Intramolecular Imino Diels-Alder Reaction: Progress toward the Synthesis of Uncialamycin

We herein described an intramolecular imino Diels-Alder reaction promoted with BF3.OEt2/DDQ affording substituted quinolines. Using this procedure, we prepared the chiral quitioline moiety of the uncialamycin, a new enediyne natural product

Accessibility to primary health care in Belgium: an evaluation of policies awarding financial assistance in shortage areas

Background: In many countries, financial assistance is awarded to physicians who settle in an area that is designated as a shortage area to prevent unequal accessibility to primary health care. Today, however, policy makers use fairly simple methods to define health care accessibility, with physician-to-population ratios (PPRs) within predefined administrative boundaries being overwhelmingly favoured. Our purpose is to verify whether these simple methods are accurate enough for adequately designating medical shortage areas and explore how these perform relative to more advanced GIS-based methods. Methods: Using a geographical information system (GIS), we conduct a nation-wide study of accessibility to primary care physicians in Belgium using four different methods: PPR, distance to closest physician, cumulative opportunity, and floating catchment area (FCA) methods. Results: The official method used by policy makers in Belgium (calculating PPR per physician zone) offers only a crude representation of health care accessibility, especially because large contiguous areas (physician zones) are considered. We found substantial differences in the number and spatial distribution of medical shortage areas when applying different methods. Conclusions: The assessment of spatial health care accessibility and concomitant policy initiatives are affected by and dependent on the methodology used. The major disadvantage of PPR methods is its aggregated approach, masking subtle local variations. Some simple GIS methods overcome this issue, but have limitations in terms of conceptualisation of physician interaction and distance decay. Conceptually, the enhanced 2-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method, an advanced FCA method, was found to be most appropriate for supporting areal health care policies, since this method is able to calculate accessibility at a small scale (e.g. census tracts), takes interaction between physicians into account, and considers distance decay. While at present in health care research methodological differences and modifiable areal unit problems have remained largely overlooked, this manuscript shows that these aspects have a significant influence on the insights obtained. Hence, it is important for policy makers to ascertain to what extent their policy evaluations hold under different scales of analysis and when different methods are used

Spatial movement pattern recognition in soccer based on relative player movements

Knowledge of spatial movement patterns in soccer occurring on a regular basis can give a soccer coach, analyst or reporter insights in the playing style or tactics of a group of players or team. Furthermore, it can support a coach to better prepare for a soccer match by analysing (trained) movement patterns of both his own as well as opponent players. We explore the use of the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC), a spatiotemporal qualitative calculus describing the relative movement between objects, for spatial movement pattern recognition of players movements in soccer. The proposed method allows for the recognition of spatial movement patterns that occur on different parts of the field and/or at different spatial scales. Furthermore, the Levenshtein distance metric supports the recognition of similar movements that occur at different speeds and enables the comparison of movements that have different temporal lengths. We first present the basics of the calculus, and subsequently illustrate its applicability with a real soccer case. To that end, we present a situation where a user chooses the movements of two players during 20 seconds of a real soccer match of a 2016-2017 professional soccer competition as a reference fragment. Following a pattern matching procedure, we describe all other fragments with QTC and calculate their distance with the QTC representation of the reference fragment. The top-k most similar fragments of the same match are presented and validated by means of a duo-trio test. The analyses show the potential of QTC for spatial movement pattern recognition in soccer

User preferences on route instruction types for mobile indoor route guidance

Adaptive mobile wayfinding systems are being developed to ease wayfinding in the indoor environment. They present wayfinding information to the user, which is adapted to the context. Wayfinding information can be communicated by using different types of route instructions, such as text, photos, videos, symbols or a combination thereof. The need for a different type of route instruction may vary at decision points, for example because of its complexity. Furthermore, these needs may be different for different user characteristics (e.g., age, gender, level of education). To determine this need for information, an online survey has been executed where participants rated 10 different route instruction types at several decision points in a case study building. Results show that the types with additional text were preferred over those without text. The photo instructions, combined with text, generally received the highest ratings, especially from first-time visitors. 3D simulations were appreciated at complex decision points and by younger people. When text (with symbols) is considered as a route instruction type, it is best used for the start or end instruction