Process improvements for custom design and construction projects

The project undertakes an investigation of Totalspan’s custom design and construction projects. These projects, referred to as Specific Designs, are inherently risky due to their complexity and uniqueness. Such issues are exacerbated by a lack of knowledge retention and reuse from project-to-project. This report aims to develop recommendation for improving the efficiency and profitability of Specific Design Projects. It explores ways to reduce the time employees spend on non-value-added activities. This will allow for more time spent on activities such as sales and project management, which increase the profitability of the business as a whole

Visual Experiences during Paralysis

Rationale: Paralyzed human volunteers (n = 6) participated in several studies the primary one of which required full neuromuscular paralysis while awake. After the primary experiment, while still paralyzed and awake, subjects undertook studies of humor and of attempted eye-movement. The attempted eye-movements tested a central, intentional component to one’s internal visual model and are the subject of this report. Methods: Subjects reclined in a supportive chair and were ventilated after paralysis (cisatracurium, 20 mg intravenously). In illumination, subjects were requested to focus alternately on the faces of investigators standing on the left and the right within peripheral vision. In darkness, subjects were instructed to look away from a point source of light. Subjects were to report their experiences after reversal of paralysis. Results: During attempted eye-movement in illumination, one subject had an illusion of environmental movement but four subjects perceived faces as clearly as if they were in central vision. In darkness, four subjects reported movement of the target light in the direction of attempted eye-movements and three could control the movement of the light at will. Conclusion: The hypothesis that internal visual models receive intended ocular-movement-information directly from oculomotor centers is strengthened by this evidence

Visual Experiences during Paralysis

Rationale: Paralyzed human volunteers (n = 6) participated in several studies the primary one of which required full neuromuscular paralysis while awake. After the primary experiment, while still paralyzed and awake, subjects undertook studies of humor and of attempted eye-movement. The attempted eye-movements tested a central, intentional component to one’s internal visual model and are the subject of this report. Methods: Subjects reclined in a supportive chair and were ventilated after paralysis (cisatracurium, 20 mg intravenously). In illumination, subjects were requested to focus alternately on the faces of investigators standing on the left and the right within peripheral vision. In darkness, subjects were instructed to look away from a point source of light. Subjects were to report their experiences after reversal of paralysis. Results: During attempted eye-movement in illumination, one subject had an illusion of environmental movement but four subjects perceived faces as clearly as if they were in central vision. In darkness, four subjects reported movement of the target light in the direction of attempted eye-movements and three could control the movement of the light at will. Conclusion: The hypothesis that internal visual models receive intended ocular-movement-information directly from oculomotor centers is strengthened by this evidence

Gender and Family Systems

Author version made available in accordance with publisher copyright policy. The final publication is available at link.springer.com.EEG recording is a time consuming operation during which the subject is expected to stay still for a long time performing tasks. It is reasonable to expect some uctuation in the level of focus toward the performed task during the task period. This study is focused on investi- gating various approaches for emphasizing regions of interest during the task period. Dividing the task period into three segments of beginning, middle and end, is expectable to improve the overall classi cation per- formance by changing the concentration of the training samples toward regions in which subject had better concentration toward the performed tasks. This issue is investigated through the use of techniques such as i) replication, ii) biasing, and iii) overlapping. A dataset with 4 motor imagery tasks (BCI Competition III dataset IIIa) is used. The results il- lustrate the existing variations within the potential of di erent segments of the task period and the feasibility of techniques that focus the training samples toward such regions

学習履歴データマイニングによる個別型学習支援システムの開発に関する研究

博士（学術）神戸大

Development of functional organization within the sensorimotor network across the perinatal period

In the mature human brain, the neural processing related to different body parts is reflected in patterns of functional connectivity, which is strongest between functional homologs in opposite cortical hemispheres. To understand how this organization is first established, we investigated functional connectivity between limb regions in the sensorimotor cortex in 400 preterm and term infants aged across the equivalent period to the third trimester of gestation (32–45 weeks postmenstrual age). Masks were obtained from empirically derived functional responses in neonates from an independent data set. We demonstrate the early presence of a crude but spatially organized functional connectivity, that rapidly matures across the preterm period to achieve an adult-like configuration by the normal time of birth. Specifically, connectivity was strongest between homolog regions, followed by connectivity between adjacent regions (different limbs but same hemisphere) already in the preterm brain, and increased with age. These changes were specific to the sensorimotor network. Crucially, these trajectories were strongly dependent on age more than age of birth. This demonstrates that during the perinatal period the sensorimotor cortex undergoes preprogrammed changes determining the functional movement organization that are not altered by preterm birth in absence of brain injury

