bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The fractal finite element method for unbounded problems
Authors: Leung A. Y. T. , Dai H. , Fok S. L. , Su R. K. L. 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThe fractal finite element method, previously developed for stress intensity factor calculation for crack problems in fracture mechanics, is extended to analyse some unbounded problems in half space. The concepts of geometrical similarity and two‐level finite element mesh are applied to generate an infinite number of self‐similar layers in the far field with a similarity ratio bigger than one; that is, one layer is bigger than the next in size but of the same shape. Only conventional finite elements are used and no new elements are generated. The global interpolating functions in the form of a truncated infinite series are employed to transform the infinite number of nodal variables to a small number of unknown coefficients associated with the global interpolating functions. Taking the advantage of geometrical similarity, transformation for one layer is enough because the relevant entries of the transformed matrix after assembling all layers are infinite geometric series of the similarity ratio and can be summed analytically. Accurate nodal displacements are obtained as shown in the numerical examples. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fixed mesh front‐tracking methodology for finite element simulations
Authors: Zhao P. , Heinrich J. C. , Poirier D. R. 
Published: August 2004

AbstractA direct front‐tracking method using an Eulerian–Lagrangian formulation is developed in two space dimensions. The front‐tracking method is general in that it can track any type of interface once its local velocity is specified or has been determined by calculation. The method uses marker points to describe the interface position and tracks the interface evolution on a fixed finite‐element mesh, including growth, contraction, splitting and merging. Interfacial conditions are applied directly at the interface position. The method is applied to three scenarios that involve different interface conditions and are based on energy and mass diffusion. The three calculations are for the dendritic solidification of a pure substance, the cellular growth of an alloy, and the Ostwald ripening of silica particles in silicon. Numerical results show that very complicated interface morphologies and topological changes can be simulated properly and efficiently. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reversible addition–fragmentation transfer polymerization of p‐nitrophenyl acrylate and synthesis of diblock copolymers poly(p‐nitrophenyl acrylate)‐b‐polystyrene
Authors: Hu Yong‐Chen , Liu Ye , Pan Cai‐Yuan 
Published: August 2004

AbstractPoly(p‐nitrophenyl acrylate)s (PNPAs) with different molecular mass and narrow polydispersity were successfully synthesized for the first time by reversible addition–fragmentation transfer (RAFT) polymerization with azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN) as an initiator and [1‐(ethoxy carbonyl) prop‐1‐yl dithiobenzoate] as the chain‐transfer agent. Although the molecular mass of PNPAs can be controlled by the molar ratio of NPA to RAFT agent and the conversion, a trace of homo‐PNPA was found, especially at the early stage of polymerization. The dithiobenzoyl‐terminated PNPA obtained was used as a macro chain‐transfer agent in the successive RAFT block copolymerization of styrene (St) with AIBN as the initiator. After purification by two washings with cyclohexane and nitromethane to remove homo‐PSt and homo‐PNPA, the pure diblock copolymers, PNPA‐b‐PSt's, with narrow molecular weight distribution were obtained. The structural analysis of polymerization products by 1H NMR and GPC verified the formation of diblock copolymers. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 42: 4862–4872, 2004
Synthesis and characterization of fluorescent poly[fluorene‐co‐phenylene‐1‐(di‐2‐pyridylamine)] copolymer and its Ru(II) complex
Authors: Dinakaran K. , Chou Chia‐Hung , Hsu So‐Lin , Wei Kung‐Hwa 
Published: August 2004

