<p>Ill-posed sets of linear equations typically arise when discretizing certain types of integral transforms. A well known example is image reconstruction, which can be modelled using the Radon transform. After expanding the solution into a finite series of basis functions a large, sparse and ill-conditioned linear system arises. We consider the solution of such systems. In particular we study a new class of iteration methods named DROP (for Diagonal Relaxed Orthogonal Projections) constructed for solving both linear equations and linear inequalities. This class can also be viewed, when applied to linear equations, as a generalized Landweber iteration. The method is compared with other iteration methods using test data from a medical application and from electron microscopy. Our theoretical analysis include convergence proofs of the fully-simultaneous DROP algorithm for linear equations without consistency assumptions, and of block-iterative algorithms both for linear equations and linear inequalities, for the consistent case.</p><p>When applying an iterative solver to an ill-posed set of linear equations the error typically initially decreases but after some iterations (depending on the amount of noise in the data, and the degree of ill-posedness) it starts to increase. This phenomena is called semi-convergence. It is therefore vital to find good stopping rules for the iteration.</p><p>We describe a class of stopping rules for Landweber type iterations for solving linear inverse problems. The class includes, e.g., the well known discrepancy principle, and also the monotone error rule. We also unify the error analysis of these two methods. The stopping rules depend critically on a certain parameter whose value needs to be specified. A training procedure is therefore introduced for securing robustness. The advantages of using trained rules are demonstrated on examples taken from image reconstruction from projections.</p> / <p>Vi betraktar lösning av sådana linjära ekvationssystem som uppkommer vid diskretisering av inversa problem. Dessa problem karakteriseras av att den sökta informationen inte direkt kan mätas. Ett välkänt exempel utgör datortomografi. Där mäts hur mycket strålning som passerar genom ett föremål som belyses av en strålningskälla vilken intar olika vinklar i förhållande till objektet. Syftet är förstås att generera bilder av föremålets inre (i medicinska tillämpngar av det inre av kroppen). Vi studerar en klass av iterativa lösningsmetoder för lösning av ekvationssystemen. Metoderna tillämpas på testdata från bildrekonstruktion och jämförs med andra föreslagna iterationsmetoder. Vi gör även en konvergensanalys för olika val av metod-parametrar.</p><p>När man använder en iterativ metod startar man med en begynnelse approximation som sedan gradvis förbättras. Emellertid är inversa problem känsliga även för relativt små fel i uppmätta data. Detta visar sig i att iterationerna först förbättras för att senare försämras. Detta fenomen, s.k. ’semi-convergence’ är väl känt och förklarat. Emellertid innebär detta att det är viktigt att konstruera goda stoppregler. Om man avbryter iterationen för tidigt fås dålig upplösning och om den avbryts för sent fås en oskarp och brusig bild.</p><p>I avhandligen studeras en klass av stoppregler. Dessa analyseras teoretiskt och testas på mätdata. Speciellt föreslås en inlärningsförfarande där stoppregeln presenteras med data där det korrekra värdet på stopp-indexet är känt. Dessa data används för att bestämma en viktig parameter i regeln. Sedan används regeln för nya okända data. En sådan tränad stoppregel visar sig fungera väl på testdata från bildrekonstruktionsområdet.</p>

Anforderungen an Verbindungen, Verbindungstechnik, Fügen, Modellierungspraxis, Beispiel Verschraubung, Beispiel Klebverbindung, Beispiel Schweißung, Thesen zu Simulationen in der Verbindungstechnik

Onlinekataloge erlauben den Nutzern den Zugang zum Bestand einer Bibliothek; Normdaten bilden darin die Grundlage für zwei wesentliche Sucheinstiege: Die Recherche nach Personen und die inhaltliche Suche mit Schlagwörtern. Benutzeranalysen zeigen erwartungsgemäß, dass dies nach den Titelstichwörtern die am häufigsten gestellten Suchanfragen sind. Es wird aber auch deutlich, dass in beiden Fällen die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Nulltreffer-Ergebnisses, d.h. das Scheitern der Suche, sehr hoch ist. Normdaten sollen eine effektive Recherche ermöglichen – aber wie effektiv gestaltet sich diese Recherche für den Benutzer tatsächlich? Als bibliothekarische Dienstleistung richtet sich der Onlinekatalog an den Nutzer, er sollte sich demnach an dessen Bedürfnissen und Kenntnissen orientieren. Viele Suchanfragen bei Recherchen mit Normdaten führen ins Leere, weil dem Benutzer die formalen Eingabevoraussetzungen ebenso fremd sind wie die der Erschließung zugrunde liegenden bibliothekarischen Regeln. Es zeigt sich auch, dass die Umsetzung neuer Recherchemöglichkeiten mit Normdaten alleine nicht genügt, auch die Darstellung im OPAC muss beim Vorwissen der Nutzer ansetzen. Diese erwerben ihre Recherchekompetenz vor allem bei Suchmaschinen wie Google, so dass Fachterminologie oder Unübersichtlichkeit im Onlinekatalog nur zusätzlich verwirren. Anhand verschiedener Anwendungsbeispiele soll der Vortrag zeigen, welche Probleme sich dem Benutzer bei der Recherche mit Normdaten stellen, aber auch, wie das Potential der Normdaten in Onlinekatalogen noch besser genutzt werden kann.

Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 20-21).

Research in many fields of life and biomedical sciences depends on the microscopic image analysis of biological images. Quantitative analysis of these images is often time-consuming, tedious, and may be prone to subjective bias from the observer and inter /intra observer variations. Systems for automatic analysis developed in the past decade determine various parameters associated with biological tissue, such as the number of cells, object volume and length of fibers to avoid problems with manual collection of microscopic data. Specifically, automatic analysis of biological microstructures using unbiased stereology, a set of approaches designed to avoid all known sources of systematic error, plays a large and growing role in bioscience research. Our aim is to develop an algorithm that automates and increases the throughput of a commercially available, computerized stereology device (Stereologer, Stereology Resource Center, Chester, MD). The current method for estimation of first and second order parameters of biological microstructures requires a trained user to manually select biological objects of interest (cells, fibers etc.) while systematically stepping through the three dimensional volume of a stained tissue section. The present research proposes a three-part method to automate the above process: detect the objects, connect the objects through a z-stack of images (images at varying focal planes) to form a 3D object and finally count the 3D objects. The first step involves detection of objects through learned thresholding or automatic thresholding. Learned thresholding identifies the objects of interest by training on images to obtain the threshold range for objects of interest. Automatic thresholding is performed on gray level images converted from RGB (red-green-blue) microscopic images to detect the objects of interest. Both learned and automatic thresholding are followed by iterative thresholding to separate objects that are close to each other. The second step, linking objects through a z-stack of images involves labeling the objects of interest using connected component analysis and then connecting these labeled objects across the stack of images to produce a 3D object. Finally, the number of linked objects in a 3D volume is counted using the counting rules of stereology. This automatic approach achieves an overall object detection rate of 74%. Thus, these results support the view that automatic image analysis combined with unbiased sampling as well as assumption and model-free geometric probes, provides accurate and efficient quantification of biological objects.

Relatively few empirical studies in the professional burnout literature have examined mental health providers (MHPs). Research on other professional groups has demonstrated that certain emotion regulation strategies, known as emotional labor (i.e., deep acting and surface acting), are common responses to perceived display rules (i.e., professional guidelines for emotional expression), and are differentially associated with burnout. The present study aimed to fill a gap in the literature by evaluating the empirical links between work stressors (i.e., role conflict, role ambiguity, and lack of autonomy), personality (i.e., extraversion), emotional labor (i.e., surface acting and deep acting), and burnout in a sample of MHPs. Additional variables (i.e., perceived emotional display rules, client characteristics, etc.) were also explored. Data from an online survey of 188 MHPs working in Florida was analyzed using multivariate and univariate regressions. The results of this study supported several of the hypothesized relationships between predictor variables and burnout. Most notably, extraversion, role conflict, role ambiguity, autonomy, and surface acting were significantly associated with one or more dimensions of burnout. Support was not found for extraversion as a moderator of the relationships between work stressors and burnout or between work stressors and emotional labor strategies. The effects of emotional labor strategies as mediators of the relationships between work stressors and burnout were not statistically significant. Implications and limitations of the findings, as well as suggestions for future research, are discussed.

This study investigated the hypothesis that universal psychological adaptations produce personality variation when individuals differentially face adaptive problems that shifted the cost-benefit tradeoffs of alternative personality strategies in ancestral environments. The current research tested the hypothesis that psychological adaptations calibrate individual differences in neuroticism as a functional response to social exclusion. If psychological adaptations produce neuroticism in response to social exclusion, and heritable components of individuals' social partner value influence their likelihood of being excluded, then individual differences in social partner value should yield heritable differences in neuroticism. Three conceptually distinct sub-studies tested hypotheses derived from this conceptual framework. Sub-study 1 tested the relationship between individuals' mate value, social exclusion, and neuroticism. Individuals' mate value exhibited both a direct effect on neuroticism and an indirect effect through the experience of social exclusion. Sub-study 2 investigated sexual jealousy as a specialized class of neuroticism in response to infidelity. As predicted, individuals' mate value predicted the likelihood of their partners' infidelity and their own mate guarding behavior. Sub-study 3 manipulated the threat of infidelity to test for functional shifts in neuroticism in response to relationship exclusion. Participants read vignettes describing their mates' certain fidelity, uncertain fidelity, and certain infidelity, and wrote what they would think, feel, say, and do in response to each scenario. An independent sample assessed participants' personalities based on these cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses. As predicted, participants' neuroticism tracked relationship exclusion; participants' neuroticism levels increased with infidelity threat. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that a universal psychological mechanism adaptively calibrates neuroticism levels in response to relationship exclusion; the certain absence or presence of the adaptive problem of relationship exclusion should deactivate or activate anti-exclusion mechanisms in all individuals. Above this situational effect, under conditions of uncertain infidelity -- in which the threat of infidelity would have ancestrally varied with men's (but not women's) mate value -- men's mate value predicted their neuroticism. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that humans possess psychological adaptations that functionally calibrate neuroticism levels. More broadly, they highlight the heuristic value of an evolutionary adaptationist framework for the study of personality and individual differences. / text