Hand classification of fMRI ICA noise components

We present a practical "how-to" guide to help determine whether single-subject fMRI independent components (ICs) characterise structured noise or not. Manual identification of signal and noise after ICA decomposition is required for efficient data denoising: to train supervised algorithms, to check the results of unsupervised ones or to manually clean the data. In this paper we describe the main spatial and temporal features of ICs and provide general guidelines on how to evaluate these. Examples of signal and noise components are provided from a wide range of datasets (3T data, including examples from the UK Biobank and the Human Connectome Project, and 7T data), together with practical guidelines for their identification. Finally, we discuss how the data quality, data type and preprocessing can influence the characteristics of the ICs and present examples of particularly challenging datasets

Surface Laplacian of Central Scalp Electrical Signals is Insensitive to Muscle Contamination

Author version made available in accordance with the publisher's policy. "(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works."Abstract—Objective: To investigate the effects of surface Laplacian processing on gross and persistent electromyographic (EMG) contamination of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals in electrical scalp recordings. Methods: We made scalp recordings during passive and active tasks, on awake subjects in the absence and in the presence of complete neuromuscular blockade. Three scalp surface Laplacian estimators were compared to left ear and common average reference (CAR). Contamination was quantified by comparing power after paralysis (brain signal, B) with power before paralysis (brain plus muscle signal, B+M). Brain:Muscle (B:M) ratios for the methods were calculated using B and differences in power after paralysis to represent muscle (M). Results: There were very small power differences after paralysis up to 600 Hz using surface Laplacian transforms (B:M> 6 above 30 Hz in central scalp leads). Conclusions: Scalp surface Laplacian transforms reduce muscle power in central and peri-central leads to less than one sixth of the brain signal, 2-3 times better signal detection than CAR. Significance: Scalp surface Laplacian transformations provide robust estimates for detecting high frequency (gamma) activity, for assessing electrophysiological correlates of disease, and also for providing a measure of brain electrical activity for use as a ‘standard’ in the development of brain/muscle signal separation methods

Constitutive spectral EEG peaks in the gamma range: suppressed by sleep, reduced by mental activity and resistant to sensory stimulation

This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permission. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Objective: In a systematic study of gamma activity in neuro-psychiatric disease, we unexpectedly observed distinctive, apparently persistent, electroencephalogram (EEG) spectral peaks in the gamma range (25–100 Hz). Our objective, therefore, was to examine the incidence, distribution and some of the characteristics of these peaks. Methods: High sample-rate, 128-channel, EEG was recorded in 603 volunteers (510 with neuropsychiatric disorders, 93 controls), whilst performing cognitive tasks, and converted to power spectra. Peaks of spectral power, including in the gamma range, were determined algorithmically for all electrodes. To determine if peaks were stable, 24-h ambulatory recordings were obtained from 16 subjects with peaks. In 10 subjects, steady-state responses to stimuli at peak frequency were compared with off-peak-frequency stimulation to determine if peaks were a feature of underlying network resonances and peaks were evaluated with easy and hard versions of oddball tasks to determine if peaks might be influenced by mental effort. Results: 57% of 603 subjects exhibited peaks >2 dB above trough power at or above 25 Hz. Larger peaks (>5 dB) were present in 13% of subjects. Peaks were distributed widely over the scalp, more frequent centrally. Peaks were present through the day and were suppressed by slow-wave-sleep. Steady-state responses were the same with on- or off-peak sensory stimulation. In contrast, mental effort resulted in reductions in power and frequency of gamma peaks, although the suppression did not correlate with level of effort. Conclusions: Gamma EEG can be expressed constitutively as concentrations of power in narrow or wide frequency bands that play an, as yet, unknown role in cognitive activity. Significance: These findings expand the described range of rhythmic EEG phenomena. In particular, in addition to evoked, induced and sustained gamma band activity, gamma activity can be present constitutively in spectral peaks