Query: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PORT SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT ACCORDING TO THE SERVICE DOMINANT LOGIC

Relevant passages:
REFRAMING SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT : A SERVICE-DOMINANT <=SEP=> Shifting the dominant thinking of supply chain management toward the concepts of service, value cocreation, value propositions, operant resources, networks, service ecosystems and learning opens up many research opportunities and strategies for improved organizational performance. The emerging thought world of service-dominant logic is presented as a means to reframe supply chain scholarship and practice for increased relevance and impact.

The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer : A Critical Perspective on Co-production , Co-creation and Prosumption <=SEP=> The terms ‘co-creation’, ‘co-production’, and ‘prosumption’ refer to situations in which consumers collaborate with companies or with other consumers to produce things of value. These situations sometimes appear to blur the traditional roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Building on Marx’s distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, we argue that, when consumers perform tasks normally handled by the company, this does not necessarily represent a fundamental change in exchange roles or economic organization. We then argue that, when individuals who are traditionally defined as ‘consumers’ produce exchange value for companies, this does represent a fundamental change. Thanks to recent advances in information technology, customers today are contributing to organizational processes in ways that would not have been possible 10 years ago. For example, at Threadless.com, customers can not only vote for the clothing designs that they would like to see produced but also submit their own designs for voting (Walker 2007). Similarly, at National Instruments, a company that makes measurement software and sensors, nearly half of the company’s research and development activity is done by an on-line community of customers who collaborate to discover how NI’s products can solve members’ problems (Seybold 2007). Another example is Proctor & Gamble’s ‘Vocalpoint’ program, an on-line community of product enthusiasts who are rewarded with coupons and samples in return for talking about products with their friends. The program has more than 500,000 members and is being used by other companies such as WD40 and the Discovery Channel to promote their products (Neff 2006). Some have argued that examples like these are symptomatic of a fundamental and dramatic shift that is occurring in relationships between organizations and their customers – a change that calls into question previously clear distinctions between consumers and producers and between customers and employees. For instance, some have suggested 2 Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer © 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00112.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd that customers who help with product design or assist with product marketing are part of a ‘consumer-as-creator revolution’ (Nadeau 2006, 105) and represent a ‘new paradigm of message creation and delivery’ (McConnell and Huba 2006, 42). Others have written that ‘the gap between producers and consumers is blurring’ (Tapscott and Williams 2006, 125) and that ‘in the emerging ... paradigm, a person can seamlessly shift from consumer to contributor and creator’ (143). Still others have argued that in today’s customer-organization relationships ‘power and control are radically decentralized and heterarchical: producers and consumers coalesce’ (Pitt et al. 2006, 118). We have also recently seen a resurgence of the word ‘prosumer’, which was first coined by cultural critic Alvin Toffler in 1980, to emphasize the novelty of asking individuals to simultaneously play the role of consumer and producer (Kotler 1986; Tapscott and Williams 2006). In this article, we offer a critical analysis of the ways in which the role of the consumer may be changing and therefore also an investigation of this role in the broader capitalist system, a system in which consumers have traditionally served a central function. We argue that although consumers are increasingly performing tasks normally handled by the company, this role redefinition may be, at least in some cases, illusory. We also find that although the employee/customer distinction can be blurred on many dimensions, one dimension on which the distinction remains is between those who create use value and those who create exchange value (Marx 1867 [2001]). Increasingly, individuals who have traditionally been defined as ‘consumers’ are producing exchange value for companies, and this, we argue, is where the so-called ‘prosumer’ does indeed represent a fundamental change in economic organization. We then use the distinction between use value and exchange value to further explore the normative and ethical implications of consumer production. Consumer versus producer The consumer–producer relationship has traditionally been conceived of as an exchange relationship in which each party trades one kind of value for another (Bagozzi 1975). In this article, we focus on the exchange relationship between an end user (such as a person buying coffee beans for home use) and the organization from which this end user buys a product or service (such as a supermarket or coffee shop). Before an end user buys something, a series of transformations are usually applied to it to make the product or service usable to the end user and to therefore enhance its value. To make a cup of coffee, for example, someone must grow and harvest the coffee beans, roast and grind them, transport and package them, offer them for retail sale, and finally brew the cup of coffee. These are all steps in what Michael Porter (1985) calls the ‘value chain’, the series of transformations required to make a product for an end user.

Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing <=SEP=> Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of “goods,” which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past several decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the cocreation of value, and relationships. The authors believe that the new perspectives are converging to form a new dominant logic for marketing, one in which service provision rather than goods is fundamental to economic exchange. The authors explore this evolving logic and the corresponding shift in perspective for marketing scholars, marketing practitioners, and marketing educators.

The Emerging Role of Electronic Marketplaces on the Internet <=SEP=> Markets play a central role in the economy, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services and payments. In the process, they create economic value for buyers, sellers, market intermediaries and for society at large. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the role of information technology in markets, both in traditional markets, and in the emergence of electronic marketplaces, such as the multitude of Internet-based online auctions.

Information systems in supply chain integration and management <=SEP=> Supply chain management (SCM) is the 21st century global operations strategy for achieving organizational competitiveness. Companies are attempting to find ways to improve their flexibility and responsiveness and in turn competitiveness by changing their operations strategy, methods and technologies that include the implementation of SCM paradigm and information technology (IT). However, a thorough and critical review of literature is yet to be carried out with the objective of bringing out pertinent factors and useful insights into the role and implications of IT in SCM. In this paper, the literature available on IT in SCM have been classified using suitable criteria and then critically reviewed to develop a framework for studying the applications of IT in SCM. Based on this review and analysis, recommendations have been made regarding the application of IT in SCM and some future research directions are indicated. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The American Economic Review VOLUME XLV MARCH , 1955 NUMBER ONE ECONOMIC GROWTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY <=SEP=> 

A Three-Phase Current-Fed DC/DC Converter With Active Clamp for Low-DC Renewable Energy Sources <=SEP=> This paper focuses on a new three-phase high power current-fed DC/DC converter with an active clamp. A three-phase DC/DC converter with high efficiency and voltage boosting capability is designed for use in the interface between a low-voltage fuel-cell source and a high-voltage DC bus for inverters. Zero-voltage switching in all active switches is achieved through using a common active clamp branch, and zero current switching in the rectifier diodes is achieved through discontinuous current conduction in the secondary side. Further, the converter is capable of increased power transfer due to its three-phase power configuration, and it reduces the RMS current per phase, thus reducing conduction losses. Moreover, a delta-delta connection on the three-phase transformer provides parallel current paths and reduces conduction losses in the transformer windings. An efficiency of above 93% is achieved through both improvements in the switching and through reducing conduction losses. A high voltage ratio is achieved by combining inherent voltage boost characteristics of the current-fed converter and the transformer turns ratio. The proposed converter and three-phase PWM strategy is analyzed, simulated, and implemented in hardware. Experimental results are obtained on a 500-W prototype unit, with all of the design verified and analyzed.

Par4: very high speed parallel robot for pick-and-place <=SEP=> This paper introduces a four-degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator dedicated to pick-and-place. It has been developed with the goal of reaching very high speed. This paper shows that its architecture is particularly well adapted to high dynamics. Indeed, it is an evolution of Delta, H4 and 14 robots architectures: it keeps the advantages of these existing robots, while overcoming their drawbacks. In addition, an optimization method based on velocity using adept motion has been developed and applied to this high speed parallel robot. All these considerations led to experimentations that proved we can reach high accelerations (13 G) and obtain a cycle time of 0.28 s.