Abstract2,2′‐dipyridylamine substituted poly(fluorene‐co‐phenylene) copolymers with different concentrations of dipyridylamine have been synthesized by Suzuki polycondensation. These polymers were found to be soluble in organic solvents such as tetrahydrofuran, chloroform, and dimethylformamide. The photoluminescence of the copolymer was slightly blueshifted as the concentration of dipridylamine was increased. The introduction of dipyridylamine and the ruthenium complex into the polymer significantly improved the photoluminescence efficiency. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 42: 4838–4846, 2004
Multiple risk behaviors among smokers in the childhood cancer survivors study cohort
Authors: Butterfield Rita M. , Park Elyse R. , Puleo Elaine , Mertens Ann , Gritz Ellen R. , Li Frederick P. , Emmons Karen 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThe literature on health behaviors of young adult cancer survivors is very limited, and thus little is known about preventable risk factors in this population. This paper describes the prevalence of five behavioral risk factors among 541 young adult survivors of childhood cancers from the CCSS cohort who were identified as smokers and enrolled in a randomized controlled trial of a smoking cessation intervention. The relationship between presence of multiple risk factors and a number of smoking‐related factors was examined. About 31% of the sample engaged in zero or one health‐risk behavior in addition to smoking; 63% engaged in 2 or 3, and 6% engaged in 4 or 5. There were positive linear relationships between number of risk factors and smoking rate and nicotine dependence. Number of risk factors was not associated with self‐efficacy for quitting, but was related to readiness to quit.This study demonstrated that childhood cancer survivors who smoke have a number of other risk factors for the development of preventable disease and the presence of these risks was associated with factors that decrease the likelihood of quitting smoking. Attention to other health behaviors may be an important strategy for helping smokers quit. In particular, helping childhood cancer survivors who smoke to reduce other risk behaviors might also encourage them to quit smoking. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Predictors and mediators of psychological adjustment in mothers of children newly diagnosed with cancer
Authors: Barrera Maru , D'Agostino Norma M. , Gibson Julie , Gilbert Thomas , Weksberg Rosanna , Malkin David 
Published: August 2004

AbstractEarly psychological adjustment (PA) of mothers of children with cancer (MCC) and mothers of children with acute illnesses (MCA) were compared, and predictors and mediators of maternal adjustment were tested. Sixty‐nine MCC and 22 MCA completed standardized measures of depression, anxiety, global mental health (GMH), concurrent stress and strains, social support, coping strategies and child behavior. MCC reported greater depressive symptomatology, emotion‐focused coping, and social support than did MCA. For MCC, emotion‐focused coping and child behavior both predicted depression, anxiety, and GMH; concurrent stress and strain mediated the relationship between child behavior and depression and between emotion‐focused coping and each measure of adjustment. For MCA, only emotion‐focused coping predicted PA and concurrent stress and strains mediated the relationship between emotion‐focused coping and depression. These findings suggest that MCC have more PA difficulties that are uniquely related to their child's behavior than MCA. Concurrent stress and strains seems to be an important mediator of PA for both groups of mothers. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Development and pilot testing of a psychoeducational intervention for oral cancer patients
Authors: Katz Mark R. , Irish Jonathan C. , Devins Gerald M. 
Published: August 2004

AbstractObjective: Oral cancer elicits considerable distress in both the pre and post‐treatment periods. This paper details the development, validation and pilot‐testing of a psychoeducational intervention for oral cancer patients.Method: An educational booklet covering information about oral cancer and its treatment and effective coping strategies was developed by a multi‐disciplinary team. It was evaluated by patient focus groups and content/educational experts, delivered to subjects in pre and post‐operative presentations by a health educator, and pilot‐tested in a randomized controlled trial versus standard care.Results: Pilot data from 19 subjects (10 psychoeducation, nine standard care) indicates that the intervention is feasible and highly acceptable. At follow‐up the intervention group showed a gain in knowledge, less body image disturbance, lower anxiety and a trend toward higher wellbeing.Conclusion: This program, which is currently being evaluated in a larger RCT with extended follow‐up, should prove useful in reducing the psychosocial burden of oral cancer and its treatment. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Exploring comprehensibility and manageability in palliative home care: An interview study of dying cancer patients' informal carers
Authors: Milberg Anna , Strang Peter 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThe presence of an informal carer is often a prerequisite for successful palliative home care, and the staff's ability to support informal carers' coping in such situations is important. Recent research has revealed that it is possible to achieve positive psychological states in palliative care despite the burdening situation. As there is a lack of theory‐based coping studies, the aim of this study was to describe, within the context of palliative home care, two concepts in Antonovsky's theory of Sense of Coherence: comprehensibility (a perception that the challenge is understood) and manageability (a perception that the resources to cope are available). Tape‐recorded semi‐structured interviews with 19 informal carers during ongoing palliative home care were transcribed and analysed with a qualitative hermeneutic approach. Elements that facilitated comprehensibility included open information, symbolic information, basic life assumptions and previous knowledge. These were important for creating a congruent inner reality (as opposed to chaos). Resources contributing to manageability dealt with power, support, competence and accessibility, which on a more abstract level resulted in a feeling of togetherness (as opposed to isolation). The findings are discussed in relation to the complexity of communication between staff and carers within palliative care. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The decision to have a prosthesis: A qualitative study of men with testicular cancer
Authors: Chapple A. , McPherson A. 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to understand why some men decide to have a testicular prosthesis while others reject the idea and to explore the extent to which the option of a testicular prosthesis is adequately presented. Forty‐five men with testicular cancer were interviewed about all aspects of their illness. Some men decided against a prosthesis for a number of reasons; they thought that the loss of a testicle was not visibly obvious, did not affect self‐image, was not a long‐term threat to masculinity, and that living with one testicle was comfortable. Some did not want additional surgery and others were concerned about safety issues. The men who decided to have a prosthesis were concerned about self‐image and a threat to masculinity. They had a desire to look ‘normal’ and a wish to keep the orchidectomy secret. Some men felt that the decision had been rushed. Others wished that they had had information about the possibility of implants before the orchidectomy or they considered the information presented inadequate. We conclude that it is important to counsel men with testicular cancer about the advantages and disadvantages of having a testicular prosthesis and to give them time to consider issues such as cosmetic appearance, self‐image, comfort, possible short term complications and long‐term safety. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cancer‐related attitudes: A comparative study in Japan and the US
Authors: Gotay Carolyn Cook , Shimizu Hiroyuki , Muraoka Miles , Ishihara Yoko , Tsuboi Koji , Ogawa Hiroshi 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThe cancer‐related attitudes and beliefs of adults living in central Japan (N=357) were compared to those of respondents in a US state (Hawaii) (N=223) consisting of both Japanese (n=106) and Caucasian (n=117) individuals. Almost all US subjects endorsed doctors disclosing cancer diagnoses to their patients, while a minority of the Japan sample supported cancer disclosure as a general practice. However, the majority of Japan respondents expressed a personal preference to be told if they themselves were diagnosed with cancer, as did virtually all US respondents. US subjects were more optimistic than Japanese subjects about cancer's curability, both at the present time and in the future; Japanese Americans scored intermediate between Japanese and Caucasian Americans. Word‐association data indicated that cancer was most likely to be associated with death by Japanese respondents. The data support the continued international differences in views about cancer and suggest that some of these differences persist over many generations of US residence. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An automatic fiber alignment system using genetic algorithms
Authors: Murakawa Masahiro , Noda Yoshihiro , Higuchi Tetsuya 
Published: August 2004

