What Do You Do With Hands Like These? Close Reading Facilitates Exploration and Text Creation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lindsey Moses

2013-05-01

Full Text Available This article shares instructional ideas to enhance language and literacy experiences involving the reading and writing processes of young bilinguals (Spanish and English in Colorado, USA when engaging with informational texts. Informational texts provide language scaffolds for young bilinguals because they build on their background knowledge about the world around them. Drawing on their recognition of real-world concepts found in informational texts, teaching ideas that enrich both academic and social vocabulary are shared. These teaching ideas suggest moving beyond the read aloud and individual reading of informational texts; they suggest instead teaching young learners to ‘read like writers’ and utilize Jenkins and Page’s What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? (2003 as a mentor text. This article includes relevant research, teaching ideas and classroom examples for scaffolding a close reading, ultimately resulting in intercultural explorations as the children share their writing about their home contexts.

Text de-identification for privacy protection: a study of its impact on clinical text information content.

Science.gov (United States)

Meystre, Stéphane M; Ferrández, Óscar; Friedlin, F Jeffrey; South, Brett R; Shen, Shuying; Samore, Matthew H

2014-08-01

As more and more electronic clinical information is becoming easier to access for secondary uses such as clinical research, approaches that enable faster and more collaborative research while protecting patient privacy and confidentiality are becoming more important. Clinical text de-identification offers such advantages but is typically a tedious manual process. Automated Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods can alleviate this process, but their impact on subsequent uses of the automatically de-identified clinical narratives has only barely been investigated. In the context of a larger project to develop and investigate automated text de-identification for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) clinical notes, we studied the impact of automated text de-identification on clinical information in a stepwise manner. Our approach started with a high-level assessment of clinical notes informativeness and formatting, and ended with a detailed study of the overlap of select clinical information types and Protected Health Information (PHI). To investigate the informativeness (i.e., document type information, select clinical data types, and interpretation or conclusion) of VHA clinical notes, we used five different existing text de-identification systems. The informativeness was only minimally altered by these systems while formatting was only modified by one system. To examine the impact of de-identification on clinical information extraction, we compared counts of SNOMED-CT concepts found by an open source information extraction application in the original (i.e., not de-identified) version of a corpus of VHA clinical notes, and in the same corpus after de-identification. Only about 1.2-3% less SNOMED-CT concepts were found in de-identified versions of our corpus, and many of these concepts were PHI that was erroneously identified as clinical information. To study this impact in more details and assess how generalizable our findings were, we examined the overlap between

Hand hygiene--evaluation of three disinfectant hand sanitizers in a community setting.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rita Babeluk

Full Text Available Hand hygiene is acknowledged as the single most important measure to prevent nosocomial infections in the healthcare setting. Similarly, in non-clinical settings, hand hygiene is recognised as a key element in helping prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of three different disinfectant hand sanitizers in reducing the burden of bacterial hand contamination in 60 healthy volunteers in a community setting, both before and after education about the correct use of hand sanitizers. The study is the first to evaluate the efficacy and ease of use of different formulations of hand rubs used by the general population. The products tested were: Sterillium (perfumed, liquid, desderman pure gel (odorless, gel and Lavit (perfumed, spray. Sterillium and desderman are EN1500 (hygienic hand rub certified products (available in pharmacy and Lavit is non EN1500 certified and available in supermarkets. The two EN1500 certified products were found to be significantly superior in terms of reducing bacterial load. desderman pure gel, Sterillium and Lavit reduced the bacterial count to 6.4%, 8.2% and 28.0% respectively. After education in the correct use of each hand rub, the bacterial load was reduced even further, demonstrating the value of education in improving hand hygiene. Information about the testers' perceptions of the three sanitizers, together with their expectations of a hand sanitizer was obtained through a questionnaire. Efficacy, followed by skin compatibility were found to be the two most important attributes of a hand disinfectant in our target group.

Unsupervised information extraction by text segmentation

CERN Document Server

Cortez, Eli

2013-01-01

A new unsupervised approach to the problem of Information Extraction by Text Segmentation (IETS) is proposed, implemented and evaluated herein. The authors' approach relies on information available on pre-existing data to learn how to associate segments in the input string with attributes of a given domain relying on a very effective set of content-based features. The effectiveness of the content-based features is also exploited to directly learn from test data structure-based features, with no previous human-driven training, a feature unique to the presented approach. Based on the approach, a

Mining knowledge from text repositories using information extraction ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Information extraction (IE); text mining; text repositories; knowledge discovery from .... general purpose English words. However ... of precision and recall, as extensive experimentation is required due to lack of public tagged corpora. 4. Mining ...

Children’s comprehension of informational text: Reading, engaging, and learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Linda BAKER

2011-11-01

Full Text Available The Reading, Engaging, and Learning project (REAL investigated whether a classroom intervention that enhanced young children's experience with informational books would increase reading achievement and engagement. Participants attended schools serving low income neighborhoods with 86% African American enrollment. The longitudinal study spanned second through fourth grades. Treatment conditions were: (1 Text Infusion/Reading for Learning Instruction -- students were given greater access to informational books in their classroom libraries and in reading instruction; (2 Text Infusion Alone -- the same books were provided but teachers were not asked to alter their instruction; (3 Traditional Instruction -- students experienced business as usual in the classroom. Children were assessed each year on measures of reading and reading engagement, and classroom instructional practices were observed. On most measures, the informational text infusion intervention did not yield differential growth over time. However, the results inform efforts to increase children’s facility with informational text in the early years in order to improve reading comprehension.

Clean Hands Count

Medline Plus

Full Text Available ... has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on May ... 34 How The Clean Hands - Safe Hands System Works - Duration: 3:38. Clean Hands-Safe Hands 5, ...

BILINGUAL MULTIMODAL SYSTEM FOR TEXT-TO-AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH AND SIGN LANGUAGE SYNTHESIS

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A. A. Karpov

2014-09-01

Full Text Available We present a conceptual model, architecture and software of a multimodal system for audio-visual speech and sign language synthesis by the input text. The main components of the developed multimodal synthesis system (signing avatar are: automatic text processor for input text analysis; simulation 3D model of human's head; computer text-to-speech synthesizer; a system for audio-visual speech synthesis; simulation 3D model of human’s hands and upper body; multimodal user interface integrating all the components for generation of audio, visual and signed speech. The proposed system performs automatic translation of input textual information into speech (audio information and gestures (video information, information fusion and its output in the form of multimedia information. A user can input any grammatically correct text in Russian or Czech languages to the system; it is analyzed by the text processor to detect sentences, words and characters. Then this textual information is converted into symbols of the sign language notation. We apply international «Hamburg Notation System» - HamNoSys, which describes the main differential features of each manual sign: hand shape, hand orientation, place and type of movement. On their basis the 3D signing avatar displays the elements of the sign language. The virtual 3D model of human’s head and upper body has been created using VRML virtual reality modeling language, and it is controlled by the software based on OpenGL graphical library. The developed multimodal synthesis system is a universal one since it is oriented for both regular users and disabled people (in particular, for the hard-of-hearing and visually impaired, and it serves for multimedia output (by audio and visual modalities of input textual information.

Design of a 3-DOF Parallel Hand-Controller

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Chengcheng Zhu

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Hand-controllers, as human-machine-interface (HMI devices, can transfer the position information of the operator’s hands into the virtual environment to control the target objects or a real robot directly. At the same time, the haptic information from the virtual environment or the sensors on the real robot can be displayed to the operator. It helps human perceive haptic information more truly with feedback force. A parallel hand-controller is designed in this paper. It is simplified from the traditional delta haptic device. The swing arms in conventional delta devices are replaced with the slider rail modules. The base consists of two hexagons and several links. For the use of the linear sliding modules instead of swing arms, the arc movement is replaced by linear movement. So that, the calculating amount of the position positive solution and the force inverse solution is reduced for the simplification of the motion. The kinematics, static mechanics, and dynamic mechanics are analyzed in this paper. What is more, two demonstration applications are developed to verify the performance of the designed hand-controller.

Finding Text Information in the Ocean of Electronic Documents

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Medvick, Patricia A.; Calapristi, Augustin J.

2003-02-05

Information management in natural resources has become an overwhelming task. A massive amount of electronic documents and data is now available for creating informed decisions. The problem is finding the relevant information to support the decision-making process. Determining gaps in knowledge in order to propose new studies or to determine which proposals to fund for maximum potential is a time-consuming and difficult task. Additionally, available data stores are increasing in complexity; they now may include not only text and numerical data, but also images, sounds, and video recordings. Information visualization specialists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have software tools for exploring electronic data stores and for discovering and exploiting relationships within data sets. These provide capabilities for unstructured text explorations, the use of data signatures (a compact format for the essence of a set of scientific data) for visualization (Wong et al 2000), visualizations for multiple query results (Havre et al. 2001), and others (http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz ). We will focus on IN-SPIRE, a MS Windows vision of PNNL’s SPIRE (Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration). IN-SPIRE was developed to assist information analysts find and discover information in huge masses of text documents.

Information Retrieval and Text Mining Technologies for Chemistry.

Science.gov (United States)

Krallinger, Martin; Rabal, Obdulia; Lourenço, Anália; Oyarzabal, Julen; Valencia, Alfonso

2017-06-28

Efficient access to chemical information contained in scientific literature, patents, technical reports, or the web is a pressing need shared by researchers and patent attorneys from different chemical disciplines. Retrieval of important chemical information in most cases starts with finding relevant documents for a particular chemical compound or family. Targeted retrieval of chemical documents is closely connected to the automatic recognition of chemical entities in the text, which commonly involves the extraction of the entire list of chemicals mentioned in a document, including any associated information. In this Review, we provide a comprehensive and in-depth description of fundamental concepts, technical implementations, and current technologies for meeting these information demands. A strong focus is placed on community challenges addressing systems performance, more particularly CHEMDNER and CHEMDNER patents tasks of BioCreative IV and V, respectively. Considering the growing interest in the construction of automatically annotated chemical knowledge bases that integrate chemical information and biological data, cheminformatics approaches for mapping the extracted chemical names into chemical structures and their subsequent annotation together with text mining applications for linking chemistry with biological information are also presented. Finally, future trends and current challenges are highlighted as a roadmap proposal for research in this emerging field.

Guideline Implementation: Hand Hygiene.

Science.gov (United States)

Goldberg, Judith L

2017-02-01

Performing proper hand hygiene and surgical hand antisepsis is essential to reducing the rates of health care-associated infections, including surgical site infections. The updated AORN "Guideline for hand hygiene" provides guidance on hand hygiene and surgical hand antisepsis, the wearing of fingernail polish and artificial nails, proper skin care to prevent dermatitis, the wearing of jewelry, hand hygiene product selection, and quality assurance and performance improvement considerations. This article focuses on key points of the guideline to help perioperative personnel make informed decisions about hand hygiene and surgical hand antisepsis. The key points address the necessity of keeping fingernails and skin healthy, not wearing jewelry on the hands or wrists in the perioperative area, properly performing hand hygiene and surgical hand antisepsis, and involving patients and visitors in hand hygiene initiatives. Perioperative RNs should review the complete guideline for additional information and for guidance when writing and updating policies and procedures. Copyright © 2017 AORN, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Does Personalized Water and Hand Quality Information Affect Attitudes, Behavior, and Health in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania?

Science.gov (United States)

Davis, J.; Pickering, A.; Horak, H.; Boehm, A.

2008-12-01

Tanzania (TZ) has one of the highest rates of child mortality due to enteric disease in the world. NGOs and local agencies have introduced numerous technologies (e.g., chlorine tablets, borewells) to increase the quantity and quality of water in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, in hopes of reducing morbidity and mortality of waterborne disease. The objective of the present study is to determine if providing personalized information about water quality and hand surface quality, as determined by concentrations of enterococci and E. coli, results in improved health and water quality in households. A cohort study was completed in June-September 2008 in 3 communities ranging from urban to per-urban in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to achieve our objective. The study consisted of 4 cohorts that were visited 4 times over the 3 month study. One cohort received no information about water and hand quality until the end of the summer, while the other groups received either just information on hand surface quality, just information on water quality, and information on both hand surface and water quality after the first (baseline) household visit. We report concentrations of enterococci and E. coli in water sources (surface waters and bore wells), water stored in households, and environmental waters were children and adults swim and bathe. In addition, we report concentrations of enterococci and E. coli on hands of caregivers and children in households. Preliminary results of surveys on health and perceptions of water quality and illness from the households are provided. Ongoing work will integrate the microbiological and sociological data sets to determine if personalized information interventions resulted in changes in health, water quality in the household, or perceptions of water quality, quantity and relation to human health. Future work will analyze DNA samples from hands and water for human-specific Bacteroides bacteria which are only present in human feces. Our study

Scene text detection by leveraging multi-channel information and local context

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Runmin; Qian, Shengyou; Yang, Jianfeng; Gao, Changxin

2018-03-01

As an important information carrier, texts play significant roles in many applications. However, text detection in unconstrained scenes is a challenging problem due to cluttered backgrounds, various appearances, uneven illumination, etc.. In this paper, an approach based on multi-channel information and local context is proposed to detect texts in natural scenes. According to character candidate detection plays a vital role in text detection system, Maximally Stable Extremal Regions(MSERs) and Graph-cut based method are integrated to obtain the character candidates by leveraging the multi-channel image information. A cascaded false positive elimination mechanism are constructed from the perspective of the character and the text line respectively. Since the local context information is very valuable for us, these information is utilized to retrieve the missing characters for boosting the text detection performance. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets, i.e., the ICDAR 2011 dataset and the ICDAR 2013 dataset, demonstrate that the proposed method have achieved the state-of-the-art performance.

Multiscale Convolutional Neural Networks for Hand Detection

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Shiyang Yan

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Unconstrained hand detection in still images plays an important role in many hand-related vision problems, for example, hand tracking, gesture analysis, human action recognition and human-machine interaction, and sign language recognition. Although hand detection has been extensively studied for decades, it is still a challenging task with many problems to be tackled. The contributing factors for this complexity include heavy occlusion, low resolution, varying illumination conditions, different hand gestures, and the complex interactions between hands and objects or other hands. In this paper, we propose a multiscale deep learning model for unconstrained hand detection in still images. Deep learning models, and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs in particular, have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many vision benchmarks. Developed from the region-based CNN (R-CNN model, we propose a hand detection scheme based on candidate regions generated by a generic region proposal algorithm, followed by multiscale information fusion from the popular VGG16 model. Two benchmark datasets were applied to validate the proposed method, namely, the Oxford Hand Detection Dataset and the VIVA Hand Detection Challenge. We achieved state-of-the-art results on the Oxford Hand Detection Dataset and had satisfactory performance in the VIVA Hand Detection Challenge.

Hand-related physical function in rheumatic hand conditions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Klokker, Louise; Terwee, Caroline B; Wæhrens, Eva Ejlersen

2016-01-01

as well as those items from the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Physical Function (PF) item bank that are relevant to patients with rheumatic hand conditions. Selection will be based on consensus among reviewers. Content validity of selected items will be established......INTRODUCTION: There is no consensus about what constitutes the most appropriate patient-reported outcome measurement (PROM) instrument for measuring physical function in patients with rheumatic hand conditions. Existing instruments lack psychometric testing and vary in feasibility...... and their psychometric qualities. We aim to develop a PROM instrument to assess hand-related physical function in rheumatic hand conditions. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will perform a systematic search to identify existing PROMs to rheumatic hand conditions, and select items relevant for hand-related physical function...

Hand-related physical function in rheumatic hand conditions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Klokker, Louise; Terwee, Caroline; Wæhrens, Eva Elisabet Ejlersen

2016-01-01

INTRODUCTION: There is no consensus about what constitutes the most appropriate patient-reported outcome measurement (PROM) instrument for measuring physical function in patients with rheumatic hand conditions. Existing instruments lack psychometric testing and vary in feasibility...... and their psychometric qualities. We aim to develop a PROM instrument to assess hand-related physical function in rheumatic hand conditions. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will perform a systematic search to identify existing PROMs to rheumatic hand conditions, and select items relevant for hand-related physical function...... as well as those items from the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Physical Function (PF) item bank that are relevant to patients with rheumatic hand conditions. Selection will be based on consensus among reviewers. Content validity of selected items will be established...

Information Gain Based Dimensionality Selection for Classifying Text Documents

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Dumidu Wijayasekara; Milos Manic; Miles McQueen

2013-06-01

Selecting the optimal dimensions for various knowledge extraction applications is an essential component of data mining. Dimensionality selection techniques are utilized in classification applications to increase the classification accuracy and reduce the computational complexity. In text classification, where the dimensionality of the dataset is extremely high, dimensionality selection is even more important. This paper presents a novel, genetic algorithm based methodology, for dimensionality selection in text mining applications that utilizes information gain. The presented methodology uses information gain of each dimension to change the mutation probability of chromosomes dynamically. Since the information gain is calculated a priori, the computational complexity is not affected. The presented method was tested on a specific text classification problem and compared with conventional genetic algorithm based dimensionality selection. The results show an improvement of 3% in the true positives and 1.6% in the true negatives over conventional dimensionality selection methods.

Unimanual SNARC Effect: Hand Matters

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Marianna eRiello

2011-12-01

Full Text Available A structural representation of the hand embedding information about the identity and relative position of fingers is necessary to counting routines. It may also support associations between numbers and allocentric spatial codes that predictably interact with other known numerical spatial representations, such as the mental number line. In this study, 48 Western participants whose typical counting routine proceeded from thumb-to-little on both hands performed magnitude and parity binary judgments. Response keys were pressed either with the right index and middle fingers or with the left index and middle fingers in separate blocks. 24 participants responded with either hands in prone posture (i.e. palm down and 24 participants responded with either hands in supine (i.e. palm up posture. When hands were in prone posture, the counting direction of the left hand conflicted with the direction of the left-right mental number line, whereas the counting direction of the right hand was consistent with it. When hands were in supine posture, the opposite was true. If systematic associations existed between relative number magnitude and an allocentric spatial representation of the finger series within each hand, as predicted on the basis of counting habits, interactions would be expected between hand posture and a unimanual version of the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC effect. Data revealed that with hands in prone posture a unimanual SNARC effect was present for the right hand, and with hands in supine posture a unimanual SNARC effect was present for the left hand. We propose that a posture-invariant body structural representation of the finger series provides a relevant frame of reference, a within-hand directional vector, that is associated to simple number processing. Such frame of reference can significantly interact with stimulus-response correspondence effects that have been attributed to the mapping of numbers on a mental

THE IMPACT OF TEXT DRIVING ON DRIVING SAFETY

OpenAIRE

Sanaz Motamedi; Jyh-Hone Wang

2016-01-01

In an increasingly mobile era, the wide availability of technology for texting and the prevalence of hands-free form have introduced a new safety concern for drivers. To assess this concern, a questionnaire was first deployed online to gain an understanding of drivers’ text driving experiences as well as their demographic information. The results from 232 people revealed that the majority of drivers are aware of the associated risks with texting while driving. However, more than one-fourth of...

Computer screen saver hand hygiene information curbs a negative trend in hand hygiene behavior

NARCIS (Netherlands)

K. Helder MScN (Onno); J.W.M. Weggelaar-Jansen (Anne Marie); D.J.C. Waarsenburg (Daniël); C.W.N. Looman (Caspar); J.B. van Goudoever (Hans); J. Brug (Hans); R.F. Kornelisse (René)

2012-01-01

markdownabstract__Abtract__ Background: Appropriate hand hygiene among health care workers is the most important infection prevention measure; however, compliance is generally low. Gain-framed messages (ie, messages that emphasize the benefits of hand hygiene rather than the risks of

STYLISTIC FEATURES OF ADVERTISING TEXTS OF INFORMATIVE AND COMPARATIVE TYPES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Poddubskaya, O.N.

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The relevance of this article is related to the fact that nowadays advertising has a very strong impact both on the consumer market, political and cultural life of society, and on the language and its development as a system. Advertising has given rise to the development of a special set of stylistic features of a text, formed under the influence of reviving advertising traditions in the Russian language and under the active impact of energetic and pushy European advertising. The purpose of this study is to explore stylistic features of informative and comparative advertising texts. The object of research is Russian-language advertising in printed media and on television. In the end of the article we made conclusions about groups of language means used for different stylistic devices in informative and comparative advertising texts. Analysis of stylistic features of modern informative and comparative advertising texts can be of great interest to specialists in the field of theoretical studies of modern advertising.

Preference for orientations commonly viewed for one's own hand in the anterior intraparietal cortex.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Regine Zopf

Full Text Available Brain regions in the intraparietal and the premotor cortices selectively process visual and multisensory events near the hands (peri-hand space. Visual information from the hand itself modulates this processing potentially because it is used to estimate the location of one's own body and the surrounding space. In humans specific occipitotemporal areas process visual information of specific body parts such as hands. Here we used an fMRI block-design to investigate if anterior intraparietal and ventral premotor 'peri-hand areas' exhibit selective responses to viewing images of hands and viewing specific hand orientations. Furthermore, we investigated if the occipitotemporal 'hand area' is sensitive to viewed hand orientation. Our findings demonstrate increased BOLD responses in the left anterior intraparietal area when participants viewed hands and feet as compared to faces and objects. Anterior intraparietal and also occipitotemporal areas in the left hemisphere exhibited response preferences for viewing right hands with orientations commonly viewed for one's own hand as compared to uncommon own hand orientations. Our results indicate that both anterior intraparietal and occipitotemporal areas encode visual limb-specific shape and orientation information.

Achieving U.S. Health information technology adoption: the need for a third hand.

Science.gov (United States)

Middleton, Blackford

2005-01-01

The U.S. health care information technology (HIT) market is broken; broad-scale adoption of HIT is not occurring despite considerable evidence of its impact on the quality of care and patient safety. Although adoption of HIT will not cure all that ails health care, it is an important step toward transformation of the U.S. health care delivery system. In this commentary I describe several critical issues pertaining to the HIT market failure and several ways in which the federal government may act as a deft and gentle "Third Hand" to assist the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith.

Implement of Shape Memory Alloy Actuators in a Robotic Hand

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniel Amariei

2006-10-01

Full Text Available This paper was conceived to present the ideology of utilizing advanced actuators to design and develop innovative, lightweight, powerful, compact, and as much as possible dexterous robotic hands. The key to satisfying these objectives is the use of Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs to power the joints of the robotic hand. The mechanical design of a dexterous robotic hand, which utilizes non-classical types of actuation and information obtained from the study of biological systems, is presented in this paper. The type of robotic hand described in this paper will be utilized for applications requiring low weight, power, compactness, and dexterity.

Computer screen saver hand hygiene information curbs a negative trend in hand hygiene behavior

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Helder, Onno K.; Weggelaar, Anne Marie; Waarsenburg, Daniël C. J.; Looman, Caspar W. N.; van Goudoever, Johannes B.; Brug, Johannes; Kornelisse, René F.

2012-01-01

Background: Appropriate hand hygiene among health care workers is the most important infection prevention measure; however, compliance is generally low. Gain-framed messages (ie, messages that emphasize the benefits of hand hygiene rather than the risks of noncompliance) may be most effective, but

Information structure and organisation in change of shift reports: An observational study of nursing hand-offs in a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Science.gov (United States)

Foster-Hunt, Tara; Parush, Avi; Ellis, Jacqueline; Thomas, Margot; Rashotte, Judy

2015-06-01

Patient hand-offs involve the exchange of critical information. Ineffective hand-offs can result in reduced patient safety by leading to wrong treatment, delayed diagnoses or other outcomes that can negatively affect the healthcare system. The objectives of this study were to uncover the structure of the information conveyed during patient hand-offs and look for principles characterising the organisation of the information. With an observational study approach, data was gathered during the morning and evening nursing change of shift hand-offs in a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit. Content analysis identified a common meta-structure used for information transfer that contained categories with varying degrees of information integration and the repetition of high consequence information. Differences were found in the organisation of the hand-off structures, and these varied as a function of nursing experience. The findings are discussed in terms of the potential benefits of computerised tools which utilise standardised structure for information transfer and the implications for future education and critical care skill acquisition. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Pre- and in-Service Teachers Reading and Discussing Informational Texts

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Theresa A. Deeney

2016-05-01

Full Text Available This study investigates U.S. elementary (kindergarten-Grade 6, ages 5-12 pre- and in-service teachers’ discussions of informational texts to understand current practices and identify needs with respect to how teachers support students in building knowledge from complex informational text as specified in the grade-level expectations of the Common Core State Standards adopted in many U.S. states. Transcripts and reflections from 17 in-service and 31 pre-service teachers’ informational text discussions were analyzed for teachers’ focus on the text, background knowledge, and text/background knowledge. In addition, transcripts were analyzed for the types of text ideas teachers targeted (details/main ideas, the comprehension demands placed on students, how teachers used follow-up moves to encourage higher level thinking, and how teachers use transcripts of their discussions to analyze and critique their own practice. Findings suggest that both pre- and in-service teachers draw heavily on students’ background knowledge and text details in their questioning; but differences exist in how pre- and in-service teachers use follow-up responses to promote knowledge building. Findings also suggest that both pre- and in-service teachers can use their transcripts to recognize areas of need, and offer themselves suggestions to better support students’ understanding. Implications are offered for teacher education and professional development.

The 2007 Analysis of Information Remaining on Disks Offered for Sale on the Second Hand Market

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andy Jones

2008-03-01

Full Text Available All organisations, whether in the public or private sector, increasingly use computers and other devices that contain computer hard disks for the storage and processing of information relating to their business, their employees or their customers. Individual home users also increasingly use computers and other devices containing computer hard disks for the storage and processing of information relating to their private, personal affairs. It continues to be clear that the majority of organisations and individual home users still remain ignorant or misinformed of the volume and type of information that is stored on the hard disks that these devices contain and have not considered, or are unaware of, the potential impact of this information becoming available to their competitors or to people with criminal intent.This is the third study in an ongoing research effort that is being conducted into the volume and type of information that remains on computer hard disks offered for sale on the second hand market.  The purpose of the research has been to gain an understanding of the information that remains on the disk and to determine the level of damage that could, potentially be caused, if the information fell into the wrong hands.  The study examines disks that have been obtained in a number of countries to determine whether there is any detectable national or regional variance in the way that the disposal of computer disks is addressed and to compare the results for any other detectable regional or temporal trends.The first study was carried out in 2005 and was repeated in 2006 with the scope extended to include additional countries. The studies were carried out by British Telecommunications, the University of Glamorgan in the UK and Edith Cowan University in Australia. The basis of the research was to acquire a number of second hand computer disks from various sources and then determine whether they still contained information relating to a

REMARKS ON NEUROCONTROL OF THE HAND AND SIGNIFICANCE OF AFFERENT INPUT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nejc Sarabon

2004-12-01

Full Text Available This paper outlines some remarks on our understanding of motor control of the hand. It begins with current knowledge about motor behavior of prehension movements. It further highlights the distributed nature of the control system that integrates sensory information from the periphery, existing motor memory from subcortical centers, and information from diverse primary and secondary motor as well as sensory areas. It further explains the sequential nature of the processes like decision, planning, computing, and execution involved in neurocontrol of a purposeful hand motor task. In the successive part it stresses the importance of sensory input, in particular proprioceptive, for movement setting and guidance. It concludes by pointing out research concepts used to study roles of sensory information for modulating states of neurobiological systems. Finally, a novel method of whole hand electrical stimulation, which seems promising as a tool for studying sensory-motor integration mechanisms in human’s hand, is explained and recent experimental data are provided.

The Advantage of Hiding Both Hands : Foreign Exchange Intervention, Ambiguity and Private Information

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Eijffinger, S.C.W.; Verhagen, W.H.

1997-01-01

This paper analyzes a dynamic exchange rate policy game in which the central bank has private information about its short-term exchange rate target, on the one hand, and in which the market is faced with a certain degree of ambiguity concerning the actual intervention volume, on the other.

Tactile information processing in primate hand somatosensory cortex (S1) during passive arm movement.

Science.gov (United States)

Song, Weiguo; Francis, Joseph Thachil

2013-11-01

Motor output mostly depends on sensory input, which also can be affected by action. To further our understanding of how tactile information is processed in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in dynamic environments, we recorded neural responses to tactile stimulation of the hand in three awake monkeys under arm/hand passive movement and rest. We found that neurons generally responded to tactile stimulation under both conditions and were modulated by movement: with a higher baseline firing rate, a suppressed peak rate, and a smaller dynamic range during passive movement than during rest, while the area under the response curve was stable across these two states. By using an information theory-based method, the mutual information between tactile stimulation and neural responses was quantified with rate and spatial coding models under the two conditions. The two potential encoding models showed different contributions depending on behavioral contexts. Tactile information encoded with rate coding from individual units was lower than spatial coding of unit pairs, especially during movement; however, spatial coding had redundant information between unit pairs. Passive movement regulated the mutual information, and such regulation might play different roles depending on the encoding strategies used. The underlying mechanisms of our observation most likely come from a bottom-up strategy, where neurons in S1 were regulated through the activation of the peripheral tactile/proprioceptive receptors and the interactions between these different types of information.

Electronic hand-drafting and picture management system.

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Tsung-Han; Ku, Cheng-Yuan; Yen, David C; Hsieh, Wen-Huai

2012-08-01

The Department of Health of Executive Yuan in Taiwan (R.O.C.) is implementing a five-stage project entitled Electronic Medical Record (EMR) converting all health records from written to electronic form. Traditionally, physicians record patients' symptoms, related examinations, and suggested treatments on paper medical records. Currently when implementing the EMR, all text files and image files in the Hospital Information System (HIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) are kept separate. The current medical system environment is unable to combine text files, hand-drafted files, and photographs in the same system, so it is difficult to support physicians with the recording of medical data. Furthermore, in surgical and other related departments, physicians need immediate access to medical records in order to understand the details of a patient's condition. In order to address these problems, the Department of Health has implemented an EMR project, with the primary goal of building an electronic hand-drafting and picture management system (HDP system) that can be used by medical personnel to record medical information in a convenient way. This system can simultaneously edit text files, hand-drafted files, and image files and then integrate these data into Portable Document Format (PDF) files. In addition, the output is designed to fit a variety of formats in order to meet various laws and regulations. By combining the HDP system with HIS and PACS, the applicability can be enhanced to fit various scenarios and can assist the medical industry in moving into the final phase of EMR.

Tactile Working Memory Outside our Hands

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Takako Yoshida

2011-10-01

Full Text Available The haptic perception of 2D images is believed to make heavy demands on working memory. During active exploration, we need to store not only the current sensory information, but also to integrate this with kinesthetic information of the hand and fingers in order to generate a coherent percept. The question that arises is how much tactile memory we have for tactile stimuli that are no longer in contact with the skin during active touch? We examined working memory using a tactile change detection task with active exploration. Each trial contained two stimulation arrays. Participants engaged in unconstrained active tactile exploration of an array of vibrotactile stimulators. In half of the trials, one of the vibrating tactors that was active in the first stimulation turned off and another started vibrating in the second stimulation. Participants had to report whether the arrays were the same or different. Performance was near-perfect when up to two tactors were used and dropped linearly as the number of the vibrating tactors increased. These results suggest that the tactile working memory off the hand is limited and there is little or no memory integration across hand movements.

Text Maps: Helping Students Navigate Informational Texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Spencer, Brenda H.

2003-01-01

Notes that a text map is an instructional approach designed to help students gain fluency in reading content area materials. Discusses how the goal is to teach students about the important features of the material and how the maps can be used to build new understandings. Presents the procedures for preparing and using a text map. (SG)

PaperBLAST: Text Mining Papers for Information about Homologs

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Price, Morgan N.; Arkin, Adam P.

2017-01-01

Large-scale genome sequencing has identified millions of protein-coding genes whose function is unknown. Many of these proteins are similar to characterized proteins from other organisms, but much of this information is missing from annotation databases and is hidden in the scientific literature. To make this information accessible, PaperBLAST uses EuropePMC to search the full text of scientific articles for references to genes. PaperBLAST also takes advantage of curated resources (Swiss-Prot, GeneRIF, and EcoCyc) that link protein sequences to scientific articles. PaperBLAST’s database includes over 700,000 scientific articles that mention over 400,000 different proteins. Given a protein of interest, PaperBLAST quickly finds similar proteins that are discussed in the literature and presents snippets of text from relevant articles or from the curators. With the recent explosion of genome sequencing data, there are now millions of uncharacterized proteins. If a scientist becomes interested in one of these proteins, it can be very difficult to find information as to its likely function. Often a protein whose sequence is similar, and which is likely to have a similar function, has been studied already, but this information is not available in any database. To help find articles about similar proteins, PaperBLAST searches the full text of scientific articles for protein identifiers or gene identifiers, and it links these articles to protein sequences. Then, given a protein of interest, it can quickly find similar proteins in its database by using standard software (BLAST), and it can show snippets of text from relevant papers. We hope that PaperBLAST will make it easier for biologists to predict proteins’ functions.

Hand Specific Representations in Language Comprehension

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Claire eMoody-Triantis

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Theories of embodied cognition argue that language comprehension involves sensory-motor re-enactments of the actions described. However, the degree of specificity of these re-enactments as well as the relationship between action and language remains a matter of debate. Here we investigate these issues by examining how hand-specific information (left or right hand is recruited in language comprehension and action execution. An fMRI study tested right-handed participants in two separate tasks that were designed to be as similar as possible to increase sensitivity of the comparison across task: an action execution go/no-go task where participants performed right or left hand actions, and a language task where participants read sentences describing the same left or right handed actions as in the execution task. We found that language-induced activity did not match the hand-specific patterns of activity found for action execution in primary somatosensory and motor cortex, but it overlapped with pre-motor and parietal regions associated with action planning. Within these pre-motor regions, both right hand actions and sentences elicited stronger activity than left hand actions and sentences - a dominant hand effect -. Importantly, both dorsal and ventral sections of the left pre-central gyrus were recruited by both tasks, suggesting different action features being recruited. These results suggest that (a language comprehension elicits motor representations that are hand-specific and akin to multimodal action plans, rather than full action re-enactments; and (b language comprehension and action execution share schematic hand-specific representations that are richer for the dominant hand, and thus linked to previous motor experience.

Device of Definition of Hand-Written Documents Belonging to One Executor

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S. D. Kulik

2012-03-01

Full Text Available Results of working out of the device of definition of hand-written documents belonging to the executor of the text in Russian are presented. The device is intended for automation of work of experts and allows to solve problems of information security and search of criminals.

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 75,362 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 412,404 views 5:46 Hand Washing Technique - ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 74,478 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 411,292 views 5:46 Hand Washing Technique - ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... to promote or encourage adherence to CDC hand hygiene recommendations. It is a component of the Clean ... aims to address myths and misperceptions about hand hygiene and empower patients to play a role in ...

A biometric authentication model using hand gesture images.

Science.gov (United States)

Fong, Simon; Zhuang, Yan; Fister, Iztok; Fister, Iztok

2013-10-30

A novel hand biometric authentication method based on measurements of the user's stationary hand gesture of hand sign language is proposed. The measurement of hand gestures could be sequentially acquired by a low-cost video camera. There could possibly be another level of contextual information, associated with these hand signs to be used in biometric authentication. As an analogue, instead of typing a password 'iloveu' in text which is relatively vulnerable over a communication network, a signer can encode a biometric password using a sequence of hand signs, 'i' , 'l' , 'o' , 'v' , 'e' , and 'u'. Subsequently the features from the hand gesture images are extracted which are integrally fuzzy in nature, to be recognized by a classification model for telling if this signer is who he claimed himself to be, by examining over his hand shape and the postures in doing those signs. It is believed that everybody has certain slight but unique behavioral characteristics in sign language, so are the different hand shape compositions. Simple and efficient image processing algorithms are used in hand sign recognition, including intensity profiling, color histogram and dimensionality analysis, coupled with several popular machine learning algorithms. Computer simulation is conducted for investigating the efficacy of this novel biometric authentication model which shows up to 93.75% recognition accuracy.

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 5 Moments of Hand Hygiene - Duration: 1:53. Salem Health 13,972 views 1:53 Hand Hygiene ... Mode: Off History Help Loading... Loading... Loading... About Press Copyright Creators Advertise Developers +YouTube Terms Privacy Policy & ...

PaperBLAST: Text Mining Papers for Information about Homologs.

Science.gov (United States)

Price, Morgan N; Arkin, Adam P

2017-01-01

Large-scale genome sequencing has identified millions of protein-coding genes whose function is unknown. Many of these proteins are similar to characterized proteins from other organisms, but much of this information is missing from annotation databases and is hidden in the scientific literature. To make this information accessible, PaperBLAST uses EuropePMC to search the full text of scientific articles for references to genes. PaperBLAST also takes advantage of curated resources (Swiss-Prot, GeneRIF, and EcoCyc) that link protein sequences to scientific articles. PaperBLAST's database includes over 700,000 scientific articles that mention over 400,000 different proteins. Given a protein of interest, PaperBLAST quickly finds similar proteins that are discussed in the literature and presents snippets of text from relevant articles or from the curators. PaperBLAST is available at http://papers.genomics.lbl.gov/. IMPORTANCE With the recent explosion of genome sequencing data, there are now millions of uncharacterized proteins. If a scientist becomes interested in one of these proteins, it can be very difficult to find information as to its likely function. Often a protein whose sequence is similar, and which is likely to have a similar function, has been studied already, but this information is not available in any database. To help find articles about similar proteins, PaperBLAST searches the full text of scientific articles for protein identifiers or gene identifiers, and it links these articles to protein sequences. Then, given a protein of interest, it can quickly find similar proteins in its database by using standard software (BLAST), and it can show snippets of text from relevant papers. We hope that PaperBLAST will make it easier for biologists to predict proteins' functions.

Comprehension and Analysis of Information in Text: I. Construction and Evaluation of Brief Texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Kozminsky, Ely; And Others

This report describes a series of studies designed to construct and validate a set of text materials necessary to the pursuance of a long-term research project on information analysis and integration in semantically rich, naturalistic domains, primarily in the domain of the stock market. The methods and results of six separate experiments on…

Clean Hands Count

Medline Plus

Full Text Available ... intended to promote or encourage adherence to CDC hand hygiene recommendations. It is a component of the Clean ... also aims to address myths and misperceptions about hand hygiene and empower patients to play a role in ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 585 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 412,760 ... 536,963 views 1:46 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 25,574 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 585 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 413,097 ... 089,212 views 4:50 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 26,032 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 029 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 412,404 ... 081,511 views 4:50 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 25,194 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 585 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 413,097 ... 086,746 views 4:50 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 25,802 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 453 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 413,702 ... 28,656 views 3:40 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 26,480 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 024 views 2:58 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 412,404 ... 2,805 views 3:13 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 25,574 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 362 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 412,404 ... 219,427 views 1:27 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 25,194 views ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 585 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 413,097 ... 28,656 views 3:40 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 26,032 views ...

Informational Text Comprehension: Its Challenges and How Collaborative Strategic Reading Can Help

Science.gov (United States)

McCown, Margaret Averill; Thomason, Gina B.

2014-01-01

With the increased emphasis on informational text with Common Core State Standards and the difficulty many students have with this type of text, this study examined the effects of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) on informational text comprehension and metacognitive awareness of fifth grade students. Participating students included a…

Selecting Information to Answer Questions: Strategic Individual Differences when Searching Texts

Science.gov (United States)

Cerdan, Raquel; Gilabert, Ramiro; Vidal-Abarca, Eduardo

2011-01-01

The purpose of the study was to explore students' selection of information strategies in a task-oriented reading situation. 72 secondary school students read two texts and answered six questions per text, three of which were manipulated to induce a misleading matching between the wording of the question and distracting pieces of information in the…

ONTOGRABBING: Extracting Information from Texts Using Generative Ontologies

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nilsson, Jørgen Fischer; Szymczak, Bartlomiej Antoni; Jensen, P.A.

2009-01-01

We describe principles for extracting information from texts using a so-called generative ontology in combination with syntactic analysis. Generative ontologies are introduced as semantic domains for natural language phrases. Generative ontologies extend ordinary finite ontologies with rules...... for producing recursively shaped terms representing the ontological content (ontological semantics) of NL noun phrases and other phrases. We focus here on achieving a robust, often only partial, ontology-driven parsing of and ascription of semantics to a sentence in the text corpus. The aim of the ontological...... analysis is primarily to identify paraphrases, thereby achieving a search functionality beyond mere keyword search with synsets. We further envisage use of the generative ontology as a phrase-based rather than word-based browser into text corpora....

Perfection of technical and tactical preparation of sportsmen of hand-to-hand fight

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Serebryak V.V.

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Essence of innovative hike is considered to upgrading preparation of sportsmen of hand-to-hand fight. 58 sportsmen of section of hand-to-hand fight took part in research. Age of sportsmen are from 17 to 22 years. Developed and approved the most effective technical and tactical charts of construction of duel with the opponents of different styles of single combats. It is well-proven that offered approach instrumental in development of operative thought and adaptation to sparring of hand-to-hand fight.