Towards Controlled Transformation of Sentiment in Sentences <=SEP=> An obstacle to the development of many natural language processing products is the vast amount of training examples necessary to get satisfactory results. The generation of these examples is often a tedious and timeconsuming task. This paper this paper proposes a method to transform the sentiment of sentences in order to limit the work necessary to generate more training data. This means that one sentence can be transformed to an opposite sentiment sentence and should reduce by half the work required in the generation of text. The proposed pipeline consists of a sentiment classifier with an attention mechanism to highlight the short phrases that determine the sentiment of a sentence. Then, these phrases are changed to phrases of the opposite sentiment using a baseline model and an autoencoder approach. Experiments are run on both the separate parts of the pipeline as well as on the end-to-end model. The sentiment classifier is tested on its accuracy and is found to perform adequately. The autoencoder is tested on how well it is able to change the sentiment of an encoded phrase and it was found that such a task is possible. We use human evaluation to judge the performance of the full (end-to-end) pipeline and that reveals that a model using word vectors outperforms the encoder model. Numerical evaluation shows that a success rate of 54.7% is achieved on the sentiment change.

Design, Analysis, and Test of a Novel 2-DOF Nanopositioning System Driven by Dual Mode <=SEP=> Piezodriven flexure-based motion stages, with a large workspace and high positioning precision, are really attractive for the realization of high-performance atomic force microscope (AFM) scanning. In this paper, a modified lever displacement amplifier is proposed for the mechanism design of a novel compliant two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) nanopositioning stage, which can be selected to drive in dual modes. Besides, the modified double four-bar parallelogram, P (P denotes prismatic) joints are adopted in designing the flexure limbs. The established models for the mechanical performance evaluation of the stage, in terms of kinetostatics, dynamics, and workspace, are validated by the finite-element analysis. After a series of dimension optimizations carried out through the particle swarm optimization algorithm, a novel active disturbance rejection controller, including the nonlinearity tracking differentiator, the extended state observer, and the nonlinear state error feedback, is proposed to automatically estimate and suppress plant uncertainties arising from the hysteresis nonlinearity, creep effect, sensor noises, and unknown disturbances. The simulation and prototype test results indicate that the first natural frequency of the proposed stage is approximated to be 831 Hz, the amplification ratio in two axes is about 4.2, and the workspace is 119.7 μm × 121.4 μm, while the cross coupling between the two axes is kept within 2%. All the results prove that the developed stage possesses a good property for high-performance AFM scanning.

Large Receptive Field Networks for High-Scale Image Super-Resolution <=SEP=> Convolutional Neural Networks have been the backbone of recent rapid progress in Single-Image Super-Resolution. However, existing networks are very deep with many network parameters, thus having a large memory footprint and being challenging to train. We propose Large Receptive Field Networks which strive to directly expand the receptive field of Super-Resolution networks without increasing depth or parameter count. In particular, we use two different methods to expand the network receptive field: 1-D separable kernels and atrous convolutions. We conduct considerable experiments to study the performance of various arrangement schemes of the 1-D separable kernels and atrous convolution in terms of accuracy (PSNR / SSIM), parameter count, and speed, while focusing on the more challenging high upscaling factors. Extensive benchmark evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

3D face recognition: a survey <=SEP=> 3D face recognition has become a trending research direction in both industry and academia. It inherits advantages from traditional 2D face recognition, such as the natural recognition process and a wide range of applications. Moreover, 3D face recognition systems could accurately recognize human faces even under dim lights and with variant facial positions and expressions, in such conditions 2D face recognition systems would have immense difficulty to operate. This paper summarizes the history and the most recent progresses in 3D face recognition research domain. The frontier research results are introduced in three categories: pose-invariant recognition, expression-invariant recognition, and occlusion-invariant recognition. To promote future research, this paper collects information about publicly available 3D face databases. This paper also lists important open problems.

Hybrid distribution transformer: Concept development and field demonstration <=SEP=> Today's distribution system is expected to supply power to loads for which it was not designed. Moreover, high penetration of distributed generation units is redefining the requirements for the design, control and operation of the electric distribution system. A Hybrid Distribution Transformer is a potential cost-effective alternative solution to various distribution grid control devices. The Hybrid Distribution Transformer is realized by augmenting a regular transformer with a fractionally rated power electronic converter, which provides the transformer with additional control capabilities. The Hybrid Distribution Transformer concept can provide dynamic ac voltage regulation, reactive power compensation and, in future designs, form an interface with energy storage devices. Other potential functionalities that can be realized from the Hybrid Distribution Transformer include voltage phase angle control, harmonic compensation and voltage sag compensation. This paper presents the concept of a Hybrid Distribution Transformer and the status of our efforts towards a 500 kVA, 12.47 kV/480 V field demonstrator.

