Stated Goals Research Articles

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Modelling Australian Rules Football as spatial systems with pairwise comparisons

Abstract Statistical analysis in competitive sport is an important tool for developing strategy and seeking competitive advantages. However, for complex team sports such as Australian Rules Football, major limitations occur when using possession event data for game analysis. First, focusing on counting possession events does not capture the impact of off-the-ball actions such as ground positioning of other players. Second, it is difficult to determine the extent that an event is due to either team’s relative proficiency or skill. Third, there is limited possession event data available from each match and modelling efforts often have low statistical power. Here we reinterpret event data into positional systems and utilise pairwise performance metrics to understand the relative team proficiency in each of these states. These metrics can then be used to construct transition probabilities between states for future games, and ultimately, absorbing probabilities of goal states. Our approach effectively predicts match outcomes using team ratings for forward, midfield and defensive systems and is sufficiently interpretable to support strategic decision-making by coaching departments in the Australian Football League (AFL).

Towards a conative account of mental imagery

ABSTRACT Philosophers and psychologists assume that mental imagery is a cognitive state, that it represents things as being a certain way. However, I argue that imagery is a conative state: it represents things as to be made a certain way. I challenge the traditional assumption by targeting an increasingly popular cognitive account that identifies mental imagery, such as inner speech, with predictions of sensory input. This predictive account faces both empirical and theoretical problems. The account not only fails to capture the salience effects exhibited by mental imagery, it also cannot explain why subjects should not spend their lives minimizing prediction error by engaging in fantasy. These shortcomings highlight what I call the conative profile of imagery, which includes its salience, motivational, and performance effects. I argue that an alternative, conative view of imagery, according to which mental images are goal states, is best able to account for its conative profile.

An Improved Multimodal Trajectory Prediction Method Based on Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, the deep learning method has been introduced for vehicle trajectory prediction in the internet of vehicles, since it provides relative accurate prediction results, which is one of the critical links to guarantee security in the distributed mixed-driving scenario. In order to further enhance prediction accuracy by making full utilization of complex traffic scenes, an improved multimodal trajectory prediction method based on deep inverse reinforcement learning is proposed. Firstly, a fused dilated convolution module for better extracting raster features is introduced into the existing multimodal trajectory prediction network backbone. Then, a reward update policy with inferred goals is improved by learning the state rewards of goals and paths separately instead of original complex rewards, which can reduce the requirement for predefined goal states. Furthermore, a correction factor is introduced in the existing trajectory generator module, which can better generate diverse trajectories by penalizing trajectories with little difference. Abundant experiments on the current popular public dataset indicate that the prediction results of our proposed method are a better fit with the basic structure of the given traffic scenario in a long-term prediction range, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.

A practical guide to botulinum neurotoxin treatment of shoulder spasticity 2: Injection techniques, outcome measurement scales, and case studies.

Botulinum neurotoxin type A (BoNT-A) is a first-line treatment option for post-stroke spasticity, reducing pain and involuntary movements and helping to restore function. BoNT-A is frequently injected into the arm, the wrist, the hand, and/or the finger muscles but less often into the shoulder muscles, despite clinical trials demonstrating improvements in pain and function after shoulder BoNT-A injection. In part 2 of this two-part practical guide, we present an experts' consensus on the choice of outcome measurement scales and goal-setting recommendations for BoNT-A in the treatment of shoulder spasticity to increase awareness of shoulder muscle injection with BoNT-A, alongside the more commonly injected upper limb muscles. Expert consensus was obtained from five European experts with a cumulative experience of more than 100 years of BoNT-A use in post-stroke spasticity. Case studies are included as examples of approaches taken in the treatment of shoulder spasticity. Although the velocity-dependent increase in muscle tone is often a focus of patient assessment, it is only one component of spasticity and should be assessed as part of a wider range of measurements. For outcome measurement following BoNT-A injection in shoulder muscles, shoulder-specific scales are recommended. Other scales to be considered include Pain Numerical Rating and/or global functioning, as well as the quality of life and global perception of benefit scores.Goal setting is an essential part of the multidisciplinary management process for spasticity; goals should be patient-centric, realistic, and achievable; functional-focused goal statements and a mixture of short- (3-6 month) and long-term (9-18 month) goals are recommended. These can be grouped into symptomatic, passive function, active function, involuntary movement, and global mobility.Clinical evaluation tools, goal setting, and outcome expectations for the multipattern treatment of shoulder spasticity with BoNT-A should be defined by the whole multidisciplinary team, ensuring patient and caregiver involvement. These recommendations will be of benefit to clinicians who may not be experienced in evaluating and treating spastic shoulders.