Human Hand Motion Analysis and Synthesis of Optimal Power Grasps for a Robotic Hand

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francesca Cordella

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Biologically inspired robotic systems can find important applications in biomedical robotics, since studying and replicating human behaviour can provide new insights into motor recovery, functional substitution and human-robot interaction. The analysis of human hand motion is essential for collecting information about human hand movements useful for generalizing reaching and grasping actions on a robotic system. This paper focuses on the definition and extraction of quantitative indicators for describing optimal hand grasping postures and replicating them on an anthropomorphic robotic hand. A motion analysis has been carried out on six healthy human subjects performing a transverse volar grasp. The extracted indicators point to invariant grasping behaviours between the involved subjects, thus providing some constraints for identifying the optimal grasping configuration. Hence, an optimization algorithm based on the Nelder-Mead simplex method has been developed for determining the optimal grasp configuration of a robotic hand, grounded on the aforementioned constraints. It is characterized by a reduced computational cost. The grasp stability has been tested by introducing a quality index that satisfies the form-closure property. The grasping strategy has been validated by means of simulation tests and experimental trials on an arm-hand robotic system. The obtained results have shown the effectiveness of the extracted indicators to reduce the non-linear optimization problem complexity and lead to the synthesis of a grasping posture able to replicate the human behaviour while ensuring grasp stability. The experimental results have also highlighted the limitations of the adopted robotic platform (mainly due to the mechanical structure to achieve the optimal grasp configuration.

Rubber hand illusion affects joint angle perception.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martin V Butz

Full Text Available The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI is a well-established experimental paradigm. It has been shown that the RHI can affect hand location estimates, arm and hand motion towards goals, the subjective visual appearance of the own hand, and the feeling of body ownership. Several studies also indicate that the peri-hand space is partially remapped around the rubber hand. Nonetheless, the question remains if and to what extent the RHI can affect the perception of other body parts. In this study we ask if the RHI can alter the perception of the elbow joint. Participants had to adjust an angular representation on a screen according to their proprioceptive perception of their own elbow joint angle. The results show that the RHI does indeed alter the elbow joint estimation, increasing the agreement with the position and orientation of the artificial hand. Thus, the results show that the brain does not only adjust the perception of the hand in body-relative space, but it also modifies the perception of other body parts. In conclusion, we propose that the brain continuously strives to maintain a consistent internal body image and that this image can be influenced by the available sensory information sources, which are mediated and mapped onto each other by means of a postural, kinematic body model.

Semi-supervised probabilistics approach for normalising informal short text messages

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Modupe, A

2017-03-01

Full Text Available The growing use of informal social text messages on Twitter is one of the known sources of big data. These type of messages are noisy and frequently rife with acronyms, slangs, grammatical errors and non-standard words causing grief for natural...

Representing nested semantic information in a linear string of text using XML.

Science.gov (United States)

Krauthammer, Michael; Johnson, Stephen B; Hripcsak, George; Campbell, David A; Friedman, Carol

2002-01-01

XML has been widely adopted as an important data interchange language. The structure of XML enables sharing of data elements with variable degrees of nesting as long as the elements are grouped in a strict tree-like fashion. This requirement potentially restricts the usefulness of XML for marking up written text, which often includes features that do not properly nest within other features. We encountered this problem while marking up medical text with structured semantic information from a Natural Language Processor. Traditional approaches to this problem separate the structured information from the actual text mark up. This paper introduces an alternative solution, which tightly integrates the semantic structure with the text. The resulting XML markup preserves the linearity of the medical texts and can therefore be easily expanded with additional types of information.

Hand Proximity Differentially Affects Visual Working Memory for Color and Orientation in a Binding Task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shane P. Kelly

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Observers determined whether two sequentially presented arrays of six lines were the same or different. Differences, when present, involved either a swap in the color of two lines or a swap in the orientation of two lines. Thus, accurate change detection required the binding of color and orientation information for each line within visual working memory. Holding viewing distance constant, the proximity of the arrays to the hands was manipulated. Placing the hands near the to-be-remembered array decreased participants’ ability to remember color information, but increased their ability to remember orientation information. This pair of results indicates that hand proximity differentially affects the processing of various types of visual information, a conclusion broadly consistent with functional and anatomical differences in the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. It further indicates that hand proximity affects the likelihood that various object features will be encoded into integrated object files.

Hands-on approach to teaching Earth system sciences using a information-computational web-GIS portal "Climate"

Science.gov (United States)

Gordova, Yulia; Gorbatenko, Valentina; Martynova, Yulia; Shulgina, Tamara

2014-05-01

A problem of making education relevant to the workplace tasks is a key problem of higher education because old-school training programs are not keeping pace with the rapidly changing situation in the professional field of environmental sciences. A joint group of specialists from Tomsk State University and Siberian center for Environmental research and Training/IMCES SB RAS developed several new courses for students of "Climatology" and "Meteorology" specialties, which comprises theoretical knowledge from up-to-date environmental sciences with practical tasks. To organize the educational process we use an open-source course management system Moodle (www.moodle.org). It gave us an opportunity to combine text and multimedia in a theoretical part of educational courses. The hands-on approach is realized through development of innovative trainings which are performed within the information-computational platform "Climate" (http://climate.scert.ru/) using web GIS tools. These trainings contain practical tasks on climate modeling and climate changes assessment and analysis and should be performed using typical tools which are usually used by scientists performing such kind of research. Thus, students are engaged in n the use of modern tools of the geophysical data analysis and it cultivates dynamic of their professional learning. The hands-on approach can help us to fill in this gap because it is the only approach that offers experience, increases students involvement, advance the use of modern information and communication tools. The courses are implemented at Tomsk State University and help forming modern curriculum in Earth system science area. This work is partially supported by SB RAS project VIII.80.2.1, RFBR grants numbers 13-05-12034 and 14-05-00502.

NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION FROM BIOMEDICAL TEXT -AN INFORMATION EXTRACTION TASK

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

N. Kanya

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Biomedical Text Mining targets the Extraction of significant information from biomedical archives. Bio TM encompasses Information Retrieval (IR and Information Extraction (IE. The Information Retrieval will retrieve the relevant Biomedical Literature documents from the various Repositories like PubMed, MedLine etc., based on a search query. The IR Process ends up with the generation of corpus with the relevant document retrieved from the Publication databases based on the query. The IE task includes the process of Preprocessing of the document, Named Entity Recognition (NER from the documents and Relationship Extraction. This process includes Natural Language Processing, Data Mining techniques and machine Language algorithm. The preprocessing task includes tokenization, stop word Removal, shallow parsing, and Parts-Of-Speech tagging. NER phase involves recognition of well-defined objects such as genes, proteins or cell-lines etc. This process leads to the next phase that is extraction of relationships (IE. The work was based on machine learning algorithm Conditional Random Field (CRF.

Using text mining techniques to extract phenotypic information from the PhenoCHF corpus.

Science.gov (United States)

Alnazzawi, Noha; Thompson, Paul; Batista-Navarro, Riza; Ananiadou, Sophia

2015-01-01

Phenotypic information locked away in unstructured narrative text presents significant barriers to information accessibility, both for clinical practitioners and for computerised applications used for clinical research purposes. Text mining (TM) techniques have previously been applied successfully to extract different types of information from text in the biomedical domain. They have the potential to be extended to allow the extraction of information relating to phenotypes from free text. To stimulate the development of TM systems that are able to extract phenotypic information from text, we have created a new corpus (PhenoCHF) that is annotated by domain experts with several types of phenotypic information relating to congestive heart failure. To ensure that systems developed using the corpus are robust to multiple text types, it integrates text from heterogeneous sources, i.e., electronic health records (EHRs) and scientific articles from the literature. We have developed several different phenotype extraction methods to demonstrate the utility of the corpus, and tested these methods on a further corpus, i.e., ShARe/CLEF 2013. Evaluation of our automated methods showed that PhenoCHF can facilitate the training of reliable phenotype extraction systems, which are robust to variations in text type. These results have been reinforced by evaluating our trained systems on the ShARe/CLEF corpus, which contains clinical records of various types. Like other studies within the biomedical domain, we found that solutions based on conditional random fields produced the best results, when coupled with a rich feature set. PhenoCHF is the first annotated corpus aimed at encoding detailed phenotypic information. The unique heterogeneous composition of the corpus has been shown to be advantageous in the training of systems that can accurately extract phenotypic information from a range of different text types. Although the scope of our annotation is currently limited to a single

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... 03. R Mayer 371,490 views 4:03 The psychological trick behind getting people to say yes - Duration: 8:06. PBS NewsHour 606,671 views 8:06 Should You Really Wash Your Hands? - Duration: 4:51. Gross Science 57,828 views 4:51 Healthcare Worker Hand ...

Fourth and fifth grade Latino(a) students making meaning of scientific informational texts

Science.gov (United States)

Croce, Keri-Anne

Using a socio-psycholinguistic perspective of literacy and a social-semiotic analysis of texts, this study investigates how six students made meaning of informational texts. The students came to school from a variety of English and Spanish language backgrounds. The research question being asked was 'How do Latino(a) fourth and fifth grade students make meaning of English informational texts?' Miscue analysis was used as a tool to investigate how students who have been labeled non-struggling readers by their classroom teacher and are from various language backgrounds approached five informational texts. In order to investigate students' responses to the nature of informational texts, this dissertation draws on commonly occurring structures within texts. Primary data collected included read alouds and retellings of five texts, retrospective miscue analysis, and interviews with six participant students. Two of these participants are discussed within this dissertation. Secondary data included classroom observations and teacher interviews. This study proposes that non-native speakers may use scientific concept placeholders as they transact with informational texts. The use of scientific concept placeholders by a reader indicates that the reader is engaged in the meaning making process and possesses evolving scientific knowledge about a phenomenon. The findings suggest that Latino(a) students' understandings of English informational texts is influenced not only by a student's language development but also (1) the nature of the text; (2) the reading strategies that a student uses, such as the use of placeholders; (3) the influence of the researcher during the aided retelling. This study contributes methodological tools to assess English language learners' reading. The conclusions presented within this study also support the idea that students from a variety of language backgrounds slightly altered their reliance on certain cuing systems as they encountered various sub

Extracting of implicit information in English advertising texts with phonetic and lexical-morphological means

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Traikovskaya Natalya Petrovna

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The article deals with phonetic and lexical-morphological language means participating in the process of extracting implicit information in English-speaking advertising texts for men and women. The functioning of phonetic means of the English language is not the basis for implication of information in advertising texts. Lexical and morphological means play the role of markers of relevant information, playing the role of the activator ofimplicit information in the texts of advertising.

Information booklet on personal protective equipment: arm and hand protection

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1992-01-01

Fire, heat, cold, electro-magnetic and ionising radiation, electricity, chemicals, impacts, cuts, abrasion, etc. are the common hazards for arms and hands at work. The gloves chosen for protection of the arm and hand should cover those parts adequately and the material of the gloves should be capable of offering protection against the specific hazard involved. Criteria for choosing arm and hand protection equipment will be based on their shape and part of the arm and hand protected. Guide lines for choosing such personal protection equipment for nuclear facilities are given. (M.K.V.). 3 annexures, 1 appendix

Tagline: Information Extraction for Semi-Structured Text Elements in Medical Progress Notes

Science.gov (United States)

Finch, Dezon Kile

2012-01-01

Text analysis has become an important research activity in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Statistical text mining and natural language processing have been shown to be very effective for extracting useful information from medical documents. However, neither of these techniques is effective at extracting the information stored in…

Domain-independent information extraction in unstructured text

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Irwin, N.H. [Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States). Software Surety Dept.

1996-09-01

Extracting information from unstructured text has become an important research area in recent years due to the large amount of text now electronically available. This status report describes the findings and work done during the second year of a two-year Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project. Building on the first-year`s work of identifying important entities, this report details techniques used to group words into semantic categories and to output templates containing selective document content. Using word profiles and category clustering derived during a training run, the time-consuming knowledge-building task can be avoided. Though the output still lacks in completeness when compared to systems with domain-specific knowledge bases, the results do look promising. The two approaches are compatible and could complement each other within the same system. Domain-independent approaches retain appeal as a system that adapts and learns will soon outpace a system with any amount of a priori knowledge.

Access to information technology and willingness to receive text ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Over the past decade, new technologies and methods of communication have ... To determine access to information technology and willingness to receive short message service (SMS) text message reminders for childhood immunisation .... Table 1 shows the attitude of the mothers towards reminders for immunisations.

Access to information technology and willingness to receive text ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Background. Effective communication is imperative for the delivery and receipt of adequate health care services. Aim. To determine access to information technology and willingness to receive short message service (SMS) text message reminders for childhood immunisation services among mothers in Lagos, Nigeria.

Information of the public in an emergency and preparation of text blocks

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Miska, H.

1997-01-01

In addition to the advance information, the EU also demands and regulates the information in an emergency. A prompt dissemination of the required news is facilitated by text blocks which can be prepared and harmonised with neighbouring administrations. Not before a press Center has been established, detailed texts may be compiled. (orig.) [de

Constraint Study for a Hand Exoskeleton: Human Hand Kinematics and Dynamics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fai Chen Chen

2013-01-01

Full Text Available In the last few years, the number of projects studying the human hand from the robotic point of view has increased rapidly, due to the growing interest in academic and industrial applications. Nevertheless, the complexity of the human hand given its large number of degrees of freedom (DoF within a significantly reduced space requires an exhaustive analysis, before proposing any applications. The aim of this paper is to provide a complete summary of the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the human hand as a preliminary step towards the development of hand devices such as prosthetic/robotic hands and exoskeletons imitating the human hand shape and functionality. A collection of data and constraints relevant to hand movements is presented, and the direct and inverse kinematics are solved for all the fingers as well as the dynamics; anthropometric data and dynamics equations allow performing simulations to understand the behavior of the finger.

Domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) choices in reference to information provided by human and artificial hands.

Science.gov (United States)

Kundey, Shannon M A; Delise, Justin; De Los Reyes, Andres; Ford, Kathy; Starnes, Blair; Dennen, Weston

2014-03-01

Even young humans show sensitivity to the accuracy and reliability of informants' reports. Children are selective in soliciting information and in accepting claims. Recent research has also investigated domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) sensitivity to agreement among human informants. Such research utilizing a common human pointing gesture to which dogs are sensitive in a food retrieval paradigm suggests that dogs might choose among informants according to the number of points exhibited, rather than the number of individuals indicating a particular location. Here, we further investigated dogs' use of information from human informants using a stationary pointing gesture, as well as the conditions under which dogs would utilize a stationary point. First, we explored whether the number of points or the number of individuals more strongly influenced dogs' choices. To this end, dogs encountered a choice situation in which the number of points exhibited toward a particular location and the number of individuals exhibiting those points conflicted. Results indicated that dogs chose in accordance with the number of points exhibited toward a particular location. In a second experiment, we explored the possibility that previously learned associations drove dogs' responses to the stationary pointing gesture. In this experiment, dogs encountered a choice situation in which artificial hands exhibited a stationary pointing gesture toward or away from choice locations in the absence of humans. Dogs chose the location to which the artificial hand pointed. These results are consistent with the notion that dogs may respond to a human pointing gesture due to their past-learning history.

Hands as markers of fragmentation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. Barnard

2005-07-01

Full Text Available Margaret Atwood is an internationally read, translated, and critiqued writer whose novels have established her as one of the most esteemed authors in English (McCombs & Palmer, 1991:1. Critical studies of her work deal mainly with notions of identity from psychoanalytical perspectives. This study has identified a gap in current critical studies on Atwood’s works, namely the challenging of textual unity which is paralleled in the challenging of the traditional (single narrative voice. The challenging of textual unity and the single narrative voice brings about the fragmentation of both. This article will focus on the role that hands play as markers of fragmentation in “The Blind Assassin” (2000. In the novel, the writing hand destabilises the narrative voice, since it is not connected to the voice of a single author. If the author of the text – the final signified – is eliminated, the text becomes fragmentary and open, inviting the reader to contribute to the creation of meaning. Hands play a signficant role in foregrounding the narrator’s fragmented identity, and consequently, the fragmentation of the text. We will investigate this concept in the light of Roland Barthes’ notion of the scriptor, whose hand is metaphorically severed from his or her “voice”. Instead of the text being a unified entity, it becomes unstable and it displays the absence of hierarchical textual levels. Based mainly on Barthes’ writings, this article concludes that hands foreground the narrator’s fragmented identity, which is paralleled in the fragmented text.

Text analysis of radiation information in newspaper articles headlines and internet contents after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kanda, Reiko; Tsuji, Satsuki; Yonehara, Hidenori

2014-01-01

In general, the press is considered to have amplified the level of public's anxiety and perception of risk. In the present study, we analyzed newspaper article headlines and Internet contents that were released from March 11, 2011 to January 31, 2012 using text mining techniques. The aim is to reveal the particular characteristics of the information propagated regarding the Fukushima NPP Accident. The article headlines of the newspapers which had a largest circulation were chosen for analysis, and contents of Internet media were chose based on the number of times they were linked or retweeted. According to our text mining analysis, newspaper frequently reported the 'measurement, investigation and examination' of radiation/radioactive materials caused by the Fukushima Accident, and this information might be spread selectively via the social media. On the other hand, the words related to health effects of radiation exposure (i. e., cancer, hereditary effects) were rare in newspaper headlines. Instead, words like 'anxiety' and 'safe' were often used to convey the degree of health effects. Particularly in March of 2011, the concept of 'danger' was used frequently in newspaper headlines. These indirect characterizations of the situation may have contributed more or less to the misunderstanding of the health effects and to the enhanced perception of risk felt by the public. In conclusion, there were found no evidence to suggest that newspaper or Internet media users released sensational information that increased the health anxiety of reads throughout the period of analysis. (author)

The SmartHand transradial prosthesis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carrozza Maria Chiara

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Prosthetic components and control interfaces for upper limb amputees have barely changed in the past 40 years. Many transradial prostheses have been developed in the past, nonetheless most of them would be inappropriate if/when a large bandwidth human-machine interface for control and perception would be available, due to either their limited (or inexistent sensorization or limited dexterity. SmartHand tackles this issue as is meant to be clinically experimented in amputees employing different neuro-interfaces, in order to investigate their effectiveness. This paper presents the design and on bench evaluation of the SmartHand. Methods SmartHand design was bio-inspired in terms of its physical appearance, kinematics, sensorization, and its multilevel control system. Underactuated fingers and differential mechanisms were designed and exploited in order to fit all mechatronic components in the size and weight of a natural human hand. Its sensory system was designed with the aim of delivering significant afferent information to the user through adequate interfaces. Results SmartHand is a five fingered self-contained robotic hand, with 16 degrees of freedom, actuated by 4 motors. It integrates a bio-inspired sensory system composed of 40 proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors and a customized embedded controller both employed for implementing automatic grasp control and for potentially delivering sensory feedback to the amputee. It is able to perform everyday grasps, count and independently point the index. The weight (530 g and speed (closing time: 1.5 seconds are comparable to actual commercial prostheses. It is able to lift a 10 kg suitcase; slippage tests showed that within particular friction and geometric conditions the hand is able to stably grasp up to 3.6 kg cylindrical objects. Conclusions Due to its unique embedded features and human-size, the SmartHand holds the promise to be experimentally fitted on transradial

Mental rotation of anthropoid hands: a chronometric study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

L.G. Gawryszewski

2007-03-01

Full Text Available It has been shown that mental rotation of objects and human body parts is processed differently in the human brain. But what about body parts belonging to other primates? Does our brain process this information like any other object or does it instead maximize the structural similarities with our homologous body parts? We tried to answer this question by measuring the manual reaction time (MRT of human participants discriminating the handedness of drawings representing the hands of four anthropoid primates (orangutan, chimpanzee, gorilla, and human. Twenty-four right-handed volunteers (13 males and 11 females were instructed to judge the handedness of a hand drawing in palm view by pressing a left/right key. The orientation of hand drawings varied from 0º (fingers upwards to 90º lateral (fingers pointing away from the midline, 180º (fingers downwards and 90º medial (finger towards the midline. The results showed an effect of rotation angle (F(3, 69 = 19.57, P < 0.001, but not of hand identity, on MRTs. Moreover, for all hand drawings, a medial rotation elicited shorter MRTs than a lateral rotation (960 and 1169 ms, respectively, P < 0.05. This result has been previously observed for drawings of the human hand and related to biomechanical constraints of movement performance. Our findings indicate that anthropoid hands are essentially equivalent stimuli for handedness recognition. Since the task involves mentally simulating the posture and rotation of the hands, we wondered if "mirror neurons" could be involved in establishing the motor equivalence between the stimuli and the participants' own hands.

Natural-pose hand detection in low-resolution images

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nyan Bo Bo1

2009-07-01

Full Text Available Robust real-time hand detection and tracking in video sequences would enable many applications in areas as diverse ashuman-computer interaction, robotics, security and surveillance, and sign language-based systems. In this paper, we introducea new approach for detecting human hands that works on single, cluttered, low-resolution images. Our prototype system, whichis primarily intended for security applications in which the images are noisy and low-resolution, is able to detect hands as smallas 2424 pixels in cluttered scenes. The system uses grayscale appearance information to classify image sub-windows as eithercontaining or not containing a human hand very rapidly at the cost of a high false positive rate. To improve on the false positiverate of the main classifier without affecting its detection rate, we introduce a post-processor system that utilizes the geometricproperties of skin color blobs. When we test our detector on a test image set containing 106 hands, 92 of those hands aredetected (86.8% detection rate, with an average false positive rate of 1.19 false positive detections per image. The rapiddetection speed, the high detection rate of 86.8%, and the low false positive rate together ensure that our system is useable asthe main detector in a diverse variety of applications requiring robust hand detection and tracking in low-resolution, clutteredscenes.

LanguageNet: A Novel Framework for Processing Unstructured Text Information

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Qureshi, Pir Abdul Rasool; Memon, Nasrullah; Wiil, Uffe Kock

2011-01-01

In this paper we present LanguageNet—a novel framework for processing unstructured text information from human generated content. The state of the art information processing frameworks have some shortcomings: modeled in generalized form, trained on fixed (limited) data sets, and leaving...... the specialization necessary for information consolidation to the end users. The proposed framework is the first major attempt to address these shortcomings. LanguageNet provides extended support of graphical methods contributing added value to the capabilities of information processing. We discuss the benefits...... of the framework and compare it with the available state of the art. We also describe how the framework improves the information gathering process and contribute towards building systems with better performance in the domain of Open Source Intelligence....

Improving physician hand hygiene compliance using behavioural theories: a study protocol

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Squires Janet E

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Healthcare-associated infections affect 10% of patients in Canadian acute-care hospitals and are significant and preventable causes of morbidity and mortality among hospitalized patients. Hand hygiene is among the simplest and most effective preventive measures to reduce these infections. However, compliance with hand hygiene among healthcare workers, specifically among physicians, is consistently suboptimal. We aim to first identify the barriers and enablers to physician hand hygiene compliance, and then to develop and pilot a theory-based knowledge translation intervention to increase physicians’ compliance with best hand hygiene practice. Design The study consists of three phases. In Phase 1, we will identify barriers and enablers to hand hygiene compliance by physicians. This will include: key informant interviews with physicians and residents using a structured interview guide, informed by the Theoretical Domains Framework; nonparticipant observation of physician/resident hand hygiene audit sessions; and focus groups with hand hygiene experts. In Phase 2, we will conduct intervention mapping to develop a theory-based knowledge translation intervention to improve physician hand hygiene compliance. Finally, in Phase 3, we will pilot the knowledge translation intervention in four patient care units. Discussion In this study, we will use a behavioural theory approach to obtain a better understanding of the barriers and enablers to physician hand hygiene compliance. This will provide a comprehensive framework on which to develop knowledge translation interventions that may be more successful in improving hand hygiene practice. Upon completion of this study, we will refine the piloted knowledge translation intervention so it can be tested in a multi-site cluster randomized controlled trial.

Knowledge Dictionary for Information Extraction on the Arabic Text Data

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Wahyu Jauharis Saputra

2013-04-01

Full Text Available Information extraction is an early stage of a process of textual data analysis. Information extraction is required to get information from textual data that can be used for process analysis, such as classification and categorization. A textual data is strongly influenced by the language. Arabic is gaining a significant attention in many studies because Arabic language is very different from others, and in contrast to other languages, tools and research on the Arabic language is still lacking. The information extracted using the knowledge dictionary is a concept of expression. A knowledge dictionary is usually constructed manually by an expert and this would take a long time and is specific to a problem only. This paper proposed a method for automatically building a knowledge dictionary. Dictionary knowledge is formed by classifying sentences having the same concept, assuming that they will have a high similarity value. The concept that has been extracted can be used as features for subsequent computational process such as classification or categorization. Dataset used in this paper was the Arabic text dataset. Extraction result was tested by using a decision tree classification engine and the highest precision value obtained was 71.0% while the highest recall value was 75.0%. 

Using WordNet to Complement Training Information in Text Categorization

OpenAIRE

Rodriguez, Manuel de Buenaga; Hidalgo, Jose Maria Gomez; Agudo, Belen Diaz

1997-01-01

Automatic Text Categorization (TC) is a complex and useful task for many natural language applications, and is usually performed through the use of a set of manually classified documents, a training collection. We suggest the utilization of additional resources like lexical databases to increase the amount of information that TC systems make use of, and thus, to improve their performance. Our approach integrates WordNet information with two training approaches through the Vector Space Model. ...

Make It Real: Strategies for Success with Informational Texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Hoyt, Linda

This book provides a practical classroom guide to unlocking the treasures of informational texts. It also aims to demonstrate that reading and writing nonfiction can overcome the gender gap, allowing girls and boys to share interests in any subject from bugs and magnets to gardens and cake baking. It explains the use of a range of instructional…

The Distribution of the Informative Intensity of the Text in Terms of its Structure (On Materials of the English Texts in the Mining Sphere

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Znikina Ludmila

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the distribution of informative intensity of the English-language scientific text based on its structural features contributing to the process of formalization of the scientific text and the preservation of the adequacy of the text with derived semantic information in relation to the primary. Discourse analysis is built on specific compositional and meaningful examples of scientific texts taken from the mining field. It also analyzes the adequacy of the translation of foreign texts into another language, the relationships between elements of linguistic systems, the degree of a formal conformance, translation with the specific objectives and information needs of the recipient. Some key words and ideas are emphasized in the paragraphs of the English-language mining scientific texts. The article gives the characteristic features of the structure of paragraphs of technical text and examples of constructions in English scientific texts based on a mining theme with the aim to explain the possible ways of their adequate translation.

Effects of Surrounding Information and Line Length on Text Comprehension from the Web

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Jess McMullin

2002-02-01

Full Text Available The World Wide Web (Web is becoming a popular medium for transmission of information and online learning. We need to understand how people comprehend information from the Web to design Web sites that maximize the acquisition of information. We examined two features of Web page design that are easily modified by developers, namely line length and the amount of surrounding information, or whitespace. Undergraduate university student participants read text and answered comprehension questions on the Web. Comprehension was affected by whitespace; participants had better comprehension for information surrounded by whitespace than for information surrounded by meaningless information. Participants were not affected by line length. These findings demonstrate that reading from the Web is not the same as reading print and have implications for instructional Web design.

The Marble-Hand Illusion.

Science.gov (United States)

Senna, Irene; Maravita, Angelo; Bolognini, Nadia; Parise, Cesare V

2014-01-01

Our body is made of flesh and bones. We know it, and in our daily lives all the senses constantly provide converging information about this simple, factual truth. But is this always the case? Here we report a surprising bodily illusion demonstrating that humans rapidly update their assumptions about the material qualities of their body, based on their recent multisensory perceptual experience. To induce a misperception of the material properties of the hand, we repeatedly gently hit participants' hand with a small hammer, while progressively replacing the natural sound of the hammer against the skin with the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of marble. After five minutes, the hand started feeling stiffer, heavier, harder, less sensitive, unnatural, and showed enhanced Galvanic skin response (GSR) to threatening stimuli. Notably, such a change in skin conductivity positively correlated with changes in perceived hand stiffness. Conversely, when hammer hits and impact sounds were temporally uncorrelated, participants did not spontaneously report any changes in the perceived properties of the hand, nor did they show any modulation in GSR. In two further experiments, we ruled out that mere audio-tactile synchrony is the causal factor triggering the illusion, further demonstrating the key role of material information conveyed by impact sounds in modulating the perceived material properties of the hand. This novel bodily illusion, the 'Marble-Hand Illusion', demonstrates that the perceived material of our body, surely the most stable attribute of our bodily self, can be quickly updated through multisensory integration.

Differences among college women for breast cancer prevention acquired information-seeking, desired apps and texts, and daughter-initiated information to mothers.

Science.gov (United States)

Kratzke, Cynthia; Amatya, Anup; Vilchis, Hugo

2014-04-01

The purpose of this study was to examine among college women acquired breast cancer prevention information-seeking, desired apps and texts, and information given to mothers. Using a cross-sectional study, a survey was administered to college women at a southwestern university. College women (n = 546) used the Internet (44 %) for active breast cancer prevention information-seeking and used the Internet (74 %), magazines (69 %), and television (59 %) for passive information receipt. Over half of the participants desired breast cancer prevention apps (54 %) and texts (51 %). Logistic regression analyses revealed predictors for interest to receive apps were ethnicity (Hispanic), lower self-efficacy, actively seeking online information, and older age and predictors for interest to receive texts were lower self-efficacy and higher university level. Eighteen percent of college women (n = 99) reported giving information to mothers and reported in an open-ended item the types of information given to mothers. Predictors for giving information to mothers were actively and passively seeking online information, breast self-exam practice, and higher university level. Screenings were the most frequent types of information given to mothers. Breast cancer prevention information using apps, texts, or Internet and daughter-initiated information for mothers should be considered in health promotion targeting college students or young women in communities. Future research is needed to examine the quality of apps, texts, and online information and cultural differences for breast cancer prevention sources.

The Distribution of the Informative Intensity of the Text in Terms of its Structure (On Materials of the English Texts in the Mining Sphere)

Science.gov (United States)

Znikina, Ludmila; Rozhneva, Elena

2017-11-01

The article deals with the distribution of informative intensity of the English-language scientific text based on its structural features contributing to the process of formalization of the scientific text and the preservation of the adequacy of the text with derived semantic information in relation to the primary. Discourse analysis is built on specific compositional and meaningful examples of scientific texts taken from the mining field. It also analyzes the adequacy of the translation of foreign texts into another language, the relationships between elements of linguistic systems, the degree of a formal conformance, translation with the specific objectives and information needs of the recipient. Some key words and ideas are emphasized in the paragraphs of the English-language mining scientific texts. The article gives the characteristic features of the structure of paragraphs of technical text and examples of constructions in English scientific texts based on a mining theme with the aim to explain the possible ways of their adequate translation.

Eye movements during the recollection of text information reflect content rather than the text itself

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Traub, Franziska; Johansson, Roger; Holmqvist, Kenneth

Several studies have reported that spontaneous eye movements occur when visuospatial information is recalled from memory. Such gazes closely reflect the content and spatial relations from the original scene layout (e.g., Johansson et al., 2012). However, when someone has originally read a scene....... Recollection was performed orally while gazing at a blank screen. Results demonstrate that participant’s gaze patterns during recall more closely reflect the spatial layout of the scene than the physical locations of the text. Memory data provide evidence that mental models representing either the situation...... description, the memory of the physical layout of the text itself might compete with the memory of the spatial arrangement of the described scene. The present study was designed to address this fundamental issue by having participants read scene descriptions that where manipulated to be either congruent...

SERVICES OF FULL-TEXT SEARCHING IN A DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT (PROJECT HUMANITARIANA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S. K. Lyapin

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Problem statement. We justify the possibility of full-text search services application in both universal and specialized (in terms of resource base digital libraries for the extraction and analysis of the context knowledge in the humanities. The architecture and services of virtual information and resource center for extracting knowledge from the humanitarian texts generated by «Humanitariana» project are described. The functional integration of the resources and services for a full-text search in a distributed decentralized environment, organized in the Internet / Intranet architecture under the control of the client (user browser accessing a variety of independent servers. An algorithm for a distributed full-text query implementation is described. Methods. Method of combining requency-ranked and paragraph-oriented full-text queries is used: the first are used for the preliminary analysis of the subject area or a combination product (explication of "vertical" context, or macro context, the second - for the explication of "horizontal" context, or micro context within copyright paragraph. The results of the frequency-ranked queries are used to compile paragraph-oriented queries. Results. The results of textual research are shown on the topics "The question of fact in Russian philosophy", "The question of loneliness in Russian philosophy and culture". About 50 pieces of context knowledge on the total resource base of about 2,500 full-text resources have been explicated and briefly described to their further expert investigating. Practical significance. The proposed technology (advanced full-text searching services in a distributed information environment can be used for the information support of humanitarian studies and education in the humanities, for functional integration of resources and services of various organizations, for carrying out interdisciplinary research.

The 2006 Analysis of Information Remaining on Disks Offered for Sale on the Second Hand Market

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andy Jones

2006-09-01

Full Text Available All organisations, whether in the public or private sector, use computers for the storage and processing of information relating to their business or services, their employees and their customers. A large proportion of families and individuals in their homes now also use personal computers and, both intentionally and inadvertently, often store on those computers personal information. It is clear that most organisations and individuals continue to be unaware of the information that may be stored on the hard disks that the computers contain, and have not considered what may happen to the information after the disposal of the equipment.In 2005, joint research was carried out by the University of Glamorgan in Wales and Edith Cowan University in Australia to determine whether second hand computer disks that were purchased from a number of sources still contained any information or whether the information had been effectively erased. The research revealed that, for the majority of the disks that were examined, the information had not been effectively removed and as a result, both organisations and individuals were potentially exposed to a range of potential crimes.  It is worthy of note that in the disposal of this equipment, the organisations involved had failed to meet their statutory, regulatory and legal obligations.This paper describes a second research project that was carried out in 2006 which repeated the research carried out the previous year and also extended the scope of the research to include additional countries.  The methodology used was the same as that in the previous year and the disks that were used for the research were again supplied blind by a third party. The research involved the forensic imaging of the disks which was followed by an analysis of the disks to determine what information remained and whether it could be easily recovered using publicly available tools and techniques.

Clean Hands Count

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"Really," "Not Possible," "I Can't Believe It": Exploring Informational Text in Literature Circles

Science.gov (United States)

Barone, Diane; Barone, Rebecca

2016-01-01

Fifth graders' interpretations of nonfiction or informational text were explored. Each literature circle group read and responded to informational text. Discoveries included that students' conversations and written responses were closely connected to text and that students created multimodal responses.

Survey reveals public open to ban on hand-held cell phone use and texting.

Science.gov (United States)

2013-01-01

A study performed by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) reveals that the public is open to a ban on hand-held cell phone use while driving. The study is based on data from 2009s Omnibus Household Survey (OHS), which is administered by B...

Clean Hands Count

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Clean Hands Count

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Formal approach to modeling of modern Information Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bálint Molnár

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Most recently, the concept of business documents has started to play double role. On one hand, a business document (word processing text or calculation sheet can be used as specification tool, on the other hand the business document is an immanent constituent of business processes, thereby essential component of business Information Systems. The recent tendency is that the majority of documents and their contents within business Information Systems remain in semi-structured format and a lesser part of documents is transformed into schemas of structured databases. In order to keep the emerging situation in hand, we suggest the creation (1 a theoretical framework for modeling business Information Systems; (2 and a design method for practical application based on the theoretical model that provides the structuring principles. The modeling approach that focuses on documents and their interrelationships with business processes assists in perceiving the activities of modern Information Systems.

VARIABLE STIFFNESS HAND PROSTHESIS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S. Cecilia Tapia-Siles

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Prosthetics is an important field in engineering due to the large number of amputees worldwide and the associated problems such as limited functionality of the state of the art. An important functionality of the human hand is its capability of adjusting the stiffness of the joints depending on the currently performed task. For the development of new technology it is important to understand the limitations of existing resources. As part of our efforts to develop a variable stiffness grasper for developing countries a systematic review was performed covering technology of body powered and myoelectric hand prosthesis. Focus of the review is readiness of prosthetic hands regarding their capability of controlling the stiffness of the end effector. Publications sourced through three different digital libraries were systematically reviewed on the basis of the PRISMA standard. We present a search strategy as well as the PRISMA assessment of the resulting records which covered 321 publications. The records were assessed and the results are presented for the ability of devices to control their joint stiffness. The review indicates that body powered prosthesis are preferred to myoelectric hands due to the reduced cost, the simplicity of use and because of their inherent ability to provide feedback to the user. Stiffness control was identified but has not been fully covered in the current state of the art. In addition we summarise the identified requirements on prosthetic hands as well as related information which can support the development of new prosthetics.

Virtual Hand Feedback Reduces Reaction Time in an Interactive Finger Reaching Task.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Johannes Brand

Full Text Available Computer interaction via visually guided hand or finger movements is a ubiquitous part of daily computer usage in work or gaming. Surprisingly, however, little is known about the performance effects of using virtual limb representations versus simpler cursors. In this study 26 healthy right-handed adults performed cued index finger flexion-extension movements towards an on-screen target while wearing a data glove. They received each of four different types of real-time visual feedback: a simple circular cursor, a point light pattern indicating finger joint positions, a cartoon hand and a fully shaded virtual hand. We found that participants initiated the movements faster when receiving feedback in the form of a hand than when receiving circular cursor or point light feedback. This overall difference was robust for three out of four hand versus circle pairwise comparisons. The faster movement initiation for hand feedback was accompanied by a larger movement amplitude and a larger movement error. We suggest that the observed effect may be related to priming of hand information during action perception and execution affecting motor planning and execution. The results may have applications in the use of body representations in virtual reality applications.

Degloving injuries of the hand

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

R Krishnamoorthy

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Avulsion of skin from the hand or fingers is an injury that has a dramatic presentation. The entire musculo-skeletal unit of the finger is intact, and the patient can often move the parts of his naked hand quite normally. The challenge for the reconstructive surgeon lies in resurfacing the hand or finger with a good quality pliable sensate skin cover while preserving the movements and function of the hand. Traditionally, skin grafting has been the standard method of reconstruction in such injuries. However, skin grafting does have many disadvantages, too. This article deals with the features of such injuries, management protocols and other reconstructive options available in the armamentarium of the hand surgeon.

Validation and Comprehension of Text Information: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Science.gov (United States)

Richter, Tobias

2015-01-01

In psychological research, the comprehension of linguistic information and the knowledge-based assessment of its validity are often regarded as two separate stages of information processing. Recent findings in psycholinguistics and text comprehension research call this two-stage model into question. In particular, validation can affect…

Text Mining for Information Systems Researchers: An Annotated Topic Modeling Tutorial

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Debortoli, Stefan; Müller, Oliver; Junglas, Iris

2016-01-01

, such as manual coding. Yet, the size of text data setsobtained from the Internet makes manual analysis virtually impossible. In this tutorial, we discuss the challengesencountered when applying automated text-mining techniques in information systems research. In particular, weshowcase the use of probabilistic...... researchers,this tutorial provides some guidance for conducting text mining studies on their own and for evaluating the quality ofothers.......t is estimated that more than 80 percent of today’s data is stored in unstructured form (e.g., text, audio, image, video);and much of it is expressed in rich and ambiguous natural language. Traditionally, the analysis of natural languagehas prompted the use of qualitative data analysis approaches...

Texting Styles and Information Change of SMS Text Messages in Filipino

Science.gov (United States)

Cabatbat, Josephine Jill T.; Tapang, Giovanni A.

2013-02-01

We identify the different styles of texting in Filipino short message service (SMS) texts and analyze the change in unigram and bigram frequencies due to these styles. Style preference vectors for sample texts were calculated and used to identify the style combination used by an average individual. The change in Shannon entropy of the SMS text is explained in light of a coding process.

A qualitative evaluation of hand drying practices among Kenyans.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bobbie Person

Full Text Available Recommended disease prevention behaviors of hand washing, hygienic hand drying, and covering one's mouth and nose in a hygienic manner when coughing and sneezing appear to be simple behaviors but continue to be a challenge to successfully promote and sustain worldwide. We conducted a qualitative inquiry to better understand current hand drying behaviors associated with activities of daily living, and mouth and nose covering practices, among Kenyans.We conducted 7 focus group discussions; 30 in-depth interviews; 10 structured household observations; and 75 structured observations in public venues in the urban area of Kisumu; rural communities surrounding Kisumu; and a peri-urban area outside Nairobi, Kenya. Using a grounded theory approach, we transcribed and coded the narrative data followed by thematic analysis of the emergent themes. Hand drying, specifically on a clean towel, was not a common practice among our participants. Most women dried their hands on their waist cloth, called a leso, or their clothes whether they were cooking, eating or cleaning the nose of a young child. If men dried their hands, they used their trousers or a handkerchief. Children rarely dried their hands; they usually just wiped them on their clothes, shook them, or left them wet as they continued with their activities. Many people sneezed into their hands and wiped them on their clothes. Men and women used a handkerchief fairly often when they had a runny nose, cold, or the flu. Most people coughed into the air or their hand.Drying hands on dirty clothes, rags and lesos can compromise the benefits of handwashing. Coughing and sneezing in to an open hand can contribute to spread of disease as well. Understanding these practices can inform health promotion activities and campaigns for the prevention and control of diarrheal disease and influenza.

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... now. Please try again later. Published on May 5, 2017 This video for healthcare providers is intended ... 36 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 413,702 views 5:46 ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 72,885 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Jefferson Health 410,052 views 5:46 'It's in your ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 75,585 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand ... soap and water - Duration: 1:27. World Health Organization 224,180 views 1:27 The five moments ...

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Full Text Available ... CDC) 97,825 views 5:12 CDC Flu Education Video - Duration: 10:26. Nicole Shelton 213 views ... Infection Control Video - Duration: 20:55. Paramedical Services Education Page 4,735 views 20:55 Hand Washing ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... action today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 78,256 views 3:10 Wash ... handwash? With soap and water - Duration: 1:27. World Health Organization 230,361 views 1:27 Hand ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... empower patients to play a role in their care by asking or reminding healthcare providers to clean ... It's in your hands - prevent sepsis in health care' A 5 May 2018 advocacy message from WHO - ...