Designing a Tag-Based Statistical Math Word Problem Solver with Reasoning and Explanation <=SEP=> Background Since Big Data mainly aims to explore the correlation between surface features but not their underlying causality relationship, the Big Mechanism 2 program has been proposed by DARPA to find out “why” behind the “Big Data”. However, the pre-requisite for it is that the machine can read each document and learn its associated knowledge, which is the task of Machine Reading (MR). Since a domain-independent MR system is complicated and difficult to build, the math word problem (MWP) [1] is frequently chosen as the first test case to study MR (as it usually uses less complicated syntax and requires less amount of domain knowledge). According to the framework for making the decision while there are several candidates, previous MWP algebra solvers can be classified into: (1) Rule-based approaches with logic inference [2-7], which apply rules to get the answer (via identifying entities, quantities, operations, etc.) with a logic inference engine. (2) Rule-based approaches without logic inference [8-13], which apply rules to get the answer without a logic inference engine. (3) Statistics-based approaches [14, 15], which use statistical models to identify entities, quantities, operations, and get the answer. To our knowledge, all the statistics-based approaches do not adopt logic inference. The main problem of the rule-based approaches mentioned above is that the coverage rate problem is serious, as rules with wide coverage are difficult and expensive to construct. Also, since they adopt Go/No-Go approach (unlike statistical approaches which can adopt a large Top-N to have high including rates), the error accumulation problem would be severe. On the other hand, the main problem of those approaches without adopting logic inference is that they usually need to implement a new handling procedure for each new type of problems (as the general logic inference mechanism is not adopted). Also, as there is no inference engine to generate the reasoning chain [16], additional effort would be required for

Attribute-based People Search: Lessons Learnt from a Practical Surveillance System <=SEP=> We address the problem of attribute-based people search in real surveillance environments. The system we developed is capable of answering user queries such as "show me all people with a beard and sunglasses, wearing a white hat and a patterned blue shirt, from all metro cameras in the downtown area, from 2pm to 4pm last Saturday". In this paper, we describe the lessons we learned from practical deployments of our system, and how we made our algorithms achieve the accuracy and efficiency required by many police departments around the world. In particular, we show that a novel set of multimodal integral filters and proper normalization of attribute scores are critical to obtain good performance. We conduct a comprehensive experimental analysis on video footage captured from a large set of surveillance cameras monitoring metro chokepoints, in both crowded and normal activity periods. Moreover, we show impressive results using images from the recent Boston marathon bombing event, where our system can rapidly retrieve the two suspects based on their attributes from a database containing more than one thousand people present at the event.

Why does the microbiome affect behaviour? <=SEP=> Growing evidence indicates that the mammalian microbiome can affect behaviour, and several symbionts even produce neurotransmitters. One common explanation for these observations is that symbionts have evolved to manipulate host behaviour for their benefit. Here, we evaluate the manipulation hypothesis by applying evolutionary theory to recent work on the gut–brain axis. Although the theory predicts manipulation by symbionts under certain conditions, these appear rarely satisfied by the genetically diverse communities of the mammalian microbiome. Specifically, any symbiont investing its resources to manipulate host behaviour is expected to be outcompeted within the microbiome by strains that do not manipulate and redirect their resources into growth and survival. Moreover, current data provide no clear evidence for manipulation. Instead, we show how behavioural effects can readily arise as a by-product of natural selection on microorganisms to grow within the host and natural selection on hosts to depend upon their symbionts. We argue that understanding why the microbiome influences behaviour requires a focus on microbial ecology and local effects within the host. The microbiota can influence host behaviour through the gut–brain axis. In this Opinion, Johnson and Foster explore the evolution of this relationship and propose that adaptations of competing gut microorganisms may affect behaviour as a by‑product, leading to host dependence.

Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval Models Based on (Bilingual) Word Embeddings <=SEP=> We propose a new unified framework for monolingual (MoIR) and cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) which relies on the induction of dense real-valued word vectors known as word embeddings (WE) from comparable data. To this end, we make several important contributions: (1) We present a novel word representation learning model called Bilingual Word Embeddings Skip-Gram (BWESG) which is the first model able to learn bilingual word embeddings solely on the basis of document-aligned comparable data; (2) We demonstrate a simple yet effective approach to building document embeddings from single word embeddings by utilizing models from compositional distributional semantics. BWESG induces a shared cross-lingual embedding vector space in which both words, queries, and documents may be presented as dense real-valued vectors; (3) We build novel ad-hoc MoIR and CLIR models which rely on the induced word and document embeddings and the shared cross-lingual embedding space; (4) Experiments for English and Dutch MoIR, as well as for English-to-Dutch and Dutch-to-English CLIR using benchmarking CLEF 2001-2003 collections and queries demonstrate the utility of our WE-based MoIR and CLIR models. The best results on the CLEF collections are obtained by the combination of the WE-based approach and a unigram language model. We also report on significant improvements in ad-hoc IR tasks of our WE-based framework over the state-of-the-art framework for learning text representations from comparable data based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA).

Easily Add Significance Testing to your Market Basket Analysis in SAS ® Enterprise Miner TM <=SEP=> Market Basket Analysis is a popular data mining tool that can be used to search through data to find patterns of co-occurrence among objects. It is an algorithmic process that generates business rules and several metrics for each business rule such as support, confidence and lift that help researchers identify “interesting” patterns. Although useful, these popular metrics do not incorporate traditional significance testing. This paper describes how to easily add a well-known statistical significance test, the Pearson’s Chi Squared statistic, to the existing output generated by SAS® Enterprise Miner’s Association Node. The addition of this significance test enhances the ability of data analysts to make better decisions about which business rules are likely to be more useful.

Leveraging social media networks for classification <=SEP=> Social media has reshaped the way in which people interact with each other. The rapid development of participatory web and social networking sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, also brings about many data mining opportunities and novel challenges. In particular, we focus on classification tasks with user interaction information in a social network. Networks in social media are heterogeneous, consisting of various relations. Since the relation-type information may not be available in social media, most existing approaches treat these inhomogeneous connections homogeneously, leading to an unsatisfactory classification performance. In order to handle the network heterogeneity, we propose the concept of social dimension to represent actors’ latent affiliations, and develop a classification framework based on that. The proposed framework, SocioDim, first extracts social dimensions based on the network structure to accurately capture prominent interaction patterns between actors, then learns a discriminative classifier to select relevant social dimensions. SocioDim, by differentiating different types of network connections, outperforms existing representative methods of classification in social media, and offers a simple yet effective approach to integrating two types of seemingly orthogonal information: the network of actors and their attributes.

From Word To Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning <=SEP=> Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.

Iterated learning and the evolution of language <=SEP=> Iterated learning describes the process whereby an individual learns their behaviour by exposure to another individual's behaviour, who themselves learnt it in the same way. It can be seen as a key mechanism of cultural evolution. We review various methods for understanding how behaviour is shaped by the iterated learning process: computational agent-based simulations; mathematical modelling; and laboratory experiments in humans and non-human animals. We show how this framework has been used to explain the origins of structure in language, and argue that cultural evolution must be considered alongside biological evolution in explanations of language origins.

Demographic Attributes Prediction on the Real-World Mobile Data <=SEP=> The deluge of the data generated by mobile phone devices imposes new challenges on the data mining community. User activities recorded by mobile phones could be useful for uncovering behavioral patterns. An interesting question is whether patterns in mobile phone usage can reveal demographic characteristics of the user? Demographic information about gender, age, marital status, job type, etc. is a key for applications with customer centric strategies. In this paper, we describe our approach to feature extraction from raw data and building predictive models for the task of demographic attributes predictions. We experimented with graph based representation of users inferred from similarity of their feature vectors, feature selections and classifications algorithms. Our work contributes to the Nokia Mobile Data Challenge (MDC) in the endeavor of exploring the real-world mobile data.

