helpful for these children, and the addition of structured home activity programs may augment the effects on developmental progression

COMPARISON OF TORSO TWIST BETWEEN SLAP HIT AND ORDINARY HIT IN SOFTBALL BATTING

Softball batters take advantage of slap hit, by positioning the batters much closer to the first base. The purpose of this study was to compare the difference of torso twist between a slap hit and an ordinary hit in softball batting. Ten female college softball batters performed slap hits and ordinary hits. Reflective markers were placed on specific landmarks for each subject and VICON motion analysis system was used to record the hits. Slap hits showed less backward rotation during the torso wind-up phase while ordinary hit showed more forward rotation during the torso follow-through phase. No difference on trunk rotation was found at impact. The findings of this study suggested that the restricted backward torso twist during the wind-up phase and the limited forward torso twist during the follow-through phase should be taken into consideration in slap hits

A Robust Optimization Approach to Emergency Vehicle Scheduling

The emergency vehicle scheduling problem is studied under the objective function to minimize the total transportation time with uncertain road travel time. Firstly, we build a stochastic programming model considering the constrained chance. Then, we analyze the model based on robust optimization method and get its equivalent set of uncertainty constraint, which has good mathematical properties with consideration of the robustness of solutions. Finally, we implement a numerical example to compare the results of robust optimization method and that of the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The case study shows that the proposed method achieves better performance on computational complexity and stability

Algorithmic Views of Vectorized Polynomial Multipliers -- NTRU

The lattice-based post-quantum cryptosystem NTRU is used by Google for protecting Google’s internal communication. In NTRU, polynomial multiplication is one of bottleneck. In this paper, we explore the interactions between polynomial multiplication, Toeplitz matrix–vector product, and vectorization with architectural insights. For a unital commutative ring $R$, a positive integer $n$, and an element $\zeta \in R$, we reveal the benefit of vector-by-scalar multiplication instructions while multiplying in $R[x] / \langle x^n - \zeta \rangle$. We aim at designing an algorithm exploiting no algebraic and number–theoretic properties of $n$ and $\zeta$. An obvious way is to multiply in $R[x]$ and reduce modulo $x^n - \zeta$. Since the product in $R[x]$ is a polynomial of degree at most $2n − 2$, one usually chooses a polynomial modulus $g$ such that (i) $deg(g) \geq 2n − 1$, and (ii) there exists a well-studied fast polynomial multiplication algorithm f for multiplying in $R[x] / \langle g \rangle$. We deviate from common approaches and point out a novel insight with dual modules and vector-by-scalar multiplications. Conceptually, we relate the module-theoretic dual of $R[x] / \langle x^n - \zeta \rangle$ and $R[x] / \langle g \rangle$ with Toeplitz matrix-vector products, and demonstrate the benefit of Toeplitz matrix-vector products with vector-by-scalar multiplication instructions. It greatly reduces the register pressure, and allows us to multiply with essentially no permutation instructions that are commonly used in vectorized implementation. We implement the ideas for the NTRU parameter sets ntruhps2048677 and ntruhrss701 on a Cortex-A72 implementing the Armv8.0-A architecture with the single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) technology Neon. For polynomial multiplications, our implementation is 2.18× and 2.23× for ntruhps2048677 and ntruhrsss701 than the state-of-the-art optimized implementation. We also vectorize the polynomial inversions and sorting network by employing existing techniques and translating AVX2-optimized implementations into Neon. Compared to the state-of-the-art optimized implementation, our key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation for ntruhps2048677 are 7.67×, 2.48×, and 1.77× faster, respectively. For ntruhrss701, our key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation are 7.99×, 1.47×, and 1.56× faster, respectively