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 78,256 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand ... message from WHO - Duration: 10:07. World Health Organization 9,045 views 10:07 A very serious ...

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Full Text Available ... today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 69,414 views 3:10 Hand Washing ... Video - Duration: 5:46. Thomas Jefferson University & Jefferson Health 408,436 views 5:46 83 videos Play ...

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Full Text Available ... Gorin 243,451 views 2:57 Hand Hygiene Dance - Duration: 3:15. mohd hafiz 34,146 views ... Language: English Location: United States Restricted Mode: Off History Help Loading... Loading... Loading... About Press Copyright Creators ...

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Full Text Available ... Em - Hand Hygiene Music Video - Duration: 5:46. Thomas Jefferson University & Jefferson Health 408,436 views 5: ... Prevention (CDC) 97,277 views 5:12 Loading more suggestions... Show more Language: English Location: United States ...

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Full Text Available ... Washing Video from CDC called "Put Your Hands Together" - Duration: 3:40. Patrick Boshell 27,834 views ... Policy & Safety Send feedback Test new features Loading... Working... Sign in to add this to Watch Later ...

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Full Text Available ... Published on May 5, 2017 This video for healthcare providers is intended to promote or encourage adherence ... role in their care by asking or reminding healthcare providers to clean their hands. See: https://www. ...

Complementary Hand Responses Occur in Both Peri- and Extrapersonal Space.

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Tim W Faber

Full Text Available Human beings have a strong tendency to imitate. Evidence from motor priming paradigms suggests that people automatically tend to imitate observed actions such as hand gestures by performing mirror-congruent movements (e.g., lifting one's right finger upon observing a left finger movement; from a mirror perspective. Many observed actions however, do not require mirror-congruent responses but afford complementary (fitting responses instead (e.g., handing over a cup; shaking hands. Crucially, whereas mirror-congruent responses don't require physical interaction with another person, complementary actions often do. Given that most experiments studying motor priming have used stimuli devoid of contextual information, this space or interaction-dependency of complementary responses has not yet been assessed. To address this issue, we let participants perform a task in which they had to mirror or complement a hand gesture (fist or open hand performed by an actor depicted either within or outside of reach. In three studies, we observed faster reaction times and less response errors for complementary relative to mirrored hand movements in response to open hand gestures (i.e., 'hand-shaking' irrespective of the perceived interpersonal distance of the actor. This complementary effect could not be accounted for by a low-level spatial cueing effect. These results demonstrate that humans have a strong and automatic tendency to respond by performing complementary actions. In addition, our findings underline the limitations of manipulations of space in modulating effects of motor priming and the perception of affordances.

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Hand Hygiene – Evaluation of Three Disinfectant Hand Sanitizers in a Community Setting

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Babeluk, Rita; Jutz, Sabrina; Mertlitz, Sarah; Matiasek, Johannes; Klaus, Christoph

2014-01-01

Hand hygiene is acknowledged as the single most important measure to prevent nosocomial infections in the healthcare setting. Similarly, in non-clinical settings, hand hygiene is recognised as a key element in helping prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of three different disinfectant hand sanitizers in reducing the burden of bacterial hand contamination in 60 healthy volunteers in a community setting, both before and after education about the correct use of hand sanitizers. The study is the first to evaluate the efficacy and ease of use of different formulations of hand rubs used by the general population. The products tested were: Sterillium (perfumed, liquid), desderman pure gel (odorless, gel) and Lavit (perfumed, spray). Sterillium and desderman are EN1500 (hygienic hand rub) certified products (available in pharmacy) and Lavit is non EN1500 certified and available in supermarkets. The two EN1500 certified products were found to be significantly superior in terms of reducing bacterial load. desderman pure gel, Sterillium and Lavit reduced the bacterial count to 6.4%, 8.2% and 28.0% respectively. After education in the correct use of each hand rub, the bacterial load was reduced even further, demonstrating the value of education in improving hand hygiene. Information about the testers' perceptions of the three sanitizers, together with their expectations of a hand sanitizer was obtained through a questionnaire. Efficacy, followed by skin compatibility were found to be the two most important attributes of a hand disinfectant in our target group. PMID:25379773

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Tracking and Classification of In-Air Hand Gesture Based on Thermal Guided Joint Filter

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Seongwan Kim

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The research on hand gestures has attracted many image processing-related studies, as it intuitively conveys the intention of a human as it pertains to motional meaning. Various sensors have been used to exploit the advantages of different modalities for the extraction of important information conveyed by the hand gesture of a user. Although many works have focused on learning the benefits of thermal information from thermal cameras, most have focused on face recognition or human body detection, rather than hand gesture recognition. Additionally, the majority of the works that take advantage of multiple modalities (e.g., the combination of a thermal sensor and a visual sensor, usually adopting simple fusion approaches between the two modalities. As both thermal sensors and visual sensors have their own shortcomings and strengths, we propose a novel joint filter-based hand gesture recognition method to simultaneously exploit the strengths and compensate the shortcomings of each. Our study is motivated by the investigation of the mutual supplementation between thermal and visual information in low feature level for the consistent representation of a hand in the presence of varying lighting conditions. Accordingly, our proposed method leverages the thermal sensor’s stability against luminance and the visual sensors textural detail, while complementing the low resolution and halo effect of thermal sensors and the weakness against illumination of visual sensors. A conventional region tracking method and a deep convolutional neural network have been leveraged to track the trajectory of a hand gesture and to recognize the hand gesture, respectively. Our experimental results show stability in recognizing a hand gesture against varying lighting conditions based on the contribution of the joint kernels of spatial adjacency and thermal range similarity.

A new approach to hand-based authentication

Science.gov (United States)

Amayeh, G.; Bebis, G.; Erol, A.; Nicolescu, M.

2007-04-01

Hand-based authentication is a key biometric technology with a wide range of potential applications both in industry and government. Traditionally, hand-based authentication is performed by extracting information from the whole hand. To account for hand and finger motion, guidance pegs are employed to fix the position and orientation of the hand. In this paper, we consider a component-based approach to hand-based verification. Our objective is to investigate the discrimination power of different parts of the hand in order to develop a simpler, faster, and possibly more accurate and robust verification system. Specifically, we propose a new approach which decomposes the hand in different regions, corresponding to the fingers and the back of the palm, and performs verification using information from certain parts of the hand only. Our approach operates on 2D images acquired by placing the hand on a flat lighting table. Using a part-based representation of the hand allows the system to compensate for hand and finger motion without using any guidance pegs. To decompose the hand in different regions, we use a robust methodology based on morphological operators which does not require detecting any landmark points on the hand. To capture the geometry of the back of the palm and the fingers in suffcient detail, we employ high-order Zernike moments which are computed using an effcient methodology. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a database of 100 subjects with 10 images per subject, illustrating promising performance. Comparisons with related approaches using the whole hand for verification illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach. Moreover, qualitative comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches indicate that the proposed approach has comparable or better performance.

Hands-on optics: an informal science education initiative

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Johnson, Anthony M.; Pompea, Stephen M.; Arthurs, Eugene G.; Walker, Constance E.; Sparks, Robert T.

2007-09-01

The project is collaboration between two scientific societies, the Optical Society of America (OSA) and SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). The program is designed to bring science education enrichment to thousands of underrepresented middle school students in more than ten states, including female and minority students, who typically have not been the beneficiaries of science and engineering resources and investments. HOO provides each teacher with up to six activity modules, each containing enough materials for up to 30 students to participate in 6-8 hours of hands-on optics-related activities. Sample activities, developed by education specialists at NOAO, include building kaleidoscopes and telescopes, communicating with a beam of light, and a hit-the-target laser beam challenge. Teachers engage in two days of training and, where possible, are partnered with a local optics professional (drawn from the local rosters of SPIE and OSA members) who volunteers to spend time with the teacher and students as they explore the module activities. Through these activities, students gain experience and understanding of optics principles, as well as learning the basics of inquiry, critical thinking, and problem solving skills involving optics, and how optics interfaces with other disciplines. While the modules were designed for use in informal after- school or weekend sessions, the number of venues has expanded to large and small science centers, Boys and Girls Clubs, Girl Scouts, summer camps, family workshops, and use in the classroom.

Clean Hands Count

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Full Text Available ... action today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 72,319 views 3:10 Wash 'Em - Hand ... handwash? With soap and water - Duration: 1:27. World Health Organization 205,878 views 1:27 Germ Smart - Wash ...

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Full Text Available ... action today; no cure tomorrow - Duration: 3:10. World Health Organization 74,478 views 3:10 Wash your Hands - ... handwash? With soap and water - Duration: 1:27. World Health Organization 215,487 views 1:27 Infection Control Video - ...

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Full Text Available ... News 581,131 views 18:49 Just Good Music 24/7 ● Classic Live Radio classics. 1,406 ... 611,013 views 1:46 Hand hygiene FULL music video - Duration: 2:33. AlfredHealthTV 26,798 views ...

A proposal for a drug information database and text templates for generating package inserts

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Okuya R

2013-07-01

Full Text Available Ryo Okuya,1 Masaomi Kimura,2 Michiko Ohkura,2 Fumito Tsuchiya3 1Graduate School of Engineering and Science, 2Faculty of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, 3School of Pharmacy, International University of Health and Welfare, Tokyo, Japan Abstract: To prevent prescription errors caused by information systems, a database to store complete and accurate drug information in a user-friendly format is needed. In previous studies, the primary method for obtaining data stored in a database is to extract drug information from package inserts by employing pattern matching or more sophisticated methods such as text mining. However, it is difficult to obtain a complete database because there is no strict rule concerning expressions used to describe drug information in package inserts. The authors' strategy was to first build a database and then automatically generate package inserts by embedding data in the database using templates. To create this database, the support of pharmaceutical companies to input accurate data is required. It is expected that this system will work, because these companies can earn merit for newly developed drugs to decrease the effort to create package inserts from scratch. This study designed the table schemata for the database and text templates to generate the package inserts. To handle the variety of drug-specific information in the package inserts, this information in drug composition descriptions was replaced with labels and the replacement descriptions utilizing cluster analysis were analyzed. To improve the method by which frequently repeated ingredient information and/or supplementary information are stored, the method was modified by introducing repeat tags in the templates to indicate repetition and improving the insertion of data into the database. The validity of this method was confirmed by inputting the drug information described in existing package inserts and checking that the method could

Hand Motion Classification Using a Multi-Channel Surface Electromyography Sensor

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Dong Sun

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The human hand has multiple degrees of freedom (DOF for achieving high-dexterity motions. Identifying and replicating human hand motions are necessary to perform precise and delicate operations in many applications, such as haptic applications. Surface electromyography (sEMG sensors are a low-cost method for identifying hand motions, in addition to the conventional methods that use data gloves and vision detection. The identification of multiple hand motions is challenging because the error rate typically increases significantly with the addition of more hand motions. Thus, the current study proposes two new methods for feature extraction to solve the problem above. The first method is the extraction of the energy ratio features in the time-domain, which are robust and invariant to motion forces and speeds for the same gesture. The second method is the extraction of the concordance correlation features that describe the relationship between every two channels of the multi-channel sEMG sensor system. The concordance correlation features of a multi-channel sEMG sensor system were shown to provide a vast amount of useful information for identification. Furthermore, a new cascaded-structure classifier is also proposed, in which 11 types of hand gestures can be identified accurately using the newly defined features. Experimental results show that the success rate for the identification of the 11 gestures is significantly high.

Texting while driving: is speech-based text entry less risky than handheld text entry?

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He, J; Chaparro, A; Nguyen, B; Burge, R J; Crandall, J; Chaparro, B; Ni, R; Cao, S

2014-11-01

Research indicates that using a cell phone to talk or text while maneuvering a vehicle impairs driving performance. However, few published studies directly compare the distracting effects of texting using a hands-free (i.e., speech-based interface) versus handheld cell phone, which is an important issue for legislation, automotive interface design and driving safety training. This study compared the effect of speech-based versus handheld text entries on simulated driving performance by asking participants to perform a car following task while controlling the duration of a secondary text-entry task. Results showed that both speech-based and handheld text entries impaired driving performance relative to the drive-only condition by causing more variation in speed and lane position. Handheld text entry also increased the brake response time and increased variation in headway distance. Text entry using a speech-based cell phone was less detrimental to driving performance than handheld text entry. Nevertheless, the speech-based text entry task still significantly impaired driving compared to the drive-only condition. These results suggest that speech-based text entry disrupts driving, but reduces the level of performance interference compared to text entry with a handheld device. In addition, the difference in the distraction effect caused by speech-based and handheld text entry is not simply due to the difference in task duration. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

RGBD Video Based Human Hand Trajectory Tracking and Gesture Recognition System

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Weihua Liu

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The task of human hand trajectory tracking and gesture trajectory recognition based on synchronized color and depth video is considered. Toward this end, in the facet of hand tracking, a joint observation model with the hand cues of skin saliency, motion and depth is integrated into particle filter in order to move particles to local peak in the likelihood. The proposed hand tracking method, namely, salient skin, motion, and depth based particle filter (SSMD-PF, is capable of improving the tracking accuracy considerably, in the context of the signer performing the gesture toward the camera device and in front of moving, cluttered backgrounds. In the facet of gesture recognition, a shape-order context descriptor on the basis of shape context is introduced, which can describe the gesture in spatiotemporal domain. The efficient shape-order context descriptor can reveal the shape relationship and embed gesture sequence order information into descriptor. Moreover, the shape-order context leads to a robust score for gesture invariant. Our approach is complemented with experimental results on the settings of the challenging hand-signed digits datasets and American sign language dataset, which corroborate the performance of the novel techniques.

Hand eczema: An update

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Chembolli Lakshmi

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Eczema, the commonest disorders afflicting the hands, is also the commonest occupational skin disease (OSD. In the dermatology outpatient departments, only the severe cases are diagnosed since patients rarely report with early hand dermatitis. Mild forms are picked up only during occupational screening. Hand eczema (HE can evolve into a chronic condition with persistent disease even after avoiding contact with the incriminated allergen / irritant. The important risk factors for hand eczema are atopy (especially the presence of dermatitis, wet work, and contact allergy. The higher prevalence in women as compared to men in most studies is related to environmental factors and is mainly applicable to younger women in their twenties. Preventive measures play a very important role in therapy as they enable the affected individuals to retain their employment and livelihood. This article reviews established preventive and therapeutic options and newer drugs like alitretinoin in hand eczema with a mention on the etiology and morphology. Identifying the etiological factors is of paramount importance as avoiding or minimizing these factors play an important role in treatment.

Coordination of hand shape.

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Pesyna, Colin; Pundi, Krishna; Flanders, Martha

2011-03-09

The neural control of hand movement involves coordination of the sensory, motor, and memory systems. Recent studies have documented the motor coordinates for hand shape, but less is known about the corresponding patterns of somatosensory activity. To initiate this line of investigation, the present study characterized the sense of hand shape by evaluating the influence of differences in the amount of grasping or twisting force, and differences in forearm orientation. Human subjects were asked to use the left hand to report the perceived shape of the right hand. In the first experiment, six commonly grasped items were arranged on the table in front of the subject: bottle, doorknob, egg, notebook, carton, and pan. With eyes closed, subjects used the right hand to lightly touch, forcefully support, or imagine holding each object, while 15 joint angles were measured in each hand with a pair of wired gloves. The forces introduced by supporting or twisting did not influence the perceptual report of hand shape, but for most objects, the report was distorted in a consistent manner by differences in forearm orientation. Subjects appeared to adjust the intrinsic joint angles of the left hand, as well as the left wrist posture, so as to maintain the imagined object in its proper spatial orientation. In a second experiment, this result was largely replicated with unfamiliar objects. Thus, somatosensory and motor information appear to be coordinated in an object-based, spatial-coordinate system, sensitive to orientation relative to gravitational forces, but invariant to grasp forcefulness.

Text feature extraction based on deep learning: a review.

Science.gov (United States)

Liang, Hong; Sun, Xiao; Sun, Yunlei; Gao, Yuan

2017-01-01

Selection of text feature item is a basic and important matter for text mining and information retrieval. Traditional methods of feature extraction require handcrafted features. To hand-design, an effective feature is a lengthy process, but aiming at new applications, deep learning enables to acquire new effective feature representation from training data. As a new feature extraction method, deep learning has made achievements in text mining. The major difference between deep learning and conventional methods is that deep learning automatically learns features from big data, instead of adopting handcrafted features, which mainly depends on priori knowledge of designers and is highly impossible to take the advantage of big data. Deep learning can automatically learn feature representation from big data, including millions of parameters. This thesis outlines the common methods used in text feature extraction first, and then expands frequently used deep learning methods in text feature extraction and its applications, and forecasts the application of deep learning in feature extraction.

Helping hands: A cluster randomised trial to evaluate the effectiveness of two different strategies for promoting hand hygiene in hospital nurses

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Hulscher Marlies

2011-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Hand hygiene prescriptions are the most important measure in the prevention of hospital-acquired infections. Yet, compliance rates are generally below 50% of all opportunities for hand hygiene. This study aims at evaluating the short- and long-term effects of two different strategies for promoting hand hygiene in hospital nurses. Methods/design This study is a cluster randomised controlled trial with inpatient wards as the unit of randomisation. Guidelines for hand hygiene will be implemented in this study. Two strategies will be used to improve the adherence to guidelines for hand hygiene. The state-of-the-art strategy is derived from the literature and includes education, reminders, feedback, and targeting adequate products and facilities. The extended strategy also contains activities aimed at influencing social influence in groups and enhancing leadership. The unique contribution of the extended strategy is built upon relevant behavioural science theories. The extended strategy includes all elements of the state-of-the-art strategy supplemented with gaining active commitment and initiative of ward management, modelling by informal leaders at the ward, and setting norms and targets within the team. Data will be collected at four points in time, with six-month intervals. An average of 3,000 opportunities for hand hygiene in approximately 900 nurses will be observed at each time point. Discussion Performing and evaluating an implementation strategy that also targets the social context of teams may considerably add to the general body of knowledge in this field. Results from our study will allow us to draw conclusions on the effects of different strategies for the implementation of hand hygiene guidelines, and based on these results we will be able to define a preferred implementation strategy for hospital based nursing. Trial registration The study is registered as a Clinical Trial in ClinicalTrials.gov, dossier number: NCT

Attention affects visual perceptual processing near the hand.

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Cosman, Joshua D; Vecera, Shaun P

2010-09-01

Specialized, bimodal neural systems integrate visual and tactile information in the space near the hand. Here, we show that visuo-tactile representations allow attention to influence early perceptual processing, namely, figure-ground assignment. Regions that were reached toward were more likely than other regions to be assigned as foreground figures, and hand position competed with image-based information to bias figure-ground assignment. Our findings suggest that hand position allows attention to influence visual perceptual processing and that visual processes typically viewed as unimodal can be influenced by bimodal visuo-tactile representations.

Developing resources for sentiment analysis of informal Arabic text in social media

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Itani, Maher; Roast, Chris; Al-Khayatt, Samir

2017-01-01

Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as text categorization, machine translation, sentiment analysis, etc., need annotated corpora and lexicons to check quality and performance. This paper describes the development of resources for sentiment analysis specifically for Arabic text in social media. A distinctive feature of the corpora and lexicons developed are that they are determined from informal Arabic that does not conform to grammatical or spelling standards. We refer to Ara...

A Comparison of Two Strategies for Teaching Third Graders to Summarize Information Text

Science.gov (United States)

Dromsky, Ann Marie

2011-01-01

Summarizing text is one of the most effective comprehension strategies (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) and an effective way to learn from information text (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995). In addition, much research supports the explicit instruction of such strategies as…

THE VISIBLE HAND? THE ECONOMICS OF ALFRED CHANDLER

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Don Matthews

2000-01-01

Full Text Available In his great work The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Alfred Chandler argues that the modern managerial enterprise replaced the invisible hand of the market in coordinating the activities and allocating the resources of the U.S. economy. But Chandler’s view of the invisible hand of the market is much too narrow. The modern managerial enterprise is not a substitute for the invisible hand of the market but an integral part of it. The Visible Hand is actually a history of the invisible hand of the market.

No specific role for the manual motor system in processing the meanings of words related to the hand

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Natasha ePostle

2013-02-01

Full Text Available The present study explored whether semantic and motor systems are functionally interwoven via the use of a dual-task paradigm. According to embodied language accounts that propose an automatic and necessary involvement of the motor system in conceptual processing, concurrent processing of hand-related information should interfere more with hand movements than processing of unrelated body-part (i.e., foot, mouth information. Across three experiments, 100 right-handed participants performed left- or right-hand tapping movements while repeatedly reading action words related to different body-parts, or different body-part names, in both aloud and silent conditions. Concurrent reading of single words related to specific body-parts, or the same words embedded in sentences differing in syntactic and phonological complexity (to manipulate context-relevant processing, and reading while viewing videos of the actions and body-parts described by the target words (to elicit visuomotor associations all interfered with right-hand but not left-hand tapping rate. However, this motor interference was not affected differentially by hand-related stimuli. Thus, the results provide no support for proposals that body-part specific resources in cortical motor systems are shared between overt manual movements and meaning-related processing of words related to the hand.

Using Digital Think-Alouds to Build Comprehension of Online Informational Texts

Science.gov (United States)

White, Amber

2016-01-01

The ability to navigate and comprehend online informational text is essential for 21st century learners. It requires orchestrating a mix of old and new reading strategies--and it's easy for teachers and students to feel overwhelmed! This column describes a way of combining student screencasting with Reciprocal Teaching to help students--and…

Evaluation of a hand hygiene campaign in outpatient health care clinics.

Science.gov (United States)

Kukanich, Kate Stenske; Kaur, Ramandeep; Freeman, Lisa C; Powell, Douglas A

2013-03-01

To improve hand hygiene in two outpatient health care clinics through the introduction of a gel sanitizer and an informational poster. In this interventional study, health care workers at two outpatient clinics were observed for frequency of hand hygiene (attempts versus opportunities). Gel sanitizer and informational posters were introduced together as an intervention. Direct observation of the frequency of hand hygiene was performed during baseline, intervention, and follow-up. A poststudy survey of health care workers was also distributed and collected. In both clinics, the frequency of hand hygiene was poor at baseline (11% and 21%) but improved significantly after intervention (36% and 54%) and was maintained through the follow-up period (32% and 51%). Throughout the study, postcontact hand hygiene was observed significantly more often than precontact hand hygiene. In both clinics, health care workers reported a preference for soap and water; yet observations showed that when the intervention made gel sanitizer available, sanitizer use predominated. Fifty percent of the surveyed health care workers considered the introduction of gel sanitizer to be an effective motivating tool for improving hand hygiene. Hand hygiene performance by health care workers in outpatient clinics may be improved through promoting the use of gel sanitizer and using informational posters. Compared with surveys, direct observation by trained observers may provide more accurate information about worker preferences for hand hygiene tools.

Representing nested semantic information in a linear string of text using XML.

OpenAIRE

Krauthammer, Michael; Johnson, Stephen B.; Hripcsak, George; Campbell, David A.; Friedman, Carol

2002-01-01

XML has been widely adopted as an important data interchange language. The structure of XML enables sharing of data elements with variable degrees of nesting as long as the elements are grouped in a strict tree-like fashion. This requirement potentially restricts the usefulness of XML for marking up written text, which often includes features that do not properly nest within other features. We encountered this problem while marking up medical text with structured semantic information from a N...

Hand Osteoblastoma

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M. Farzan

2006-06-01

Full Text Available Background and Aim: Osteoblastoma is one of the rarest primary bone tumors. Although, small bones of the hands and feet are the third most common location for this tumor, the hand involvement is very rare and few case observations were published in the English-language literature. Materials and Methods: In this study, we report five cases of benign osteoblastoma of the hand, 3 in metacarpals and two in phalanxes. The clinical feature is not specific. The severe nocturnal, salicylate-responsive pain is not present in patients with osteoblastoma. The pain is dull, persistent and less localized. The clinical course is usually long and there is often symptoms for months before medical attention are sought. Swelling is a more persistent finding in osteoblastoma of the hand that we found in all of our patients. The radiologic findings are indistinctive, so preoperative diagnosis based on X-ray appearance is difficult. In all of our 5 cases, we fail to consider osteoblastoma as primary diagnosis. Pathologically, osteoblastoma consisting of a well-vascularized connective tissue stroma in which there is active production of osteoid and primitive woven bone. Treatment depends on the stage and localization of the tumor. Curettage and bone grafting is sufficient in stage 1 or stage 2, but in stage 3 wide resection is necessary for prevention of recurrence. Osteosarcoma is the most important differential diagnosis that may lead to inappropriate operation.

Health Professionals and hand hygiene: a question of pediatric patient safety

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Daisy Zanchi de Abreu Botene

Full Text Available This paper is a qualitative descriptive study, which aims to analyze how the academic education concerning hand hygiene contributes to the pediatric patient safety. This research was developed in an university hospital in Southern Brazil, in the pediatric unit, during the period of August to December, 2012. Sixteen healthcare professionals participated (doctors, nurses and physical therapists. A semi-structured interview was used to gather information. Data was organized by the software QSR Nvivo and analyzed using the content analysis technique. The results allowed us to list two thematic categories: "Hand hygiene and healthcare professionals' academic education"; and "Hand hygiene and professional life". The first thematic category will be presented in this paper. It was identified that the academic education contributes in an ineffective way to the creation of a patient safety culture. According to the professionals, there are gaps during the educational process regarding hand hygiene. The topic is treated in an ineffective and not very significant way to the learning and adhesion of hand hygiene in the professional life. It is recommended that, for the internalization of the practice by future professionals, a transversal, continuous and systematical approach is adopted during the professional's training, evaluations concerning the hand hygiene are done throughout the academic life as well as healthcare professors bethink the topic.

Schematizing and Processing Informational Texts with Mind Maps in Fifth and Sixth Grade

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Merchie, Emmelien; Van Keer, Hilde

2013-01-01

From the age of 11-13, children start to spend increasingly more time on learning from texts. The need arises to support them in dealing with this text information and engaging them in self-regulated learning (SRL). This study is embedded within the cognitive component of SRL and focuses on mind mapping as a promising organizational learning…

Network and Ensemble Enabled Entity Extraction in Informal Text (NEEEEIT) final report

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kegelmeyer, Philip W. [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States); Shead, Timothy M. [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States); Dunlavy, Daniel M. [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

2013-09-01

This SAND report summarizes the activities and outcomes of the Network and Ensemble Enabled Entity Extraction in Information Text (NEEEEIT) LDRD project, which addressed improving the accuracy of conditional random fields for named entity recognition through the use of ensemble methods.

Hand hygiene in reducing transient flora on the hands of healthcare workers: an educational intervention.

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Kapil, R; Bhavsar, H K; Madan, M

2015-01-01

Hand hygiene has now been recognised as one of the most effective intervention to control the transmission of infections in a hospital and education is an important tool to ensure its implementation. In order to convince the users and as a part of education, it is important to generate evidence on the role of hand hygiene in reducing the bacterial flora on their hands. The present study was undertaken in a tertiary care hospital to demonstrate the presence of bacterial flora on the hands of healthcare workers (HCW) in different categories, to teach them proper hand hygiene technique using alcohol-based hand rub and determine the outcome for reduction of bacteria. A total sample size of 60 subjects including resident doctors, medical students, nurses and hospital attendants were included in the study after obtaining informed consent. Each person was educated on the technique of hand hygiene with alcohol-based hand rub and hand impressions were cultured before and after hand hygiene. All the subjects were also given a questionnaire to assess their perception on hand hygiene. The WHO posters on proper hand hygiene were displayed in the appropriate areas of the hospital in addition, as an educational tool. Majority (42 out of 60) of the HCWs had bacterial count up to 100 colonies or more on both hands before the application of hand rub while working in the hospital. After use of alcohol hand rub with a proper hand hygiene technique, it was found that the percentage reduction was 95-99% among doctors and nurses, 70% among hospital attendants and 50% among sanitary attendants. Staphylococcus aureus was present on the hands of eight persons of which three were methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The study demonstrates that transient bacteria are present on the hands of HCWs but majority could be removed by proper hand hygiene, which needs continuous education to be effective. It also shows that active education by demonstrating the proper hand hygiene technique

Nurses’ Knowledge Regarding Hand Hygiene and Its Individual and Organizational Predictors

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Malihe Asadollahi

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Based on recommendations from World Health Organization, hand hygiene is the most important way to control the hospital infections. Due to the critical role of nurses in patient care, they should have essential and updated information regarding hand hygiene. So this study aims at determining the knowledge of hand hygiene and its individual and organizational predictors among nurses in neonatal units. Methods: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted in neonatal units in the hospitals affiliated to Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. The participants surveyed in this study were 150 nurses who were invited by census sampling method. A researcher prepared questionnaire that investigated the knowledge of participants about hand hygiene and was used after approving its validity and reliability. The quantitative analysis of this study used Statistical Package for Social Sciences SPSS version 13 by descriptive statistics and pearson correlation test, independent samples t-test, One-way ANOVA. For multivariable explanation of nurses’ knowledge based on independent variables multiple linear regressions was used. Results: Most of participants have an acceptable level of knowledge regarding hand hygiene. The highest score was for infection control domain and the lowest score was for definition of hand hygiene domain. Multivariable analysis showed that work experience and history of previous training were the most important predictors of participants’ knowledge about hand hygiene. Conclusion: It is recommended that infection control committees should revise their educational methods and give more emphasis on update guidelines regarding hand hygiene. Also, more experienced nurses should be employed in neonatal units.

A Review Paper On Exploring Text Link And Spacial-Temporal Information In Social Media Networks

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Dr. Mamta Madan

2015-03-01

Full Text Available ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to have a literature review on the various methods to mine the knowledge from the social media by taking advantage of embedded heterogeneous information. Specifically we are trying to review different types of mining framework which provides us useful information from these networks that have heterogeneous data types including text spacial-temporal and data association LINK information. Firstly we will discuss the link mining to study the link structure with respect to Social Media SM. Secondly we summarize the various text mining models thirdly we shall review spacial as well the temporal models to extract or detect the frequent related topics from SM. Fourthly we will try to figure out few improvised models that take advantage of the link textual temporal and spacial information which motivates to discover progressive principles and fresh methodologies for DM Data Mining in social media networks SMNs.

Management of post burn hand deformities

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Sabapathy S

2010-10-01

Full Text Available The hand is ranked among the three most frequent sites of burns scar contracture deformity. One of the major determinants of the quality of life in burns survivors is the functionality of the hands. Burns deformities, although largely preventable, nevertheless do occur when appropriate treatment is not provided in the acute situation or when they are part of a major burns. Reconstructive procedures can greatly improve the function of the hands. Appropriate choice of procedures and timing of surgery followed by supervised physiotherapy can be a boon for a burns survivor.

Typhoid fever: hurdles to adequate hand washing for disease prevention among the population of a peri-urban informal settlement in Fiji

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Mosese Salusalu

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Problem/context: The Pacific island nation of Fiji Islands has high rates of endemic typhoid fever which is difficult to diagnose and often underreported. However, the majority of cases are preventable through use of safe water; adequate sanitation; vaccination; and, most sustainable of all, simple hygienic behaviour, such as hand washing with soap (HWWS. Despite many attempts by public health authorities, little progress has been made in the area of environmental adaptation and behaviour change. Action: To explore perceptions of typhoid fever risk among urban squatters and behavioural determinants surrounding HWWS, indigenous Fijians living in informal settlements with high typhoid fever incidence were invited to participate in focus group discussions. In-depth interviews were conducted with community leaders. Outcome: Perceptions of typhoid fever suggest confusion about risk factors, symptoms and communicability. Environmental barriers for hand washing were related to water and soap access. Standard social marketing approaches have been trialled with little clear evidence of impact. Despite this, we continue to advocate for the social and cultural determinants of typhoid prevention to remain central to future public health strategies. Discussion: Despite behaviour change being notoriously difficult, we argue that community-driven behaviour adaptation initiatives based on sound epidemiological evidence and health communication theory are likely to have significant impact and greater likelihood of sustainability.

Unimanual SNARC Effect: Hand Matters.

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Riello, Marianna; Rusconi, Elena

2011-01-01

A structural representation of the hand embedding information about the identity and relative position of fingers is necessary to counting routines. It may also support associations between numbers and allocentric spatial codes that predictably interact with other known numerical spatial representations, such as the mental number line (MNL). In this study, 48 Western participants whose typical counting routine proceeded from thumb-to-little on both hands performed magnitude and parity binary judgments. Response keys were pressed either with the right index and middle fingers or with the left index and middle fingers in separate blocks. 24 participants responded with either hands in prone posture (i.e., palm down) and 24 participants responded with either hands in supine (i.e., palm up) posture. When hands were in prone posture, the counting direction of the left hand conflicted with the direction of the left-right MNL, whereas the counting direction of the right hand was consistent with it. When hands were in supine posture, the opposite was true. If systematic associations existed between relative number magnitude and an allocentric spatial representation of the finger series within each hand, as predicted on the basis of counting habits, interactions would be expected between hand posture and a unimanual version of the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect. Data revealed that with hands in prone posture a unimanual SNARC effect was present for the right hand, and with hands in supine posture a unimanual SNARC effect was present for the left hand. We propose that a posture-invariant body structural representation of the finger series provides a relevant frame of reference, a within-hand directional vector, that is associated to simple number processing. Such frame of reference can significantly interact with stimulus-response correspondence effects, like the SNARC, that have been typically attributed to the mapping of numbers on a left

The 2009 Analysis of Information Remaining on Disks Offered for Sale on the Second Hand Market

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Andy Jones

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The ever increasing use and reliance upon computers in both the public and private sector has led to enormous numbers of computers being disposed of at the end of their useful life within an organisation. As the cost of computers has dropped, their use in the home has also continued to increase. In most organisations, computers have a relatively short life and are replaced on a regular basis with the result that, if not properly cleansed of data, they are released into the public domain containing data that can be relatively up to date. This problem is exacerbated by the increasing popularity and use of smart phones, which also contain significant storage capacity. From the results of the research it remains clear that the majority of organisations and private individuals that are using these computers still remain ignorant or misinformed of the potential volume and type of information that is stored on the hard disks contained within these systems. The evidence of the research is that neither organisations nor individuals have considered, or are aware of, the potential impact of the information that is contained in the disks from these systems becoming available to an unintended third party.This is the fifth study in an ongoing research programme being conducted into the levels and types of information that remain on computer hard disks that have been offered for sale on the second hand market. This ongoing research series has been undertaken to gain an understanding of the level and types of information that remains on these disks, to determine the damage that could potentially be caused if the information was misused, and to determine whether there are any developing trends. The disks used have been purchased in a number of countries.The rationale for this was to determine whether there are any national or regional differences in the way that computer disks are disposed of and to compare the results for any regional or temporal trends. The

SAIL: Summation-bAsed Incremental Learning for Information-Theoretic Text Clustering.

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Cao, Jie; Wu, Zhiang; Wu, Junjie; Xiong, Hui

2013-04-01

Information-theoretic clustering aims to exploit information-theoretic measures as the clustering criteria. A common practice on this topic is the so-called Info-Kmeans, which performs K-means clustering with KL-divergence as the proximity function. While expert efforts on Info-Kmeans have shown promising results, a remaining challenge is to deal with high-dimensional sparse data such as text corpora. Indeed, it is possible that the centroids contain many zero-value features for high-dimensional text vectors, which leads to infinite KL-divergence values and creates a dilemma in assigning objects to centroids during the iteration process of Info-Kmeans. To meet this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Summation-bAsed Incremental Learning (SAIL) algorithm for Info-Kmeans clustering. Specifically, by using an equivalent objective function, SAIL replaces the computation of KL-divergence by the incremental computation of Shannon entropy. This can avoid the zero-feature dilemma caused by the use of KL-divergence. To improve the clustering quality, we further introduce the variable neighborhood search scheme and propose the V-SAIL algorithm, which is then accelerated by a multithreaded scheme in PV-SAIL. Our experimental results on various real-world text collections have shown that, with SAIL as a booster, the clustering performance of Info-Kmeans can be significantly improved. Also, V-SAIL and PV-SAIL indeed help improve the clustering quality at a lower cost of computation.

Hand Grasping Synergies As Biometrics

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Ramana Vinjamuri

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Recently, the need for more secure identity verification systems has driven researchers to explore other sources of biometrics. This includes iris patterns, palm print, hand geometry, facial recognition, and movement patterns (hand motion, gait, and eye movements. Identity verification systems may benefit from the complexity of human movement that integrates multiple levels of control (neural, muscular, and kinematic. Using principal component analysis, we extracted spatiotemporal hand synergies (movement synergies from an object grasping dataset to explore their use as a potential biometric. These movement synergies are in the form of joint angular velocity profiles of 10 joints. We explored the effect of joint type, digit, number of objects, and grasp type. In its best configuration, movement synergies achieved an equal error rate of 8.19%. While movement synergies can be integrated into an identity verification system with motion capture ability, we also explored a camera-ready version of hand synergies—postural synergies. In this proof of concept system, postural synergies performed well, but only when specific postures were chosen. Based on these results, hand synergies show promise as a potential biometric that can be combined with other hand-based biometrics for improved security.

Lexical Information in Memory for Text.

Science.gov (United States)

Hayes-Roth, Barbara

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

Hand on the wheel, mind on the mobile: an analysis of social factors contributing to texting while driving.

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Seiler, Steven J

2015-02-01

In an era defined by social technology, mobile phones provide constant connection to others. However, they also present a very dangerous situation when people choose to use their mobile phones while driving. In particular, exchanging text messages while driving has resulted in numerous accidents and fatalities. The purpose of this study is to examine social factors that lead people to text while driving. Specifically, using a multivariate logistic regression analysis of data from a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, variables for general mobile talk, driving while talking on a mobile, using the Internet on a mobile, sexting, and various motivations for texting were examined to determine factors that increase the likelihood of texting while driving. The findings suggest that people engage in mobile multiplexing (i.e., communication using two or more media on the mobile) while driving. Additionally, exchanging text messages in public, and consequently texting while driving, has become normalized. Furthermore, people are socialized into such behaviors through observing others texting while driving and using a mobile recklessly while driving. Finally, a number of motivations for texting were found to increase the likelihood of texting while driving significantly. Ultimately, the author contends that texting while driving has become a cultural artifact in the United States, which conflicts with driver safety as well as laws prohibiting texting while driving. The findings of this study could inform future awareness campaigns and technology developers to help establish a safer driving environment within the multitasking culture.

Air Muscle Actuated Low Cost Humanoid Hand

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Peter Scarfe

2008-11-01

Full Text Available The control of humanoid robot hands has historically been expensive due to the cost of precision actuators. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-cost air muscle actuated humanoid hand developed at Curtin University of Technology. This hand offers 10 individually controllable degrees of freedom ranging from the elbow to the fingers, with overall control handled through a computer GUI. The hand is actuated through 20 McKibben-style air muscles, each supplied by a pneumatic pressure-balancing valve that allows for proportional control to be achieved with simple and inexpensive components. The hand was successfully able to perform a number of human-equivalent tasks, such as grasping and relocating objects.

Air Muscle Actuated Low Cost Humanoid Hand

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Peter Scarfe

2006-06-01

Full Text Available The control of humanoid robot hands has historically been expensive due to the cost of precision actuators. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-cost air muscle actuated humanoid hand developed at Curtin University of Technology. This hand offers 10 individually controllable degrees of freedom ranging from the elbow to the fingers, with overall control handled through a computer GUI. The hand is actuated through 20 McKibben-style air muscles, each supplied by a pneumatic pressure-balancing valve that allows for proportional control to be achieved with simple and inexpensive components. The hand was successfully able to perform a number of human-equivalent tasks, such as grasping and relocating objects.

Hands On Activity Pada Pembelajaran Geometri Sekolah Sebagai Asesmen Kinerja Siswa

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Kartono Kartono

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Geometri merupakan cabang matematika yang diajarkan mulai dari pendidikan dasar sampai pendidikan tinggi, namun berdasarkan suatu penelitian hasil belajar geometri kurang memuaskan khususnya hasil belajar geometri sekolah. Hasil belajar geometri sekolah terkait langsung dengan kegiatan pembelajarannya. Pembelajaran geometri akan efektif apabila kegiatan yang dilakukan sesuai dengan struktur kemampuan berpikir siswa. Menurut Teori Van Hiele tentang pembelajaran geometri, bahwa tingkat kemampuan berpikir siswa dalam belajar geometri meliputi lima tingkat , yaitu visualisasi, analisis, deduksi informal, deduksi, dan rigor.Tingkatan berpikir tersebut akan dilalui siswa secara berurutan, kecepatan berpindah dari tingkat ke tingkat berikutnya banyak bergantung pada isi dan metode pembelajarannya.Perlu disediakan aktivitas-aktivitas dalam pembelajaran yang sesuai dengan tingkat berpikir siswa dalam bentuk hands on activity. Melalui hands on activity akan terbentuk suatu penghayatan dan pengalaman untuk  menetapkan suatu pengertian, karena mampu membelajarkan secara bersama-sama kemampuan kognitif, afektif, dan psikomotorik serta dapat memberikan penghayatan secara mendalam terhadap apa yang dipelajari, sehingga apa yang diperoleh oleh siswa tidak mudah dilupakan. Hands on activity selain sebagai komponen kegiatan pembelajaran, dapat dimanfaatkan sebagai intrumen asesmen, khususnya asesmen kinerja siswa. Gunakanlah hands on activity pada pembelajaran geometri sekolah dan manfaatkan kegiatan tersebut sebagai bentuk asesmen kinerja siswa. 