The Effects of Profile Pictures and Friends' Comments on Social Network Site Users' Body Image and Adherence to the Norm <=SEP=> This study sought to explore the effects of exposure to Facebook body ideal profile pictures and norm conforming comments on users' body image. In addition, the social identity and self-categorization theoretical frameworks were used to explore users' endorsement of a body ideal norm. A mock Facebook page was used to conduct a pretest posttest 2 × 2 between-group web-based experiment that featured body ideal profile pictures (body ideal vs. no body) and body ideal comments (conforming vs. nonconforming). Five hundred and one participants completed the experiment and passed all manipulation checks. Participants viewed pictures and comments on the status page and were able to leave their own comment before exiting. Results demonstrated no significant main effects. However, predispositional body satisfaction significantly moderated the relationship between body ideal pictures and body satisfaction. Most comments supported the body ideal norm. However, in support of self-categorization theory, participants exposed to nonconforming comments made nonconforming comments themselves significantly more than those exposed to conforming comments. The findings demonstrated the importance of continued body image research in social network sites, as well as the potential for self-categorization theory to guide such research.

(Invited) Nanoimprinted perovskite for optoelectronics <=SEP=> Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites have recently emerged as promising materials for optoelectronics. Here we show successful patterning of hybrid perovskite into nanostructures with cost-effective nanoimprint technology. Photodetectors are fabricated on nanoimprinted perovskite with improved responsivity. Nanoimprinted perovskite metasurface forms with significantly enhanced photoluminescence. Lasing is expected on nanoimprinted perovskite with optimized cavity design and process.

A 0.7V Fully-on-Chip Pseudo-Digital LDO Regulator with 6.3μA Quiescent Current and 100mV Dropout Voltage in 0.18-μm CMOS <=SEP=> This paper presents an NMOS pseudo-digital low-dropout (PD-LDO) regulator that supports low-voltage operation by eliminating the amplifier of an analog LDO. The proposed pseudo-digital control loop consists of a latched comparator, a 2X charge pump and a RC network. It detects the output voltage and provides a continuous gate control signal for the power transistor by charging and discharging the RC network. Fast transient response is achieved due to the source follower structure of the power NMOS, with a small output capacitor and small occupied chip area and without consuming large quiescent current. The proof-of-concept design of the proposed PD-LDO is implemented in a 0.18-J.1m CMOS process. The minimum supply voltage is 0.7 V, with a dropout voltage of 100 mV and a maximum load current of 100 mA. Using only 20 pF of on-chip output capacitor and 10 MHz comparator clock frequency, the undershoot is 106 mV with 90 mA load current step and 150 ns edge time. The quiescent current is only 6.3 μA and the active chip area is 0.08 mm2.

Heart rate variability and psychometric responses to overload and tapering in collegiate sprint-swimmers. <=SEP=> OBJECTIVES
The purpose of this study was to evaluate cardiac-parasympathetic and psychometric responses to competition preparation in collegiate sprint-swimmers. Additionally, we aimed to determine the relationship between average vagal activity and its daily fluctuation during each training phase.


DESIGN
Observational.


METHODS
Ten Division-1 collegiate sprint-swimmers performed heart rate variability recordings (i.e., log transformed root mean square of successive RR intervals, lnRMSSD) and completed a brief wellness questionnaire with a smartphone application daily after waking. Mean values for psychometrics and lnRMSSD (lnRMSSDmean) as well as the coefficient of variation (lnRMSSDcv) were calculated from 1 week of baseline (BL) followed by 2 weeks of overload (OL) and 2 weeks of tapering (TP) leading up to a championship competition.


RESULTS
Competition preparation resulted in improved race times (p<0.01). Moderate decreases in lnRMSSDmean, and Large to Very Large increases in lnRMSSDcv, perceived fatigue and soreness were observed during the OL and returned to BL levels or peaked during TP (p<0.05). Inverse correlations between lnRMSSDmean and lnRMSSDcv were Very Large at BL and OL (p<0.05) but only Moderate at TP (p>0.05).