AbstractIn this paper, the authors propose an automatic optical fiber alignment method using genetic algorithms and develop a fiber alignment system to verify its effectiveness. The theory for connecting optical fibers basically differs from the theory for connecting conventional metallic‐core wires because the coupling faces must be completely aligned with submicrometer precision. As a result, even manual fiber alignment takes an extremely long time unless an expert with experience and technical proficiency is doing it. To resolve this problem, some attempts have been made to develop automatic fiber alignment systems. However, these systems are not yet practical because the fiber alignment time increases too much as the number of degrees of freedom of the optical fiber coupling faces increases. Therefore, in this paper, the authors developed an automatic fiber alignment system using genetic algorithms, which are efficient search techniques, to implement fiber alignment with many degrees of freedom. Experimental results showed that fiber alignment with five degrees of freedom, which was difficult conventionally, could be completed within a practical interval of approximately 3 minutes. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(11): 80–90, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10035
Performance evaluation of dynamic load balancing scheme with load prediction mechanism using the load growing acceleration for massively parallel computers
Authors: Nunome Atsushi , Hirata Hiroaki , Niimi Haruo , Shibayama Kiyoshi 
Published: August 2004

AbstractIn this paper, we will propose a new dynamic load balancing scheme in which, based on the load conditions of the whole system of a massively parallel computer, the respective processing elements (PEs) will perform load balancing control in such a way that the loads are balanced as a whole. In the proposed scheme, although each PE exchanges load information with the neighboring PEs, load balancing is performed from a more global viewpoint, not considering only the load conditions of the surroundings of the transfer‐origin PE: instead, each PE takes into consideration the load distribution in the whole system and its increasing and decreasing trends. Furthermore, in order to determine how the load quantity of the whole system changes, prediction of the load quantity is performed by using the load variation acceleration. By doing so, the transfer‐origin PE is made to appropriately select the transfer destination of the load. Evaluation by simulation demonstrated, a performance enhancement of about 60% maximum compared to the scheme in which only the load quantities of the neighboring PEs are collected. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(11): 69–79, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10212
Speaker adaptation of pitch and spectrum for HMM‐based speech synthesis
Authors: Tamura Masatsune , Masuko Takashi , Tokuda Keiichi , Kobayashi Takao 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThis paper describes a technique for synthesizing speech with an arbitrary speaker's voice using speaker‐independent speech units, which we call “average voice”models. The proposed method is based on an HMM‐based text‐to‐speech synthesis system. In the HMM‐based speech synthesis system, the spectrum and the pitch parameter are modeled simultaneously using an HMM based on the multi‐space probability distribution (MSD). By appropriately transforming the HMM parameters, the voice characteristics and the prosodic features of synthesized speech can be transformed. In this paper, we derive an extension of the MLLR algorithm to apply it to MSD‐HMMs. It is shown that by speaker adaptation for the pitch and applying the spectrum model, not only the voice characteristics, but also the prosodic features, can be adapted by using a small number of sentences uttered by a target speaker. Through the subjective evaluation, it is shown that by applying simultaneous adaptation of pitch and spectrum, synthetic speech generated from adapted models from the average voice model using a small number of sentences is very close to that from speaker‐dependent models. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(11): 59–68, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10332
Stochastic resonance in the brain
Authors: Mori Toshio , Kai Shoichi 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThis paper investigates the existence of stochastic resonance (SR) in the human brain, based on the noise effect of the α‐wave. In order to show clear evidence of the SR phenomenon in the central nervous system, the measurement was carried out under the following conditions; the periodic and noisy light stimuli are respectively applied to the right and left eye of a subject separately. When the periodic stimulus is applied with a subthreshold condition and the amplitude of noise stimulus of which the frequency bandwidth ranges from 15 to 60 Hz is varied, strong entrainment occurs for a certain range of the noise amplitude. Then the curve for the amplitude of the peak versus the noise amplitude shows a bell‐type shape, that is, the maximum signal amplitude at an optimum noise. Thus, the SR phenomenon occurs not on the retina but on the visual processing area after the optic chiasm—no mixing occurs before primary visual cortex in this manner, because the periodic and random stimuli are separately applied to the right and left eyes, respectively. This result suggests that the human brain may exploit internal and/or external noise for the higher‐order activities such as perception and cognition. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(11): 39–47, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10398
Integration process of visual and haptic information based on experiments about size perception of solid objects
Authors: Fukumura Naohiro , Otane Shigenao , Uno Yoji 
Published: August 2004

AbstractWhen humans recognize external information, multiple kinds of sensory information are integrated and recognized in most cases. When a solid object is to be recognized, for example, not only visual information, but also somatosensory information and motor information obtained by actually grasping the object previously, are integrated for recognition. To investigate such integration processes for various kinds of sensory information in the brain, we performed some psychophysical experiments on the information processing involved in size perception of solid objects. First, an experiment on the estimation of object size by active finger movement and an experiment on the estimation of object size by passive finger movement were performed. The latter experiment revealed that even if the object size was the same, there was a large difference in the estimation of the object depending on the initial position at the start of estimation. It was also found that the difference in estimation was reduced if an opening‐and‐closing finger movement is performed immediately before estimation. Additional experiments were performed in order to investigate the factors that produce estimation difference from the viewpoint of the information transformation process. The results suggest that the difference originates from the module that calculates the inverse kinematics in order to compute the finger joint angle from the perceived size of the object. It is believed that the difference originates from redundancy in inverse kinematics. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(11): 24–38, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10399
Cerebellar model arithmetic computer with pseudo‐bacterial genetic algorithm and its hardware acceleration
Authors: Miwa Masahiro , Furuhashi Takeshi , Matsuzaki Motoaki , Okuma Shigeru 
Published: August 2004

AbstractThe cerebellar model arithmetic computer (CMAC) is a kind of neural network that is capable of high‐speed learning. In the use of the CMAC, various parameters must be defined, but it is difficult to set the parameters adequately. The pseudo‐bacterial genetic algorithm (PBGA) is a kind of evolutionary computation which offers local search. This paper considers adequate determination of the location of the boundary line, which is one of the parameters of the CMAC. For that purpose the PBGA is applied, and PBGA/CMAC, which realizes the efficient search of the boundary line of the CMAC, is proposed. Furthermore, since PBGA/CMAC requires a large amount of computation, a hardware implementation is considered in order to improve the computation speed. The computation involved in the learning rules of the CMAC is divided into four stages, and the structure is implemented as a pipeline. The pipeline implementation produces read‐after‐write hazards for the granular cell values. However, it is shown that the difference in performance from conventional CMAC learning rule is small, indicating the possibility of achieving high‐speed learning. The speed of PBGA/CMAC hardware is improved to 140 times the speed of operation by software. In order to present a guide for PBGA/CMAC hardware, the hardware volume is evaluated, and it is shown that it can be implemented with precision sufficient for practice. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(11): 14–23, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10437