Harmony between the information contained in the text and figures of Brazilian companies’ annual reports

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Marcelo Sanches Pagliarussi

2015-03-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study is to analyze the harmony between information provided in the narrative sections of annual reports and the corporate financial performance. The sample consisted of 120 companies listed on BM&FBovespa (Brazilian Stock Exchange in 2009 -- 60 with greater positive variation and 60 with greater negative variation in net accounting profit. Keywords relating to three central topics were selected: profitability, growth and management. Through content analysis, the meaning of these keywords in the reports was evaluated (quantitative positive, qualitative positive, quantitative negative and qualitative negative. Once the frequencies were obtained, two logistic regressions were performed to compare the text to the numbers, one on the raw frequency of words and another by a weighting of terms. The results indicate that, in the information linked to the topic of profitability, the text is harmonious with the numbers. In the information relating to growth, harmony is partial. In addition, when it comes to information linked to management, there is conflict between the narrative sections and corporate performance. Finally, it was found that, the more subjective the information, the greater the conflict.

Programming of left hand exploits task set but that of right hand depends on recent history.

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Tang, Rixin; Zhu, Hong

2017-07-01

There are many differences between the left hand and the right hand. But it is not clear if there is a difference in programming between left hand and right hand when the hands perform the same movement. In current study, we carried out two experiments to investigate whether the programming of two hands was equivalent or they exploited different strategies. In the first experiment, participants were required to use one hand to grasp an object with visual feedback or to point to the center of one object without visual feedback on alternate trials, or to grasp an object without visual feedback and to point the center of one object with visual feedback on alternating trials. They then performed the tasks with the other hand. The result was that previous pointing task affected current grasping when it was performed by the left hand, but not the right hand. In experiment 2, we studied if the programming of the left (or right) hand would be affected by the pointing task performed on the previous trial not only by the same hand, but also by the right (or left) hand. Participants pointed and grasped the objects alternately with two hands. The result was similar with Experiment 1, i.e., left-hand grasping was affected by right-hand pointing, whereas right-hand grasping was immune from the interference from left hand. Taken together, the results suggest that when open- and closed-loop trials are interleaved, motor programming of grasping with the right hand was affected by the nature of the online feedback on the previous trial only if it was a grasping trial, suggesting that the trial-to-trial transfer depends on sensorimotor memory and not on task set. In contrast, motor programming of grasping with the left hand can use information about the nature of the online feedback on the previous trial to specify the parameters of the movement, even when the type of movement that occurred was quite different (i.e., pointing) and was performed with the right hand. This suggests that

Prolonged disengagement from distractors near the hands

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Daniel B Vatterott

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Because items near our hands are often more important than items far from our hands, the brain processes visual items near our hands differently than items far from our hands. Multiple experiments have attributed this processing difference to spatial attention, but the exact mechanism behind how spatial attention near our hands changes is still under investigation. The current experiments sought to differentiate between two of the proposed mechanisms: a prioritization of the space near the hands and a prolonged disengagement of spatial attention near the hands. To differentiate between these two accounts, we used the additional singleton paradigm in which observers searched for a shape singleton among homogenously shaped distractors. On half the trials, one of the distractors was a different color. Both the prioritization and disengagement accounts predict differently colored distractors near the hands will slow target responses more than differently colored distractors far from the hands, but the prioritization account also predicts faster responses to targets near the hands than far from the hands. The disengagement account does not make this prediction, because attention does not need to be disengaged when the target appears near the hand. We found support for the disengagement account: Salient distractors near the hands slowed responses more than those far from the hands, yet observers did not respond faster to targets near the hands.

HUMAN HAND STUDY FOR ROBOTIC EXOSKELETON DELVELOPMENT

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BIROUAS Flaviu Ionut

2016-11-01

Full Text Available This paper will be presenting research with application in the rehabilitation of hand motor functions by the aid of robotics. The focus will be on the dimensional parameters of the biological human hand from which the robotic system will be developed. The term used for such measurements is known as anthropometrics. The anthropometric parameters studied and presented in this paper are mainly related to the angular limitations of the finger joints of the human hand.

METHODS OF TEXT INFORMATION CLASSIFICATION ON THE BASIS OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL AND SEMANTIC NETWORKS

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L. V. Serebryanaya

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The article covers the use of perseptron, Hopfild artificial neural network and semantic network for classification of text information. Network training algorithms are studied. An algorithm of inverse mistake spreading for perceptron network and convergence algorithm for Hopfild network are implemented. On the basis of the offered models and algorithms automatic text classification software is developed and its operation results are evaluated.

Text Processing of Domain-Related Information for Individuals with High and Low Domain Knowledge.

Science.gov (United States)

Spilich, George J.; And Others

1979-01-01

The way in which previously acquired knowledge affects the processing on new domain-related information was investigated. Text processing was studied in two groups differing in knowledge of the domain of baseball. A knowledge structure for the domain was constructed, and text propositions were classified. (SW)

Individual Differences in the Rubber Hand Illusion Are Related to Sensory Suggestibility.

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Angela Marotta

Full Text Available In the rubber hand illusion (RHI, watching a rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with one's own hidden hand may induce a sense of ownership over the rubber hand. The illusion relies on bottom-up multisensory integration of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information, and on top-down processes through which the rubber hand is incorporated into pre-existing representations of the body. Although the degree of illusory experience varies largely across individuals, the factors influencing individual differences are unknown. We investigated whether sensory suggestibility might modulate susceptibility to the RHI. Sensory suggestibility is a personality trait related to how individuals react to sensory information. Because of its sensory nature, this trait could be relevant for studies using the RHI paradigm. Seventy healthy volunteers were classified by Sensory Suggestibility Scale (SSS scores as having high or low suggestibility and assigned to either a high- (High-SSS or a low-suggestibility (Low-SSS group. Two components of the RHI were evaluated in synchronous and asynchronous stroking conditions: subjective experience of sense of ownership over the rubber hand via a 9-statement questionnaire, and proprioceptive drift as measured with a ruler. The High-SSS group was generally more susceptible to the subjective component; in the synchronous condition, they rated the statement assessing the sense of ownership higher than the Low-SSS group. The scores for this statement significantly correlated with the total SSS score, indicating that the higher the sensory suggestibility, the stronger the sense of ownership. No effect of sensory suggestibility on proprioceptive drift was observed, suggesting that the effect is specific for the subjective feeling of ownership. This study demonstrates that sensory suggestibility may contribute to participants' experience of the illusion and should be considered when using the RHI paradigm.

Reaching rural women: breast cancer prevention information seeking behaviors and interest in Internet, cell phone, and text use.

Science.gov (United States)

Kratzke, Cynthia; Wilson, Susan; Vilchis, Hugo

2013-02-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the breast cancer prevention information seeking behaviors among rural women, the prevalence of Internet, cell, and text use, and interest to receive breast cancer prevention information cell and text messages. While growing literature for breast cancer information sources supports the use of the Internet, little is known about breast cancer prevention information seeking behaviors among rural women and mobile technology. Using a cross-sectional study design, data were collected using a survey. McGuire's Input-Ouput Model was used as the framework. Self-reported data were obtained from a convenience sample of 157 women with a mean age of 60 (SD = 12.12) at a rural New Mexico imaging center. Common interpersonal information sources were doctors, nurses, and friends and common channel information sources were television, magazines, and Internet. Overall, 87% used cell phones, 20% had an interest to receive cell phone breast cancer prevention messages, 47% used text messaging, 36% had an interest to receive text breast cancer prevention messages, and 37% had an interest to receive mammogram reminder text messages. Bivariate analysis revealed significant differences between age, income, and race/ethnicity and use of cell phones or text messaging. There were no differences between age and receiving text messages or text mammogram reminders. Assessment of health information seeking behaviors is important for community health educators to target populations for program development. Future research may identify additional socio-cultural differences.

Text analysis methods, text analysis apparatuses, and articles of manufacture

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Whitney, Paul D; Willse, Alan R; Lopresti, Charles A; White, Amanda M

2014-10-28

Text analysis methods, text analysis apparatuses, and articles of manufacture are described according to some aspects. In one aspect, a text analysis method includes accessing information indicative of data content of a collection of text comprising a plurality of different topics, using a computing device, analyzing the information indicative of the data content, and using results of the analysis, identifying a presence of a new topic in the collection of text.

Flexible frontiers for text division into rows

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Dan L. Lacrămă

2009-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents an original solution for flexible hand-written text division into rows. Unlike the standard procedure, the proposed method avoids the isolated characters extensions amputation and reduces the recognition error rate in the final stage.

Towards NIRS-based hand movement recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Paleari, Marco; Luciani, Riccardo; Ariano, Paolo

2017-07-01

This work reports on preliminary results about on hand movement recognition with Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (NIRS) and surface ElectroMyoGraphy (sEMG). Either basing on physical contact (touchscreens, data-gloves, etc.), vision techniques (Microsoft Kinect, Sony PlayStation Move, etc.), or other modalities, hand movement recognition is a pervasive function in today environment and it is at the base of many gaming, social, and medical applications. Albeit, in recent years, the use of muscle information extracted by sEMG has spread out from the medical applications to contaminate the consumer world, this technique still falls short when dealing with movements of the hand. We tested NIRS as a technique to get another point of view on the muscle phenomena and proved that, within a specific movements selection, NIRS can be used to recognize movements and return information regarding muscles at different depths. Furthermore, we propose here three different multimodal movement recognition approaches and compare their performances.

Tracing Knowledge Transfer from Universities to Industry: A Text Mining Approach

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Woltmann, Sabrina; Alkærsig, Lars

2017-01-01

This paper identifies transferred knowledge between universities and the industry by proposing the use of a computational linguistic method. Current research on university-industry knowledge exchange relies often on formal databases and indicators such as patents, collaborative publications and l...... is the first step to enable the identification of common knowledge and knowledge transfer via text mining to increase its measurability....... and license agreements, to assess the contribution to the socioeconomic surrounding of universities. We, on the other hand, use the texts from university abstracts to identify university knowledge and compare them with texts from firm webpages. We use these text data to identify common key words and thereby...... identify overlapping contents among the texts. As method we use a well-established word ranking method from the field of information retrieval term frequency–inverse document frequency (TFIDF) to identify commonalities between texts from university. In examining the outcomes of the TFIDF statistic we find...

1st Hands-on Science Science Fair

OpenAIRE

Costa, Manuel F. M.; Esteves. Z.

2017-01-01

In school learning of science through investigative hands-on experiments is in the core of the Hands-on Science Network vision. However informal and non-formal contexts may also provide valuable paths for implementing this strategy aiming a better e!ective science education. In May 2011, a "rst country wide “Hands-on Science’ Science Fair” was organized in Portugal with the participation of 131 students that presented 38 projects in all "elds of Science. In this communication we will pr...

Prosthetic hand sensor placement: Analysis of touch perception during the grasp

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mirković Bojana

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Humans rely on their hands to perform everyday tasks. The hand is used as a tool, but also as the interface to “sense” the world. Current prosthetic hands are based on sophisticated multi-fingered structures, and include many sensors which counterpart natural proprioceptors and exteroceptors. The sensory information is used for control, but not sent to the user of the hand (amputee. Grasping without sensing is not good enough. This research is part of the development of the sensing interface for amputees, specifically addressing the analysis of human perception while grasping. The goal is to determine the small number of preferred positions of sensors on the prosthetic hand. This task has previously been approached by trying to replicate a natural sensory system characteristic for healthy humans, resulting in a multitude of redundant sensors and basic inability to make the patient aware of the sensor readings on the subconscious level. We based our artificial perception system on the reported sensations of humans when grasping various objects without seeing the objects (obstructed visual feedback. Subjects, with no known sensory deficits, were asked to report on the touch sensation while grasping. The analysis included objects of various sizes, weights, textures and temperatures. Based on this data we formed a map of the preferred positions for the sensors that is appropriate for five finger human-like robotic hand. The final map was intentionally minimized in size (number of sensors.

Ontology-based retrieval of bio-medical information based on microarray text corpora

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Kim Allan; Zambach, Sine; Have, Christian Theil

are exponentially growing, the text corpora are sparse and inconsistent in spite of attempts to standardize the format. Ordinary keyword search may in some cases be insucient to nd rele- vant information and the potential benet of using a semantic approach in this context has only been investigated to a limited...

Social Networks and Corporate Information Security

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ekaterina Gennadievna Kondratova

2013-06-01

Full Text Available It is defined in the article social networks as a tool in the hands of cyber-criminals to compromise the organization’s data. The author focuses on a list of threats to information security caused by social networks usage, which should be considered in the set up of information security management system of the company.

Unusual case of cleft hand

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sahasrabudhe Parag

2007-01-01

Full Text Available We present a case of a six-year-old male child with cleft hand deformity involving the dominant right hand. It was a rare case of atypical cleft hand with no missing tissue but cleft extending to metacarpal level and associated hypoplasia of thumb and index finger. As per Manske′s classification of cleft hand our patient belongs to the Class III variety. There was associated malposition of the index finger with absence of first web space and syndactly of thumb and index finger at the metacarpal level. A modified Snow-Littler procedure was planned. The surgical plan involved closure of cleft, release of thumb and index finger syndactly and reconstruction of the first web space. The functional outcome was good considering hypoplasia of the index finger and thumb. Depending upon the function of the thumb tendon transfers can be planned to augment thumb function at a later date along with correction of rotational deformities of the index and middle finger.

Contextual Text Mining

Science.gov (United States)

Mei, Qiaozhu

2009-01-01

With the dramatic growth of text information, there is an increasing need for powerful text mining systems that can automatically discover useful knowledge from text. Text is generally associated with all kinds of contextual information. Those contexts can be explicit, such as the time and the location where a blog article is written, and the…

Electronic Communication of Protected Health Information: Privacy, Security, and HIPAA Compliance.

Science.gov (United States)

Drolet, Brian C; Marwaha, Jayson S; Hyatt, Brad; Blazar, Phillip E; Lifchez, Scott D

2017-06-01

Technology has enhanced modern health care delivery, particularly through accessibility to health information and ease of communication with tools like mobile device messaging (texting). However, text messaging has created new risks for breach of protected health information (PHI). In the current study, we sought to evaluate hand surgeons' knowledge and compliance with privacy and security standards for electronic communication by text message. A cross-sectional survey of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand membership was conducted in March and April 2016. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed of composite results as well as relevant subgroup analyses. A total of 409 responses were obtained (11% response rate). Although 63% of surgeons reported that they believe that text messaging does not meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 security standards, only 37% reported they do not use text messages to communicate PHI. Younger surgeons and respondents who believed that their texting was compliant were statistically significantly more like to report messaging of PHI (odds ratio, 1.59 and 1.22, respectively). A majority of hand surgeons in this study reported the use of text messaging to communicate PHI. Of note, neither the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 statute nor US Department of Health and Human Services specifically prohibits this form of electronic communication. To be compliant, surgeons, practices, and institutions need to take reasonable security precautions to prevent breach of privacy with electronic communication. Communication of clinical information by text message is not prohibited under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, but surgeons should use appropriate safeguards to prevent breach when using this form of communication. Copyright © 2017 American Society for Surgery of the Hand. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hand specific representations in language comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Moody-Triantis, Claire; Humphreys, Gina F; Gennari, Silvia P

2014-01-01

Theories of embodied cognition argue that language comprehension involves sensory-motor re-enactments of the actions described. However, the degree of specificity of these re-enactments as well as the relationship between action and language remains a matter of debate. Here we investigate these issues by examining how hand-specific information (left or right hand) is recruited in language comprehension and action execution. An fMRI study tested self-reported right-handed participants in two separate tasks that were designed to be as similar as possible to increase sensitivity of the comparison across task: an action execution go/no-go task where participants performed right or left hand actions, and a language task where participants read sentences describing the same left or right handed actions as in the execution task. We found that language-induced activity did not match the hand-specific patterns of activity found for action execution in primary somatosensory and motor cortex, but it overlapped with pre-motor and parietal regions associated with action planning. Within these pre-motor regions, both right hand actions and sentences elicited stronger activity than left hand actions and sentences-a dominant hand effect. Importantly, both dorsal and ventral sections of the left pre-central gyrus were recruited by both tasks, suggesting different action features being recruited. These results suggest that (a) language comprehension elicits motor representations that are hand-specific and akin to multimodal action plans, rather than full action re-enactments; and (b) language comprehension and action execution share schematic hand-specific representations that are richer for the dominant hand, and thus linked to previous motor experience.

The Problem of Informational Object Identification in Case of the Considerable Quantity of Identifying Features

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S. D. Kulik

2010-03-01

Full Text Available The modification of the algorithm of identification of the informational object, used for identification of the hand-written texts performer in an automated workplace of the forensic expert, is presented. As modification, it is offered to use a method of association rules discovery for definition of statistically dependent sets of feature of hand-written capital letters of the Russian language. The algorithm is approved on set of 691 samples of hand-written documents for which about 2000 identifying feature are defined. The modification of the identification algorithm allows to lower level of errors and to raise quality of accepted decisions for information security.

Recognizing the Operating Hand and the Hand-Changing Process for User Interface Adjustment on Smartphones

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Hansong Guo

2016-08-01

Full Text Available As the size of smartphone touchscreens has become larger and larger in recent years, operability with a single hand is getting worse, especially for female users. We envision that user experience can be significantly improved if smartphones are able to recognize the current operating hand, detect the hand-changing process and then adjust the user interfaces subsequently. In this paper, we proposed, implemented and evaluated two novel systems. The first one leverages the user-generated touchscreen traces to recognize the current operating hand, and the second one utilizes the accelerometer and gyroscope data of all kinds of activities in the user’s daily life to detect the hand-changing process. These two systems are based on two supervised classifiers constructed from a series of refined touchscreen trace, accelerometer and gyroscope features. As opposed to existing solutions that all require users to select the current operating hand or confirm the hand-changing process manually, our systems follow much more convenient and practical methods and allow users to change the operating hand frequently without any harm to the user experience. We conduct extensive experiments on Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones, and the evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed systems can recognize the current operating hand and detect the hand-changing process with 94.1% and 93.9% precision and 94.1% and 93.7% True Positive Rates (TPR respectively, when deciding with a single touchscreen trace or accelerometer-gyroscope data segment, and the False Positive Rates (FPR are as low as 2.6% and 0.7% accordingly. These two systems can either work completely independently and achieve pretty high accuracies or work jointly to further improve the recognition accuracy.

Regular use of a hand cream can attenuate skin dryness and roughness caused by frequent hand washing

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Kampf Günter

2006-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Aim of the study was to determine the effect of the regular use of a hand cream after washing hands on skin hydration and skin roughness. Methods Twenty-five subjects washed hands and forearms with a neutral soap four times per day, for 2 minutes each time, for a total of two weeks. One part of them used a hand cream after each hand wash, the others did not (cross over design after a wash out period of two weeks. Skin roughness and skin hydration were determined on the forearms on days 2, 7, 9 and 14. For skin roughness, twelve silicon imprint per subject and time point were taken from the stratum corneum and assessed with a 3D skin analyzer for depth of the skin relief. For skin hydration, five measurements per subject and time point were taken with a corneometer. Results Washing hands lead to a gradual increase of skin roughness from 100 (baseline to a maximum of 108.5 after 9 days. Use of a hand cream after each hand wash entailed a decrease of skin roughness which the lowest means after 2 (94.5 and 14 days (94.8. Skin hydration was gradually decreased after washing hands from 79 (baseline to 65.5 after 14 days. The hand wash, followed by use of a hand cream, still decreased skin hydration after 2 days (76.1. Over the next 12 days, however, skin hydration did not change significantly (75.6 after 14 days. Conclusion Repetitive and frequent hand washing increases skin dryness and roughness. Use of a hand cream immediately after each hand wash can confine both skin dryness and skin roughness. Regular use of skin care preparations should therefore help to prevent both dry and rough skin among healthcare workers in clinical practice.

Hand washing practices and the occurrence of enteropathogenic ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

... levels of compliance to hand washing and related this to the occurrence of infectious bacteria in the test population. A questionnaire which contained information on bio-demographic characteristics and hand hygiene practices was applied to 100 individuals in the study population. Microbiological samples were obtained, ...

Hand Gesture Recognition with Leap Motion

OpenAIRE

Du, Youchen; Liu, Shenglan; Feng, Lin; Chen, Menghui; Wu, Jie

2017-01-01

The recent introduction of depth cameras like Leap Motion Controller allows researchers to exploit the depth information to recognize hand gesture more robustly. This paper proposes a novel hand gesture recognition system with Leap Motion Controller. A series of features are extracted from Leap Motion tracking data, we feed these features along with HOG feature extracted from sensor images into a multi-class SVM classifier to recognize performed gesture, dimension reduction and feature weight...

Integration of Information Technologies in Enterprise Application Development

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Iulia SURUGIU

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Healthcare enterprises are disconnected. In the era of integrated information systems and Internet explosion, the necessity of information systems integration reside from business process evolution, on the one hand, and from information technology tendencies, on the other hand. In order to become more efficient and adaptive to change, healthcare organizations are tremendously preoccupied of business process automation, flexibility and complexity. The need of information systems integration arise from these goals, explaining, at the same time, the special interest in EAI. Extensible software integration architectures and business orientation of process modeling and information systems functionalities, the same as open-connectivity, accessibility and virtualization lead to most suitable integration solutions: SOA and BPM architectural styles in a cloud computing environment.

"Like the palm of my hands": Motor imagery enhances implicit and explicit visual recognition of one's own hands.

Science.gov (United States)

Conson, Massimiliano; Volpicella, Francesco; De Bellis, Francesco; Orefice, Agnese; Trojano, Luigi

2017-10-01

A key point in motor imagery literature is that judging hands in palm view recruits sensory-motor information to a higher extent than judging hands in back view, due to the greater biomechanical complexity implied in rotating hands depicted from palm than from back. We took advantage from this solid evidence to test the nature of a phenomenon known as self-advantage, i.e. the advantage in implicitly recognizing self vs. others' hand images. The self-advantage has been actually found when implicitly but not explicitly judging self-hands, likely due to dissociation between implicit and explicit body representations. However, such a finding might be related to the extent to which motor imagery is recruited during implicit and explicit processing of hand images. We tested this hypothesis in two behavioural experiments. In Experiment 1, right-handed participants judged laterality of either self or others' hands, whereas in Experiment 2, an explicit recognition of one's own hands was required. Crucially, in both experiments participants were randomly presented with hand images viewed from back or from palm. The main result of both experiments was the self-advantage when participants judged hands from palm view. This novel finding demonstrate that increasing the "motor imagery load" during processing of self vs. others' hands can elicit a self-advantage in explicit recognition tasks as well. Future studies testing the possible dissociation between implicit and explicit visual body representations should take into account the modulatory effect of motor imagery load on self-hand processing. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

White Lies in Hand: Are Other-Oriented Lies Modified by Hand Gestures? Possibly Not

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Katarzyna Cantarero

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Previous studies have shown that the hand-over-heart gesture is related to being more honest as opposed to using self-centered dishonesty. We assumed that the hand-over-heart gesture would also relate to other-oriented dishonesty, though the latter differs highly from self-centered lying. In Study 1 (N = 79, we showed that performing a hand-over-heart gesture diminished the tendency to use other-oriented white lies and that the fingers crossed behind one’s back gesture was not related to higher dishonesty. We then pre-registered and conducted Study 2 (N = 88, which was designed following higher methodological standards than Study 1. Contrary, to the findings of Study 1, we found that using the hand-over-heart gesture did not result in refraining from using other-oriented white lies. We discuss the findings of this failed replication indicating the importance of strict methodological guidelines in conducting research and also reflect on relatively small effect sizes related to some findings in embodied cognition.

Mothers’ Hand washing Practice and Diarrhea Cases in Children under Five in Baleendah, Bandung

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M Syafril Firdaus

2015-06-01

Full Text Available ackground: Diarrhea is a disease, especially in children, with high mortality and morbidity rate in developing countries, including Indonesia. Diarrhea can be prevented if people can apply clean and healthy behaviors, especially hand washing. Hand washing is the cheapest, simplest, and the most effective methods for prevention of diarrhea. The objective of this study is to identify the knowledge, attitude, and practice of mothers’ hand washing and diarrhea cases in children under five in Baleendah District, Bandung. Methods: A descriptive study was conducted during September−November 2012 to 210 mothers who had children (ages 12−59 months in Baleendah using rapid survey technique. The time allocated for each village was adjusted to the population proportion for each region. The data were analyzed using computer and was represented using frequency distribution. Results: This study showed that the respondents had good level of knowledge and attitude of hand washing (83.8% and 61%, respectively, but only 21% of the respondents’ practices of hand washing was in good level. Most of the respondents did not wash their hands according to the 7 steps of correct hand washing. Moreover the percentage of children with diarrhea in Baleendah was 43.8% (92 cases during the study. Conclusions: There should be dissemination of information about the benefit of washing hands with 7 steps of correct hands washing so that families can practice it and can prevent diarrhea in children under five.

Science Informational Trade Books: An Exploration of Text-based Practices and Interactions in a First-grade Classroom

Science.gov (United States)

Schreier, Virginia A.

Although scholars have long advocated the use of informational texts in the primary grades, gaps and inconsistencies in research have produced conflicting reports on how teachers used these texts in the primary curriculum, and how primary students dealt with them during instruction and on their own (e.g., Saul & Dieckman, 2005). Thus, to add to research on informational texts in the primary grades, the purpose of this study was to examine: (a) a first-grade teacher's use of science informational trade books (SITBs) in her classroom, (b) the ways students responded to her instruction, and (c) how students interacted with these texts. My study was guided by a sociocultural perspective (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978), providing me a lens to examine participants during naturally occurring social practices in the classroom, mediated by language and other symbolic tools. Data were collected by means of 28 observations, 6 semi-structured interviews, 21 unstructured interviews, and 26 documents over the course of 10 weeks. Three themes generated from the data to provide insight into the teacher's and students' practices and interactions with SITBs. First, the first-grade teacher used SITBs as teaching tools during guided conversations around the text to scaffold students' understanding of specialized vocabulary, science concepts, and text features. Her instruction with SITBs included shared reading lessons, interactive read-alouds and learning activities during two literacy/science units. However, there was limited use of SITBs during the rest of her reading program, in which she demonstrated a preference for narrative. Second, students responded to instruction by participating in guided conversations around the text, in which they used prior knowledge, shared ideas, and visual representations (e.g., illustrations, diagrams, labels, and captions) to actively make meaning of the text. Third, students interacted with SITBs on their own to make sense of science, in

Accession strategy to hand hygiene by healthcare professionals

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Danielle Galdino de Paula

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Background and Objective: Healthcare-associated infections are serious health threat to hospitalized patients and contribute to increased mortality and morbidity. Hand hygiene is the simplest individual measure and lower cost in order to prevent the spread of infections in health care services. The study seeks to analyze the publications related to the strategies used to improve adherence of health professionals to hand hygiene in hospital. Contents: Integrative literature review. The descriptors were used in isolation and the associated descriptor AND;OR, by the following inclusion criteria: work full text of Article kind, published in the period 2008-2015, in Portuguese and English and used the electronic databases MEDLINE , LILACS and SCIELO. The analysis determined eleven strategies most used to improve adherence to hand hygiene in hospital. Conclusion: The availability of better resources and the use of a single strategy sometimes was not enough to increase membership, and often necessary to apply various strategies together with health professionals. KEYWORDS: Cross infection. Hand hygiene. Health personnel.

The Effects of Industrial Protective Gloves and Hand Skin Temperatures on Hand Grip Strength and Discomfort Rating

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohamed Z. Ramadan

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Daily working activities and functions require a high contribution of hand and forearm muscles in executing grip force. To study the effects of wearing different gloves on grip strength, under a variety of hand skin temperatures, an assessment of the maximum grip strength was performed with 32 healthy male workers with a mean age (standard deviation of 30.44 (5.35 years wearing five industrial gloves at three hand skin temperatures. Their ages and anthropometric characteristics including body mass index (BMI, hand length, hand width, hand depth, hand palm, and wrist circumference were measured. The hand was exposed to different bath temperatures (5 °C, 25 °C, and 45 °C and hand grip strength was measured using a Jamar hydraulic hand dynamometer with and without wearing the gloves (chemical protection glove, rubber insulating glove, anti-vibration impact glove, cotton yarn knitted glove, and RY-WG002 working glove. The data were analyzed using the Shapiro–Wilk test, Pearson correlation coefficient, Tukey test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA of the within-subject design analysis. The results showed that wearing gloves significantly affected the maximum grip strength. Wearing the RY-WG002 working glove produced a greater reduction on the maximum grip when compared with the bare hand, while low temperatures (5 °C had a significant influence on grip when compared to medium (25 °C and high (45 °C hand skin temperatures. In addition, participants felt more discomfort in both environmental extreme conditions. Furthermore, they reported more discomfort while wearing neoprene, rubber, and RY-WG002 working gloves.

COMPARISON THE NUMBER OF BACTERIA BETWEEN WASHING HANDS USING SOAP AND HAND SANITIZER AS A BACTERIOLOGY LEARNING RESOURCE FOR STUDENTS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Satya Darmayani

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Hands are the principal carriers of bacterial diseases, therefore very important to know that washing hands with soap or hand sanitizer is highly effective healthy behaviors to reduce bacteria in the palm. This study aimed to determine the total number of bacteria between washing hands with soap and hand sanitizer, also applying the results of these studies as a learning resource in bacteriology. The research design was the true experiment with pretest-posttest control group research design and laboratory examination. Analysis of data using paired t-test and independent sample t-test with α = 0.05. The result using paired t-test obtained t count= 2.48921> t 0.05 (14 = 2.14479 (with liquid soap, obtained t count= 2.32937> t 0.05 (14 = 2.14479 (with hand sanitizer. As for the comparison of the total number of bacteria include washing hands with soap and hand sanitizer using independent samples t-test obtained results there were differences in the total number of bacteria include washing hands with liquid soap and hand sanitizer with t count= 2.23755> t 0.05 ( 13 = 2.16037. That results showed hand sanitizer more effective to reduce the number of bacteria than the liquid soap, that was hand sanitizer 96% and liquid soap by 95%.

Mojo Hand, a TALEN design tool for genome editing applications

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Neff Kevin L

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Recent studies of transcription activator-like (TAL effector domains fused to nucleases (TALENs demonstrate enormous potential for genome editing. Effective design of TALENs requires a combination of selecting appropriate genetic features, finding pairs of binding sites based on a consensus sequence, and, in some cases, identifying endogenous restriction sites for downstream molecular genetic applications. Results We present the web-based program Mojo Hand for designing TAL and TALEN constructs for genome editing applications (http://www.talendesign.org. We describe the algorithm and its implementation. The features of Mojo Hand include (1 automatic download of genomic data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, (2 analysis of any DNA sequence to reveal pairs of binding sites based on a user-defined template, (3 selection of restriction-enzyme recognition sites in the spacer between the TAL monomer binding sites including options for the selection of restriction enzyme suppliers, and (4 output files designed for subsequent TALEN construction using the Golden Gate assembly method. Conclusions Mojo Hand enables the rapid identification of TAL binding sites for use in TALEN design. The assembly of TALEN constructs, is also simplified by using the TAL-site prediction program in conjunction with a spreadsheet management aid of reagent concentrations and TALEN formulation. Mojo Hand enables scientists to more rapidly deploy TALENs for genome editing applications.

Mirrors in the PDB: left-handed α-turns guide design with D-amino acids

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Nanda Vikas

2009-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Incorporating variable amino acid stereochemistry in molecular design has the potential to improve existing protein stability and create new topologies inaccessible to homochiral molecules. The Protein Data Bank has been a reliable, rich source of information on molecular interactions and their role in protein stability and structure. D-amino acids rarely occur naturally, making it difficult to infer general rules for how they would be tolerated in proteins through an analysis of existing protein structures. However, protein elements containing short left-handed turns and helices turn out to contain useful information. Molecular mechanisms used in proteins to stabilize left-handed elements by L-amino acids are structurally enantiomeric to potential synthetic strategies for stabilizing right-handed elements with D-amino acids. Results Propensities for amino acids to occur in contiguous αL helices correlate with published thermodynamic scales for incorporation of D-amino acids into αR helices. Two backbone rules for terminating a left-handed helix are found: an αR conformation is disfavored at the amino terminus, and a βR conformation is disfavored at the carboxy terminus. Helix capping sidechain-backbone interactions are found which are unique to αL helices including an elevated propensity for L-Asn, and L-Thr at the amino terminus and L-Gln, L-Thr and L-Ser at the carboxy terminus. Conclusion By examining left-handed α-turns containing L-amino acids, new interaction motifs for incorporating D-amino acids into right-handed α-helices are identified. These will provide a basis for de novo design of novel heterochiral protein folds.

Visual Field Preferences of Object Analysis for Grasping with One Hand

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Ada eLe

2014-10-01

Full Text Available When we grasp an object using one hand, the opposite hemisphere predominantly guides the motor control of grasp movements (Davare et al. 2007; Rice et al. 2007. However, it is unclear whether visual object analysis for grasp control relies more on inputs (a from the contralateral than the ipsilateral visual field, (b from one dominant visual field regardless of the grasping hand, or (c from both visual fields equally. For bimanual grasping of a single object we have recently demonstrated a visual field preference for the left visual field (Le and Niemeier 2013a, 2013b, consistent with a general right-hemisphere dominance for sensorimotor control of bimanual grasps (Le et al., 2013. But visual field differences have never been tested for unimanual grasping. Therefore, here we asked right-handed participants to fixate to the left or right of an object and then grasp the object either with their right or left hand using a precision grip. We found that participants grasping with their right hand performed better with objects in the right visual field: maximum grip apertures (MGAs were more closely matched to the object width and were smaller than for objects in the left visual field. In contrast, when people grasped with their left hand, preferences switched to the left visual field. What is more, MGA scaling showed greater visual field differences compared to right-hand grasping. Our data suggest that, visual object analysis for unimanual grasping shows a preference for visual information from the ipsilateral visual field, and that the left hemisphere is better equipped to control grasps in both visual fields.

Examining the Reading of Informational Text in 4th Grade Class and Its Relation with Students' Reading Performance

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Dan; Beecher, Constance; Cho, Byeong-Young

2018-01-01

Being proficient in independently reading and writing complex informational text has become a need for college and career success. While there is a great deal of agreement on the importance of the reading of informational text in early grades and teachers are encouraged to increase amount of the reading of informational text in early grades, few…

Performance Comparison Between FEDERICA Hand and LARM Hand

OpenAIRE

Carbone, Giuseppe; Rossi, Cesare; Savino, Sergio

2015-01-01

This paper describes two robotic hands that have been\\ud developed at University Federico II of Naples and at the\\ud University of Cassino. FEDERICA Hand and LARM Hand\\ud are described in terms of design and operational features.\\ud In particular, careful attention is paid to the differences\\ud between the above-mentioned hands in terms of transmission\\ud systems. FEDERICA Hand uses tendons and pulleys\\ud to drive phalanxes, while LARM Hand uses cross four-bar\\ud linkages. Results of experime...

[Products for hand hygiene and antisepsis: use by health professionals and relationship with hand eczema].

Science.gov (United States)

Batalla, A; García-Doval, I; de la Torre, C

2012-04-01

Hand hygiene is the most important measure for the prevention of nosocomial infection. We describe the different products available for hygiene and antisepsis of the hands and the use of these products in daily practice. Hand hygiene products such as soaps and detergents are a cause of irritant dermatitis in health professionals. This irritation is one of the principal factors affecting their use in clinical practice. Alcohol-based products are better tolerated and less irritant than soap and water; irritation should not therefore be a limiting factor in the use of these products and they are to be recommended in place of soap and water. Informative and continued education programs could increase their use. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier España, S.L. and AEDV. All rights reserved.

Back to basics: hand hygiene and surgical hand antisepsis.

Science.gov (United States)

Spruce, Lisa

2013-11-01

Health care-associated infections (HAIs) are a significant issue in the United States and throughout the world, but following proper hand hygiene practices is the most effective and least expensive way to prevent HAIs. Hand hygiene is inexpensive and protects patients and health care personnel alike. The four general types of hand hygiene that should be performed in the perioperative environment are washing hands that are visibly soiled, hand hygiene using alcohol-based products, surgical hand scrubs, and surgical hand scrubs using an alcohol-based surgical hand rub product. Barriers to proper hand hygiene may include not thinking about it, forgetting, skin irritation, a lack of role models, or a lack of a safety culture. One strategy for improving hand hygiene practices is monitoring hand hygiene as part of a quality improvement project, but the most important aspect for perioperative team members is to set an example for other team members by following proper hand hygiene practices and reminding each other to perform hand hygiene. Copyright © 2013 AORN, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Factors associated with combined hand and foot eczema

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Agner, T; Aalto-Korte, K; Andersen, K E

2017-01-01

BACKGROUND: As for hand eczema, the aetiology of foot eczema is multifactorial and not very well understood. The aim of the present study was to identify factors associated with foot eczema in a cohort of hand eczema patients being classified into different subgroups. METHODS: Associations between...... foot and hand eczema were studied in a cross-sectional design in a cohort of hand eczema patients. Consecutive patients were recruited from nine different European Centres during the period October 2011-September 2012. Data on demographic factors, presence of foot eczema, hand eczema duration...... and severity, and whether the hand eczema was work-related or not were available, as well as patch-test results. RESULTS: Of a total of 427 hand eczema patients identified, information on foot eczema was available in 419 patients who were included in the present study. A total of 125 patients (29.8%) had...

User Interface Aspects of a Human-Hand Simulation System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Beifang Yi

2005-10-01

Full Text Available This paper describes the user interface design for a human-hand simulation system, a virtual environment that produces ground truth data (life-like human hand gestures and animations and provides visualization support for experiments on computer vision-based hand pose estimation and tracking. The system allows users to save time in data generation and easily create any hand gestures. We have designed and implemented this user interface with the consideration of usability goals and software engineering issues.

Left, right, left, right, eyes to the front! Müller-Lyer bias in grasping is not a function of hand used, hand preferred or visual hemifield, but foveation does matter.

Science.gov (United States)

van der Kamp, John; de Wit, Matthieu M; Masters, Rich S W

2012-04-01

We investigated whether the control of movement of the left hand is more likely to involve the use of allocentric information than movements performed with the right hand. Previous studies (Gonzalez et al. in J Neurophys 95:3496-3501, 2006; De Grave et al. in Exp Br Res 193:421-427, 2009) have reported contradictory findings in this respect. In the present study, right-handed participants (N = 12) and left-handed participants (N = 12) made right- and left-handed grasps to foveated objects and peripheral, non-foveated objects that were located in the right or left visual hemifield and embedded within a Müller-Lyer illusion. They were also asked to judge the size of the object by matching their hand aperture to its length. Hand apertures did not show significant differences in illusory bias as a function of hand used, handedness or visual hemifield. However, the illusory effect was significantly larger for perception than for action, and for the non-foveated compared to foveated objects. No significant illusory biases were found for reach movement times. These findings are consistent with the two-visual system model that holds that the use of allocentric information is more prominent in perception than in movement control. We propose that the increased involvement of allocentric information in movements toward peripheral, non-foveated objects may be a consequence of more awkward, less automatized grasps of nonfoveated than foveated objects. The current study does not support the conjecture that the control of left-handed and right-handed grasps is predicated on different sources of information.

Addressing Information Proliferation: Applications of Information Extraction and Text Mining

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Jingjing

2013-01-01

The advent of the Internet and the ever-increasing capacity of storage media have made it easy to store, deliver, and share enormous volumes of data, leading to a proliferation of information on the Web, in online libraries, on news wires, and almost everywhere in our daily lives. Since our ability to process and absorb this information remains…

Stiff Hands

Science.gov (United States)

... All Topics A-Z Videos Infographics Symptom Picker Anatomy Bones Joints Muscles Nerves Vessels Tendons About Hand Surgery What is a Hand Surgeon? What is a Hand Therapist? Media Find a Hand Surgeon Home Anatomy Stiff Hands Email to a friend * required fields ...

Hand Infections

Science.gov (United States)

... All Topics A-Z Videos Infographics Symptom Picker Anatomy Bones Joints Muscles Nerves Vessels Tendons About Hand Surgery What is a Hand Surgeon? What is a Hand Therapist? Media Find a Hand Surgeon Home Anatomy Hand Infections Email to a friend * required fields ...

Maltravieso. A hands sanctuary in Extremadura

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Ripoll López, Sergio

1999-12-01

Full Text Available The project of investigation carried out in the cave of Maltravieso has not only yielded a notable increase in the inventory of artistic depictions -hands, zoomorphs and ideomorphs- that are known in the cave, but has also produced some new information with regard to the chronological framework of the production of the various depictions, their phases'of execution, the techniques used in creating the figures, and the typology of the motifs. Another important contribution of our work has been the observation that mutilations of these hands do not exist. The supposed amputations, which have been commented on widely in the traditional literature, are nothing of the kind-they are simply an obscuring of the little finger, with the same pigment as was used to make the hand stencil.

El proyecto de investigación llevado a cabo en la cueva de Maltravieso, no sólo ha supuesto un notable incremento en el inventario de representaciones artísticas -manos, zoomorfos e ideomorfos- conocidos en la cueva de Maltravieso, sino que aporta importantes novedades, respecto al momento cronológico de realización de las distintas manifestaciones, fases de ejecución, técnica empleada en la elaboración de las figuras y tipología de los motivos. Otra novedad importante derivada de nuestra investigación, ha sido la constatación de la inexistencia de mutilaciones en las manos. Estas amputaciones, tan largamente comentadas por la bibliografía tradicional, no son tales, sino simples ocultaciones intencionales del dedo meñique con el mismo pigmento empleado para plasmar la mano en negativo.

Lithium NLP: A System for Rich Information Extraction from Noisy User Generated Text on Social Media

OpenAIRE

Bhargava, Preeti; Spasojevic, Nemanja; Hu, Guoning

2017-01-01

In this paper, we describe the Lithium Natural Language Processing (NLP) system - a resource-constrained, high- throughput and language-agnostic system for information extraction from noisy user generated text on social media. Lithium NLP extracts a rich set of information including entities, topics, hashtags and sentiment from text. We discuss several real world applications of the system currently incorporated in Lithium products. We also compare our system with existing commercial and acad...

The Compliance Rates of Hand Hygiene in Intensive Care Unit and Surgical Services at a State Hospital in Turkey

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Serap Süzük

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Objective: The most efficient and most cost effective method for preventing health care associated infections is hand hygiene. Although hand hygiene is the most effective and simple method, compliance rates are very low among health care workers. It was aimed to evaluate the rates of compliance of healthcare workers in a state hospital. Material and Method: In this study, totally 112 healthcare workers (31 doctors and 81 nurses were evaluated with the 5-indication observation method in a period between January and July 2013. Results: A total of 754 (65.9% out of 1.144 cases were resulted in accurate hand washing and hand-rubbing. When the intensive care unit and surgical clinics were evaluated together, it was found that hand hygiene compliance rates were 51.26% in 199 cases and 66.85% in 591 cases for doctors and nurses, respectively. Conclusion: Consequently, we think that pre-informed observations are important training instruments for hand hygiene compliance.

AMPLIFICATION AND COMPRESSION OF THE TEXT AND ITS TITLE AS A MEANS OF CONVEYING THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE

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Buyanova, E.V.

2017-03-01

Full Text Available This article takes stock of the basic notions of information structure. There are two communicative goals to satisfy: making the information conveyed by the discourse easier for the reader/hearer to understand; indicating what the enunciator considers to be the most important. When translating from one language into another the information structure in most cases remains unchanged. However the text in the target language may not always be completely clear to the new recipient for a number of reasons, such as social and national differences between speakers of the two languages, or lack of realia in the target language. In this case the information structure needs extension in the form of descriptions, definitions, commentaries. This results either in amplification of the text in the target language or in its compression. The present work is based on an analysis of papers from American and British journals and periodicals. The article also deals with the peculiarities of the metaphor as a means of broader text compression in the titles of newspaper articles.

Congenital hand anomalies in Upper Egypt

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Tarek Abulezz

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Background: Congenital hand anomalies are numerous and markedly variant. Their significance is attributed to the frequent occurrence and their serious social, psychological and functional impacts on patient's life. Patients and Methods: This is a follow-up study of 64 patients with hand anomalies of variable severity. All patients were presented to Plastic Surgery Department of Sohag University Hospital in a period of 24 months. Results: This study revealed that failure of differentiation and duplication deformities were the most frequent, with polydactyly was the most common anomaly encountered. The mean age of presentation was 6 years and female to male ratio was 1.46:1. Hand anomalies were either isolated, associated with other anomalies or part of a syndrome. Conclusion: Incidence of congenital hand anomalies in Upper Egypt is difficult to be estimated due to social and cultural concepts, lack of education, poor registration and deficient medical survey. Management of hand anomalies should be individualised, carefully planned and started as early as possible to achieve the best outcome.

Hand dermatitis in beauticians in India

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Khanna Neena

1997-01-01

Full Text Available One hundred and sixty-one beauticians and hairdressers (146 women and 15 men were examined for the presence of hand dermatitis and those with hand eczema were patch tested with a battery of antigens standardised for beauticians. Forty-two (26.1% subjects were found to have hand dermatitis and of these, in 31 (69.3% the patch tests were positive; the following antigens elicited a positive response; paraphenylene diamine (35.5%, rubber antigens (22.6%, nickel (22.6%, shampoos (12.9%, ammonium thioglycollate (9.7%, ammonium persulphate (3.2%, henna mixture (3.2% and detergents (6.5%. In addition, irritant reaction was seen in 7; in 5 patients it was to shampoos and in 2 to ammonium persulphate. Of the 8 patients who, on questioning, had a history of atopy, 7 (87.5% had hand eczema, while 1 (12.5% did not, and this difference was statistically significant (p < 0.001, suggesting that beauticians with a history of atopy were more likely to develop hand eczema.

Hand infections: a retrospective analysis

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Tolga Türker

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Purpose. Hand infections are common, usually resulting from an untreated injury. In this retrospective study, we report on hand infection cases needing surgical drainage in order to assess patient demographics, causation of infection, clinical course, and clinical management.Methods. Medical records of patients presenting with hand infections, excluding post-surgical infections, treated with incision and debridement over a one-year period were reviewed. Patient demographics; past medical history; infection site(s and causation; intervals between onset of infection, hospital admission, surgical intervention and days of hospitalization; gram stains and cultures; choice of antibiotics; complications; and outcomes were reviewed.Results. Most infections were caused by laceration and the most common site of infection was the palm or dorsum of the hand. Mean length of hospitalization was 6 days. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, beta-hemolytic Streptococcus and methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus were the most commonly cultured microorganisms. Cephalosporins, clindamycin, amoxicillin/clavulanate, penicillin, vancomycin, and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole were major antibiotic choices. Amputations and contracture were the primary complications.Conclusions. Surgery along with medical management were key to treatment and most soft tissue infections resolved without further complications. With prompt and appropriate care, most hand infection patients can achieve full resolution of their infection.

Using psychological theory to inform methods to optimize the implementation of a hand hygiene intervention

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Boscart Veronique M

2012-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Careful hand hygiene (HH is the single most important factor in preventing the transmission of infections to patients, but compliance is difficult to achieve and maintain. A lack of understanding of the processes involved in changing staff behaviour may contribute to the failure to achieve success. The purpose of this study was to identify nurses’ and administrators’ perceived barriers and facilitators to current HH practices and the implementation of a new electronic monitoring technology for HH. Methods Ten key informant interviews (three administrators and seven nurses were conducted to explore barriers and facilitators related to HH and the impact of the new technology on outcomes. The semi structured interviews were based on the Theoretical Domains Framework by Michie et al. and conducted prior to intervention implementation. Data were explored using an inductive qualitative analysis approach. Data between administrators and nurses were compared. Results In 9 of the 12 domains, nurses and administrators differed in their responses. Administrators believed that nurses have insufficient knowledge and skills to perform HH, whereas the nurses were confident they had the required knowledge and skills. Nurses focused on immediate consequences, whereas administrators highlighted long-term outcomes of the system. Nurses concentrated foremost on their personal safety and their families’ safety as a source of motivation to perform HH, whereas administrators identified professional commitment, incentives, and goal setting. Administrators stated that the staff do not have the decision processes in place to judge whether HH is necessary or not. They also highlighted the positive aspects of teams as a social influence, whereas nurses were not interested in group conformity or being compared to others. Nurses described the importance of individual feedback and self-monitoring in order to increase their performance, whereas

Have Recommended Book Lists Changed to Reflect Current Expectations for Informational Text in K-3 Classrooms?

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Dreher, Mariam Jean; Kletzien, Sharon B.

2016-01-01

Despite both longstanding and recent calls for more informational text in K-3 classrooms, research indicates that narrative text remains in the majority for read alouds, classroom libraries, and instruction, thus limiting children's opportunity to experience the demands of expository text. Because national associations' recommended book lists are…

An Ubiquitous and Non Intrusive System for Pervasive Advertising using NFC and Geolocation Technologies and Air Hand Gestures

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Francisco M. Borrego-Jaraba

2014-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper we present a pervasive proposal for advertising using mobile phones, Near Field Communication, geolocation and air hand gestures. Advertising post built by users in public/private spaces can store multiple ads containing any kind of textual, graphic or multimedia information. Ads are automatically shows in the mobile phone of the users using a notification based process considering relative user location between the posts and the user preferences. Moreover, ads can be stored and retrieved from the post using hand gestures and Near Field Communication technology. Secure management of information about users, posts, and notifications and the use of instant messaging enable the development of systems to extend the current advertising strategies based on Web, large displays or digital signage.

Accuracy and confidence of visual short-term memory do not go hand-in-hand: behavioral and neural dissociations.

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Silvia Bona

Full Text Available Currently influential models of working memory posit that memory content is highly accessible to conscious inspection. These models predict that metacognition of memory performance should go hand-in-hand with the accuracy of the underlying memory representation. To test this view, we investigated how visual information presented during the maintenance period affects VSTM accuracy and confidence. We used a delayed cue-target orientation discrimination task in which participants were asked to hold in memory a grating, and during the maintenance period a second memory cue could be presented. VSTM accuracy of the first memory cue was impaired when the orientation of the second memory cue was sufficiently different. However, participants' response confidence was reduced whenever the second memory cue was presented; thus VSTM accuracy and confidence were dissociated. In a second experiment, we applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC to investigate the causal role of this region in VSTM metacognition. Relative to the sham condition, anodal tDCS induced a general reduction in confidence ratings but did not affect VSTM accuracy. Overall, these results indicate that our metacognition of memory performance is influenced by factors other than the accuracy of the underlying memory representation.

Hand-to-Hand Model for Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis to Estimate Fat Free Mass in a Healthy Population

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Hsueh-Kuan Lu

2016-10-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to establish a hand-to-hand (HH model for bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA fat free mass (FFM estimation by comparing with a standing position hand-to-foot (HF BIA model and dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA; we also verified the reliability of the newly developed model. A total of 704 healthy Chinese individuals (403 men and 301 women participated. FFM (FFMDXA reference variables were measured using DXA and segmental BIA. Further, regression analysis, Bland–Altman plots, and cross-validation (2/3 participants as the modeling group, 1/3 as the validation group; three turns were repeated for validation grouping were conducted to compare tests of agreement with FFMDXA reference variables. In male participants, the hand-to-hand BIA model estimation equation was calculated as follows: FFMmHH = 0.537 h2/ZHH − 0.126 year + 0.217 weight + 18.235 (r2 = 0.919, standard estimate of error (SEE = 2.164 kg, n = 269. The mean validated correlation coefficients and limits of agreement (LOAs of the Bland–Altman analysis of the calculated values for FFMmHH and FFMDXA were 0.958 and −4.369–4.343 kg, respectively, for hand-to-foot BIA model measurements for men; the FFM (FFMmHF and FFMDXA were 0.958 and −4.356–4.375 kg, respectively. The hand-to-hand BIA model estimating equation for female participants was FFMFHH = 0.615 h2/ZHH − 0.144 year + 0.132 weight + 16.507 (r2 = 0.870, SEE = 1.884 kg, n = 201; the three mean validated correlation coefficient and LOA for the hand-to-foot BIA model measurements for female participants (FFMFHH and FFMDXA were 0.929 and −3.880–3.886 kg, respectively. The FFMHF and FFMDXA were 0.942 and −3.511–3.489 kg, respectively. The results of both hand-to-hand and hand-to-foot BIA models demonstrated similar reliability, and the hand-to-hand BIA models are practical for assessing FFM.

Hand hygiene in rural Indonesian healthcare workers: barriers beyond sinks, hand rubs and in-service training.

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Marjadi, B; McLaws, M-L

2010-11-01

Few attempts to increase healthcare workers' hand hygiene compliance have included an in-depth analysis of the social and behavioural context in which hand hygiene is not undertaken. We used a mixed method approach to explore hand hygiene barriers in rural Indonesian healthcare facilities to develop a resource-appropriate adoption of international guidelines. Two hospitals and eight clinics (private and public) in a rural Indonesian district were studied for three months each. Hand hygiene compliance was covertly observed for two shifts each in three adult wards at two hospitals. Qualitative data were collected from direct observation, focus group discussions and semistructured in-depth and informal interviews within healthcare facilities and the community. Major barriers to compliance included longstanding water scarcity, tolerance of dirtiness by the community and the healthcare organisational culture. Hand hygiene compliance was poor (20%; 57/281; 95% CI: 16-25%) and was more likely to be undertaken after patient contact (34% after-patient contact vs 5% before-patient contact, Pperceived to be dirty (49% 'inherent' vs 11% 'elective' opportunities associated with clean contacts, Pcommitment to the provision of supportive working conditions. Copyright © 2010 The Hospital Infection Society. All rights reserved.

Functional relationship between dominant and non-dominant hand in motor task - hand grip strength endurance

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Kljajić Dragana

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study was to determine the functional relationship between dominant and non-dominant hand in the strength endurance motor task - hand grip, in the referent population of healthy and young persons. For the purpose of the research we have implemented the method of isometric dynamometry and standardized hand grip test. The study included 48 participants, 23 of them being of female and 25 of male gender. The analysis of variance (ANOVA was used to determine the difference between the sets of variables in the function of gender and functional dimorphism, while the Bonferroni criterion was applied to determine the differences between pairs of individual variables. The difference between the maximum hand grip of dominant and non-dominant hand in female participants amounted to 9.28%, and in male ones 7.39% in favor of the dominant hand. There is no statistically significant difference between nondominant and dominant hand regarding the force endurance time aspect at 30%, 50% and 80% out of the maximum hand grip level, as well as at the absolute and relative force impulse indicators as an endurance measure. The value of gender dimorphism in relation to the absolute indicators of force momentum at 30%, 50% and 80% out of the maximum hand grip level in female participants is 0.9714, 0.9145, 0.9301, and in male participants 0.9515, 0.8264 and 0.8606. The force momentum indicators value at 30%, 50% and 80% out of the maximum hand grip level in female participants is ImpF30%=21167.58±6923.67 Ns, ImpF50%=10846.94±3800.56 Ns and ImpF80%=5438.46±1993.12 Ns, and in male participants ImpF30%=17734.03±6881.92 Ns, ImpF50%=13903.61±3437.76 Ns and ImpF80%=5117.53±1894.78 Ns. The obtained results can be used as the criteria for further research in special education and rehabilitation, medical and professional rehabilitation.

Ontology Learning for Chinese Information Organization and Knowledge Discovery in Ethnology and Anthropology

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Jing Kong

2007-09-01

Full Text Available This paper presents an ontology learning architecture that reflects the interaction between ontology learning and other applications such as ontology-engineering tools and information systems. Based on this architecture, we have developed a prototype system CHOL: a Chinese ontology learning tool. CHOL learns domain ontology from Chinese domain specific texts. On the one hand, it supports a semi-automatic domain ontology acquisition and dynamic maintenance, and on the other hand, it supports an auto-indexing and auto-classification of Chinese scholarly literature. CHOL has been applied in ethnology and anthropology for Chinese information organization and knowledge discovery.

A Comparative Analysis of Information Hiding Techniques for Copyright Protection of Text Documents

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Milad Taleby Ahvanooey

2018-01-01

Full Text Available With the ceaseless usage of web and other online services, it has turned out that copying, sharing, and transmitting digital media over the Internet are amazingly simple. Since the text is one of the main available data sources and most widely used digital media on the Internet, the significant part of websites, books, articles, daily papers, and so on is just the plain text. Therefore, copyrights protection of plain texts is still a remaining issue that must be improved in order to provide proof of ownership and obtain the desired accuracy. During the last decade, digital watermarking and steganography techniques have been used as alternatives to prevent tampering, distortion, and media forgery and also to protect both copyright and authentication. This paper presents a comparative analysis of information hiding techniques, especially on those ones which are focused on modifying the structure and content of digital texts. Herein, various text watermarking and text steganography techniques characteristics are highlighted along with their applications. In addition, various types of attacks are described and their effects are analyzed in order to highlight the advantages and weaknesses of current techniques. Finally, some guidelines and directions are suggested for future works.

Hand function with touch screen technology in children with normal hand formation, congenital differences, and neuromuscular disease.

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Shin, David H; Bohn, Deborah K; Agel, Julie; Lindstrom, Katy A; Cronquist, Sara M; Van Heest, Ann E

2015-05-01

To measure and compare hand function for children with normal hand development, congenital hand differences (CHD), and neuromuscular disease (NMD) using a function test with touch screen technology designed as an iPhone application. We measured touch screen hand function in 201 children including 113 with normal hand formation, 43 with CHD, and 45 with NMD. The touch screen test was developed on the iOS platform using an Apple iPhone 4. We measured 4 tasks: touching dots on a 3 × 4 grid, dragging shapes, use of the touch screen camera, and typing a line of text. The test takes 60 to 120 seconds and includes a pretest to familiarize the subject with the format. Each task is timed independently and the overall time is recorded. Children with normal hand development took less time to complete all 4 subtests with increasing age. When comparing children with normal hand development with those with CHD or NMD, in children aged less than 5 years we saw minimal differences; those aged 5 to 6 years with CHD took significantly longer total time; those aged 7 to 8 years with NMD took significantly longer total time; those aged 9 to 11 years with CHD took significantly longer total time; and those aged 12 years and older with NMD took significantly longer total time. Touch screen technology has becoming increasingly relevant to hand function in modern society. This study provides standardized age norms and shows that our test discriminates between normal hand development and that in children with CHD or NMD. Diagnostic III. Copyright © 2015 American Society for Surgery of the Hand. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Rubber hand illusion under delayed visual feedback.

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Sotaro Shimada

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Rubber hand illusion (RHI is a subject's illusion of the self-ownership of a rubber hand that was touched synchronously with their own hand. Although previous studies have confirmed that this illusion disappears when the rubber hand was touched asynchronously with the subject's hand, the minimum temporal discrepancy of these two events for attenuation of RHI has not been examined. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In this study, various temporal discrepancies between visual and tactile stimulations were introduced by using a visual feedback delay experimental setup, and RHI effects in each temporal discrepancy condition were systematically tested. The results showed that subjects felt significantly greater RHI effects with temporal discrepancies of less than 300 ms compared with longer temporal discrepancies. The RHI effects on reaching performance (proprioceptive drift showed similar conditional differences. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our results first demonstrated that a temporal discrepancy of less than 300 ms between visual stimulation of the rubber hand and tactile stimulation to the subject's own hand is preferable to induce strong sensation of RHI. We suggest that the time window of less than 300 ms is critical for multi-sensory integration processes constituting the self-body image.

Combining heterogenous features for 3D hand-held object recognition

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Lv, Xiong; Wang, Shuang; Li, Xiangyang; Jiang, Shuqiang

2014-10-01

Object recognition has wide applications in the area of human-machine interaction and multimedia retrieval. However, due to the problem of visual polysemous and concept polymorphism, it is still a great challenge to obtain reliable recognition result for the 2D images. Recently, with the emergence and easy availability of RGB-D equipment such as Kinect, this challenge could be relieved because the depth channel could bring more information. A very special and important case of object recognition is hand-held object recognition, as hand is a straight and natural way for both human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. In this paper, we study the problem of 3D object recognition by combining heterogenous features with different modalities and extraction techniques. For hand-craft feature, although it reserves the low-level information such as shape and color, it has shown weakness in representing hiconvolutionalgh-level semantic information compared with the automatic learned feature, especially deep feature. Deep feature has shown its great advantages in large scale dataset recognition but is not always robust to rotation or scale variance compared with hand-craft feature. In this paper, we propose a method to combine hand-craft point cloud features and deep learned features in RGB and depth channle. First, hand-held object segmentation is implemented by using depth cues and human skeleton information. Second, we combine the extracted hetegerogenous 3D features in different stages using linear concatenation and multiple kernel learning (MKL). Then a training model is used to recognize 3D handheld objects. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and gerneralization ability of the proposed method.

EthoHand: A dexterous robotic hand with ball-joint thumb enables complex in-hand object manipulation

OpenAIRE

Konnaris, C; Gavriel, C; Thomik, AAC; Aldo Faisal, A

2016-01-01

Our dexterous hand is a fundmanetal human feature that distinguishes us from other animals by enabling us to go beyond grasping to support sophisticated in-hand object manipulation. Our aim was the design of a dexterous anthropomorphic robotic hand that matches the human hand's 24 degrees of freedom, under-actuated by seven motors. With the ability to replicate human hand movements in a naturalistic manner including in-hand object manipulation. Therefore, we focused on the development of a no...

Did I see your hand moving? The effect of movement-related information on the Corsi block tapping task.

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Brunetti, Riccardo; Del Gatto, Claudia; Cavallina, Clarissa; Farina, Benedetto; Delogu, Franco

2018-05-01

The Corsi Block Tapping Task is a widespread test used to assess spatial working memory. Previous research hypothesized that the discrepancy found in some cases between the traditional and the digital (touchscreen) version of the Corsi block tapping task may be due to a direct motor resonance between the experimenter's and the participant's hand movements. However, we hypothesize that this discrepancy might be due to extra movement-related information included in the traditional version, lacking in the digital one. We investigated the effects of such task-irrelevant information using eCorsi, a touchscreen version of the task. In Experiment 1, we manipulate timing in sequence presentation, creating three conditions. In the Congruent condition, the inter-stimulus intervals reflected the physical distance in which the stimuli were spatially placed: The longer the spatial distance, the longer the temporal interval. In the Incongruent condition the timing changed randomly. Finally, in the Isochronous condition every stimulus appeared after a fixed interval, independently from its spatial position. The results showed a performance enhancement in the Congruent condition, suggesting an incidental spatio-temporal binding. In Experiment 2, we added straight lines between each location in the sequences: In the Trajectories condition participants saw trajectories from one spatial position to the other during sequence presentation, while a condition without such trajectories served as control. Results showed better performances in the Trajectories condition. We suggest that the timing and trajectories information play a significant role in the discrepancies found between the traditional and the touchscreen version of the Corsi Block Tapping Task, without the necessity of explanations involving direct motor resonance (e.g. seeing an actual hand moving) as a causal factor.

Grip Strength Survey Based on Hand Tool Usage

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Erman ÇAKIT

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Hand grip strength is broadly used for performing tasks involving equipment in production and processing activities. Most professionals in this field rely on grip strength to perform their tasks. There were three main aims of this study: i determining various hand grip strength measurements for the group of hand tool users, ii investigating the effects of height, weight, age, hand dominance, body mass index, previous Cumulative Trauma Disorder (CTD diagnosis, and hand tool usage experience on hand grip strength, and iii comparing the obtained results with existing data for other populations. The study groups comprised 71 healthy male facility workers. The values of subjects’ ages was observed between 26 and 74 years. The data were statistically analyzed to assess the normality of data and the percentile values of grip strength. The results of this study demonstrate that there were no significance differences noted between dominant and non-dominant hands. However, there were highly significant differences between the CTD group and the other group. Hand grip strength for the dominant hand was positively correlated to height, weight, and body mass index, and negatively correlated to age and tool usage experience. Hand dominance, height, weight, body mass index, age and tool usage experience should be considered when establishing normal values for grip strength.

[Infection control and hand hygiene in nursing homes in Oslo].

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Sie, Ingrid; Thorstad, Margrete; Andersen, Bjørg Marit

2008-06-26

Nosocomial infections and transmission can be substantially reduced by good infection control. The laws and regulations for infection control in heath care institutions emphasize establishment of infection control programs and improved hand hygiene. Our study reviews some factors that are important for practicing adequate hand hygiene (knowledge about infection control and hand-washing facilities). Health care workers (HCW) in nursing homes in Oslo participated in this study in 2006-2007. A questionnaire was made and SPSS was used to analyse the data . 70.7% of 324 HCW (in 42 nursing homes) answered the questionnaires. Nearly all of the respondents (95.6%) knew about the written procedures for hygiene and infection control; 88.5% knew that an infection control program was in place and about 50% had received information through internal education. Three of four had read the National guidelines for hand hygiene, 77.5% thought that hand disinfection was more effective than hand washing, and 97% reported hand hygiene after contact with a patient having an infection. Dispensers for hand disinfection were situated at central work places. At the same time, 17.9% informed that they worked in more than one place at the same time. This study confirms that most nursing homes in Oslo have an infection control program and training that improves the knowledge and awareness of hand hygiene among HCWs. However, the fact that nursing homes in Oslo have the resources, knowledge and education, is not the same as compliance.

Automated Text Markup for Information Retrieval from an Electronic Textbook of Infectious Disease

Science.gov (United States)

Berrios, Daniel C.; Kehler, Andrew; Kim, David K.; Yu, Victor L.; Fagan, Lawrence M.

1998-01-01

The information needs of practicing clinicians frequently require textbook or journal searches. Making these sources available in electronic form improves the speed of these searches, but precision (i.e., the fraction of relevant to total documents retrieved) remains low. Improving the traditional keyword search by transforming search terms into canonical concepts does not improve search precision greatly. Kim et al. have designed and built a prototype system (MYCIN II) for computer-based information retrieval from a forthcoming electronic textbook of infectious disease. The system requires manual indexing by experts in the form of complex text markup. However, this mark-up process is time consuming (about 3 person-hours to generate, review, and transcribe the index for each of 218 chapters). We have designed and implemented a system to semiautomate the markup process. The system, information extraction for semiautomated indexing of documents (ISAID), uses query models and existing information-extraction tools to provide support for any user, including the author of the source material, to mark up tertiary information sources quickly and accurately.

Automated Extraction of Substance Use Information from Clinical Texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Yan; Chen, Elizabeth S; Pakhomov, Serguei; Arsoniadis, Elliot; Carter, Elizabeth W; Lindemann, Elizabeth; Sarkar, Indra Neil; Melton, Genevieve B

2015-01-01

Within clinical discourse, social history (SH) includes important information about substance use (alcohol, drug, and nicotine use) as key risk factors for disease, disability, and mortality. In this study, we developed and evaluated a natural language processing (NLP) system for automated detection of substance use statements and extraction of substance use attributes (e.g., temporal and status) based on Stanford Typed Dependencies. The developed NLP system leveraged linguistic resources and domain knowledge from a multi-site social history study, Propbank and the MiPACQ corpus. The system attained F-scores of 89.8, 84.6 and 89.4 respectively for alcohol, drug, and nicotine use statement detection, as well as average F-scores of 82.1, 90.3, 80.8, 88.7, 96.6, and 74.5 respectively for extraction of attributes. Our results suggest that NLP systems can achieve good performance when augmented with linguistic resources and domain knowledge when applied to a wide breadth of substance use free text clinical notes.

An Introduction to Topic Modeling as an Unsupervised Machine Learning Way to Organize Text Information

Science.gov (United States)

Snyder, Robin M.

2015-01-01

The field of topic modeling has become increasingly important over the past few years. Topic modeling is an unsupervised machine learning way to organize text (or image or DNA, etc.) information such that related pieces of text can be identified. This paper/session will present/discuss the current state of topic modeling, why it is important, and…

Hand Hygiene Intervention Strategies to Reduce Diarrhoea and Respiratory Infections among Schoolchildren in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

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Balwani Chingatichifwe Mbakaya

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Effective and appropriate hand-washing practice for schoolchildren is important in preventing infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, which is the second most common cause of death among school-age children in sub-Saharan Africa. The objective of the review was to identify hand hygiene intervention strategies to reduce infectious diseases such as diarrhoea and respiratory tract infections among schoolchildren aged 6–12 years in developing countries. Published research articles were searched from databases covering a period from as far back as the creation of the databases to November 2015. Eight randomized controlled trials (RCT/CRCT from developing countries met the inclusion criteria. The Jadad Scale for appraising RCT/CRCT studies revealed methodological challenges in most studies, such that 75% (6/8 were rated as low-quality articles. The review found that hand hygiene can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea and respiratory conditions. Three hand hygiene intervention strategies utilized were training, funding and policy, with training and funding implemented more commonly than policy. These strategies were not only used in isolation but also in combination, and they qualified as multi-level interventions. Factors that influenced hand washing were contextual, psychosocial and technological. Findings can inform school health workers in categorizing and prioritizing activities into viable strategies when implementing multi-level hand-washing interventions. This review also adds to the existing evidence that multi-level hand-washing interventions can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea, respiratory infections, and school absenteeism. Further evidence-based studies are needed with improved methodological rigour in developing countries, to inform policy in this area.

Diagnostic imaging of the hand

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Schmitt, Rainer [Hospital for Cardiovascular Diseases, Bad Neustadt an der Saale (Germany). Dept. of Radiology; Lanz, Ulrich [Perlach Hospital, Munich (Germany). Dept. of Hand Surgery

2008-07-01

With its complex anatomy and specialized biomechanics, the human hand has always presented physicians with a unique challenge when it comes to diagnosing and treating the diseases that afflict it. And while recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the number of therapeutic options, many diseases and injuries of the hand are still commonly misinterpreted. In diagnostic imaging of the hand, an interdisciplinary team, comprisingspecialists in radiology, surgery, and rheumatology, presents a comprehensive,reliable guide to this topographically intricate area. Highlights include: - More than 1000 high-quality illustrations - All state-of-the-art imaging modalities-including multidetector CT, with 2D displays and 3D reconstructions, and contrast-enhanced MRI with multi-channel, phased-array coils - An overview of all currently used methods of examination - A detailed presentation of the anatomic and functional foundations necessary for diagnosis - Full coverage of all disorders of the hand - Systematic treatment of each disease's definition, pathogenesis, and clinical symptoms, according to a graduated diagnostic plan - Easy-to-use format, featuring crisp images and line drawings seamlessly integrated with concise text, summary tables, and handy checklists - A heavily cross-referenced appendix of differential diagnosis tables - Emphasis on interdisciplinary consultation throughout designed to help both radiologists and clinicians develop the most efficient and effective strategies for evaluating and treating patients, Diagnostic imaging of the hand will leave specialists of all levels with a fresh appreciation for - and a richer understanding of - the expanding array of cutting-edge alternatives for diagnosing and treating disorders of the hand. (orig.)

Diagnostic imaging of the hand

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Schmitt, Rainer; Lanz, Ulrich

2008-01-01

With its complex anatomy and specialized biomechanics, the human hand has always presented physicians with a unique challenge when it comes to diagnosing and treating the diseases that afflict it. And while recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the number of therapeutic options, many diseases and injuries of the hand are still commonly misinterpreted. In diagnostic imaging of the hand, an interdisciplinary team, comprisingspecialists in radiology, surgery, and rheumatology, presents a comprehensive,reliable guide to this topographically intricate area. Highlights include: - More than 1000 high-quality illustrations - All state-of-the-art imaging modalities-including multidetector CT, with 2D displays and 3D reconstructions, and contrast-enhanced MRI with multi-channel, phased-array coils - An overview of all currently used methods of examination - A detailed presentation of the anatomic and functional foundations necessary for diagnosis - Full coverage of all disorders of the hand - Systematic treatment of each disease's definition, pathogenesis, and clinical symptoms, according to a graduated diagnostic plan - Easy-to-use format, featuring crisp images and line drawings seamlessly integrated with concise text, summary tables, and handy checklists - A heavily cross-referenced appendix of differential diagnosis tables - Emphasis on interdisciplinary consultation throughout designed to help both radiologists and clinicians develop the most efficient and effective strategies for evaluating and treating patients, Diagnostic imaging of the hand will leave specialists of all levels with a fresh appreciation for - and a richer understanding of - the expanding array of cutting-edge alternatives for diagnosing and treating disorders of the hand. (orig.)

3D Visual Sensing of the Human Hand for the Remote Operation of a Robotic Hand

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Pablo Gil

2014-02-01

Full Text Available New low cost sensors and open free libraries for 3D image processing are making important advances in robot vision applications possible, such as three-dimensional object recognition, semantic mapping, navigation and localization of robots, human detection and/or gesture recognition for human-machine interaction. In this paper, a novel method for recognizing and tracking the fingers of a human hand is presented. This method is based on point clouds from range images captured by a RGBD sensor. It works in real time and it does not require visual marks, camera calibration or previous knowledge of the environment. Moreover, it works successfully even when multiple objects appear in the scene or when the ambient light is changed. Furthermore, this method was designed to develop a human interface to control domestic or industrial devices, remotely. In this paper, the method was tested by operating a robotic hand. Firstly, the human hand was recognized and the fingers were detected. Secondly, the movement of the fingers was analysed and mapped to be imitated by a robotic hand.

Extracting attempted hand movements from EEGs in people with complete hand paralysis following stroke

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Abirami eMuralidharan

2011-03-01

Full Text Available This study examines the feasibility of using electroencephalograms (EEGs to rapidly detect the intent to open one’s hand in individuals with complete hand paralysis following a subcortical ischemic stroke. If detectable, this motor planning activity could be used in real time to trigger a motorized hand exoskeleton or an electrical stimulation device that opens/closes the hand. While EEG-triggered movement-assist devices could restore function, they may also promote recovery by reinforcing the use of remaining cortical circuits. EEGs were recorded while participants were cued to either relax or attempt to extend their fingers. Linear discriminant analysis was used to detect onset of finger extension from the EEGs in a leave-one-trial-out cross-validation process. In each testing trial, the classifier was applied in pseudo real time starting from an initial hand-relaxed phase, through movement planning, and into the initial attempted finger extension phase (finger extension phase estimated from typical time-to-movement-onset measured in the unaffected hand. The classifiers detected attempted finger-extension at a significantly higher rate during both motor planning and early attempted execution compared to rest. To reduce inappropriate triggering of a movement-assist device during rest, the classification threshold could be adjusted to require more certainty about one’s intent to move before triggering a device. Additionally, a device could be set to activate only after multiple time samples in a row were classified as finger extension events. These options resulted in some sessions with no false triggers while the person was resting, but moderate-to-high true trigger rates during attempted movements.

Oral and Hand Hygiene Behaviour and Risk Factors among In-School Adolescents in Four Southeast Asian Countries

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Karl Peltzer

2014-03-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study was to investigate oral and hand hygiene behaviour and risk factors among 13 to 15 year-old in-school adolescents in four Southeast Asian countries. Data were collected by self-reported questionnaire from nationally representative samples (total 13,824 of school children aged 13 to 15 years in India, Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand. Results indicate that overall, 22.4% of school children reported sub-optimal oral hygiene (hands before meals, 26.5% after toileting and 59.8% washing their hands with soap (59.8%. In multivariate analysis, male gender, health risk behaviours and lack of protective factors were associated with sub-optimal tooth brushing, and lower socioeconomic status, health risk behaviours, psychological distress and lack of protective factors were found to be associated with sub-optimal hand washing hygiene behaviour. As a conclusion, the cross-national data on oral and hand hygiene behaviour from four Southeast Asian countries found sub-optimal hygiene behaviour. Several determinants of sub-optimal hygiene behaviour were identified that can inform programmes in order to improve oral and hand hygiene behaviour of this adolescent population.

A demonstration of the transition from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand.

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Dobromir G Dotov

Full Text Available The ideas of continental philosopher Martin Heidegger have been influential in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, despite the fact that there has been no effort to analyze these ideas empirically. The experiments reported here are designed to lend empirical support to Heidegger's phenomenology and more specifically his description of the transition between ready-to-hand and unready-to-hand modes in interactions with tools. In experiment 1, we found that a smoothly coping cognitive system exhibits type positively correlated noise and that its correlated character is reduced when the system is perturbed. This indicates that the participant and tool constitute a self-assembled, extended device during smooth coping and this device is disrupted by the perturbation. In experiment 2, we examine the re-organization of awareness that occurs when a smoothly coping, self-assembled, extended cognitive system is perturbed. We found that the disruption is accompanied by a change in attention which interferes with participants' performance on a simultaneous cognitive task. Together these experiments show that a smoothly coping participant-tool system can be temporarily disrupted and that this disruption causes a change in the participant's awareness. Since these two events follow as predictions from Heidegger's work, our study offers evidence for the hypothesized transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand.

Hand proximity facilitates spatial discrimination of auditory tones

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Philip eTseng

2014-06-01

Full Text Available The effect of hand proximity on vision and visual attention has been well documented. In this study we tested whether such effect(s would also be present in the auditory modality. With hands placed either near or away from the audio sources, participants performed an auditory-spatial discrimination (Exp 1: left or right side, pitch discrimination (Exp 2: high, med, or low tone, and spatial-plus-pitch (Exp 3: left or right; high, med, or low discrimination task. In Exp 1, when hands were away from the audio source, participants consistently responded faster with their right hand regardless of stimulus location. This right hand advantage, however, disappeared in the hands-near condition because of a significant improvement in left hand’s reaction time. No effect of hand proximity was found in Exp 2 or 3, where a choice reaction time task requiring pitch discrimination was used. Together, these results suggest that the effect of hand proximity is not exclusive to vision alone, but is also present in audition, though in a much weaker form. Most important, these findings provide evidence from auditory attention that supports the multimodal account originally raised by Reed et al. in 2006.

Real-Time Control of an Exoskeleton Hand Robot with Myoelectric Pattern Recognition.

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Lu, Zhiyuan; Chen, Xiang; Zhang, Xu; Tong, Kay-Yu; Zhou, Ping

2017-08-01

Robot-assisted training provides an effective approach to neurological injury rehabilitation. To meet the challenge of hand rehabilitation after neurological injuries, this study presents an advanced myoelectric pattern recognition scheme for real-time intention-driven control of a hand exoskeleton. The developed scheme detects and recognizes user's intention of six different hand motions using four channels of surface electromyography (EMG) signals acquired from the forearm and hand muscles, and then drives the exoskeleton to assist the user accomplish the intended motion. The system was tested with eight neurologically intact subjects and two individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). The overall control accuracy was [Formula: see text] for the neurologically intact subjects and [Formula: see text] for the SCI subjects. The total lag of the system was approximately 250[Formula: see text]ms including data acquisition, transmission and processing. One SCI subject also participated in training sessions in his second and third visits. Both the control accuracy and efficiency tended to improve. These results show great potential for applying the advanced myoelectric pattern recognition control of the wearable robotic hand system toward improving hand function after neurological injuries.

Unconstrained and Contactless Hand Geometry Biometrics

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Carmen Sánchez-Ávila

2011-10-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a hand biometric system for contact-less, platform-free scenarios, proposing innovative methods in feature extraction, template creation and template matching. The evaluation of the proposed method considers both the use of three contact-less publicly available hand databases, and the comparison of the performance to two competitive pattern recognition techniques existing in literature: namely Support Vector Machines (SVM and k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN. Results highlight the fact that the proposed method outcomes existing approaches in literature in terms of computational cost, accuracy in human identification, number of extracted features and number of samples for template creation. The proposed method is a suitable solution for human identification in contact-less scenarios based on hand biometrics, providing a feasible solution to devices with limited hardware requirements like mobile devices.

Hand Fractures

Science.gov (United States)

... All Topics A-Z Videos Infographics Symptom Picker Anatomy Bones Joints Muscles Nerves Vessels Tendons About Hand Surgery What is ... Hand Therapist? Media Find a Hand Surgeon Home Anatomy ... DESCRIPTION The bones of the hand serve as a framework. This framework supports the muscles that make the wrist and fingers move. When ...

Hand osteoarthritis: diagnosis, pathogenesis, treatment

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R. M. Balabanova

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Due to the development of synovitis, early-stage hand osteoarthritis (HOA mimics hand joint injury in rheumatoid arthritis (RA. However, the topography of synovitis is diverse in these diseases:  distal interphalangeal and thumb joints are involved in the process in HOA. In the latter, tests are negative for immunological markers  (anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies, which is typical of RA.  The differences between HOA and RA are prominent, as evidenced  by hand X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging. Investigations  suggest that cytokine profile imbalance is implicated in the  pathogenesis of osteoarthritis, which brings it closer to RA. However, therapy for HOA has not been practically developed; there are only a few works on the use of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and  biological agents in these patients. It is necessary to work out Russian guidelines for the treatment of HOA.

Hand Washing Practices Among Emergency Medical Services Providers

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Joshua Bucher

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Hand hygiene is an important component of infection control efforts. Our primary and secondary goals were to determine the reported rates of hand washing and stethoscope cleaning in emergency medical services (EMS workers, respectively. Methods: We designed a survey about hand hygiene practices. The survey was distributed to various national EMS organizations through e-mail. Descriptive statistics were calculated for survey items (responses on a Likert scale and subpopulations of survey respondents to identify relationships between variables. We used analysis of variance to test differences in means between the subgroups. Results: There were 1,494 responses. Overall, reported hand hygiene practices were poor among pre-hospital providers in all clinical situations. Women reported that they washed their hands more frequently than men overall, although the differences were unlikely to be clinically significant. Hygiene after invasive procedures was reported to be poor. The presence of available hand sanitizer in the ambulance did not improve reported hygiene rates but improved reported rates of cleaning the stethoscope (absolute difference 0.4, p=0.0003. Providers who brought their own sanitizer were more likely to clean their hands. Conclusion: Reported hand hygiene is poor amongst pre-hospital providers. There is a need for future intervention to improve reported performance in pre-hospital provider hand washing.

Classification of brain signals associated with imagination of hand grasping, opening and reaching by means of wavelet-based common spatial pattern and mutual information.

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Amanpour, Behzad; Erfanian, Abbas

2013-01-01

An important issue in designing a practical brain-computer interface (BCI) is the selection of mental tasks to be imagined. Different types of mental tasks have been used in BCI including left, right, foot, and tongue motor imageries. However, the mental tasks are different from the actions to be controlled by the BCI. It is desirable to select a mental task to be consistent with the desired action to be performed by BCI. In this paper, we investigated the detecting the imagination of the hand grasping, hand opening, and hand reaching in one hand using electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. The results show that the ERD/ERS patterns, associated with the imagination of hand grasping, opening, and reaching are different. For classification of brain signals associated with these mental tasks and feature extraction, a method based on wavelet packet, regularized common spatial pattern (CSP), and mutual information is proposed. The results of an offline analysis on five subjects show that the two-class mental tasks can be classified with an average accuracy of 77.6% using proposed method. In addition, we examine the proposed method on datasets IVa from BCI Competition III and IIa from BCI Competition IV.

