Ideation as an intellectual information acquisition and use context: Investigating game designers’ information-based ideation behavior

Human Information Behavior (HIB) research commonly examines behavior in the context of why information is acquired and how it will be used, but usually at the level of the work or everyday-life tasks the information will support. HIB has not been examined in detail at the broader contextual level of intellectual purpose (i.e. the higher-order conceptual tasks the information was acquired to support). Examination at this level can enhance holistic understanding of HIB as a ‘means to an intellectual end’ and inform the design of digital information environments that support information interaction for specific intellectual purposes. We investigate information-based ideation (IBI) as a specific intellectual information acquisition and use context by conducting Critical Incident-style interviews with ten game designers, focusing on how they interact with information to generate and develop creative design ideas. Our findings give rise to a framework of their ideation-focused HIB, which systems designers can leverage to reason about how best to support certain behaviors to drive design ideation. These findings emphasize the importance of intellectual purpose as a driver for acquisition and desired outcome of use

Electrocatalysis of fuel cell reactions: Investigation of alternate electrolytes

Oxygen reduction and transport properties of the electrolyte in the phosphoric acid fuel cell are studied. The areas covered were: (1) development of a theoretical expression for the rotating ring disk electrode technique; (2) determination of the intermediate reaction rate constants for oxygen reduction on platinum in phosphoric acid electrolyte; (3) determination of oxygen reduction mechanism in trifluoreomethanesulfonic acid (TFMSA) which was considered as an alternate electrolyte for the acid fuel cells; and (4) the measurement of transport properties of the phosphoric acid electrolyte at high concentrations and temperatures

Electrocatalysis of fuel cell reactions: Investigation of alternate electrolytes

Oxygen reduction and transport properties of the electrolyte in the phosphoric acid fuel cell are studied. A theoretical expression for the rotating ring-disk electrode technique; the intermediate reaction rate constants for oxygen reduction on platinum in phosphoric acid electrolyte; oxygen reduction mechanism in trifluoromethanesulfonic acid (TFMSA), considered as an alternate electrolyte for the acid fuel cells; and transport properties of the phosphoric acid electrolyte at high concentrations and temperatures are covered

Equilibrium vortex formation in ultrarapidly rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensates

Equilibrium vortex formation in rotating binary Bose gases with a rotating frequency higher than the harmonic trapping frequency is investigated theoretically. We consider the system being evaporatively cooled to form condensates and a combined numerical scheme is applied to ensure the binary system being in an authentic equilibrium state. To keep the system stable against the large centrifugal force of ultrafast rotation, a quartic trapping potential is added to the existing harmonic part. Using the Thomas-Fermi approximation, a critical rotating frequency \Omega_c is derived, which characterizes the structure with or without a central density hole. Vortex structures are studied in detail with rotation frequency both above and below ?\Omega_c and with respect to the miscible, symmetrically separated, and asymmetrically separated phases in their nonrotating ground-state counterparts.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Comparative bactericidal activities of daptomycin, glycopeptides, linezolid and tigecycline against blood isolates of Gram-positive bacteria in Taiwan

ABSTRACTIn-vitro MICs and minimum bactericidal concentrations (MBCs) of daptomycin, linezolid, tigecycline, vancomycin and teicoplanin against Gram-positive bacteria were determined using the broth microdilution method for ten blood isolates each of methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), including two vancomycin-intermediate S. aureus (VISA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium and Enterococcus faecalis. One strain of VISA was tested in a time-kill synergism assay of daptomycin combined with oxacillin, imipenem, rifampicin and isepamicin. Daptomycin showed excellent in-vitro bactericidal activity against all the isolates tested, with no tolerance or synergism effects when combined with other agents, except with rifampicin against VISA. Vancomycin had better bactericidal activity against MRSA and MSSA than did teicoplanin. Linezolid had the poorest bactericidal activity against the isolates tested, with 100% tolerance by the MSSA and VRE isolates, and 80% tolerance by the MRSA isolates. Tolerance towards tigecycline was exhibited by 40% of the MRSA isolates, 100% of the MSSA and vancomycin-resistant E. faecalis isolates, and 90% of the vancomycin-resistant E. faecium isolates

Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts

Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng' 201

Spontaneous Crystallization of Skyrmions and Fractional Vortices in the Fast-rotating and Rapidly-quenched Spin-1 Bose-Einstein Condensates

We investigate the spontaneous generation of crystallized topological defects via the combining effects of fast rotation and rapid thermal quench on the spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates. By solving the stochastic projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we show that, when the system reaches equilibrium, a hexagonal lattice of skyrmions, and a square lattice of half-quantized vortices can be formed in a ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic spinor BEC, respetively, which can be imaged by using the polarization-dependent phase-contrast method

THE SURFACE EMG ACTIVITY OF THE UPPER LIMB MUSCLES IN TABLE TENNIS FOREHAND DRIVES

The purpose of this study was to analyze the 3D kinematics variables and the upper limb muscle surface EMG activity of Taiwan elite table tennis players when they were performing forehand drives after receiving topspin and backspin services. Ten Vicon MX-13 2+cameras (Vicon, Oxford, UK, 250Hz) were used to record the 3D kinematics data and measured the EMG signals of seven upper limb muscles of the players. The results showed that the tactics of the table tennis players performed the forehand drive to receive backspin were both to increase the racket tilt angle in advance and to raise the path angle during the upswing phase. The players exerted greater muscular activity during receiving the backspin forehand drive than receiving topspin forehand drive in the wrist extensor, the biceps and the triceps

Melioidosis: an emerging infection in Taiwan?

From January 1982 to May 2000, 17 infections caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei were diagnosed in 15 patients in Taiwan; almost all the infections were diagnosed from 1994 to May 2000. Of the 15 patients, 9 (60%) had underlying diseases, and 10 (67%) had bacteremic pneumonia. Thirteen (76%) episodes of infection were considered indigenous. Four patients died of melioidosis. Seventeen B. pseudomallei isolates, recovered from eight patients from November 1996 to May 2000, were analyzed to determine their in vitro susceptibilities to 14 antimicrobial agents, cellular fatty acid and biochemical reaction profiles, and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA patterns. Eight strains (highly related isolates) were identified. All isolates were arabinose non-assimilators and were susceptible to amoxicillin-clavulanate, piperacillin-tazobactam, imipenem, and meropenem. No spread of the strain was documented

A new approach to axial coupling constants in the QCD sum rule

We derive new QCD sum rules for the axial coupling constants by considering two-point correlation functions of the axial-vector currents in a one nucleon state. The QCD sum rules tell us that the axial coupling constants are expressed by nucleon matrix elements of quark and gluon operators which are related to the sigma terms and the moments of parton distribution functions. The results for the iso-vector axial coupling constants and the 8th component of the SU(3) octet are in good agreement with experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure include