The Impact of the NIHERST/NGC National Science Centre, Trinidad and Tobago on Visiting Student Groups

The aim of this study was to asses the impact of a visit to the NIHERST/NGC National Science Centre in Trinidad on four different school-age visitor groups. The research was conducted through the administering of a post-visit questionnaire immediately upon completion of each visit by each group, and via visitor feedback obtained in post-visit or pre-visit activities conducted within two weeks of the visit for three groups. Teachers/instructors who accompanied the groups on their visit also completed post-visit questionnaires and provided additional information on follow-up activities via an interview. The results of this investigation suggest that the visit to this science centre provided entertainment/enjoyment value and potential educational value to most individuals. The nature of this enjoyment was noted for various age groups and genders in this study. Quantification of the educational impact was not possible within the constraints of this study, which was unable to capture long-term effects of the supply of ‘new knowledge’ to visitors which the visit to the science centre had provided.

Individuell utprovning av inkontinenshjälpmedel i kommunala särskilda boenden

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which incontinence aids, used in local authority/municipal nursing homes, were adapted to the resident’s urine-leakage volume and to find out how nurses perceived the current situation concerning individual testing of incontinence aids in municipal nursing homes. The study method was a quantitative empirical study and was carried out in two phases. The first phase was a weighing test, carried out in three nursing homes, whereby the incontinence aids used by 25 residents during a 48 hour period were weighed. The second phase was the completion of a questionnaire by the municipal nurses working in the same local authority. The questionnaire covered: the division of responsibilities; routines for testing incontinence aids, and the level of knowledge concerning individual incontinence aid testing. Only 22 % of the pads used during the observation were properly adapted to the patients’ urinary leakage volume, while 76 % of incontinence aids were larger than necessary in relation to the real volume of urinary leakage. The municipal nurses, who have a key role and formal responsibility for individual incontinence aid testing, considered that there was insufficient knowledge within the organisation concerning individual incontinence aid testing, and that the division of responsibilities in this area was unclear. There were great variations relating to the extent of the nurses’ involvement in individual incontinence aid testing, and the nurses stated that increased involvement in individual incontinence aid testing was dependent on more time being made available for this task. Only a minority of the nurses thought that the requisitioning of incontinence aids was preceded by individual testing of the incontinence pads within the organisation. The majority of nurses considered that this was not the case or were unsure of the situation.

Using ant colonies for solve the multiprocessor task graph scheduling

The problem of scheduling a parallel program presented by a weighted directed acyclic graph (DAG) to the set of homogeneous processors for minimizing the completion time of the program has been extensively studied as academic optimization problem which occurs in optimizing the execution time of parallel algorithm with parallel computer.In this paper, we propose an application of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to a multiprocessor scheduling problem (MPSP). In the MPSP, no preemption is allowed and each operation demands a setup time on the machines. The problem seeks to compose a schedule that minimizes the total completion time.We therefore rely on heuristics to find solutions since solution methods are not feasible for most problems as such. This novel heuristic searching approach to the multiprocessor based on the ACO algorithm a collection of agents cooperate to effectively explore the search space.A computational experiment is conducted on a suit of benchmark application. By comparing our algorithm result obtained to that of previous heuristic algorithm, it is evince that the ACO algorithm exhibits competitive performance with small error ratio.

Biopolitik, civilsamfund og ’politisk eskatologi’ : Foucaults mistillid over for befolkningens indre kræfter

Biopolitics, Civil Society and Political Eschatology: Foucault’s distrust in the population’s inherent forces Michel Foucault’s scepticism toward discourses on the organic vitality of populations is not only explainable by his attention to the dark ‘underside of biopolitics – the risks of persecution of individuals, who threaten the population’s vitality from the inside. Moreover, it should be understood in light of Foucault’s acute sensitivity to the deep-seated, conflict-ridden nature of the population in terms of its inherent potential for cultural clashes, violent struggles, suspicions, hatred, or, in short, the perpetual conflicts of civil society. Foucault’s work led him to a position of ambiguous support for the state and to a more evident distrust in the forces of the population. He used the term “political eschatologies” about antipolitical visions that pronounce the end of politics in a final accord where social contradictions dissolve and the community will prevail over the state. Foucault played on the religious significations of the term, especially in regard to the religious, fanatic rejection of the duality between state and civil society, a rejection that rests on the belief in a completion of historical and political time and the final salvation of all in “the city of God”. The article demonstrates Foucault’s highly ambiguous view of civil society, it examines his discussion Ferguson’s work on civil society, and it considers Foucault’s use of the term “political eschatologies” to indicate the dangers of extreme, anti-state, political movements. It challenges the image of Foucault as an unequivocal proponent of grass roots and identity politics.  

Spiral drawing during self-rated dyskinesia is more impaired than during self-rated off

Background: A mobile device test battery, consisting of a patient diary collection section with disease-related questions and a fine motor test section (including spiral drawing tasks), was used by 65 patients with advanced Parkinson's disease (PD)(treated with intraduodenal levodopa/carbidopa gel infusion, Duodopa®, or candidates for this treatment) on 10439 test occasions in their home environments. On each occasion, patients traced three pre-drawn Archimedes spirals using an ergonomic stylus and self-assessed their motor function on a global Treatment Response Scale (TRS) ranging from -3 = very 'off' to 0 = 'on' to +3 = very dyskinetic. The spirals were processed by a computer-based method that generates a "spiral score" representing the PD-related drawing impairment. The scale for the score was based on a modified Bain & Findley rating scale in the range from 0 = no impairment to 5 = moderate impairment to 10 = extremely severe impairment. Objective: To analyze the test battery data for the purpose to find differences in spiral drawing performance of PD patients in relation to their self-assessments of motor function. Methods: Three motor states were used in the analysis; OFF state (including moderate and very 'off'), ON state ('on') and a dyskinetic (DYS) state (moderate and very dyskinetic). In order to avoid the problem of multiple test occasions per patient, 200 random samples of single test occasions per patient were drawn. One-way analysis of variance, ANOVA, test followed by Tukey multiple comparisons test was used to test if mean values of spiral test parameters, i.e. the spiral score and drawing completion times (in seconds), were different among the three motor states. Statistical significance was set at p<0.05. To investigate changes in the spiral score over the time-of-day test sessions for the three motor states, plots of statistical summaries were inspected. Results: The mean spiral score differed significantly across the three self-assessed motor states (p<0.001, ANOVA test). Tukey post-hoc comparisons indicate that the mean spiral score (mean ± SD; [95% CI for mean]) in DYS state (5.2 ± 1.8; [5.12, 5.28]) was higher than the mean spiral score in OFF (4.3 ± 1.7; [4.22, 4.37]) and ON (4.2 ± 1.7; [4.17, 4.29]) states. The mean spiral score was also significantly different among individual TRS values of slightly 'off' (4.02 ± 1.63), 'on' (4.07 ± 1.65) and slightly dyskinetic (4.6 ± 1.71), (p<0.001). There were no differences in drawing completion times among the three motor states (p=0.509). In the OFF and ON states, patients drew slightly more impaired spirals in the afternoon whereas in the DYS state the spiral drawing performance was more impaired in the morning. Conclusion: It was found that when patients considered themselves as being dyskinetic spiral drawing was more impaired (nearly one unit change in a 0-10 scale) compared to when they considered themselves as being 'off' and 'on'. The spiral drawing at patients that self-assessed their motor state as dyskinetic was slightly more impaired in the morning hours, between 8 and 12 o'clock, a situation possibly caused by the morning dose effect.

Digital spiral analysis for objective assessment of fine motor timing variability in Parkinson's disease

OBJECTIVES: To develop a method for objective assessment of fine motor timing variability in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients, using digital spiral data gathered by a touch screen device. BACKGROUND: A retrospective analysis was conducted on data from 105 subjects including65 patients with advanced PD (group A), 15 intermediate patients experiencing motor fluctuations (group I), 15 early stage patients (group S), and 10 healthy elderly subjects (HE) were examined. The subjects were asked to perform repeated upper limb motor tasks by tracing a pre-drawn Archimedes spiral as shown on the screen of the device. The spiral tracing test was performed using an ergonomic pen stylus, using dominant hand. The test was repeated three times per test occasion and the subjects were instructed to complete it within 10 seconds. Digital spiral data including stylus position (x-ycoordinates) and timestamps (milliseconds) were collected and used in subsequent analysis. The total number of observations with the test battery were as follows: Swedish group (n=10079), Italian I group (n=822), Italian S group (n = 811), and HE (n=299). METHODS: The raw spiral data were processed with three data processing methods. To quantify motor timing variability during spiral drawing tasks Approximate Entropy (APEN) method was applied on digitized spiral data. APEN is designed to capture the amount of irregularity or complexity in time series. APEN requires determination of two parameters, namely, the window size and similarity measure. In our work and after experimentation, window size was set to 4 and similarity measure to 0.2 (20% of the standard deviation of the time series). The final score obtained by APEN was normalized by total drawing completion time and used in subsequent analysis. The score generated by this method is hence on denoted APEN. In addition, two more methods were applied on digital spiral data and their scores were used in subsequent analysis. The first method was based on Digital Wavelet Transform and Principal Component Analysis and generated a score representing spiral drawing impairment. The score generated by this method is hence on denoted WAV. The second method was based on standard deviation of frequency filtered drawing velocity. The score generated by this method is hence on denoted SDDV. Linear mixed-effects (LME) models were used to evaluate mean differences of the spiral scores of the three methods across the four subject groups. Test-retest reliability of the three scores was assessed after taking mean of the three possible correlations (Spearman’s rank coefficients) between the three test trials. Internal consistency of the methods was assessed by calculating correlations between their scores. RESULTS: When comparing mean spiral scores between the four subject groups, the APEN scores were different between HE subjects and three patient groups (P=0.626 for S group with 9.9% mean value difference, P=0.089 for I group with 30.2%, and P=0.0019 for A group with 44.1%). However, there were no significant differences in mean scores of the other two methods, except for the WAV between the HE and A groups (P<0.001). WAV and SDDV were highly and significantly correlated to each other with a coefficient of 0.69. However, APEN was not correlated to neither WAV nor SDDV with coefficients of 0.11 and 0.12, respectively. Test-retest reliability coefficients of the three scores were as follows: APEN (0.9), WAV(0.83) and SD-DV (0.55). CONCLUSIONS: The results show that the digital spiral analysis-based objective APEN measure is able to significantly differentiate the healthy subjects from patients at advanced level. In contrast to the other two methods (WAV and SDDV) that are designed to quantify dyskinesias (over-medications), this method can be useful for characterizing Off symptoms in PD. The APEN was not correlated to none of the other two methods indicating that it measures a different construct of upper limb motor function in PD patients than WAV and SDDV. The APEN also had a better test-retest reliability indicating that it is more stable and consistent over time than WAV and SDDV.

Pedagogisk dokumentation i förskolan : En intervjustudie om några förskollärares uppfattningar om begreppet pedagogisk dokumentation och dess innebörd

I dagens förskoleverksamhet är det i regel ett måste att dokumentera lärandeprocesser för att kunna uppfylla samtliga mål i utbildningsplaner och bistå med god utbildningskvalitet. Pedagogisk dokumentation – som grundades av Reggio Emilia – är ett utvärderingsverktyg som skall observera barnets lärandeprocesser samt förskollärarnas förhållningssätt. I vardagliga situationer i förskoleverksamheten har pedagogisk dokumentation många fördelar som kan kartlägga och ge bra förutsättningar genom att skapa förståelse för hur barn lär sig och utvecklas bäst. Syftet med denna studie var att genomföra en litteraturstudie i kombination med kvalitativa intervjuer som utgick ifrån följande frågeställningar: Hur definierar förskollärare begreppet dokumentation respektive pedagogisk dokumentation? Hur beskriver förskollärare arbetet med pedagogisk dokumentation? Och hur menar förskollärare att arbetet med pedagogisk dokumentation utvecklar verksamheten? Intervjuerna transkriberades och kategoriserades sedan kring hur förskollärarna använder pedagogisk dokumentation, hur synen på pedagogisk dokumentation ser ut samt vilka olika arbetssätt som används. Vid färdigställande av resultatet framgick det att tre av fyra respondenter upplevde pedagogisk dokumentation som något positivt och modernt. En respondent av fyra fann inte pedagogisk dokumentation som ett bra hjälpmedel för utvärdering, då verktyget kan vara oetiskt på så sätt att det kan användas som ett bedömningsverktyg på det enskilda barnet. Diskussionsavsnittet kopplar samman tidigare forskning med förskollärarnas svar kring hur de ser på pedagogisk dokumentation, hur de beskriver arbetet med pedagogisk dokumentation och hur arbetssättet kan utveckla verksamheten.

Machine Learning Algorithms in Heavy Process Manufacturing

In a global economy, manufacturers mainly compete with cost efficiency of production, as the price of raw materials are similar worldwide. Heavy industry has two big issues to deal with. On the one hand there is lots of data which needs to be analyzed in an effective manner, and on the other hand making big improvements via investments in cooperate structure or new machinery is neither economically nor physically viable. Machine learning offers a promising way for manufacturers to address both these problems as they are in an excellent position to employ learning techniques with their massive resource of historical production data. However, choosing modelling a strategy in this setting is far from trivial and this is the objective of this article. The article investigates characteristics of the most popular classifiers used in industry today. Support Vector Machines, Multilayer Perceptron, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and the meta-algorithms Bagging and Boosting are mainly investigated in this work. Lessons from real-world implementations of these learners are also provided together with future directions when different learners are expected to perform well. The importance of feature selection and relevant selection methods in an industrial setting are further investigated. Performance metrics have also been discussed for the sake of completion.

A data driven approach for automating vehicle activated signs

Vehicle activated signs (VAS) display a warning message when drivers exceed a particular threshold. VAS are often installed on local roads to display a warning message depending on the speed of the approaching vehicles. VAS are usually powered by electricity; however, battery and solar powered VAS are also commonplace. This thesis investigated devel-opment of an automatic trigger speed of vehicle activated signs in order to influence driver behaviour, the effect of which has been measured in terms of reduced mean speed and low standard deviation. A comprehen-sive understanding of the effectiveness of the trigger speed of the VAS on driver behaviour was established by systematically collecting data. Specif-ically, data on time of day, speed, length and direction of the vehicle have been collected for the purpose, using Doppler radar installed at the road. A data driven calibration method for the radar used in the experiment has also been developed and evaluated. Results indicate that trigger speed of the VAS had variable effect on driv-ers’ speed at different sites and at different times of the day. It is evident that the optimal trigger speed should be set near the 85th percentile speed, to be able to lower the standard deviation. In the case of battery and solar powered VAS, trigger speeds between the 50th and 85th per-centile offered the best compromise between safety and power consump-tion. Results also indicate that different classes of vehicles report differ-ences in mean speed and standard deviation; on a highway, the mean speed of cars differs slightly from the mean speed of trucks, whereas a significant difference was observed between the classes of vehicles on lo-cal roads. A differential trigger speed was therefore investigated for the sake of completion. A data driven approach using Random forest was found to be appropriate in predicting trigger speeds respective to types of vehicles and traffic conditions. The fact that the predicted trigger speed was found to be consistently around the 85th percentile speed justifies the choice of the automatic model.