Information and Knowledge Management in the Scope of the Information Security practices: the human factor within Organizations

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Luciana Emirena Santos Carneiro

2013-08-01

Full Text Available The security of informational assets has always been a corporate requirement. These assets can be scaled in three main spheres, namely, people, organizational processes and technologies. The internet, the web, the broadcast of networks, and the growing presence of technology both in people's lives and in organizational contexts have caused profound transformations in the intrinsic processes that constitute personal and organizational routines. On the one hand, these changes provided by the technological progress have fostered competitiveness and decentralization; on the other hand, they require better management, control, security and protection for information and knowledge. This article presents the results of an investigation within information security realm, focusing on the human aspects of knowledge and information management related to security practices. Using a quality-quantitative approach, we identify behavioral actions and profiles of employees of a company in the field of healthcare, which reveal some connections with information security failures. We conclude that the human element is a relevant variable, even a critical one, for the management of information security in organizations.

Cortical Asymmetries during Hand Laterality Task Vary with Hand Laterality: A fMRI Study in 295 Participants

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Mellet, Emmanuel; Mazoyer, Bernard; Leroux, Gaelle; Joliot, Marc; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to characterize, using fMRI, the functional asymmetries of hand laterality task (HLT) in a sample of 295 participants balanced for handedness. During HLT, participants have to decide whether the displayed picture of a hand represent a right or a left hand. Pictures of hands’ back view were presented for 150 ms in the right or left hemifield. At the whole hemisphere level, we evidenced that the laterality of the hand and of the hemifield in which the picture was displayed combined their effects on the hemispheric asymmetry in an additive way. We then identified a set of 17 functional homotopic regions of interest (hROIs) including premotor, motor, somatosensory and parietal regions, whose activity and asymmetry varied with the laterality of the presented hands. When the laterality of a right hand had to be evaluated, these areas showed stronger leftward asymmetry, the hROI located in the primary motor area showing a significant larger effect than all other hROIs. In addition a subset of six parietal regions involved in visuo-motor integration together with two postcentral areas showed a variation in asymmetry with hemifield of presentation. Finally, while handedness had no effect at the hemispheric level, two regions located in the parietal operculum and intraparietal sulcus exhibited larger leftward asymmetry with right handedness independently of the hand of presentation. The present results extend those of previous works in showing a shift of asymmetries during HLT according to the hand presented in sensorimotor areas including primary motor cortex. This shift was not affected by manual preference. They also demonstrate that the coordination of visual information and handedness identification of hands relied on the coexistence of contralateral motor and visual representations in the superior parietal lobe and the postcentral gyrus. PMID:27999536

Why language matters: a tour through hand hygiene literature

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Daniela Pires

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Hand hygiene has evolved over the last decades and many terminologies emerged. We aimed to analyse the evolution in the frequency of utilization of key hand hygiene terms in the literature along the years. Methods We identified keywords and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH used in MEDLINE® indexation related to hand hygiene by searching international guidelines and the MeSH database. We performed a MEDLINE® search combining the selected keywords and MeSH and analysed the number of publications retrieved yearly. Results The literature search yielded 9019 publications when all hand hygiene related search terms were combined, between 1921 and November 2016. The total number of publications per year increased from a median of 4 (IQR 3, 6 in the 1950’s to 554 (IQR 478, 583 between 2011 and 2015. The most frequently used keywords are hand disinfection, hand hygiene, hand washing, handrub, hand sanitizer and alcohol-based hand rub (ABHR. Until the 1990s, hand disinfection and hand washing were the most frequently used terms. Whilst the last decade has seen a remarkable increase in publications mentioning hand disinfection and hand hygiene and for the first time handrub, hand sanitizers and ABHR were introduced in the literature. Hand disinfection, hand hygiene and hand sanitizers are the main MeSH used by MEDLINE®. Since 2013 hand hygiene is the most frequently used MeSH and keyword. Conclusions The change seen in literature in the last two decades, from hand washing and hand disinfection to hand hygiene, most probably reflect the paradigm shift favouring use of ABHR over soap and water promoted by international guidelines in the early 2000s.

Studying text coherence in Czech – a corpus-based analysis

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Rysová Magdaléna

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The paper deals with the field of Czech corpus linguistics and represents one of various current studies analysing text coherence through language interactions. It presents a corpusbased analysis of grammatical coreference and sentence information structure (in terms of contextual boundness in Czech. It focuses on examining the interaction of these two language phenomena and observes where they meet to participate in text structuring. Specifically, the paper analyses contextually bound and non-bound sentence items and examines whether (and how often they are involved in relations of grammatical coreference in Czech newspaper articles. The analysis is carried out on the language data of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT containing 3,165 Czech texts. The results of the analysis are helpful in automatic text annotation - the paper presents how (or to what extent the annotation of grammatical coreference may be used in automatic (pre-annotation of sentence information structure in Czech. It demonstrates how accurately we may (automatically assume the value of contextual boundness for the antecedent and anaphor (as the two participants of a grammatical coreference relation. The results of the paper demonstrate that the anaphor of grammatical coreference is automatically predictable - it is a non-contrastive contextually bound sentence item in 99.18% of cases. On the other hand, the value of contextual boundness of the antecedent is not so easy to estimate (according to the PDT, the antecedent is contextually non-bound in 37% of cases, non-contrastive contextually bound in 50% and contrastive contextually bound in 13% of cases.

Hand Matters: Left-Hand Gestures Enhance Metaphor Explanation

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Argyriou, Paraskevi; Mohr, Christine; Kita, Sotaro

2017-01-01

Research suggests that speech-accompanying gestures influence cognitive processes, but it is not clear whether the gestural benefit is specific to the gesturing hand. Two experiments tested the "(right/left) hand-specificity" hypothesis for self-oriented functions of gestures: gestures with a particular hand enhance cognitive processes…

An improved algorithm for information hiding based on features of Arabic text: A Unicode approach

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A.A. Mohamed

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Steganography means how to hide secret information in a cover media, so that other individuals fail to realize their existence. Due to the lack of data redundancy in the text file in comparison with other carrier files, text steganography is a difficult problem to solve. In this paper, we proposed a new promised steganographic algorithm for Arabic text based on features of Arabic text. The focus is on more secure algorithm and high capacity of the carrier. Our extensive experiments using the proposed algorithm resulted in a high capacity of the carrier media. The embedding capacity rate ratio of the proposed algorithm is high. In addition, our algorithm can resist traditional attacking methods since it makes the changes in carrier text as minimum as possible.

Volume correction in the aging hand: role of dermal fillers

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Rivkin AZ

2016-08-01

Full Text Available Alexander Z Rivkin David Geffen/UCLA School of Medicine Los Angeles, CA, USA Abstract: The hands, just like the face, are highly visible parts of the body. They age at a similar rate and demonstrate comparable changes with time, sun damage, and smoking. Loss of volume in the hands exposes underlying tendons, veins, and bony prominences. Rejuvenation of the hands with dermal fillers is a procedure with high patient satisfaction and relatively low risk for complications. This study will review relevant anatomy, injection technique, clinical safety, and efficacy of dermal filler volumization of the aging hand. Keywords: dermal fillers, hands, volumization, hyaluronic acid, calcium hydroxylapatite

[Hand osteoarthritis].

Science.gov (United States)

Šenolt, Ladislav

Hand osteoarthritis (OA) is a common chronic disorder causing pain and limitation of mobility of affected joints. The prevalence of hand OA increases with age and more often affects females. Clinical signs obviously do not correlate with radiographic findings - symptomatic hand OA affects approximately 26 % of adult subjects, but radiographic changes can be found in up to two thirds of females and half of males older than 55 years.Disease course differ among individual patients. Hand OA is a heterogeneous disease. Nodal hand OA is the most common subtype affecting interphalangeal joints, thumb base OA affects first carpometacarpal joint. Erosive OA represents a specific subtype of hand OA, which is associated with joint inflammation, more pain, functional limitation and erosive findings on radiographs.Treatment of OA is limited. Analgesics and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are the only agents reducing symptoms. New insights into the pathogenesis of disease should contribute to the development of novel effective treatment of hand OA.

Hand Gesture Modeling and Recognition for Human and Robot Interactive Assembly Using Hidden Markov Models

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Fei Chen

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Gesture recognition is essential for human and robot collaboration. Within an industrial hybrid assembly cell, the performance of such a system significantly affects the safety of human workers. This work presents an approach to recognizing hand gestures accurately during an assembly task while in collaboration with a robot co-worker. We have designed and developed a sensor system for measuring natural human-robot interactions. The position and rotation information of a human worker's hands and fingertips are tracked in 3D space while completing a task. A modified chain-code method is proposed to describe the motion trajectory of the measured hands and fingertips. The Hidden Markov Model (HMM method is adopted to recognize patterns via data streams and identify workers' gesture patterns and assembly intentions. The effectiveness of the proposed system is verified by experimental results. The outcome demonstrates that the proposed system is able to automatically segment the data streams and recognize the gesture patterns thus represented with a reasonable accuracy ratio.

A community sharing hands-on centers in engineer's training

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jean-pierre jpt Taboy

2006-02-01

Full Text Available As teachers in Technical Universities, we must think about the engineer's training. We need good applicants, up to date hardware and software for hand-on. Each university don't have enough money and technical people to cover the new needs. A community sharing remote hand-on centers could be a solution.

Enrolling Underserved Women in mHealth Programs: Results From Text4baby Outreach Campaigns.

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Bushar, Jessica A; Fishman, Jodie; Garfinkel, Danielle; Pirretti, Amy

2018-03-01

Public health practitioners have increasingly leveraged technology-based communication to get health information into the hands of hard-to-reach populations; however, best practices for outreach and enrollment into mobile health (mHealth) programs are lacking. This article describes enrollment results from campaigns focused on enrolling underserved pregnant women and mothers in Text4baby-a free, mHealth service-to inform outreach strategies for mHealth programs. Text4baby participants receive health and safety information, interactive surveys, alerts, and appointment reminders through at least three weekly texts and a free app-timed to users' due date or babies' birth date. Text4baby worked with partners to implement national, state, and community-based enrollment campaigns. Descriptive statistics were used to compare baseline enrollment prior to a campaign with enrollment during a campaign to generate enrollment estimates. Enrollment rates were calculated for campaigns for which the number targeted/reached was available. National television campaigns resulted in more than 10,000 estimated enrollments. Campaigns that were integrated with an existing program and text-based recruitment had the highest enrollment rates, ranging from 7% to 24%. Facebook advertisements and traditional media targeting providers and consumers were least effective. mHealth programs should consider text-based recruitment and outreach via existing programs; additional research is needed on return on investment for different outreach strategies and on the effectiveness of different outreach strategies at reaching and enrolling specific target populations.

Text mining of cancer-related information: review of current status and future directions.

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Spasić, Irena; Livsey, Jacqueline; Keane, John A; Nenadić, Goran

2014-09-01

This paper reviews the research literature on text mining (TM) with the aim to find out (1) which cancer domains have been the subject of TM efforts, (2) which knowledge resources can support TM of cancer-related information and (3) to what extent systems that rely on knowledge and computational methods can convert text data into useful clinical information. These questions were used to determine the current state of the art in this particular strand of TM and suggest future directions in TM development to support cancer research. A review of the research on TM of cancer-related information was carried out. A literature search was conducted on the Medline database as well as IEEE Xplore and ACM digital libraries to address the interdisciplinary nature of such research. The search results were supplemented with the literature identified through Google Scholar. A range of studies have proven the feasibility of TM for extracting structured information from clinical narratives such as those found in pathology or radiology reports. In this article, we provide a critical overview of the current state of the art for TM related to cancer. The review highlighted a strong bias towards symbolic methods, e.g. named entity recognition (NER) based on dictionary lookup and information extraction (IE) relying on pattern matching. The F-measure of NER ranges between 80% and 90%, while that of IE for simple tasks is in the high 90s. To further improve the performance, TM approaches need to deal effectively with idiosyncrasies of the clinical sublanguage such as non-standard abbreviations as well as a high degree of spelling and grammatical errors. This requires a shift from rule-based methods to machine learning following the success of similar trends in biological applications of TM. Machine learning approaches require large training datasets, but clinical narratives are not readily available for TM research due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. This issue remains the main

Evaluating EMG Feature and Classifier Selection for Application to Partial-Hand Prosthesis Control

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Adenike A. Adewuyi

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Pattern recognition-based myoelectric control of upper limb prostheses has the potential to restore control of multiple degrees of freedom. Though this control method has been extensively studied in individuals with higher-level amputations, few studies have investigated its effectiveness for individuals with partial-hand amputations. Most partial-hand amputees retain a functional wrist and the ability of pattern recognition-based methods to correctly classify hand motions from different wrist positions is not well studied. In this study, focusing on partial-hand amputees, we evaluate (1 the performance of non-linear and linear pattern recognition algorithms and (2 the performance of optimal EMG feature subsets for classification of four hand motion classes in different wrist positions for 16 non-amputees and 4 amputees. Our results show that linear discriminant analysis and linear and non-linear artificial neural networks perform significantly better than the quadratic discriminant analysis for both non-amputees and partial-hand amputees. For amputees, including information from multiple wrist positions significantly decreased error (p<0.001 but no further significant decrease in error occurred when more than 4, 2, or 3 positions were included for the extrinsic (p=0.07, intrinsic (p=0.06, or combined extrinsic and intrinsic muscle EMG (p=0.08, respectively. Finally, we found that a feature set determined by selecting optimal features from each channel outperformed the commonly used time domain (p<0.001 and time domain/autoregressive feature sets (p<0.01. This method can be used as a screening filter to select the features from each channel that provide the best classification of hand postures across different wrist positions.

EnvMine: A text-mining system for the automatic extraction of contextual information

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de Lorenzo Victor

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background For ecological studies, it is crucial to count on adequate descriptions of the environments and samples being studied. Such a description must be done in terms of their physicochemical characteristics, allowing a direct comparison between different environments that would be difficult to do otherwise. Also the characterization must include the precise geographical location, to make possible the study of geographical distributions and biogeographical patterns. Currently, there is no schema for annotating these environmental features, and these data have to be extracted from textual sources (published articles. So far, this had to be performed by manual inspection of the corresponding documents. To facilitate this task, we have developed EnvMine, a set of text-mining tools devoted to retrieve contextual information (physicochemical variables and geographical locations from textual sources of any kind. Results EnvMine is capable of retrieving the physicochemical variables cited in the text, by means of the accurate identification of their associated units of measurement. In this task, the system achieves a recall (percentage of items retrieved of 92% with less than 1% error. Also a Bayesian classifier was tested for distinguishing parts of the text describing environmental characteristics from others dealing with, for instance, experimental settings. Regarding the identification of geographical locations, the system takes advantage of existing databases such as GeoNames to achieve 86% recall with 92% precision. The identification of a location includes also the determination of its exact coordinates (latitude and longitude, thus allowing the calculation of distance between the individual locations. Conclusion EnvMine is a very efficient method for extracting contextual information from different text sources, like published articles or web pages. This tool can help in determining the precise location and physicochemical

Cleaning OCR'd text with Regular Expressions

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Laura Turner O'Hara

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Optical Character Recognition (OCR—the conversion of scanned images to machine-encoded text—has proven a godsend for historical research. This process allows texts to be searchable on one hand and more easily parsed and mined on the other. But we’ve all noticed that the OCR for historic texts is far from perfect. Old type faces and formats make for unique OCR. How might we improve poor quality OCR? The answer is Regular Expressions or “regex.”

Extracting information from 0νββ decay and LHC pp-cross sections: Limits on the left-right mixing angle and right-handed boson mass

Science.gov (United States)

Civitarese, O.; Suhonen, J.; Zuber, K.

2015-10-01

The existence of massive neutrinos forces the extension of the Standard Model of electroweak interactions, to accommodate them and/or right-handed currents. This is one of the fundamental questions in todays's physics. The consequences of it would reflect upon several decay processes, like the very exotic nuclear double-beta-decay. By the other hand, high-energy proton-proton reactions of the type performed at the LHC accelerator can provide information about the existence of a right-handed generation of the W and Z-bosons. Here we shall address the possibility of performing a joint analysis of the results reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations (σ(pp- > 2l + jets)) and the latest measurements of nuclear-double-beta decays reported by the GERDA and EXO collaborations.

The Relationship between Teacher Attitudes toward the Common Core State Standards and Informational Text

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Estruch, Marcie Jane

2018-01-01

This study sought to determine the relationship between teachers' attitudes toward the Common Core State Standards and three predetermined factors. These factors were (1) teachers' attitudes toward the practicality of pedagogical shift three, balancing informational and literary texts, (2) teachers' attitudes toward school support with the…

TREATMENT OF FRACTURES TO THE HAND

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Valentina Colombo

2012-03-01

Full Text Available The aim of this article is to discuss the treatment of fractures to the hand given the importance of this organ in terms of functional anatomy. After classifying the various types of fractures, surgery and rehabilitation options for all types are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on therapy for the most frequently seen lesions such as fractures to the scaphoid, the fifth metacarpal and the base of the first metacarpal. The importance of the use of prophylaxis against stiffness and treatment for oedema, which are commonly seen in fractures to the hand, is also highlighted.

Denmark: HAND in HAND Policy Questionnaire

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Laursen, Hilmar Dyrborg; Nielsen, Birgitte Lund

2018-01-01

Som del af det internationale EU finansierede projekt Hand in Hand, der fokuserer på de såkaldte SEI-kompetencer (Social, Emotional, Intercultural), er dansk policy i relation til elevernes sociale, emotionelle og interkulturelle læring kortlagt i denne rapport. Der refereres bl.a. til "elevernes...

Health effects of exposure to second- and third-hand marijuana smoke: a systematic review.

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Holitzki, Hannah; Dowsett, Laura E; Spackman, Eldon; Noseworthy, Tom; Clement, Fiona

2017-11-24

Recreational marijuana has been legalized in 11 jurisdictions; Canada will legalize marijuana by July 2018. With this changing landscape, there is a need to understand the public health risks associated with marijuana to support patient-care provider conversations, harm-reduction measures and evidence-informed policy. The objective of this work was to summarize the health effects of exposure to second- and third-hand marijuana smoke. In this systematic review, we searched 6 databases from inception to October 2017. Abstract and full-text review was conducted in duplicate. Studies were included if they were human, in vivo or in vitro studies with more than 1 case reported in English or French, and reported original, quantitative data. Three outcomes were extracted: 1) cannabinoids and cannabinoid metabolites in bodily fluids, 2) self-reported psychoactive effects and 3) eye irritation and discomfort. Of the 1701 abstracts identified, 60 proceeded to full-text review; the final data set contained 15 articles. All of the included studies were of good to poor quality as assessed with the Downs and Black checklist. There is evidence of a direct relation between the tetrahydrocannabinol content of marijuana and effects on those passively exposed. This relation is mediated by several environmental factors including the amount of smoke, ventilation, air volume, number of marijuana cigarettes lit and number of smokers present. No evidence was identified assessing exposure to third-hand marijuana smoke or the health effects of long-term exposure. Exposure to second-hand marijuana smoke leads to cannabinoid metabolites in bodily fluids, and people experience psychoactive effects after such exposure. Alignment of tobacco and marijuana smoking bylaws may result in the most effective public policies. More research is required to understand the impact of exposure to third-hand smoke and the health effects of long-term exposure to second-hand smoke. Copyright 2017, Joule Inc. or

Impaired hand size estimation in CRPS.

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Peltz, Elena; Seifert, Frank; Lanz, Stefan; Müller, Rüdiger; Maihöfner, Christian

2011-10-01

A triad of clinical symptoms, ie, autonomic, motor and sensory dysfunctions, characterizes complex regional pain syndromes (CRPS). Sensory dysfunction comprises sensory loss or spontaneous and stimulus-evoked pain. Furthermore, a disturbance in the body schema may occur. In the present study, patients with CRPS of the upper extremity and healthy controls estimated their hand sizes on the basis of expanded or compressed schematic drawings of hands. In patients with CRPS we found an impairment in accurate hand size estimation; patients estimated their own CRPS-affected hand to be larger than it actually was when measured objectively. Moreover, overestimation correlated significantly with disease duration, neglect score, and increase of two-point-discrimination-thresholds (TPDT) compared to the unaffected hand and to control subjects' estimations. In line with previous functional imaging studies in CRPS patients demonstrating changes in central somatotopic maps, we suggest an involvement of the central nervous system in this disruption of the body schema. Potential cortical areas may be the primary somatosensory and posterior parietal cortices, which have been proposed to play a critical role in integrating visuospatial information. CRPS patients perceive their affected hand to be bigger than it is. The magnitude of this overestimation correlates with disease duration, decreased tactile thresholds, and neglect-score. Suggesting a disrupted body schema as the source of this impairment, our findings corroborate the current assumption of a CNS involvement in CRPS. Copyright © 2011 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hand Surgery: Anesthesia

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... All Topics A-Z Videos Infographics Symptom Picker Anatomy Bones Joints Muscles Nerves Vessels Tendons About Hand Surgery What is a Hand Surgeon? What is a Hand Therapist? Media Find a Hand Surgeon Home Anatomy Hand Surgery Anesthesia Email to a friend * required ...

Hand Hygiene and Tuberculosis Risk in Korea: An Ecological Association.

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Han, Mi Ah

2018-01-01

Hand hygiene is a basic but effective strategy against infectious disease. This study investigated an ecological association between hand hygiene and tuberculosis (TB) risk in Korea. Hand hygiene data were obtained from the 2015 Community Health Survey. Information on TB incidence and mortality in 2015 were obtained from the National Infectious Diseases Surveillance System and death monitoring database, respectively. In multiple linear regression analysis, frequent hand washing rates after using the restroom (B = -0.78, P = .037), after returning from the outdoors (B = -0.28, P = .049), and with soap or hand sanitizer (B = -0.54, P = .018) were negatively associated with TB incidence. TB mortality were associated with frequent hand washing rates after returning from the outdoors (B = -0.05, P = .035), and with soap or hand sanitizer (B = -0.10, P = .010), respectively. Hand washing was associated with lower TB incidence and mortality at the community level. These results could contribute to develop community-based health promotion strategies.

Hand Anatomy

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... All Topics A-Z Videos Infographics Symptom Picker Anatomy Bones Joints Muscles Nerves Vessels Tendons About Hand Surgery What is ... Hand Therapist? Media Find a Hand Surgeon Home Anatomy Bones Joints Muscles Nerves Vessels Tendons Anatomy The upper extremity is ...

Self-reported hand hygiene practices, and feasibility and acceptability of alcohol-based hand rubs among village healthcare workers in Inner Mongolia, China.

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Li, Y; Wang, Y; Yan, D; Rao, C Y

2015-08-01

Good hand hygiene is critical to reduce the risk of healthcare-associated infections. Limited data are available on hand hygiene practices from rural healthcare systems in China. To assess the feasibility and acceptability of sanitizing hands with alcohol-based hand rubs (ABHRs) among Chinese village healthcare workers, and to assess their hand hygiene practice. Five hundred bottles of ABHR were given to village healthcare workers in Inner Mongolia, China. Standardized questionnaires collected information on their work load, availability, and usage of hand hygiene facilities, and knowledge, attitudes, and practices of hand hygiene. In all, 369 (64.2%) participants completed the questionnaire. Although 84.5% of the ABHR recipients believed that receiving the ABHR improved their hand hygiene practice, 78.8% of recipients would pay no more than US$1.5 out of their own pocket (actual cost US$4). The majority (77.2%) who provided medical care at patients' homes never carried hand rubs with them outside their clinics. In general, self-reported hand hygiene compliance was suboptimal, and the lowest compliance was 'before touching a patient'. Reported top three complaints with using ABHR were skin irritation, splashing, and unpleasant residual. Village doctors with less experience practised less hand hygiene. The overall acceptance of ABHR among the village healthcare workers is high as long as it is provided to them for free/low cost, but their overall hand hygiene practice is suboptimal. Hand hygiene education and training is needed in settings outside of traditional healthcare facilities. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Passive hand movements disrupt adults’ counting strategies

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Ineke eImbo

2011-09-01

Full Text Available In the present study, we experimentally tested the role of hand motor circuits in simple-arithmetic strategies. Educated adults solved simple additions (e.g., 8+3 or simple subtractions (e.g., 11–3 while they were required to retrieve the answer from long-term memory (e.g., knowing that 8+3 = 11, to transform the problem by making an intermediate step (e.g., 8+3 = 8+2+1 = 10+1 = 11 or to count one-by-one (e.g., 8+3 = 8…9…10…11. During the process of solving the arithmetic problems, the experimenter did or did not move the participants’ hand on a 4-point matrix. The results show that passive hand movements disrupted the counting strategy while leaving the other strategies unaffected. This pattern of results is in agreement with a procedural account, showing that the involvement of hand motor circuits in adults’ mathematical abilities is reminiscent of finger counting during childhood.

Controller design for Robotic hand through Electroencephalogram

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Pandelidis P.

2016-01-01

Full Text Available - This paper deals with the designing, the construction and the control of a robotic hand via an electroencephalogram sensor. First a robotic device that is able to mimic a real human hand is constructed. A PID controller is designed in order to improve the performance of the robotic arm for grabbing objects. Furthermore, a novel design approach is presented for controlling the motion of the robotic arm using signals produced from an innovative electroencephalogram sensor that detects the concentration of the brain

Synthesis of Optimal Isolation Systems of Hand-Transmitted Vibration

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Marek Książek

1997-01-01

Full Text Available In this article a procedure is presented for the analytical synthesis of optimal vibration isolation for a hand-arm system subjected to stochastic excitation. A general approach is discussed for a selected vibration isolation criterion. The general procedure is illustrated by analytical examples for different hand-arm systems described by their driving-point impedances. The influence of particular forms of excitation and the structure of the vibroisolated hand-arm systems on the resultant vibration isolation is then discussed. Some numerical examples illustrating the procedure have also been included.

The Clinical Assessment Study of the Hand (CAS-HA: a prospective study of musculoskeletal hand problems in the general population

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Marshall Michelle

2007-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Pain in the hand affects an estimated 12–21% of the population, and at older ages the hand is one of the most common sites of pain and osteoarthritis. The association between symptomatic hand osteoarthritis and disability in everyday life has not been studied in detail, although there is evidence that older people with hand problems suffer significant pain and disability. Despite the high prevalence of hand problems and the limitations they cause in older adults, little attention has been paid to the hand by health planners and policy makers. We plan to conduct a prospective, population-based, observational cohort study designed in parallel with our previously reported cohort study of knee pain, to describe the course of musculoskeletal hand problems in older adults and investigate the relative merits of different approaches to classification and defining prognosis. Methods/Design All adults aged 50 years and over registered with two general practices in North Staffordshire will be invited to take part in a two-stage postal survey. Respondents to the survey who indicate that they have experienced hand pain or problems within the previous 12 months will be invited to attend a research clinic for a detailed assessment. This will consist of clinical interview, hand assessment, screening test of lower limb function, digital photography, plain x-rays, anthropometric measurement and brief self-complete questionnaire. All consenting clinic attenders will be followed up by (i general practice medical record review, (ii repeat postal questionnaire at 18-months, and (iii repeat postal questionnaire at 3 years. Discussion This paper describes the protocol for the Clinical Assessment Study of the Hand (CAS-HA, a prospective, population-based, observational cohort study of community-dwelling older adults with hand pain and hand problems based in North Staffordshire.

Hand functioning in children with cerebral palsy

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Carlyne eArnould

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Brain lesions may disturb hand functioning in children with cerebral palsy (CP, making it difficult or even impossible for them to perform several manual activities. Most conventional treatments for hand dysfunction in CP assume that reducing the hand dysfunctions will improve the capacity to manage activities (i.e., manual ability, MA. The aim of this study was to investigate the directional relationships (direct and indirect pathways through which hand skills influence MA in children with CP. A total of 136 children with CP (mean age: 10 years; range: 6–16 years; 35 quadriplegics, 24 diplegics, 77 hemiplegics were assessed. Six hand skills were measured on both hands: touch-pressure detection (Semmes-Weinstein aesthesiometer, stereognosis (Manual Form Perception Test, proprioception (passive mobilization of the metacarpophalangeal joints, grip strength (Jamar dynamometer, gross manual dexterity (Box and Block Test, and fine finger dexterity (Purdue Pegboard Test. MA was measured with the ABILHAND-Kids questionnaire. Correlation coefficients were used to determine the linear associations between observed variables. A path analysis of structural equation modeling was applied to test different models of causal relationships among the observed variables. Purely sensory impairments did seem not to play a significant role in the capacity to perform manual activities. According to path analysis, gross manual dexterity in both hands and stereognosis in the dominant hand were directly related to MA, whereas grip strength was indirectly related to MA through its relationship with gross manual dexterity. However, one-third of the variance in MA measures could not be explained by hand skills. It can be concluded that MA is not simply the integration of hand skills in daily activities and should be treated per se, supporting activity-based interventions.

Patient empowerment and hand hygiene, 1997-2012.

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McGuckin, M; Govednik, J

2013-07-01

Multi-modal hand hygiene programmes that include patient empowerment are promoted as a necessary component of hand hygiene compliance. However, the question still remains, do we have enough information to determine if, and under what conditions, patients will be able to play an immediate role in healthcare workers' hand hygiene behaviour? To review the current literature on patient willingness to be empowered, barriers to empowerment, and hand hygiene programmes that include patient empowerment and hand hygiene improvement. A Medline (Ovid) search of all English-language papers for 1997-2007 and 2008-2012 was conducted using the following keywords alone and in various combinations: 'patient participation', 'involvement', 'empowerment', 'education', 'decision-making', 'professional-patient relations', 'behavioural change', 'culture of safety', 'social marketing', 'consumer awareness', 'leadership', 'institutional climate', 'hand hygiene' and 'patient reminders'. The 1997-2007 review was conducted as part of the World Health Organization's Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care, and updated with the 2008-2012 review. Several studies show that, in principle, patients are willing to be empowered. However, there is variation in the actual number of patients that practice empowerment for hand hygiene, ranging from 5% to 80%. The actual performance of patient empowerment can be increased when a patient is given explicit permission by a healthcare worker. There is ongoing support from patients that they are willing to be empowered. There is a need to develop programmes that empower both healthcare workers and patients so that they become more comfortable in their roles. Copyright © 2013 The Healthcare Infection Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Rubber hand illusion induced by touching the face ipsilaterally to a deprived hand: evidence for plastic ‘somatotopic’ remapping in tetraplegics

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Michele eScandola

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Background: Studies in animals and humans indicate that the interruption of body-brain connections following spinal cord injury (SCI leads to plastic cerebral reorganization.Objective: To explore whether inducing the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI via synchronous multisensory visuo-tactile bodily stimulation may reveal any perceptual correlates of plastic remapping in SCI.Methods: In 16 paraplegic, 16 tetraplegic and 16 healthy participants we explored whether RHI may be induced by tactile stimuli involving not only the left hand but also the left hemi-face. Touching the participant’s actual hand or face was either synchronous or asynchronous with tactile stimuli seen on a rubber hand. We assessed two components of the illusion, namely perceived changes in the real hand in space (indexed by proprioceptive drift and ownership of the rubber hand (indexed by subjective responses to an ad-hoc questionnaire.Results: Proprioceptive drift and ownership were found in the healthy group only in the condition where the left real and fake hand were touched simultaneously. In contrast, no drift was found in the SCI patients who, however, showed ownership after both synchronous and asynchronous hand stroking. Importantly, only tetraplegics showed the effect also after synchronous face stroking. Conclusions: RHI may reveal plastic phenomena in SCI. In hand representation-deprived tetraplegics, stimuli on the face (represented contiguously in the somatic and motor systems, drive the sense of hand ownership. This hand-face remapping phenomenon may be useful for restoring a sense of self in massively deprived individuals.

Growth curves and their implications in hand-fed Monk parrots (Myiopsitta monachus

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Petzinger C

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Christina Petzinger,1,2 J Jill Heatley,3 John E Bauer1,2 1Comparative Animal Nutrition Research Laboratory, Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, 2Intercollegiate Faculty of Nutrition, Texas A&M University, 3Zoological Medicine Service, Department of Small Animal Medicine and Surgery, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Abstract: Monk parrots (Myiopsitta monachus were hand-fed over two chick seasons spanning of 2010 to 2011. Information from the growth curve of chicks hand-fed in 2010 was used to develop a feeding protocol for the 2011 season (Protocol-2011. This protocol addressed the problems of delayed followed by excessive growth experienced by parrots hand fed in 2010. Monk parrots that were hand-fed in 2011 following the new protocol experienced delayed growth after 20 days of age. However, some Monk parrots were fed in excess of Protocol-2011 and did not experience a major delay in growth. The energy requirement equations used to construct Protocol-2011 were low when compared to adult Monk parrot maintenance energy requirements. The data suggest that growing birds do not require approximately twice their adult maintenance energy requirements, as is the case for growing dogs. Additionally, there appear to be fluctuations in energy needs as Monk parrots grow. A major increase in energy needs occurred between days 18 and 23 posthatching, which corresponds to feather development and growth in Monk parrot chicks. Thus, multiple equations estimating energy requirements, rather than just one equation, are likely needed from hatching to fledging in order to ensure adequate energy is provided to chicks. More research on the energy requirements of growing Monk parrots, especially around the time of fledging and weaning, is needed to improve hand-fed methods and potentially the adult health of hand-fed birds. Keywords

SparkText: Biomedical Text Mining on Big Data Framework.

Science.gov (United States)

Ye, Zhan; Tafti, Ahmad P; He, Karen Y; Wang, Kai; He, Max M

Many new biomedical research articles are published every day, accumulating rich information, such as genetic variants, genes, diseases, and treatments. Rapid yet accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature can discover novel knowledge to better understand human diseases and to improve the quality of disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. In this study, we designed and developed an efficient text mining framework called SparkText on a Big Data infrastructure, which is composed of Apache Spark data streaming and machine learning methods, combined with a Cassandra NoSQL database. To demonstrate its performance for classifying cancer types, we extracted information (e.g., breast, prostate, and lung cancers) from tens of thousands of articles downloaded from PubMed, and then employed Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression to build prediction models to mine the articles. The accuracy of predicting a cancer type by SVM using the 29,437 full-text articles was 93.81%. While competing text-mining tools took more than 11 hours, SparkText mined the dataset in approximately 6 minutes. This study demonstrates the potential for mining large-scale scientific articles on a Big Data infrastructure, with real-time update from new articles published daily. SparkText can be extended to other areas of biomedical research.

Infant Hand Preference and the Development of Cognitive Abilities

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George Frederick Michel

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Hand preference develops in the first two postnatal years with nearly half of infants exhibiting a consistent early preference for acquiring objects. Others exhibit a more variable developmental trajectory but by the end of their second postnatal year, most exhibit a consistent hand preference for role-differentiated bimanual manipulation. According to some forms of embodiment theory, these differences in hand use patterns should influence the way children interact with their environments, which, in turn, should affect the structure and function of brain development. Such early differences in brain development should result in different trajectories of psychological development. We present evidence that children with consistent early hand preferences exhibit advanced patterns of cognitive development as compared to children who develop a hand preference later. Differences in the developmental trajectory of hand preference are predictive of developmental differences in language, object management skills, and tool-use skills. As predicted by Cassasanto’s body-specificity hypothesis, infants with different hand preferences proceed along different developmental pathways of cognitive functioning.

Extracting information from 0νββ decay and LHC pp-cross sections: Limits on the left-right mixing angle and right-handed boson mass

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Civitarese, O., E-mail: osvaldo.civitarese@fisica.unlp.edu.ar [Departamento de Física, UNLP, C.C. 67, (1900) La Plata (Argentina); Suhonen, J. [University of Jyvaskyla, Department of Physics, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 (Finland); Zuber, K. [Department of Physics, TU-University, Dresden (Germany)

2015-10-28

The existence of massive neutrinos forces the extension of the Standard Model of electroweak interactions, to accommodate them and/or right-handed currents. This is one of the fundamental questions in todays’s physics. The consequences of it would reflect upon several decay processes, like the very exotic nuclear double-beta-decay. By the other hand, high-energy proton-proton reactions of the type performed at the LHC accelerator can provide information about the existence of a right-handed generation of the W and Z-bosons. Here we shall address the possibility of performing a joint analysis of the results reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations (σ(pp− > 2l + jets)) and the latest measurements of nuclear-double-beta decays reported by the GERDA and EXO collaborations.

Information Portal Costs and Benefits

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lorena BATAGAN

2006-01-01

Full Text Available All transformations of our society are the product of the large use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT and Internet. ICT are technologies which facilitate communication, processing, and transmission of information by electronic means. It is very important to use the new technologies to the correct value because this determinate an increase of global benefits. Portal provides a consistent way to select, evaluate, prioritize and plan the right information. In research we point the important costs and benefits for an informational portal. The portal for local administrative determinate for citizens the access to information of interest and on the other hand make easier for employer to manage the documents.

Fixed versus dynamic co-occurrence windows in TextRank term weights for information retrieval

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lu, Wei; Cheng, Qikai; Lioma, Christina

2012-01-01

iteratively is a score for each vertex, i.e. a term weight, that can be used for information retrieval (IR) just like conventional term frequency based term weights. So far, when computing TextRank term weights over co-occurrence graphs, the window of term co-occurrence is always fixed. This work departs from...

A Novel Application for Text Watermarking in Digital Reading

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Jin; Li, Qing-Cheng; Wang, Cong; Fang, Ji

Although watermarking research has made great strides in theoretical aspect, its lack of application in business could not be covered. It is due to few people pays attention to usage of the information carried by watermarking. This paper proposes a new watermarking application method. After digital document being reorganized with advertisement together, watermarking is designed to carry this structure of new document. It will release advertisement as interference information under attack. On the one hand, reducing the quality of digital works could inhabit unauthorized distribution. On the other hand, advertisement can benefit copyright holders as compensation. Moreover implementation detail, attack evaluation and watermarking algorithm correlation are also discussed through an experiment based on txt file.

On the Feasibility of Interoperable Schemes in Hand Biometrics

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Miguel A. Ferrer

2012-02-01

Full Text Available Personal recognition through hand-based biometrics has attracted the interest of many researchers in the last twenty years. A significant number of proposals based on different procedures and acquisition devices have been published in the literature. However, comparisons between devices and their interoperability have not been thoroughly studied. This paper tries to fill this gap by proposing procedures to improve the interoperability among different hand biometric schemes. The experiments were conducted on a database made up of 8,320 hand images acquired from six different hand biometric schemes, including a flat scanner, webcams at different wavelengths, high quality cameras, and contactless devices. Acquisitions on both sides of the hand were included. Our experiment includes four feature extraction methods which determine the best performance among the different scenarios for two of the most popular hand biometrics: hand shape and palm print. We propose smoothing techniques at the image and feature levels to reduce interdevice variability. Results suggest that comparative hand shape offers better performance in terms of interoperability than palm prints, but palm prints can be more effective when using similar sensors.

SparkText: Biomedical Text Mining on Big Data Framework.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhan Ye

Full Text Available Many new biomedical research articles are published every day, accumulating rich information, such as genetic variants, genes, diseases, and treatments. Rapid yet accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature can discover novel knowledge to better understand human diseases and to improve the quality of disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment.In this study, we designed and developed an efficient text mining framework called SparkText on a Big Data infrastructure, which is composed of Apache Spark data streaming and machine learning methods, combined with a Cassandra NoSQL database. To demonstrate its performance for classifying cancer types, we extracted information (e.g., breast, prostate, and lung cancers from tens of thousands of articles downloaded from PubMed, and then employed Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM, and Logistic Regression to build prediction models to mine the articles. The accuracy of predicting a cancer type by SVM using the 29,437 full-text articles was 93.81%. While competing text-mining tools took more than 11 hours, SparkText mined the dataset in approximately 6 minutes.This study demonstrates the potential for mining large-scale scientific articles on a Big Data infrastructure, with real-time update from new articles published daily. SparkText can be extended to other areas of biomedical research.

Development of a prototype over-actuated biomimetic prosthetic hand.

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Matthew R Williams

Full Text Available The loss of a hand can greatly affect quality of life. A prosthetic device that can mimic normal hand function is very important to physical and mental recuperation after hand amputation, but the currently available prosthetics do not fully meet the needs of the amputee community. Most prosthetic hands are not dexterous enough to grasp a variety of shaped objects, and those that are tend to be heavy, leading to discomfort while wearing the device. In order to attempt to better simulate human hand function, a dexterous hand was developed that uses an over-actuated mechanism to form grasp shape using intrinsic joint mounted motors in addition to a finger tendon to produce large flexion force for a tight grip. This novel actuation method allows the hand to use small actuators for grip shape formation, and the tendon to produce high grip strength. The hand was capable of producing fingertip flexion force suitable for most activities of daily living. In addition, it was able to produce a range of grasp shapes with natural, independent finger motion, and appearance similar to that of a human hand. The hand also had a mass distribution more similar to a natural forearm and hand compared to contemporary prosthetics due to the more proximal location of the heavier components of the system. This paper describes the design of the hand and controller, as well as the test results.

Virtual hand illusion induced by visuomotor correlations.