CONCLUSIONS
OL training is associated with a reduction and greater daily fluctuation in vagal activity compared with BL, concurrent with decrements in perceived fatigue and muscle soreness. These effects are reversed during TP where these values returned to baseline or peaked leading into successful competition. The strong inverse relationship between average vagal activity and its daily fluctuation weakened during TP.

基於對照表以及語言模型之簡繁字體轉換 (Chinese Characters Conversion System based on Lookup Table and Language Model) [In Chinese] <=SEP=> The character sets used in China and Taiwan are both Chinese, but they are divided into simplified and traditional Chinese characters. There are large amount of information exchange between China and Taiwan through books and Internet. To provide readers a convenient reading environment, the character conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese is necessary. The conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese characters has two problems: one-to-many ambiguity and term usage problems. Since there are many traditional Chinese characters that have only one corresponding simplified character, when converting simplified Chinese into traditional Chinese, the system will face the one-to-many ambiguity. Also, there are many terms that have different usages between the two Chinese societies. This paper focus on designing an extensible conversion system, that can take the advantage of community knowledge by accumulating lookup tables through Wikipedia to tackle the term usage problem and can integrate language model to disambiguate the one-to-many ambiguity. The system can reduce the cost of proofreading of character conversion for books, e-books, or online publications. The extensible architecture makes it easy to improve the system with new training data.

Checklists for improving rigour in qualitative research: a case of the tail wagging the dog? <=SEP=> Qualitative research methods are enjoying unprecedented popularity. Although checklists have undoubtedly contributed to the wider acceptance of such methods, these can be counterproductive if used prescriptively. The uncritical adoption of a range of “technical fixes” (such as purposive sampling, grounded theory, multiple coding, triangulation, and respondent validation) does not, in itself, confer rigour. In this article I discuss the limitations of these procedures and argue that there is no substitute for systematic and thorough application of the principles of qualitative research. Technical fixes will achieve little unless they are embedded in a broader understanding of the rationale and assumptions behind qualitative research.

Agile Flight Control Techniques for a Fixed-Wing Aircraft by Frantisek Michal Sobolic <=SEP=> As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become more involved in challenging mission objectives, the need for agility controlled flight becomes more of a necessity. The ability to navigate through constrained environments as well as quickly maneuver to each mission target is essential. Currently, individual vehicles are developed with a particular mission objective, whether it be persistent surveillance or fly-by reconnaissance. Fixed-wing vehicles with a high thrust-to-weight ratio are capable of performing maneuvers such as take-off or perch style landing and switch between hover and conventional flight modes. Agile flight controllers enable a single vehicle to achieve multiple mission objectives. By utilizing the knowledge of the flight dynamics through all flight regimes, nonlinear controllers can be developed that control the aircraft in a single design. This thesis develops a full six-degree-of-freedom model for a fixed-wing propellerdriven aircraft along with methods of control through nonconventional flight regimes. In particular, these controllers focus on transitioning into and out of hover to level flight modes. This maneuver poses hardships for conventional linear control architectures because these flights involve regions of the post-stall regime, which is highly nonlinear due to separation of flow over the lifting surfaces. Using Lyapunov backstepping control stability theory as well as quaternion-based control methods, control strategies are developed that stabilize the aircraft through these flight regimes without the need to switch control schemes. The effectiveness of each control strategy is demonstrated in both simulation and flight experiments. Thesis Supervisor: Jonathan P. How Title: Professor

Yet Another Visit to Paxos <=SEP=> This paper presents a modular introduction to crash-tolerant and Byzantine-tolerant protocols for reaching consensus that use the method introduced by the Paxos algorithm of Lamport and by the viewstamped replication algorithm of Oki and Liskov. The consensus protocol runs a sequence of epoch abstractions as governed by an epoch-change abstraction. Implementations of epoch and epoch-change that tolerate crash faults yield the consensus algorithm in Paxos and in viewstamped replication. Implementations of epoch and epoch-change that tolerate Byzantine faults yield the consensus algorithm in the PBFT protocol of Castro and Liskov.