Systematic reviews of occupational therapy interventions: summarizing research evidence and highlighting the gaps

As services are commissioned based on effectiveness, occupational therapists are under pressure to demonstrate the efficacy of their interventions. Occupational therapists also need to know that the interventions they are providing are effective. Robertson et al (2013) demonstrated that the occupational therapy literature is important for clinicians and is an essential part of their practice. However, as more research is published, it can be increasingly time-consuming and confusing for clinicians to keep abreast of the current literature. Occupational therapy-related research may be published in different forms, in a range of locations, and be of varying methodological quality. Furthermore, readily available published studies that investigate occupational therapy efficacy may not be sufficiently powered, or may lack external validity, when applied to different clinical settings. When well conducted, systematic reviews provide a useful way of synthesizing and evaluating the evidence on a particular topic and, to some extent, provide a solution to this problem. This paper focuses upon reviews of randomized controlled trials, as these provide the highest quality of evidence on the question of a particular intervention’s effectiveness. The merits of reviews of qualitative studies are also considered, together with the possibility of combining more than one type of review

Electromigration voiding in nanoindented, single crystal Al lines

We consider the interpretation of some theoretical and experimental work regarding electromigration voiding in nanoindented, single crystal aluminum lines. A recently suggested voiding criterion of a critical accumulated flux divergence is found, in fact, to be identical to the widely accepted critical stress criterion. The inclusion of the stress dependence of the atomic diffusion coefficient is shown to be vital when the steady state is characterized by J ≠ 0, such as in the case of a void growing at a constant rate. It is found, for example, that the stress required for steady void growth, within single crystal Al lines, is probably significantly smaller than previously suggested

Improving Neural Vocoder Stability Using Artificial Training Data

A text-to-speech (TTS) converter typically comprises a prosodic model that generates acoustic parameters from linguistic features paired with a neural vocoder. With such a configuration, some feature values can be difficult for the neural vocoder to process, resulting in audio artifacts. This disclosure describes techniques to improve neural vocoder performance, e.g., reduce audio artifacts, make the vocoder more robust to unusual acoustic feature variations, generally be more forgiving of errors made by the feature generator, etc. The techniques entail the use of an auxiliary training path that is driven by synthetic training examples generated by CHiVE inference with some random sampling far enough from the mean (zero)

Reflection On Service-Learning Among Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Students

The purpose of service learning is to connect theory and practice in a way that gives students a prospect to both take part in a service activity that meets community needs, as well as reflect on the experience in class to enhance their civic engagement and deepen their understanding of course content. A successful service-learning program requires reflective practice. The School of Education at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia has been conducting service-learning for many years. Although there is no proper guideline for the students to reflect on their service-learning experiences, students are still expected to do so. The objective in this study are describing service-learning experience. This research study applies case study research method among students’ reflective experiences in service-learning at School of Education in UTM. Data collection was done using qualitative research methodology involving semi structured interviews with UTM postgraduates. Triangulation method used to validate the data and continued with thematic analysis to identify the themes. The findings for every research question have been plotted in diagram. Based on the themes from the findings, a template was proposed for improving service-learning reflection for the students from UTM

The 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetings

In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription\ud of speech in meetings used for participation in the 2005 NIST\ud RT evaluations. The system was designed for participation in the speech\ud to text part of the evaluations, in particular for transcription of speech\ud recorded with multiple distant microphones and independent headset\ud microphones. System performance was tested on both conference room\ud and lecture style meetings. Although input sources are processed using\ud different front-ends, the recognition process is based on a unified system\ud architecture. The system operates in multiple passes and makes use\ud of state of the art technologies such as discriminative training, vocal\ud tract length normalisation, heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis,\ud speaker adaptation with maximum likelihood linear regression and minimum\ud word error rate decoding. In this paper we describe the system performance\ud on the official development and test sets for the NIST RT05s\ud evaluations. The system was jointly developed in less than 10 months\ud by a multi-site team and was shown to achieve very competitive performance

Identifying the level of flexibility, agility and speed among track and field athletes with disabilities

In order to become a successful track and field athlete, an athlete must develop skills in flexibility, agility and speed. However, to date, all the research regarding flexibility, agility and speed have concentrated on normal athletes. The present study extends this line of research to disabled track and field athletes in Malaysia. The aims of the present study were to achieve the set a benchmark for measuring level of flexibility, speed and agility among track and field athletes with disabilities; and to examine the influence of participation in either track or field events on the development of flexibility, agility and speed. Thirty-eight (n=38) track and field athletes with disabilities comprising of 27 males and 11 females participated in the study. Each participant completed six tests made up of sit and reach test, lateral change of direction test, hand grip strength test; back leg dynamometer test and sit-up test. A descriptive analysis was used to assess differences in performance between track and field athletes with disabilities on the six tests. It was observed that track athletes with disabilities were superior on agility, speed and agility than field athletes with disabilities. All the data were analysed using SPSS and presented as mean of (± SEM). The mean value height and weight for male 168.35 ± 1.46m and 66.73 ± 3.28kg. Meanwhile, the mean value height and weight for female’s 153.82 ± 2.10m and 45.08 ± 1.94kg. For male Body Mass Index (BMI), the mean was 23.33 ± 4.5 kg.m2 and 19.09 ± 1.6 kg.m2 for females. When divided according to gender category, the mean back grip test for male subjects was 92.06 ± 44.2 kg and 48.45 ± 17.2 kg for females. Sit-ups test revealed that the mean performance for male was 35.52 ± 9.8 and 28.36 ± 8.14 for the female athletes. Besides that in the sit and reach test, the mean for male athletes was 30.78 ± 12.2 cm and 23.18 ± 12.40 cm for females athletes. In the hand grip test, male subjects mean was 70.51 ± 30.5 kg and 45.47 ± 15.91 kg for females. The mean value for lateral change of direction test for male athletes was 13.66 ± 3.7 and 15.78 ± 2.9 for the female athletes. The field athletes were, however, superior on flexibility, back grip test and hand-grip test than track disabled athletes. The results showed the three measures of flexibility, agility and speed were appropriate for determining the physical fitness level of track and field athletes with disabilities

Global Asymptotic Stabilization of a Spinning Top With Torque Actuators Using Stereographic Projection

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57817/1/CJWan1997.pd