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Maria V Sanchez-Vives

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Our body schema gives the subjective impression of being highly stable. However, a number of easily-evoked illusions illustrate its remarkable malleability. In the rubber-hand illusion, illusory ownership of a rubber-hand is evoked by synchronous visual and tactile stimulation on a visible rubber arm and on the hidden real arm. Ownership is concurrent with a proprioceptive illusion of displacement of the arm position towards the fake arm. We have previously shown that this illusion of ownership plus the proprioceptive displacement also occurs towards a virtual 3D projection of an arm when the appropriate synchronous visuotactile stimulation is provided. Our objective here was to explore whether these illusions (ownership and proprioceptive displacement can be induced by only synchronous visuomotor stimulation, in the absence of tactile stimulation. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To achieve this we used a data-glove that uses sensors transmitting the positions of fingers to a virtually projected hand in the synchronous but not in the asynchronous condition. The illusion of ownership was measured by means of questionnaires. Questions related to ownership gave significantly larger values for the synchronous than for the asynchronous condition. Proprioceptive displacement provided an objective measure of the illusion and had a median value of 3.5 cm difference between the synchronous and asynchronous conditions. In addition, the correlation between the feeling of ownership of the virtual arm and the size of the drift was significant. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We conclude that synchrony between visual and proprioceptive information along with motor activity is able to induce an illusion of ownership over a virtual arm. This has implications regarding the brain mechanisms underlying body ownership as well as the use of virtual bodies in therapies and rehabilitation.

Pathophysiology and Treatment of Alien Hand Syndrome

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Harini Sarva

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Background: Alien hand syndrome (AHS is a disorder of involuntary, yet purposeful, hand movements that may be accompanied by agnosia, aphasia, weakness, or sensory loss. We herein review the most reported cases, current understanding of the pathophysiology, and treatments.Methods: We performed a PubMed search in July of 2014 using the phrases “alien hand syndrome,” “alien hand syndrome pathophysiology,” “alien hand syndrome treatment,” and “anarchic hand syndrome.” The search yielded 141 papers (reviews, case reports, case series, and clinical studies, of which we reviewed 109. Non‐English reports without English abstracts were excluded.Results: Accumulating evidence indicates that there are three AHS variants: frontal, callosal, and posterior. Patients may demonstrate symptoms of multiple types; there is a lack of correlation between phenomenology and neuroimaging findings. Most pathologic and functional imaging studies suggest network disruption causing loss of inhibition as the likely cause. Successful interventions include botulinum toxin injections, clonazepam, visuospatial coaching techniques, distracting the affected hand, and cognitive behavioral therapy.Discussion: The available literature suggests that overlap between AHS subtypes is common. The evidence for effective treatments remains anecdotal, and, given the rarity of AHS, the possibility of performing randomized, placebo‐controlled trials seems unlikely. As with many other interventions for movement disorders, identifying the specific functional impairments caused by AHS may provide the best guidance towards individualized supportive care.

Getting Their Hands Dirty: Qualitative Study on Hands-on Learning for Architectural Students in Design-build Course

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Zunaibi B. Abdullah

2011-06-01

Full Text Available This qualitative study provides an in-depth perspective of hands-on learning through the observation and analysis of architectural students' views in a design-build program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the fall semester of 2008. Qualitative data was gathered from 14 participants involved in the construction of a low energy double-storey house in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. The study inventoried the requisite characteristics of a design-build course. Participants' views and activities were studied to ascribe the qualitative benefits of hands-on learning. In addition, students' motivation towards hands-on activities were evaluated in reference to student confidence and independence levels towards their future career as architects, designers or other design-build professionals. The findings showed the design-build course could offer a specific knowledge that link between theoretical subjects and the practical expect of building contractions.

Quantity of ethanol absorption after excessive hand disinfection using three commercially available hand rubs is minimal and below toxic levels for humans

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Toma Cyril D

2007-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Despite the increasing promotion of alcohol-based hand rubs and the worldwide use of ethanol-based hand rubs in hospitals only few studies have specifically addressed the issue of ethanol absorption when repeatedly applied to human skin. The aim of this study was to assess if ethanol absorption occurs during hygienic and surgical hand disinfection using three different alcohol-based hand-rubs, and to quantify absorption levels in humans. Methods Twelve volunteers applied three hand-rubs containing 95% (hand-rub A, 85% (hand-rub B and 55% ethanol (hand-rub C; all w/w. For hygienic hand disinfection, 4 mL were applied 20 times for 30 s, with 1 minute break between applications. For surgical hand disinfection, 20 mL of each hand rub was applied to hands and arms up to the level of the elbow 10 times for 3 minutes, with a break of 5 minutes between applications. Blood concentrations of ethanol and acetaldehyde were determined immediately prior and up to 90 minutes after application using head space gas chromatography. Results The median of absorbed ethanol after hygienic hand disinfection was 1365 mg (A, 630 mg (B, and 358 mg (C. The proportion of absorbed ethanol was 2.3% (A, 1.1% (B, and 0.9% (C. After surgical hand disinfection, the median of absorbed ethanol was 1067 mg (A, 1542 mg (B, and 477 mg (C. The proportion of absorbed ethanol was 0.7% (A, 1.1% (B, and 0.5% (C. The highest median acetaldehyde concentration after 20 hygienic hand disinfections was 0.57 mg/L (hand-rub C, after 30 min, after 10 surgical hand disinfections 3.99 mg/L (hand-rub A, after 20 minutes. Conclusion The overall dermal and pulmonary absorption of ethanol was below toxic levels in humans and allows the conclusion that the use of the evaluated ethanol-based hand-rubs is safe.

Hand hygiene posters: motivators or mixed messages?

Science.gov (United States)

Jenner, E A; Jones, F; Fletcher, B C; Miller, L; Scott, G M

2005-07-01

Poster campaigns regarding hand hygiene are commonly used by infection control teams to improve practice, yet little is known of the extent to which they are based on established theory or research. This study reports on the content analysis of hand hygiene posters (N=69) and their messages (N=75) using message-framing theory. The results showed that posters seldom drew on knowledge about effective ways to frame messages. Frequently, they simply conveyed information 'telling' rather than 'selling' and some of this was confusing. Most posters were not designed to motivate, and some conveyed mixed messages. Few used fear appeals. Hand hygiene posters could have a greater impact if principles of message framing were utilized in their design. Suggestions for gain-framed messages are offered, but these need to be tested empirically.

Between-hand difference in ipsilateral deactivation is associated with hand lateralization: fMRI mapping of 284 volunteers balanced for handedness

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Nathalie eTzourio-Mazoyer

2015-02-01

Full Text Available In right-handers, an increase in the pace of dominant hand movement results in increased ipsilateral deactivation of the primary motor cortex (M1. By contrast, an increase in non-dominant hand movement frequency is associated with reduced ipsilateral deactivation. This pattern suggests that inhibitory processes support right hand dominance in right-handers and raises the issues of whether this phenomenon also supports left hand preference in left-handers, and/or whether it relates to asymmetry of manual ability in either group. Thanks to the BIL&GIN, a database dedicated to the investigation of hemispheric specialization, we studied the variation in M1 activity during right and left finger tapping tasks in a sample of 284 healthy participants balanced for handedness. An M1 fMRI localizer was defined for each participant as an 8 mm diameter sphere centered on the motor activation peak. Right-handers exhibited significantly larger deactivation of the ipsilateral M1 when moving their dominant hand than their non-dominant hand. In contrast, left-handers exhibited comparable ipsilateral M1 deactivation during either hand movement, reflecting a bilateral cortical specialization. This pattern is likely related to left-handers’ good performances with their right hand and consequent lower asymmetry in manual ability compared with right-handers. Finally, inter-individual analyses over the whole sample demonstrated that the larger the difference in manual skill across hands, the larger the difference in ipsilateral deactivation. Overall, we propose that difference in ipsilateral deactivation is a marker of difference in manual ability asymmetry reflecting differences in the strength of transcallosal inhibition when a given hand is moving.

Influence of rub-in technique on required application time and hand coverage in hygienic hand disinfection

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Feil Yvonne

2008-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Recent data indicate that full efficacy of a hand rub preparation for hygienic hand disinfection can be achieved within 15 seconds (s. However, the efficacy test used for the European Norm (EN 1500 samples only the fingertips. Therefore, we investigated hand coverage using sixteen different application variations. The hand rub was supplemented with a fluorescent dye, and hands were assessed under UV light by a blind test, before and after application. Fifteen non-healthcare workers were used as subjects for each application variation apart from one test which was done with a group of twenty healthcare workers. All tests apart from the reference procedure were performed using 3 mL of hand rub. The EN 1500 reference procedure, which consists of 6 specific rub-in steps performed twice with an aliquot of 3 ml each time, served as a control. In one part of this study, each of the six steps was performed from one to five times before proceeding to the next step. In another part of the study, the entire sequence of six steps was performed from one to five times. Finally, all subjects were instructed to cover both hands completely, irrespective of any specific steps ("responsible application". Each rub-in technique was evaluated for untreated skin areas. Results The reference procedure lasted on average 75 s and resulted in 53% of subjects with at least one untreated area on the hands. Five repetitions of the rub-in steps lasted on average 37 s with 67% of subjects having incompletely treated hands. One repetition lasted on average 17 s, and all subjects had at least one untreated area. Repeating the sequence of steps lasted longer, but did not yield a better result. "Responsible application" was quite fast, lasting 25 s among non-healthcare worker subjects and 28 s among healthcare workers. It was also effective, with 53% and 55% of hands being incompletely treated. New techniques were as fast and effective as "responsible

Efficient storage, retrieval and analysis of poker hands: An adaptive data framework

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Gorawski Marcin

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In online gambling, poker hands are one of the most popular and fundamental units of the game state and can be considered objects comprising all the events that pertain to the single hand played. In a situation where tens of millions of poker hands are produced daily and need to be stored and analysed quickly, the use of relational databases no longer provides high scalability and performance stability. The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient way of storing and retrieving poker hands in a big data environment. We propose a new, read-optimised storage model that offers significant data access improvements over traditional database systems as well as the existing Hadoop file formats such as ORC, RCFile or SequenceFile. Through index-oriented partition elimination, our file format allows reducing the number of file splits that needs to be accessed, and improves query response time up to three orders of magnitude in comparison with other approaches. In addition, our file format supports a range of new indexing structures to facilitate fast row retrieval at a split level. Both index types operate independently of the Hive execution context and allow other big data computational frameworks such as MapReduce or Spark to benefit from the optimized data access path to the hand information. Moreover, we present a detailed analysis of our storage model and its supporting index structures, and how they are organised in the overall data framework. We also describe in detail how predicate based expression trees are used to build effective file-level execution plans. Our experimental tests conducted on a production cluster, holding nearly 40 billion hands which span over 4000 partitions, show that multi-way partition pruning outperforms other existing file formats, resulting in faster query execution times and better cluster utilisation.

Robotic hand project

OpenAIRE

Karaçizmeli, Cengiz; Çakır, Gökçe; Tükel, Dilek

2014-01-01

In this work, the mechatronic based robotic hand is controlled by the position data taken from the glove which has flex sensors mounted to capture finger bending of the human hand. The angular movement of human hand’s fingers are perceived and processed by a microcontroller, and the robotic hand is controlled by actuating servo motors. It has seen that robotic hand can simulate the movement of the human hand that put on the glove, during tests have done. This robotic hand can be used not only...

Hand Grip Strength: age and gender stratified normative data in a population-based study

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Taylor Anne W

2011-04-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The North West Adelaide Health Study is a representative longitudinal cohort study of people originally aged 18 years and over. The aim of this study was to describe normative data for hand grip strength in a community-based Australian population. Secondary aims were to investigate the relationship between body mass index (BMI and hand grip strength, and to compare Australian data with international hand grip strength norms. Methods The sample was randomly selected and recruited by telephone interview. Overall, 3 206 (81% of those recruited participants returned to the clinic during the second stage (2004-2006 which specifically focused on the collection of information relating to musculoskeletal conditions. Results Following the exclusion of 435 participants who had hand pain and/or arthritis, 1366 men and 1312 women participants provided hand grip strength measurement. The study population was relatively young, with 41.5% under 40 years; and their mean BMI was 28.1 kg/m2 (SD 5.5. Higher hand grip strength was weakly related to higher BMI in adults under the age of 30 and over the age of 70, but inversely related to higher BMI between these ages. Australian norms from this sample had amongst the lowest of the hand grip strength of the internationally published norms, except those from underweight populations. Conclusions This population demonstrated higher BMI and lower grip strength in younger participants than much of the international published, population data. A complete exploration of the relationship between BMI and hand grip strength was not fully explored as there were very few participants with BMI in the underweight range. The age and gender grip strength values are lower in younger adults than those reported in international literature.

What constitutes a good hand offs in the emergency department: a patient's perspective.

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Downey, La Vonne; Zun, Leslie; Burke, Trena

2013-01-01

The aim is to determine, from the patient's perspective, what constitutes a good hand-off procedure in the emergency department (ED). The secondary purpose is to evaluate what impact a formalized hand-off had on patient knowledge, throughput and customer service This study used a randomized controlled clinical trial involving two unique hand-off approaches and a convenience sample. The study alternated between the current hand-off process that documented the process but not specific elements (referred to as the informal process) to one using the IPASS the BATON process (considered the formal process). Consenting patients completed a 12-question validated questionnaire on how the process was perceived by patients and about their understanding why they waited in the ED. Statistical analysis using SPSS calculated descriptive frequencies and t-tests. In total 107 patients were enrolled: 50 in the informal and 57 in the formal group. Most patients had positive answers to the customer survey. There were significant differences between formal and informal groups: recalling the oncoming and outgoing physician coming to the patient's bed (p = 0.000), with more formal group recalling that than informal group patients; the oncoming physician introducing him/herself (p = 0.01), with more from the formal group answering yes and the physician discussing tests and implications with formal group patients (p = 0.02). This study was done at an urban inner city ED, a fact that may have skewed its results. A comparison of suburban and rural EDs would make the results stronger. It also reflected a very high level of customer satisfaction within the ED. This lack of variance may have meant that the correlation between customer service and handoffs was missed or underrepresented. There was no codified observation of either those using the IPASS the BATON script or those using informal procedures, so no comparison of level and types of information given between the two groups was done

Public libraries, information society and technology: communication

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Elsa Barber

2001-01-01

Full Text Available The research team focuses in the influence that Argentinian public libraries (popular and public have with library automation and public services oriented to the use of information technologies, and the acquisition of communitarian information skills within the information society. The methodology consists of a survey already successfully approved in previous investigations by the research team (UBACYT FI013 and TF06. The questionnaire focuses on related variables. On one hand, the variables were related to libraries automation processes (equipment, information systems,working modules, retrospective conversion, digitization, networks,and so on. And on the other hand, with given information technologies services (access to networks and documents in every media, Web navigation assistance, information technology local server, services to minorities, and so on. Data would be gathered with specific applications from the social sciences field. The final stage would be to study specific aspects of the automation processes of the libraries surveyed, in order to verify the reciprocal relationship between the automation level reached. And subsequently, to examine the likelihood of establishing new services that respond to the community information trends within the information technology and telecommunications development context.

The Will to Touch: David Copperfield’s Hand

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Pamela K. Gilbert

2014-10-01

Full Text Available In the nineteenth century, touch was considered to be a more privileged sense than has been generally noted, and the hand was pre-eminently the site of active touching. The hand comes newly to rival the face in descriptive significance in mid-nineteenth-century fiction, and reflects contemporary notions of the role of touch in the exercise of the will and the development of the sensorium. This article explores medical and philosophical understandings of embodied touch within the period, and examines why the hand emerged as a focal point for scientific, poetic, and popular discussion. Such scientists as Charles Bell, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain tend to work within two paradigms: the hand as a site of sensory input that forms a conduit between inner and outer worlds, and the hand as an instrument of the will. The article explores Dickens's use of these ideas about touch and development in his 1850 'Bildungsroman', 'David Copperfield'. David struggles to establish his proper status as a middle-class male, in part by learning to use his hands to impose his own will and to resist the dominance of inappropriate others through touch.

Performing Allen's test in immobile hand: The Esmarch bandage method

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Nebil Yesiloglu

2015-12-01

Full Text Available In this study, an alternative method of assessing hand vascular flow using a modification of Allen's test is presented. This technique may be helpful for patients who have immobile hands due to severe trauma, patients scheduled for free tissue transfer reconstruction, patients under general anesthesia in intensive care units that require serial arterial blood gas analyses, and emergency coronary by-pass candidates who decided to receive radial arterial grafts. [Hand Microsurg 2015; 4(3.000: 83-85

Right-handed neutrinos and T-violating, P-conserving interactions

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Basem Kamal El-Menoufi

2017-02-01

Full Text Available We show that experimental probes of the P-conserving, T-violating triple correlation in polarized neutron or nuclear β-decay provide a unique probe of possible T-violation at the TeV scale in the presence of right-handed neutrinos. In contrast to other possible sources of semileptonic T-violation involving only left-handed neutrinos, those involving right-handed neutrinos are relatively unconstrained by present limits on the permanent electric dipole moments of the electron, neutral atoms, and the neutron. On the other hand, LHC results for pp→e+ missing transverse energy imply that an order of magnitude of improvement in D-coefficient sensitivity would be needed for discovery. Finally, we discuss the interplay with the scale of neutrino mass and naturalness considerations.

Bimanual proprioception: are two hands better than one?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wong, J.D.; Wilson, E.T.; Kistemaker, D.A.; Gribble, P.L.

2014-01-01

Information about the position of an object that is held in both hands, such as a golf club or a tennis racquet, is transmitted to the human central nervous system from peripheral sensors in both left and right arms. How does the brain combine these two sources of information? Using a robot to move

Recurrent lactic acidosis secondary to hand sanitizer ingestion

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M E Wilson

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Due to their ability to decrease the spread of infection, hand sanitizers are now ubiquitous in health care settings. We present the case of a 50-year-old woman who was admitted with acute alcohol intoxication and had near complete recovery in 12 hrs. Subsequently, she was found unresponsive on the floor of her hospital room on two separate occasions. Evaluations revealed repeatedly elevated levels of ethanol, acetone, and lactate as well as increased anion gap and hypotension, requiring intensive care unit evaluation and intubation for airway protection. During the second episode, she was found next to an empty bottle of ethanol-based hospital hand sanitizer. She confirmed ingesting hand sanitizer in order to become intoxicated.

SparkText: Biomedical Text Mining on Big Data Framework

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He, Karen Y.; Wang, Kai

2016-01-01

Background Many new biomedical research articles are published every day, accumulating rich information, such as genetic variants, genes, diseases, and treatments. Rapid yet accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature can discover novel knowledge to better understand human diseases and to improve the quality of disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Results In this study, we designed and developed an efficient text mining framework called SparkText on a Big Data infrastructure, which is composed of Apache Spark data streaming and machine learning methods, combined with a Cassandra NoSQL database. To demonstrate its performance for classifying cancer types, we extracted information (e.g., breast, prostate, and lung cancers) from tens of thousands of articles downloaded from PubMed, and then employed Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression to build prediction models to mine the articles. The accuracy of predicting a cancer type by SVM using the 29,437 full-text articles was 93.81%. While competing text-mining tools took more than 11 hours, SparkText mined the dataset in approximately 6 minutes. Conclusions This study demonstrates the potential for mining large-scale scientific articles on a Big Data infrastructure, with real-time update from new articles published daily. SparkText can be extended to other areas of biomedical research. PMID:27685652

Left, right, left, right, eyes to the front! Müller-Lyer bias in grasping is not a function of hand used, hand preferred or visual hemifield, but foveation does matter.

OpenAIRE

van der Kamp, J.; de Wit, M.M.; Masters, R.S.W.

2012-01-01

We investigated whether the control of movement of the left hand is more likely to involve the use of allocentric information than movements performed with the right hand. Previous studies (Gonzalez et al. in J Neurophys 95:3496-3501, 2006; De Grave et al. in Exp Br Res 193:421-427, 2009) have reported contradictory findings in this respect. In the present study, right-handed participants (N = 12) and left-handed participants (N = 12) made right- and left-handed grasps to foveated objects and...

The Effects of Literacy Support Tools on the Comprehension of Informational e-Books and Print-Based Text

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Herman, Heather A.

2017-01-01

This mixed methods research explores the effects of literacy support tools to support comprehension strategies when reading informational e-books and print-based text with 14 first-grade students. This study focused on the following comprehension strategies: annotating connections, annotating "I wonders," and looking back in the text.…

Driver Cellphone and Texting Bans in the United States: Evidence of Effectiveness

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McCartt, Anne T.; Kidd, David G.; Teoh, Eric R.

2014-01-01

Almost all U.S. states have laws limiting drivers’ cellphone use. The evidence suggests that all-driver bans on hand-held phone conversations have resulted in long-term reductions in hand-held phone use, and drivers in ban states reported higher rates of hands-free phone use and lower overall phone use compared with drivers in non-ban states. Bans on all phone use by teenage drivers have not been shown to reduce their phone use. The effects of texting bans on the rates of drivers’ texting are unknown. With regard to the effects of bans on crashes, 11 peer-reviewed papers or technical reports of all-driver hand-held phone bans and texting bans were reviewed. Some were single-state studies examining crash measures before and after a state ban; other national or multi-state studies compared crashes in states with and without bans over time. The results varied widely. The lack of appropriate controls and other challenges in conducting strong evaluations limited the findings of some studies. Thus, despite the proliferation of laws limiting drivers’ cellphone use, it is unclear whether they are having the desired effects on safety. Priorities for future research are suggested. PMID:24776230

A Study on Environmental Research Trends Using Text-Mining Method - Focus on Spatial information and ICT -

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, M. J.; Oh, K. Y.; Joung-ho, L.

2016-12-01

Recently there are many research about analysing the interaction between entities by text-mining analysis in various fields. In this paper, we aimed to quantitatively analyse research-trends in the area of environmental research relating either spatial information or ICT (Information and Communications Technology) by Text-mining analysis. To do this, we applied low-dimensional embedding method, clustering analysis, and association rule to find meaningful associative patterns of key words frequently appeared in the articles. As the authors suppose that KCI (Korea Citation Index) articles reflect academic demands, total 1228 KCI articles that have been published from 1996 to 2015 were reviewed and analysed by Text-mining method. First, we derived KCI articles from NDSL(National Discovery for Science Leaders) site. And then we pre-processed their key-words elected from abstract and then classified those in separable sectors. We investigated the appearance rates and association rule of key-words for articles in the two fields: spatial-information and ICT. In order to detect historic trends, analysis was conducted separately for the four periods: 1996-2000, 2001-2005, 2006-2010, 2011-2015. These analysis were conducted with the usage of R-software. As a result, we conformed that environmental research relating spatial information mainly focused upon such fields as `GIS(35%)', `Remote-Sensing(25%)', `environmental theme map(15.7%)'. Next, `ICT technology(23.6%)', `ICT service(5.4%)', `mobile(24%)', `big data(10%)', `AI(7%)' are primarily emerging from environmental research relating ICT. Thus, from the analysis results, this paper asserts that research trends and academic progresses are well-structured to review recent spatial information and ICT technology and the outcomes of the analysis can be an adequate guidelines to establish environment policies and strategies. KEY WORDS: Big data, Test-mining, Environmental research, Spatial-information, ICT Acknowledgements: The

The role of readability in effective health communication: an experiment using a Japanese health information text on chronic suppurative otitis media.

Science.gov (United States)

Sakai, Yukiko

2013-09-01

This study identifies the most significant readability factors and examines ways of improving and evaluating Japanese health information text in terms of ease of reading and understanding. Six different Japanese texts were prepared based on an original short text written by a medical doctor for a hospital web site intended for laypersons regarding chronic suppurative otitis media. Four were revised for single readability factor (syntax, vocabulary, or text structure) and two were modified in all three factors. Using a web-based survey, 270 high school students read one of the seven texts, including the original, completed two kinds of comprehension tests, and answered questions on their impressions of the text's readability. Significantly higher comprehension test scores were shown in the true or false test for a mixed text that presented important information first for better text structure. They were also found in the cloze test for a text using common vocabulary and a cohesive mixed text. Vocabulary could be a critical single readability factor when presumably combined with better text structure. Using multiple evaluation methods can help assess comprehensive readability. The findings on improvement and evaluation methods of readability can be applied to support effective health communication. © 2013 The authors. Health Information and Libraries Journal © 2013 Health Libraries Group Health Information and Libraries Journal.

BrailleEasy: One-handed Braille Keyboard for Smartphones.

Science.gov (United States)

Šepić, Barbara; Ghanem, Abdurrahman; Vogel, Stephan

2015-01-01

The evolution of mobile technology is moving at a very fast pace. Smartphones are currently considered a primary communication platform where people exchange voice calls, text messages and emails. The human-smartphone interaction, however, is generally optimized for sighted people through the use of visual cues on the touchscreen, e.g., typing text by tapping on a visual keyboard. Unfortunately, this interaction scheme renders smartphone technology largely inaccessible to visually impaired people as it results in slow typing and higher error rates. Apple and some third party applications provide solutions specific to blind people which enables them to use Braille on smartphones. These applications usually require both hands for typing. However, Brailling with both hands while holding the phone is not very comfortable. Furthermore, two-handed Brailling is not possible on smartwatches, which will be used more pervasively in the future. Therefore, we develop a platform for one-handed Brailing consisting of a custom keyboard called BrailleEasy to input Arabic or English Braille codes within any application, and a BrailleTutor application for practicing. Our platform currently supports Braille grade 1, and will be extended to support contractions, spelling correction, and more languages. Preliminary analysis of user studies for blind participants showed that after less than two hours of practice, participants were able to type significantly faster with the BrailleEasy keyboard than with the standard QWERTY keyboard.

Early intensive hand rehabilitation after spinal cord injury ("Hands On": a protocol for a randomised controlled trial

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Hsueh Ya-Seng

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Loss of hand function is one of the most devastating consequences of spinal cord injury. Intensive hand training provided on an instrumented exercise workstation in conjunction with functional electrical stimulation may enhance neural recovery and hand function. The aim of this trial is to compare usual care with an 8-week program of intensive hand training and functional electrical stimulation. Methods/design A multicentre randomised controlled trial will be undertaken. Seventy-eight participants with recent tetraplegia (C2 to T1 motor complete or incomplete undergoing inpatient rehabilitation will be recruited from seven spinal cord injury units in Australia and New Zealand and will be randomised to a control or experimental group. Control participants will receive usual care. Experimental participants will receive usual care and an 8-week program of intensive unilateral hand training using an instrumented exercise workstation and functional electrical stimulation. Participants will drive the functional electrical stimulation of their target hands via a behind-the-ear bluetooth device, which is sensitive to tooth clicks. The bluetooth device will enable the use of various manipulanda to practice functional activities embedded within computer-based games and activities. Training will be provided for one hour, 5 days per week, during the 8-week intervention period. The primary outcome is the Action Research Arm Test. Secondary outcomes include measurements of strength, sensation, function, quality of life and cost effectiveness. All outcomes will be taken at baseline, 8 weeks, 6 months and 12 months by assessors blinded to group allocation. Recruitment commenced in December 2009. Discussion The results of this trial will determine the effectiveness of an 8-week program of intensive hand training with functional electrical stimulation. Trial registration NCT01086930 (12th March 2010 ACTRN12609000695202 (12th August 2009

Real-Time Hand Posture Recognition Using a Range Camera

Science.gov (United States)

Lahamy, Herve

The basic goal of human computer interaction is to improve the interaction between users and computers by making computers more usable and receptive to the user's needs. Within this context, the use of hand postures in replacement of traditional devices such as keyboards, mice and joysticks is being explored by many researchers. The goal is to interpret human postures via mathematical algorithms. Hand posture recognition has gained popularity in recent years, and could become the future tool for humans to interact with computers or virtual environments. An exhaustive description of the frequently used methods available in literature for hand posture recognition is provided. It focuses on the different types of sensors and data used, the segmentation and tracking methods, the features used to represent the hand postures as well as the classifiers considered in the recognition process. Those methods are usually presented as highly robust with a recognition rate close to 100%. However, a couple of critical points necessary for a successful real-time hand posture recognition system require major improvement. Those points include the features used to represent the hand segment, the number of postures simultaneously recognizable, the invariance of the features with respect to rotation, translation and scale and also the behavior of the classifiers against non-perfect hand segments for example segments including part of the arm or missing part of the palm. A 3D time-of-flight camera named SR4000 has been chosen to develop a new methodology because of its capability to provide in real-time and at high frame rate 3D information on the scene imaged. This sensor has been described and evaluated for its capability for capturing in real-time a moving hand. A new recognition method that uses the 3D information provided by the range camera to recognize hand postures has been proposed. The different steps of this methodology including the segmentation, the tracking, the hand

Spatial Representation of Ordinal Information

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Meng eZhang

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Right hand responds faster than left hand when shown larger numbers and vice-versa when shown smaller numbers (the SNARC effect. Accumulating evidence suggests that the SNARC effect may not be exclusive for numbers and can be extended to other ordinal sequences (e.g., months or letters in the alphabet as well. In this study, we tested the SNARC effect with a non-numerically ordered sequence: The Chinese notations for the color spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Chinese color word sequence reserves relatively weak ordinal information, because each element color in the sequence normally appears in non-sequential contexts, making it ideal to test the spatial organization of sequential information that was stored in the long-term memory. This study found a reliable SNARC-like effect for Chinese color words (deciding whether the presented color word was before or after the reference color word green, suggesting that, without access to any quantitative information or exposure to any previous training, ordinal representation can still activate a sense of space. The results support that weak ordinal information without quantitative magnitude encoded in the long-term memory can activate spatial representation in a comparison task.

Enhanced Motor Imagery-Based BCI Performance via Tactile Stimulation on Unilateral Hand

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Xiaokang Shu

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Brain-computer interface (BCI has attracted great interests for its effectiveness in assisting disabled people. However, due to the poor BCI performance, this technique is still far from daily-life applications. One of critical issues confronting BCI research is how to enhance BCI performance. This study aimed at improving the motor imagery (MI based BCI accuracy by integrating MI tasks with unilateral tactile stimulation (Uni-TS. The effects were tested on both healthy subjects and stroke patients in a controlled study. Twenty-two healthy subjects and four stroke patients were recruited and randomly divided into a control-group and an enhanced-group. In the control-group, subjects performed two blocks of conventional MI tasks (left hand vs. right hand, with 80 trials in each block. In the enhanced-group, subjects also performed two blocks of MI tasks, but constant tactile stimulation was applied on the non-dominant/paretic hand during MI tasks in the second block. We found the Uni-TS significantly enhanced the contralateral cortical activations during MI of the stimulated hand, whereas it had no influence on activation patterns during MI of the non-stimulated hand. The two-class BCI decoding accuracy was significantly increased from 72.5% (MI without Uni-TS to 84.7% (MI with Uni-TS in the enhanced-group (p < 0.001, paired t-test. Moreover, stroke patients in the enhanced-group achieved an accuracy >80% during MI with Uni-TS. This novel approach complements the conventional methods for BCI enhancement without increasing source information or complexity of signal processing. This enhancement via Uni-TS may facilitate clinical applications of MI-BCI.

Text mining in livestock animal science: introducing the potential of text mining to animal sciences.

Science.gov (United States)

Sahadevan, S; Hofmann-Apitius, M; Schellander, K; Tesfaye, D; Fluck, J; Friedrich, C M

2012-10-01

In biological research, establishing the prior art by searching and collecting information already present in the domain has equal importance as the experiments done. To obtain a complete overview about the relevant knowledge, researchers mainly rely on 2 major information sources: i) various biological databases and ii) scientific publications in the field. The major difference between the 2 information sources is that information from databases is available, typically well structured and condensed. The information content in scientific literature is vastly unstructured; that is, dispersed among the many different sections of scientific text. The traditional method of information extraction from scientific literature occurs by generating a list of relevant publications in the field of interest and manually scanning these texts for relevant information, which is very time consuming. It is more than likely that in using this "classical" approach the researcher misses some relevant information mentioned in the literature or has to go through biological databases to extract further information. Text mining and named entity recognition methods have already been used in human genomics and related fields as a solution to this problem. These methods can process and extract information from large volumes of scientific text. Text mining is defined as the automatic extraction of previously unknown and potentially useful information from text. Named entity recognition (NER) is defined as the method of identifying named entities (names of real world objects; for example, gene/protein names, drugs, enzymes) in text. In animal sciences, text mining and related methods have been briefly used in murine genomics and associated fields, leaving behind other fields of animal sciences, such as livestock genomics. The aim of this work was to develop an information retrieval platform in the livestock domain focusing on livestock publications and the recognition of relevant data from

Hand biometric recognition based on fused hand geometry and vascular patterns.

Science.gov (United States)

Park, GiTae; Kim, Soowon

2013-02-28

A hand biometric authentication method based on measurements of the user's hand geometry and vascular pattern is proposed. To acquire the hand geometry, the thickness of the side view of the hand, the K-curvature with a hand-shaped chain code, the lengths and angles of the finger valleys, and the lengths and profiles of the fingers were used, and for the vascular pattern, the direction-based vascular-pattern extraction method was used, and thus, a new multimodal biometric approach is proposed. The proposed multimodal biometric system uses only one image to extract the feature points. This system can be configured for low-cost devices. Our multimodal biometric-approach hand-geometry (the side view of the hand and the back of hand) and vascular-pattern recognition method performs at the score level. The results of our study showed that the equal error rate of the proposed system was 0.06%.

Hand hygiene posters: selling the message.

Science.gov (United States)

Jenner, E A; Jones, F; Fletcher, B C; Miller, L; Scott, G M

2005-02-01

This literature review was undertaken to determine the established theory and research that might be utilized to inform the construction of persuasive messages on hand hygiene posters. It discusses the principles of message framing and the use of fear appeals. Current theory suggests that the most effective messages for health promotion behaviours should be framed in terms of gains rather than losses for the individual. However, as clinical hand hygiene is largely for the benefit of others (i.e. patients), messages should also invoke a sense of personal responsibility and appeal to altruistic behaviour. The use of repeated minimal fear appeals have their place. Posters that simply convey training messages are not effective persuaders.

Hand proximity differentially affects visual working memory for color and orientation in a binding task.

Science.gov (United States)

Kelly, Shane P; Brockmole, James R

2014-01-01

Observers determined whether two sequentially presented arrays of six lines were the same or different. Differences, when present, involved either a swap in the color of two lines or a swap in the orientation of two lines. Thus, accurate change detection required the binding of color and orientation information for each line within visual working memory. Holding viewing distance constant, the proximity of the arrays to the hands was manipulated. Placing the hands near the to-be-remembered array decreased participants' ability to remember color information, but increased their ability to remember orientation information. This pair of results indicates that hand proximity differentially affects the processing of various types of visual information, a conclusion broadly consistent with functional and anatomical differences in the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. It further indicates that hand proximity affects the likelihood that various object features will be encoded into integrated object files.

Hand Hygiene With Alcohol-Based Hand Rub: How Long Is Long Enough?

Science.gov (United States)

Pires, Daniela; Soule, Hervé; Bellissimo-Rodrigues, Fernando; Gayet-Ageron, Angèle; Pittet, Didier

2017-05-01

BACKGROUND Hand hygiene is the core element of infection prevention and control. The optimal hand-hygiene gesture, however, remains poorly defined. OBJECTIVE We aimed to evaluate the influence of hand-rubbing duration on the reduction of bacterial counts on the hands of healthcare personnel (HCP). METHODS We performed an experimental study based on the European Norm 1500. Hand rubbing was performed for 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 60 seconds, according to the WHO technique using 3 mL alcohol-based hand rub. Hand contamination with E. coli ATCC 10536 was followed by hand rubbing and sampling. A generalized linear mixed model with a random effect on the subject adjusted for hand size and gender was used to analyze the reduction in bacterial counts after each hand-rubbing action. In addition, hand-rubbing durations of 15 and 30 seconds were compared to assert non-inferiority (0.6 log10). RESULTS In total, 32 HCP performed 123 trials. All durations of hand rubbing led to significant reductions in bacterial counts (Phand rubbing were not significantly different from those obtained after 30 seconds. The mean bacterial reduction after 15 seconds of hand rubbing was 0.11 log10 lower (95% CI, -0.46 to 0.24) than after 30 seconds, demonstrating non-inferiority. CONCLUSIONS Hand rubbing for 15 seconds was not inferior to 30 seconds in reducing bacterial counts on hands under the described experimental conditions. There was no gain in reducing bacterial counts from hand rubbing longer than 30 seconds. Further studies are needed to assess the clinical significance of our findings. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2017;38:547-552.

Extraction of Pluvial Flood Relevant Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI by Deep Learning from User Generated Texts and Photos

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Yu Feng

2018-01-01

Full Text Available In recent years, pluvial floods caused by extreme rainfall events have occurred frequently. Especially in urban areas, they lead to serious damages and endanger the citizens’ safety. Therefore, real-time information about such events is desirable. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, information provided by voluntary users becomes a valuable source for emergency response. Many applications have been built for disaster detection and flood mapping using crowdsourcing. Most of the applications so far have merely used keyword filtering or classical language processing methods to identify disaster relevant documents based on user generated texts. As the reliability of social media information is often under criticism, the precision of information retrieval plays a significant role for further analyses. Thus, in this paper, high quality eyewitnesses of rainfall and flooding events are retrieved from social media by applying deep learning approaches on user generated texts and photos. Subsequently, events are detected through spatiotemporal clustering and visualized together with these high quality eyewitnesses in a web map application. Analyses and case studies are conducted during flooding events in Paris, London and Berlin.

Hand in Hand - SEI Programmes for School Staff

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Birgitte Lund; Réol, Lise Andersen; Laursen, Hilmar Dyrborg

2017-01-01

This catalogue of research in the field of SEI programmes for the school staff’s and teachers’ SEI competencies is based on a review performed by the main researchers Birgitte Lund Nielsen, Lise Andersen Réol and Hilmar Dyrborg Laursen, VIA University College, Denmark, but discussed by the entire...... team of Hand in Hand partner countries and researchers. The aim was to identify the central aspects and elements concerning successful implementation, and school staff’s development of professional competencies in the specific field of supporting students’ social, emotional and intercultural (SEI......) competencies. Abstract: Framed by the EU-project Hand in Hand focusing on Social, Emotional and Intercultural (SEI) competencies among students and school staff, the paper discusses implementation and professional competencies based on a research review. The following five topics were identified: 1...

Hand Biometric Recognition Based on Fused Hand Geometry and Vascular Patterns

Science.gov (United States)

Park, GiTae; Kim, Soowon

2013-01-01

A hand biometric authentication method based on measurements of the user's hand geometry and vascular pattern is proposed. To acquire the hand geometry, the thickness of the side view of the hand, the K-curvature with a hand-shaped chain code, the lengths and angles of the finger valleys, and the lengths and profiles of the fingers were used, and for the vascular pattern, the direction-based vascular-pattern extraction method was used, and thus, a new multimodal biometric approach is proposed. The proposed multimodal biometric system uses only one image to extract the feature points. This system can be configured for low-cost devices. Our multimodal biometric-approach hand-geometry (the side view of the hand and the back of hand) and vascular-pattern recognition method performs at the score level. The results of our study showed that the equal error rate of the proposed system was 0.06%. PMID:23449119

Hand hygiene in hospital environments: use of conformity indicators

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thaíne Cristina Romualdo dos SANTOS

Full Text Available An exploratory descriptive study with a quantitative approach whose objective was to use indicators to evaluate the frequency and infrastructure for hand hygiene, as well as the nursing team's knowledge about the subject. Systematized observation was carried out at hospital in the state of São Paulo, Brazil of the routine activities of 33 participating professionals (nurses and technicians as well as the application of an individual questionnaire about the subject.1206 opportunities for hand hygiene were identified, though it was effected in only 481 (39.9% of them. Alcohol solution was not used at any opportunity. The infrastructure indicator for hand hygiene was close to the ideal value (83.3%. The professionals reported a high frequency of hand hygiene, demonstrating knowledge in relation to its importance, yet contradicting the findings of the observation. It was concluded that, despite the adequate infrastructure, hand hygiene was below that expected, requiring actions and strategies to overcomes these barrier and increase the use of alcohol solution.

Entity recognition from clinical texts via recurrent neural network.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Zengjian; Yang, Ming; Wang, Xiaolong; Chen, Qingcai; Tang, Buzhou; Wang, Zhe; Xu, Hua

2017-07-05

Entity recognition is one of the most primary steps for text analysis and has long attracted considerable attention from researchers. In the clinical domain, various types of entities, such as clinical entities and protected health information (PHI), widely exist in clinical texts. Recognizing these entities has become a hot topic in clinical natural language processing (NLP), and a large number of traditional machine learning methods, such as support vector machine and conditional random field, have been deployed to recognize entities from clinical texts in the past few years. In recent years, recurrent neural network (RNN), one of deep learning methods that has shown great potential on many problems including named entity recognition, also has been gradually used for entity recognition from clinical texts. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the performance of LSTM (long-short term memory), a representative variant of RNN, on clinical entity recognition and protected health information recognition. The LSTM model consists of three layers: input layer - generates representation of each word of a sentence; LSTM layer - outputs another word representation sequence that captures the context information of each word in this sentence; Inference layer - makes tagging decisions according to the output of LSTM layer, that is, outputting a label sequence. Experiments conducted on corpora of the 2010, 2012 and 2014 i2b2 NLP challenges show that LSTM achieves highest micro-average F1-scores of 85.81% on the 2010 i2b2 medical concept extraction, 92.29% on the 2012 i2b2 clinical event detection, and 94.37% on the 2014 i2b2 de-identification, which is considerably competitive with other state-of-the-art systems. LSTM that requires no hand-crafted feature has great potential on entity recognition from clinical texts. It outperforms traditional machine learning methods that suffer from fussy feature engineering. A possible future direction is how to integrate knowledge

The Mirrored Hand Illusion: I Control, So I Possess?