In spite of the fact that Western companies have been actively developing the Russian market over the last twenty years, they are still faced with the Soviet-era heritage in human resource management. This paper gives an overview of the common Soviet human resource practices of the past. Understanding traditional human resource practices in the Soviet Union prior to the end of communism will help practitioners to design human resource management systems for Russia more efficiently today. Moreover, this article makes recommendations for HR professionals on some unwritten rules of human resource management, summarizes current best practices for the recruitment, selection and retention of employees and helps to reduce potential cultural misunderstandings and conflicts between the two different systems: market and planned economies.(author's abstract) / Series: WU Online Papers in International Business Communication / Series One: Intercultural Communication and Language Learning

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur kriminalvårdare vid häktet Kronoberg på avdelningen för polisarrest och säkerhet hanterar sina emotioner i det dagliga arbetet med personer som är gripna, anhållna, häktade samt personer som är omhändertagna enligt lagen om berusade personer. Studien behandlar även frågan huruvida det går att urskilja några känslomässiga konsekvenser av att arbeta på denna avdelning. För att genomföra studien intervjuades totalt fem stycken kriminalvårdare, tre män och två kvinnor. Respondenterna hade olika lång anställning och ålder. Studien utgår ifrån emotionssociologin och det dramaturgiska perspektivet.Sammantaget visar studien att kriminalvårdarnas egen inställning till hur en bra kriminalvårdare ska vara stämmer väl överens med hur kriminalvården själva definierar tjänsten som en professionell kriminalvårdare. Personalens försök att leva upp till detta stämmer överens med Hochschilds teorier om surface acting och deep acting, där de genom surface acting trycker undan sina egna känslor för att visa andra känslor och på det sättet kan de påverka hur en situation ska sluta. Den vanligaste förekommande känslan hos personalen i samband med de tillfällena kriminalvårdarna var tvungna att aktivt arbeta med sina känslor genom surface acting var ilska och aggression. En intressant iakttagelse från studien var att det fanns en gräns för personalen där de inte längre kunde, ville eller orkade tillämpa surface acting och handlandet rättfärdigades med att den intagne var så pass våldsam eller svårhanterlig att det inte längre gick att spela med längre. Var den gränsen gick var dock inte helt självklart och berodde på hur situationen såg ut och vilken kriminalvårdare som ställdes inför gränsprövningen.Miljön på häktet beskrivs som relativt hotfull och våldsam. Personalen bearbetar arbetet och miljön de befinner sig i nästan uteslutande genom att prata med sina kollegor och använda sig av en viss jargong eller som Crawley beskriver det som en ”svart humor”. Avslutningsvis visar studien att kriminalvårdarna påverkas negativt av arbetet på häktet genom att bli mer cyniska, fördomsfulla och få en ökad misstro mot människor.

Over the past few years, mining data located in heterogeneous and geographically distributed sites have been designated as one of the key important issues. Loading distributed data into centralized location for mining interesting rules is not a good approach. This is because it violates common issues such as data privacy and it imposes network overheads. The situation becomes worse when the network has limited bandwidth which is the case in most of the real time systems. This has prompted the need for intelligent data analysis to discover the hidden information in these huge amounts of distributed databases. In this research, we present an incremental approach for building an efficient Multi-Agent based algorithm for mining real world databases in geographically distributed sites. First, we propose the Distributed Multi-Agent Association Rules algorithm (DMAAR) to minimize the all-to-all broadcasting between distributed sites. Analytical calculations show that DMAAR reduces the algorithm complexity and minimizes the message communication cost. The proposed Multi-Agent based algorithm complies with the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA), which is considered as the global standards in communication between agents, thus, enabling the proposed algorithm agents to cooperate with other standard agents. Second, the BitTable Multi-Agent Association Rules algorithm (BMAAR) is proposed. BMAAR includes an efficient BitTable data structure which helps in compressing the database thus can easily fit into the memory of the local sites. It also includes two BitWise AND/OR operations for quick candidate itemsets generation and support counting. Moreover, the algorithm includes three transaction trimming techniques to reduce the size of the mined data. Third, we propose the Pruning Multi-Agent Association Rules algorithm (PMAAR) which includes three candidate itemsets pruning techniques for reducing the large number of generated candidate itemsets, consequently, reducing the total time for the mining process. The proposed PMAAR algorithm has been compared with existing Association Rules algorithms against different benchmark datasets and has proved to have better performance and execution time. Moreover, PMAAR has been implemented on real world distributed medical databases obtained from more than one hospital in Egypt to discover the hidden Association Rules in patients' records to demonstrate the merits and capabilities of the proposed model further. Medical data was anonymously obtained without the patients' personal details. The analysis helped to identify the existence or the absence of the disease based on minimum number of effective examinations and tests. Thus, the proposed algorithm can help in providing accurate medical decisions based on cost effective treatments, improving the medical service for the patients, reducing the real time response for the health system and improving the quality of clinical decision making.