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Aibao; Zhang, Yanchi; Yin, Yulong; Yang, Yang

2015-01-01

Certain situations may not only cause people to misjudge external information but also distort people's perception of themselves. The present study is the first to report the mirrored hand illusion which could be generated when the experimenter imitated the fist-clenching movements of the subject synchronously. The subjects formed the illusion that the experimenter's hand was "something I can control" when being imitated synchronously. In addition, a sense of ownership over the alien hand was established by integrating multisensory signals and comparing these signals with preexisting body presentations. This method might represent a new avenue for research on the formation of self-consciousness. © The Author(s) 2015.

Cleaning OCR'd text with Regular Expressions

OpenAIRE

Laura Turner O'Hara

2013-01-01

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—the conversion of scanned images to machine-encoded text—has proven a godsend for historical research. This process allows texts to be searchable on one hand and more easily parsed and mined on the other. But we’ve all noticed that the OCR for historic texts is far from perfect. Old type faces and formats make for unique OCR. How might we improve poor quality OCR? The answer is Regular Expressions or “regex.”

Spinal kinematics during smartphone texting - A comparison between young adults with and without chronic neck-shoulder pain.

Science.gov (United States)

Xie, Yan Fei; Szeto, Grace; Madeleine, Pascal; Tsang, Sharon

2018-04-01

To advance our understanding about the association between smartphone use and chronic neck-shoulder pain, the objective of this study was to compare spinal kinematics between different text-entry methods in smartphone users with and without chronic neck-shoulder pain. Symptomatic (n = 19) and healthy participants (n = 18) were recruited and they performed three tasks: texting on a smartphone with one hand, with two hands, and typing on a desktop computer. Three-dimensional kinematics were examined in the cervical, thoracic and lumbar regions for each task. This study suggests that altered kinematics may be associated with pain since significantly increased angles of cervical right side flexion during smartphone texting and greater postural changes in cervical rotation were found during all text-entry tasks in the symptomatic group. Two-handed texting was associated with increased cervical flexion while one-handed texting was correlated with an asymmetric neck posture, indicating both text-entry methods are not favorable in terms of spinal postures. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An Approach for Pattern Recognition of EEG Applied in Prosthetic Hand Drive

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Xiao-Dong Zhang

2011-12-01

Full Text Available For controlling the prosthetic hand by only electroencephalogram (EEG, it has become the hot spot in robotics research to set up a direct communication and control channel between human brain and prosthetic hand. In this paper, the EEG signal is analyzed based on multi-complicated hand activities. And then, two methods of EEG pattern recognition are investigated, a neural prosthesis hand system driven by BCI is set up, which can complete four kinds of actions (arm’s free state, arm movement, hand crawl, hand open. Through several times of off-line and on-line experiments, the result shows that the neural prosthesis hand system driven by BCI is reasonable and feasible, the C-support vector classifiers-based method is better than BP neural network on the EEG pattern recognition for multi-complicated hand activities.

Inspections of Hand Washing Supplies and Hand Sanitizer in Public Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Ramos, Mary M.; Blea, Mary; Trujillo, Rebecca; Greenberg, Cynthia

2010-01-01

Hand washing and hand antisepsis are proven infection control measures in the school setting, yet barriers such as lack of soap, paper towels, and hand sanitizer can hinder compliance. This pilot study measured the prevalence of hand cleaning supplies in public schools. Ten school districts (93 schools) participated in school nurse inspections. In…

Comprehending text in literature class

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Purić Daliborka S.

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The paper discusses the problem of understanding a text and the contribution of methodological apparatus in the reader book to comprehension of a text being read in junior classes of elementary school. By using the technique of content analysis from methodological apparatuses in eight reader books for the fourth grade of elementary school, approved for usage in 2014/2015 academic year, and surveying 350 teachers in 33 elementary schools and 11 administrative districts in the Republic of Serbia we examined: (a to what extent the Serbian language text book contents enable junior students to understand a literary text; (b to what extent teachers accept the suggestions offered in the textbook for preparing literature teaching. The results show that a large number of suggestions relate to reading comprehension, but some of categories of understanding are unevenly distributed in the methodological apparatus. On the other hand, the majority of teachers use the methodological apparatus given in a textbook for preparing classes, not only the textbook he or she selected for teaching but also other textbooks for the same grade.

Effect of hand sanitizer location on hand hygiene compliance.

Science.gov (United States)

Cure, Laila; Van Enk, Richard

2015-09-01

Hand hygiene is the most important intervention to prevent infection in hospitals. Health care workers should clean their hands at least before and after contact with patients. Hand sanitizer dispensers are important to support hand hygiene because they can be made available throughout hospital units. The aim of this study was to determine whether the usability of sanitizer dispensers correlates with compliance of staff in using the sanitizer in a hospital. This study took place in a Midwest, 404-bed, private, nonprofit community hospital with 15 inpatient care units in addition to several ambulatory units. The usability and standardization of sanitizers in 12 participating inpatient units were evaluated. The hospital measured compliance of staff with hand hygiene as part of their quality improvement program. Data from 2010-2012 were analyzed to measure the relationship between compliance and usability using mixed-effects logistic regression models. The total usability score (P = .0046), visibility (P = .003), and accessibility of the sanitizer on entrance to the patient room (P = .00055) were statistically associated with higher observed compliance rates. Standardization alone showed no significant impact on observed compliance (P = .37). Hand hygiene compliance can be influenced by visibility and accessibility of dispensers. The sanitizer location should be part of multifaceted interventions to improve hand hygiene. Copyright © 2015 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Die Sprache der Hande zu den Handen sprechen (Talking the Language of the Hands to the Hands). DB-LINK.

Science.gov (United States)

Miles, Barbara

This paper examines the importance of hands for the person who is deafblind, reviews hand development, and identifies specific teaching skills that facilitate hand development and expressiveness in persons who are deafblind. It notes that the hands of a deafblind individual serve not only as tools but also as sense organs (to compensate for their…

A review on the application of medical infrared thermal imaging in hands

Science.gov (United States)

Sousa, Elsa; Vardasca, Ricardo; Teixeira, Sérgio; Seixas, Adérito; Mendes, Joaquim; Costa-Ferreira, António

2017-09-01

Infrared Thermal (IRT) imaging is a medical imaging modality to study skin temperature in real time, providing physiological information about the underlining structures. One of the most accessible body sites to be investigated using such imaging method is the hands, which can reflect valuable information about conditions affecting the upper limbs. The aim of this review is to acquaint the successful applications of IRT in the hands with a medical scope, opening horizons for future applications based in the achieved results. A systematic literature review was performed in order to assess in which applications medical IRT imaging was applied to the hands. The literature search was conducted in the reference databases: PubMed, Scopus and ISI Web of Science, making use of keywords (hand, thermography, infrared imaging, thermal imaging) combination that were present at the title and abstract. No temporal restriction was made. As a result, 4260 articles were identified, after removal of duplicates, 3224 articles remained and from first title and abstract filtering, a total of 388 articles were considered. After application of exclusion criteria (non-availability, non-clinical applications, reviews, case studies, written in other languages than English and using liquid crystal thermography), 146 articles were considered for this review. It can be verified that thermography provides useful diagnostic and monitoring information of conditions that directly or indirectly related to hands, as well as aiding in the treatment assessment. Trends and future challenges for IRT applications on hands are provided to stimulate researchers and clinicians to explore and address them.

Web-based interactive drone control using hand gesture

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Zhenfei; Luo, Hao; Song, Guang-Hua; Chen, Zhou; Lu, Zhe-Ming; Wu, Xiaofeng

2018-01-01

This paper develops a drone control prototype based on web technology with the aid of hand gesture. The uplink control command and downlink data (e.g., video) are transmitted by WiFi communication, and all the information exchange is realized on web. The control command is translated from various predetermined hand gestures. Specifically, the hardware of this friendly interactive control system is composed by a quadrotor drone, a computer vision-based hand gesture sensor, and a cost-effective computer. The software is simplified as a web-based user interface program. Aided by natural hand gestures, this system significantly reduces the complexity of traditional human-computer interaction, making remote drone operation more intuitive. Meanwhile, a web-based automatic control mode is provided in addition to the hand gesture control mode. For both operation modes, no extra application program is needed to be installed on the computer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system, including control accuracy, operation latency, etc. This system can be used in many applications such as controlling a drone in global positioning system denied environment or by handlers without professional drone control knowledge since it is easy to get started.

Web-based interactive drone control using hand gesture.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Zhenfei; Luo, Hao; Song, Guang-Hua; Chen, Zhou; Lu, Zhe-Ming; Wu, Xiaofeng

2018-01-01

This paper develops a drone control prototype based on web technology with the aid of hand gesture. The uplink control command and downlink data (e.g., video) are transmitted by WiFi communication, and all the information exchange is realized on web. The control command is translated from various predetermined hand gestures. Specifically, the hardware of this friendly interactive control system is composed by a quadrotor drone, a computer vision-based hand gesture sensor, and a cost-effective computer. The software is simplified as a web-based user interface program. Aided by natural hand gestures, this system significantly reduces the complexity of traditional human-computer interaction, making remote drone operation more intuitive. Meanwhile, a web-based automatic control mode is provided in addition to the hand gesture control mode. For both operation modes, no extra application program is needed to be installed on the computer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system, including control accuracy, operation latency, etc. This system can be used in many applications such as controlling a drone in global positioning system denied environment or by handlers without professional drone control knowledge since it is easy to get started.

Accuracy of outcome anticipation, but not gaze behavior, differs against left- and right-handed penalties in team-handball goalkeeping

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Florian eLoffing

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Low perceptual familiarity with relatively rarer left-handed as opposed to more common right-handed individuals may result in athletes’ poorer ability to anticipate the former’s action intentions. Part of such left-right asymmetry in visual anticipation could be due to an inefficient gaze strategy during confrontation with left-handed individuals. To exemplify, observers may not mirror their gaze when viewing left- vs. right-handed actions but preferentially fixate on an opponent’s right body side, irrespective of an opponent’s handedness, owing to the predominant exposure to right-handed actions. So far empirical verification of such assumption, however, is lacking. Here we report on an experiment where team-handball goalkeepers’ and non-goalkeepers’ gaze behavior was recorded while they predicted throw direction of left- and right-handed seven-meter penalties shown as videos on a computer monitor. As expected, goalkeepers were considerably more accurate than non-goalkeepers and prediction was better against right- than left-handed penalties. However, there was no indication of differences in gaze measures (i.e., number of fixations, overall and final fixation duration, time-course of horizontal or vertical fixation deviation as a function of skill group or the penalty-takers’ handedness. Findings suggest that inferior anticipation of left-handed compared to right-handed individuals’ action intentions may not be associated with misalignment in gaze behavior. Rather, albeit looking similarly, accuracy differences could be due to observers’ differential ability of picking up and interpreting the visual information provided by left- vs. right-handed movements.

Hand hygiene strategies

OpenAIRE

Yazaji, Eskandar Alex

2011-01-01

Hand hygiene is one of the major players in preventing healthcare associated infections. However, healthcare workers compliance with hand hygiene continues to be a challenge. This article will address strategies to help improving hand hygiene compliance. Keywords: hand hygiene; healthcare associated infections; multidisciplinary program; system change; accountability; education; feedback(Published: 18 July 2011)Citation: Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives 2011, 1: 72...

Is body dysmorphic disorder associated with abnormal bodily self-awareness? A study using the rubber hand illusion.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ryan A Kaplan

Full Text Available Evidence from past research suggests that behaviours and characteristics related to body dissatisfaction may be associated with greater instability of perceptual body image, possibly due to problems in the integration of body-related multisensory information. We investigated whether people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD, a condition characterised by body image disturbances, demonstrated enhanced susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI, which arises as a result of multisensory integration processes when a rubber hand and the participant's hidden real hand are stimulated in synchrony. Overall, differences in RHI experience between the BDD group and healthy and schizophrenia control groups (n = 17 in each were not significant. RHI strength, however, was positively associated with body dissatisfaction and related tendencies. For the healthy control group, proprioceptive drift towards the rubber hand was observed following synchronous but not asynchronous stimulation, a typical pattern when inducing the RHI. Similar drifts in proprioceptive awareness occurred for the BDD group irrespective of whether stimulation was synchronous or not. These results are discussed in terms of possible abnormalities in visual processing and multisensory integration among people with BDD.

Healthcare personnel perceptions of hand hygiene monitoring technology.

Science.gov (United States)

Ellingson, Katherine; Polgreen, Philip M; Schneider, Amy; Shinkunas, Laura; Kaldjian, Lauris C; Wright, Donald; Thomas, Geb W; Segre, Alberto M; Herman, Ted; McDonald, L Clifford; Sinkowitz-Cochran, Ronda

2011-11-01

To assess healthcare personnel (HCP) perceptions regarding implementation of sensor-based electronic systems for automated hand hygiene adherence monitoring. Using a mixed-methods approach, structured focus groups were designed to elicit quantitative and qualitative responses on familiarity, comfort level, and perceived impact of sensor-based hand hygiene adherence monitoring. A university hospital, a Veterans Affairs hospital, and a community hospital in the Midwest. Focus groups were homogenous by HCP type, with separate groups held for leadership, midlevel management, and frontline personnel at each hospital. Overall, 89 HCP participated in 10 focus groups. Levels of familiarity and comfort with electronic oversight technology varied by HCP type; when compared with frontline HCP, those in leadership positions were significantly more familiar with ([Formula: see text]) and more comfortable with ([Formula: see text]) the technology. The most common concerns cited by participants across groups included lack of accuracy in the data produced, such as the inability of the technology to assess the situational context of hand hygiene opportunities, and the potential punitive use of data produced. Across groups, HCP had decreased tolerance for electronic collection of spatial-temporal data, describing such oversight as Big Brother. While substantial concerns were expressed by all types of HCP, participants' recommendations for effective implementation of electronic oversight technologies for hand hygiene monitoring included addressing accuracy issues before implementation and transparent communication with frontline HCP about the intended use of the data.

THE KNOWLEDGE OF HEALTH CARE WORKERS AND DOCTORS REGARDING HAND SCRUB

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Rahul Sanjeev Chaudhary

2016-08-01

Full Text Available BACKGROUND Hand hygiene practices of health care workers has been shown to be an effective measure in preventing hospital acquired infections. This concept has been aptly used to improve understanding, training, monitoring, and reporting hand hygiene among healthcare workers. We conducted this study to assess the knowledge of doctors and health care workers regarding hand scrub. METHODS A study was conducted among doctors and health care workers in a tertiary care hospital. Knowledge was evaluated by using self-structured questionnaire based on the guidelines of hand hygiene prescribed by WHO. RESULTS The awareness and knowledge of preoperative surgical hand scrubbing was moderate in doctors, but unfortunately poor in HCWs. CONCLUSION Our study highlights the need for introducing measures in order to increase the knowledge of preoperative hand scrub in teaching hospital which may translate into good practices.

A Biomechanical Model for the Development of Myoelectric Hand Prosthesis Control Systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Peerdeman, B.; van Baal, D.W.; Boere, Daphne; Kallenberg, L.A.C.; Stramigioli, Stefano; Misra, Sarthak

2010-01-01

Advanced myoelectric hand prostheses aim to reproduce as much of the human hand's functionality as possible. Development of the control system of such a prosthesis is strongly connected to its mechanical design; the control system requires accurate information on the prosthesis' structure and the

The human hand as an inspiration for robot hand development

CERN Document Server

Santos, Veronica

2014-01-01

“The Human Hand as an Inspiration for Robot Hand Development” presents an edited collection of authoritative contributions in the area of robot hands. The results described in the volume are expected to lead to more robust, dependable, and inexpensive distributed systems such as those endowed with complex and advanced sensing, actuation, computation, and communication capabilities. The twenty-four chapters discuss the field of robotic grasping and manipulation viewed in light of the human hand’s capabilities and push the state-of-the-art in robot hand design and control. Topics discussed include human hand biomechanics, neural control, sensory feedback and perception, and robotic grasp and manipulation. This book will be useful for researchers from diverse areas such as robotics, biomechanics, neuroscience, and anthropologists.

Alexithymia Modulates the Experience of the Rubber Hand Illusion

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Delphine eGrynberg

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Alexithymia is associated with lower awareness of emotional and non-emotional internal bodily signals. However, evidence suggesting that alexithymia modulates body awareness at an external level is scarce. This study aimed to investigate whether alexithymia is associated with disrupted multisensory integration by using the rubber hand illusion task.Fifty healthy individuals completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and underwent the rubber hand illusion measure. In this measure, one watches a rubber hand being stroked synchronously or asynchronously with one’s own hand, which is hidden from view. Compared to the asynchronous stimulation, the synchronous stimulation results in the illusion that the rubber hand and the participant’s hand are closer together than they really are and that the rubber hand belongs to them. Results revealed that higher levels of alexithymia are associated with a lower ownership illusion. In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that high alexithymia scorers integrate two simultaneous sensory and proprioceptive events into a single experience (lower multisensory integration to a lesser extent than low alexithymia scorers. Higher susceptibility to the illusion in high alexithymia scorers may -indicate that alexithymia is associated with impaired multisensory integration and that this association results from an abnormal focus of one's own body.

Reconstruction of hand contracture by reverse ulnar perforator flap

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Cengiz Eser

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Hand burn scar contractures affect patients in aesthetic and functional aspects. After releasing these scars, the defects should be repaired. The reconstruction methods include primary suturation, Z plasty, skin grafting, local or free flaps, etc. All methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. One of the most useful flaps is the reverse ulnar perforator flap. We performed a two-staged procedure for repairing a post-burn contracture release defect in a 40-year-old male. In the first stage we applied reverse ulnar perforator flap for the hand defect, and ulnar artery and vein repair in the second stage. In conclusion, this two-staged procedure is a non-primary but useful option for hand and finger defects and prevents major vascular structure damage of the forearm. [Hand Microsurg 2016; 5(1.000: 40-43

Hand eczema, atopic dermatitis and filaggrin mutations in adult Danes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Heede, Nina G.; Thuesen, Betina H.; Thyssen, Jacob P.

2017-01-01

in the general population, especially among individuals with a history of atopic dermatitis. Moreover, self-reported hand eczema and atopic dermatitis were associated with particularly high risk of disability pension among FLG mutation carriers [odds ratio (OR) 4.02 and 95% confidence interval (CI): 1...... with a genetically impaired skin barrier, were associated with disability pension, suggesting that FLG mutations carriers with a history of atopic dermatitis and hand eczema could benefit from early attention with respect to choice of occupation....... a questionnaire about skin symptoms and hand eczema. Socioeconomic variables, including disability pension, and information on work in risk occupations were retrieved from national registries. The reasons for granting disability pension were unknown. Results: Disability pension was associated with hand eczema...

Considerations for double-hand replantation in a resource-constrained healthcare facility

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bibhuti Bhusan Nayak

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Bilateral-hand amputation is extremely rare and double-hand replantation is even rarer. Only one case of successful double replantation at arm level has been reported from India. We present a case of double-hand replantation at proximal palmar level in a young adult executed in a small nursing home. The patient presented 5 h after injury with limbs preserved well in ice. There were difficulties in executing such an unusual case in a small nursing home set-up. The patient is performing his activities of daily living and basic functions independently. We share our experience of this double-hand replantation with special emphasis on problems encountered.

Predicting Prosody from Text for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

CERN Document Server

Rao, K Sreenivasa

2012-01-01

Predicting Prosody from Text for Text-to-Speech Synthesis covers the specific aspects of prosody, mainly focusing on how to predict the prosodic information from linguistic text, and then how to exploit the predicted prosodic knowledge for various speech applications. Author K. Sreenivasa Rao discusses proposed methods along with state-of-the-art techniques for the acquisition and incorporation of prosodic knowledge for developing speech systems. Positional, contextual and phonological features are proposed for representing the linguistic and production constraints of the sound units present in the text. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers working in the area of speech processing.

HandTutor™ enhanced hand rehabilitation after stroke--a pilot study.

Science.gov (United States)

Carmeli, Eli; Peleg, Sara; Bartur, Gadi; Elbo, Enbal; Vatine, Jean-Jacques

2011-12-01

This study assessed the potential therapeutic benefi t of using HandTutor™ in combination with traditional rehabilitation in a post-stroke sub-acute population. The study compares an experimental group receiving traditional therapy combined with HandTutorTM treatment, against a control group receiving only traditional therapy. An assessor-blinded, randomized controlled pilot trial, was conducted in the Reuth rehabilitation unit in Israel. Thirty-one stroke patients in the sub-acute phase, were randomly assigned to one of the two groups (experimental or control) in sets of three. The experimental group (n = 16) underwent a hand rehabilitation programme using the HandTutorTM combined with traditional therapy. The control group (n = 15) received only traditional therapy. The treatment schedules for both groups were of similar duration and frequency. Improvements were evaluated using three indicators: 1) The Brunnström-Fugl-Meyer (FM) test, 2) the Box and Blocks (B&B) test and 3) improvement parameters as determined by the HandTutorTM software. Following 15 consecutive treatment sessions, a signifi cant improvement was observed within the experimental group (95% confi dence intervals) compared with the control group: B&B p = 0.015; FM p = 0.041, HandTutor™ performance accuracy on x axis and performance accuracy on y axis p stroke hand function rehabilitation.

A Hands-On Approach To Teaching Microcontroller

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Che Fai Yeong

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Practice and application-oriented approach in education is important, and some research on active learning and cooperative problem-solving have shown that a student will learn faster and develop communication skill, leadership and team work through these methods. This paper presents a study of student preference and performance while learning the microcontroller subject with a 2-day curriculum that emphasized on hands-on approach. The curriculum uses the PIC16F877A microcontroller and participants learned to develop basic circuits and several other applications. Programming was completed on the MPLAB platform. Results show that participants had better understanding in this subject after attending the hands-on course.

The Avocado Hand

LENUS (Irish Health Repository)

Rahmani, G

2017-11-01

Accidental self-inflicted knife injuries to digits are a common cause of tendon and nerve injury requiring hand surgery. There has been an apparent increase in avocado related hand injuries. Classically, the patients hold the avocado in their non-dominant hand while using a knife to cut\\/peel the fruit with their dominant hand. The mechanism of injury is usually a stabbing injury to the non-dominant hand as the knife slips past the stone, through the soft avocado fruit. Despite their apparent increased incidence, we could not find any cases in the literature which describe the “avocado hand”. We present a case of a 32-year-old woman who sustained a significant hand injury while preparing an avocado. She required exploration and repair of a digital nerve under regional anaesthesia and has since made a full recovery.

NOTE ABOUT THE MORALS CONCEIVED IN DIRTY HANDS

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Humberto Pereira da Silva

2007-12-01

Full Text Available Sartre’s philosophy and the existentialism were very important to the thought in the last century. Besides being a philosopher, Sartre was also a great writer and, in his play, Dirty hands, one can see many of his ideas. Tthis paper indicates the moral question, thus, the problem of liberty, presented in this Sartre’s specific work. Tthe matter of Dirty hands, when the characters are inside of the “border-situation”, is the liberty of choice. is the moment of affirmation of liberty, to Sartre. Iin this paper it is not the objective to contest Sartre’s concepts, as the one about “border-situation” or the other about liberty, because the purpose is only to show as Sartre use them in the play Dirty hands.

About the role of stylistic and syntactic devices of expansion in the informational complex of dicteme of a German advertising text

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Артур Нарманович Мамедов

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The article highlights stylistic and syntactic devices of expansion, which act as compositional means, vary normative syntactic structure of an advertising text, contribute to sense formation, creating conditions for the purpose of advertiser’s intent. By means of these language elements expressing invariant tactic sense the advertiser consciously expands and/or complicates the informative complex of dicteme, an acting text unit, transmitting superfluous impressive information together with factual one. Combination of factual and impressive items of information activates both rational and emotional perceptional channels of prospective consumer, intensifies the positioning process of an advertised article.

The use of polyurethane foam as an antimicrobial dressing material in hand surgery

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nebil Yesiloglu

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Polyurethane foam is generally used in negative pressure-assisted wound closure therapy. It provides an antimicrobial environment around the wound, while reducing the rate of skin maceration. The authors used polyurethane foam in routine hand dressings after hand surgery operations that were performed for both congenital and acquired purposes. [Hand Microsurg 2015; 4(3.000: 91-92

Hand held data collection and monitoring system for nuclear facilities

Science.gov (United States)

Brayton, D.D.; Scharold, P.G.; Thornton, M.W.; Marquez, D.L.

1999-01-26

Apparatus and method is disclosed for a data collection and monitoring system that utilizes a pen based hand held computer unit which has contained therein interaction software that allows the user to review maintenance procedures, collect data, compare data with historical trends and safety limits, and input new information at various collection sites. The system has a means to allow automatic transfer of the collected data to a main computer data base for further review, reporting, and distribution purposes and uploading updated collection and maintenance procedures. The hand held computer has a running to-do list so sample collection and other general tasks, such as housekeeping are automatically scheduled for timely completion. A done list helps users to keep track of all completed tasks. The built-in check list assures that work process will meet the applicable processes and procedures. Users can hand write comments or drawings with an electronic pen that allows the users to directly interface information on the screen. 15 figs.

Consumer attitudes about health care-acquired infections and hand hygiene.

Science.gov (United States)

McGuckin, Maryanne; Waterman, Richard; Shubin, Arlene

2006-01-01

Mandatory reporting and disclosure of health care-acquired infections have resulted in controversy over the perceived notion that consumers will not understand how to interpret data and that such information may negatively influence utilization of hospitals. The objective was to determine consumers' attitudes about health care-acquired infections, hand hygiene practices, and patient empowerment. A telephone survey based on a random digit dialing sample of all households in the United States was conducted. Consumers were asked about choosing a hospital, hand hygiene practices, and health care-acquired infections. Some 94% of respondents rated environmental cleanliness as very important. Hospital infection rates would influence decision making for 93% of consumers. Four in 5 consumers said they would ask their health care worker to wash and sanitize his or her hands. Our findings strongly suggest that (1) consumers will use infection data in selecting and/or leaving a hospital system and (2) consumers are ready to be empowered with information to ensure a positive outcome.

Hand held data collection and monitoring system for nuclear facilities

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Brayton, D.D.; Scharold, P.G.; Thornton, M.W.; Marquez, D.L.

1999-01-01

Apparatus and method is disclosed for a data collection and monitoring system that utilizes a pen based hand held computer unit which has contained therein interaction software that allows the user to review maintenance procedures, collect data, compare data with historical trends and safety limits, and input new information at various collection sites. The system has a means to allow automatic transfer of the collected data to a main computer data base for further review, reporting, and distribution purposes and uploading updated collection and maintenance procedures. The hand held computer has a running to-do list so sample collection and other general tasks, such as housekeeping are automatically scheduled for timely completion. A done list helps users to keep track of all completed tasks. The built-in check list assures that work process will meet the applicable processes and procedures. Users can hand write comments or drawings with an electronic pen that allows the users to directly interface information on the screen. 15 figs

Gaussian Multiscale Aggregation Applied to Segmentation in Hand Biometrics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gonzalo Bailador del Pozo

2011-11-01

Full Text Available This paper presents an image segmentation algorithm based on Gaussian multiscale aggregation oriented to hand biometric applications. The method is able to isolate the hand from a wide variety of background textures such as carpets, fabric, glass, grass, soil or stones. The evaluation was carried out by using a publicly available synthetic database with 408,000 hand images in different backgrounds, comparing the performance in terms of accuracy and computational cost to two competitive segmentation methods existing in literature, namely Lossy Data Compression (LDC and Normalized Cuts (NCuts. The results highlight that the proposed method outperforms current competitive segmentation methods with regard to computational cost, time performance, accuracy and memory usage.

EEG-informed fMRI analysis during a hand grip task: estimating the relationship between EEG rhythms and the BOLD signal

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roberta eSclocco

2014-04-01

Full Text Available In the last decade, an increasing interest has arisen in investigating the relationship between the electrophysiological and hemodynamic measurements of brain activity, such as EEG and (BOLD fMRI. In particular, changes in BOLD have been shown to be associated with changes in the spectral profile of neural activity, rather than with absolute power. Concurrently, recent findings showed that different EEG rhythms are independently related to changes in the BOLD signal: therefore, it would be important to distinguish between the contributions of the different EEG rhythms to BOLD fluctuations when modeling the relationship between the two signals. Here we propose a method to perform EEG-informed fMRI analysis, in which the EEG regressors take into account both the changes in the spectral profile and the rhythms distinction. We applied it to EEG-fMRI data during a hand grip task in healthy subjects, and compared the results with those obtained by two existing models found in literature. Our results showed that the proposed method better captures the correlations between BOLD signal and EEG rhythms modulations, identifying task-related, well localized activated volumes. Furthermore, we showed that including among the regressors also EEG rhythms not primarily involved in the task enhances the performance of the analysis, even when only correlations with BOLD signal and specific EEG rhythms are explored.

Video observation of hand hygiene practices during routine companion animal appointments and the effect of a poster intervention on hand hygiene compliance

Science.gov (United States)

2014-01-01

Background Hand hygiene is considered one of the most important infection control measures in human healthcare settings, but there is little information available regarding hand hygiene frequency and technique used in veterinary clinics. The objectives of this study were to describe hand hygiene practices associated with routine appointments in companion animal clinics in Ontario, and the effectiveness of a poster campaign to improve hand hygiene compliance. Results Observation of hand hygiene practices was performed in 51 clinics for approximately 3 weeks each using 2 small wireless surveillance cameras: one in an exam room, and one in the most likely location for hand hygiene to be performed outside the exam room following an appointment. Data from 38 clinics were included in the final analysis, including 449 individuals, 1139 appointments before and after the poster intervention, and 10894 hand hygiene opportunities. Overall hand hygiene compliance was 14% (1473/10894), while before and after patient contact compliance was 3% (123/4377) and 26% (1145/4377), respectively. Soap and water was used for 87% (1182/1353) of observed hand hygiene attempts with a mean contact time of 4 s (median 2 s, range 1-49 s), while alcohol-based hand rub (ABHR) was used for 7% (98/1353) of attempts with a mean contact time of 8 s (median 7 s, range 1-30 s). The presence of the posters had no significant effect on compliance, although some staff reported that they felt the posters did increase their personal awareness of the need to perform hand hygiene, and the posters had some effect on product contact times. Conclusions Overall hand hygiene compliance in veterinary clinics in this study was low, and contact time with hand hygiene products was frequently below current recommendations. Use of ABHR was low despite its advantages over hand washing and availability in the majority of clinics. The poster campaign had a limited effect on its own, but could still be used as a

The effects of two health information texts on patient recognition memory: a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Freed, Erin; Long, Debra; Rodriguez, Tonantzin; Franks, Peter; Kravitz, Richard L; Jerant, Anthony

2013-08-01

To compare the effects of two health information texts on patient recognition memory, a key aspect of comprehension. Randomized controlled trial (N=60), comparing the effects of experimental and control colorectal cancer (CRC) screening texts on recognition memory, measured using a statement recognition test, accounting for response bias (score range -0.91 to 5.34). The experimental text had a lower Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level (7.4 versus 9.6), was more focused on addressing screening barriers, and employed more comparative tables than the control text. Recognition memory was higher in the experimental group (2.54 versus 1.09, t=-3.63, P=0.001), including after adjustment for age, education, and health literacy (β=0.42, 95% CI: 0.17, 0.68, P=0.001), and in analyses limited to persons with college degrees (β=0.52, 95% CI: 0.18, 0.86, P=0.004) or no self-reported health literacy problems (β=0.39, 95% CI: 0.07, 0.71, P=0.02). An experimental CRC screening text improved recognition memory, including among patients with high education and self-assessed health literacy. CRC screening texts comparable to our experimental text may be warranted for all screening-eligible patients, if such texts improve screening uptake. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

DDMGD: the database of text-mined associations between genes methylated in diseases from different species

KAUST Repository

Raies, A. B.

2014-11-14

Gathering information about associations between methylated genes and diseases is important for diseases diagnosis and treatment decisions. Recent advancements in epigenetics research allow for large-scale discoveries of associations of genes methylated in diseases in different species. Searching manually for such information is not easy, as it is scattered across a large number of electronic publications and repositories. Therefore, we developed DDMGD database (http://www.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/ddmgd/) to provide a comprehensive repository of information related to genes methylated in diseases that can be found through text mining. DDMGD\\'s scope is not limited to a particular group of genes, diseases or species. Using the text mining system DEMGD we developed earlier and additional post-processing, we extracted associations of genes methylated in different diseases from PubMed Central articles and PubMed abstracts. The accuracy of extracted associations is 82% as estimated on 2500 hand-curated entries. DDMGD provides a user-friendly interface facilitating retrieval of these associations ranked according to confidence scores. Submission of new associations to DDMGD is provided. A comparison analysis of DDMGD with several other databases focused on genes methylated in diseases shows that DDMGD is comprehensive and includes most of the recent information on genes methylated in diseases.

Ability of Hand Hygiene Interventions Using Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizers and Soap To Reduce Microbial Load on Farmworker Hands Soiled during Harvest.

Science.gov (United States)

de Aceituno, Anna Fabiszewski; Bartz, Faith E; Hodge, Domonique Watson; Shumaker, David J; Grubb, James E; Arbogast, James W; Dávila-Aviña, Jorgé; Venegas, Fabiola; Heredia, Norma; García, Santos; Leon, Juan S

2015-11-01

Effective hand hygiene is essential to prevent the spread of pathogens on produce farms and reduce foodborne illness. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Food Safety Modernization Act Proposed Rule for Produce Safety recommends the use of soap and running water for hand hygiene of produce handlers. The use of alcohol-based hand sanitizer (ABHS) may be an effective alternative hygiene intervention where access to water is limited. There are no published data on the efficacy of either soap or ABHS-based interventions to reduce microbial contamination in agricultural settings. The goal of this study was to assess the ability of two soap-based (traditional or pumice) and two ABHS-based (label-use or two-step) hygiene interventions to reduce microbes (coliforms, Escherichia coli, and Enterococcus spp.) and soil (absorbance of hand rinsate at 600 nm [A600]) on farmworker hands after harvesting produce, compared with the results for a no-hand-hygiene control. With no hand hygiene, farmworker hands were soiled (median A600, 0.48) and had high concentrations of coliforms (geometric mean, 3.4 log CFU per hand) and Enterococcus spp. (geometric mean, 5.3 log CFU per hand) after 1 to 2 h of harvesting tomatoes. Differences in microbial loads in comparison to the loads in the control group varied by indicator organism and hygiene intervention (0 to 2.3 log CFU per hand). All interventions yielded lower concentrations of Enterococcus spp. and E. coli (P hands (P hand washing with soap at reducing indicator organisms on farmworker hands. Based on these results, ABHS is an efficacious hand hygiene solution for produce handlers, even on soiled hands.

Hand Therapy

Science.gov (United States)

... from conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow , as well as from chronic problems such as ... Tools Advice from a Certified Hand Therapist on Tennis Elbow Advice from a Certified Hand Therapist: Living with( ...

Automatically Tracing Information Flow of Vulnerability and Cyber-Attack Information through Text Strings

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Rowe, Neil C; Sjoberg, Eric; Adams, Paige

2008-01-01

... of it. We are developing data mining techniques to track the flow of such information by comparing important information-security Web sites, alert messages, and strings in packets to find similar words and sentences...

A hand tracking algorithm with particle filter and improved GVF snake model

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Yi-qi; Wu, Ai-guo; Dong, Na; Shao, Yi-zhe

2017-07-01

To solve the problem that the accurate information of hand cannot be obtained by particle filter, a hand tracking algorithm based on particle filter combined with skin-color adaptive gradient vector flow (GVF) snake model is proposed. Adaptive GVF and skin color adaptive external guidance force are introduced to the traditional GVF snake model, guiding the curve to quickly converge to the deep concave region of hand contour and obtaining the complex hand contour accurately. This algorithm realizes a real-time correction of the particle filter parameters, avoiding the particle drift phenomenon. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the root mean square error of the hand tracking by 53%, and improve the accuracy of hand tracking in the case of complex and moving background, even with a large range of occlusion.

Barriers and Solutions to Fieldwork Education in Hand Therapy.

Science.gov (United States)

Short, Nathan; Sample, Shelby; Murphy, Malachi; Austin, Brittany; Glass, Jillian

2017-08-09

Survey. Fieldwork education is a vital component of training the next generation of CHTs. Barriers and solutions to fieldwork rotations in hand therapy are examined, as well as proposed solutions, including recommendations for student preparation. This descriptive study examined barriers for certified hand therapist clinicians to accept students for clinical rotations and clinicians' preferences for student preparation before a rotation in a hand setting. A survey was developed, peer reviewed, and distributed using the electronic mailing list of the Hand Therapy Certification Commission via SurveyMonkey. Aggregate responses were analyzed to identify trends including barriers to student clinical rotations and recommendations for students to prepare for hand rotations. A total of 2080 participants responded to the survey, representing a 37% response rate. Common logistical barriers were identified for accepting students such as limited clinical time and space. Many clinicians (32% agree and 8% strongly agree) also felt that the students lack the clinical knowledge to be successful. Areas of knowledge, skill set, and experience were surveyed for development before a clinical rotation in a hand setting. Most respondents (74%) reported increased likelihood of accepting a student with the recommended preparation. Novel qualitative responses to improve clinical experiences are presented as well. Student preparation before a clinical rotation in a hand setting appears to be a significant barrier based on the survey results. Areas of recommended knowledge, skill set, and experience may serve to guide both formal and informal methods of student preparation before a hand-specific clinical rotation to facilitate knowledge translation from experienced certified hand therapists to the next generation. Although logistical barriers may be difficult to overcome, hand-specific preparation based on clinician' recommendations may facilitate student acceptance and success in hand

A qualitative evaluation of hand drying practices among Kenyans.

Science.gov (United States)

Person, Bobbie; Schilling, Katharine; Owuor, Mercy; Ogange, Lorraine; Quick, Rob

2013-01-01

Recommended disease prevention behaviors of hand washing, hygienic hand drying, and covering one's mouth and nose in a hygienic manner when coughing and sneezing appear to be simple behaviors but continue to be a challenge to successfully promote and sustain worldwide. We conducted a qualitative inquiry to better understand current hand drying behaviors associated with activities of daily living, and mouth and nose covering practices, among Kenyans. We conducted 7 focus group discussions; 30 in-depth interviews; 10 structured household observations; and 75 structured observations in public venues in the urban area of Kisumu; rural communities surrounding Kisumu; and a peri-urban area outside Nairobi, Kenya. Using a grounded theory approach, we transcribed and coded the narrative data followed by thematic analysis of the emergent themes. Hand drying, specifically on a clean towel, was not a common practice among our participants. Most women dried their hands on their waist cloth, called a leso, or their clothes whether they were cooking, eating or cleaning the nose of a young child. If men dried their hands, they used their trousers or a handkerchief. Children rarely dried their hands; they usually just wiped them on their clothes, shook them, or left them wet as they continued with their activities. Many people sneezed into their hands and wiped them on their clothes. Men and women used a handkerchief fairly often when they had a runny nose, cold, or the flu. Most people coughed into the air or their hand. Drying hands on dirty clothes, rags and lesos can compromise the benefits of handwashing. Coughing and sneezing in to an open hand can contribute to spread of disease as well. Understanding these practices can inform health promotion activities and campaigns for the prevention and control of diarrheal disease and influenza.

Relationship between speed and EEG activity during imagined and executed hand movements

Science.gov (United States)

Yuan, Han; Perdoni, Christopher; He, Bin

2010-04-01

The relationship between primary motor cortex and movement kinematics has been shown in nonhuman primate studies of hand reaching or drawing tasks. Studies have demonstrated that the neural activities accompanying or immediately preceding the movement encode the direction, speed and other information. Here we investigated the relationship between the kinematics of imagined and actual hand movement, i.e. the clenching speed, and the EEG activity in ten human subjects. Study participants were asked to perform and imagine clenching of the left hand and right hand at various speeds. The EEG activity in the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (18-28 Hz) frequency bands were found to be linearly correlated with the speed of imagery clenching. Similar parametric modulation was also found during the execution of hand movements. A single equation relating the EEG activity to the speed and the hand (left versus right) was developed. This equation, which contained a linear independent combination of the two parameters, described the time-varying neural activity during the tasks. Based on the model, a regression approach was developed to decode the two parameters from the multiple-channel EEG signals. We demonstrated the continuous decoding of dynamic hand and speed information of the imagined clenching. In particular, the time-varying clenching speed was reconstructed in a bell-shaped profile. Our findings suggest an application to providing continuous and complex control of noninvasive brain-computer interface for movement-impaired paralytics.

Novel Approach to Control of Robotic Hand Using Flex Sensors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sandesh R.S

2014-05-01

Full Text Available This paper discuss about novel design approach to control of a robotic hand using flex sensors which indicates a biomechatronic multi fingered robotic hand. This robotic hand consists of base unit, upper arm, lower arm, palm and five fingers. The aim is to develop an anthropomorphic five fingered robotic hand. The proposed design illustrates the use of 5 micro DC motors with 9 Degrees of Freedom (DOF.Each finger is controlled independently. Further three extra motors were used for the control of wrist elbow and base movement. The study of the DC motor is being carried out using the transfer function model for constant excitation. The micro DC motor performance was analyzed using MATLAB simulation environment. The whole system is implemented using flex sensors. The flex sensors placed on the human hand gloves appear as if they look like real human hand.  89v51 microcontroller was used for all the controlling actions along with RF transmitter/receiver .The performance of the system has been conducted experimentally and studied.

Comparison of Two Different Presentations of Graphic Organizers in Recalling Information in Expository Texts with Intellectually Disabled Students

Science.gov (United States)

Ozmen, Ruya Guzel