Property Rights Protection and Land Markets in the Context of Juridical Gaps between Municipal and SADC Systems

The protection of property rights is a sensitive issue in the SADC, leading to protracted legal battles and contestations. This article explores the factors engendering the present configurations of property relations in three selected states in the region. The intention of this article is to identify the factors necessary for the development of land markets and to analyse secondary sources on themes, arguments and factors shaping market development. Interrogating the major themes in the prevailing debates, this article identifies African customary rights as an important factor in the development of markets, by acknowledging the significance of the harmonisation of property laws in the region. Since there are cross-juridical gaps between the regulatory goals of states and those of regional communities, the article identifies limitations and opportunities associated with efforts to harmonise the law. Furthermore, proposing measures to narrow the juridical gaps between the municipal and SADC systems, and presenting the idea of a regional protocol as a prospective device to ensure legal convergence.

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Simple and efficient bi-objective search algorithms via fast dominance checks

Many interesting search problems can be formulated as bi-objective search problems, that is, search problems where two kinds of costs have to be minimized, for example, travel distance and time for transportation problems. Instead of looking for a single optimal path, we compute a Pareto-optimal frontier in bi-objective search, which is a set of paths in which no two paths dominate each other. Bi-objective search algorithms perform dominance checks each time a new path is discovered. Thus, the efficiency of these checks is key to performance. In this article, we propose algorithms for two kinds of bi-objective search problems. First, we consider the problem of computing the Pareto-optimal frontier of the paths that connect a given start state with a given goal state. We propose Bi-Objective A* (BOA*), a heuristic search algorithm based on A*, for this problem. Second, we consider the problem of computing one Pareto-optimal frontier for each state s of the search graph, which contains the paths that connect a given start state with s. We propose Bi-Objective Dijkstra (BOD), which is based on BOA*, for this problem. A common feature of BOA* and BOD is that all dominance checks are performed in constant time, unlike the dominance checks of previous algorithms. We show in our experimental evaluation that both BOA* and BOD are substantially faster than state-of-the-art bi-objective search algorithms.

Maternal Mortality in Africa: Regional Trends (2000-2017).

Background: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals state that by 2030, the global maternal mortality rate (MMR) should be lower than 70 per 100,000 live births. MMR is still one of Africa’s leading causes of death among women. The leading causes of maternal mortality in Africa are hemorrhage and eclampsia. This research aims to study regional trends in maternal mortality (MM) in Africa. Methods: We extracted data for maternal mortality rates per 100,000 births from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) databank from 2000 to 2017, 2017 being the last date available. Joinpoint regression was used to study the trends and estimate the annual percent change (APC). Results: Maternal mortality has decreased in Africa over the study period by an average APC of −3.0% (95% CI −2.9; −3,2%). All regions showed significant downward trends, with the greatest decreases in the South. Only the North African region is close to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals for Maternal mortality. The remaining Sub-Saharan African regions are still far from achieving the goals. Conclusions: Maternal mortality has decreased in Africa, especially in the South African region. The only region close to the United Nations’ target is the North African region. The remaining Sub-Saharan African regions are still far from achieving the goals. The West African region needs more extraordinary efforts to achieve the goals of the United Nations. Policies should ensure that all pregnant women have antenatal visits and give birth in a health facility staffed by specialized personnel.

The Physical Therapist Assistant Education Summit Report: Prioritized Recommendations for the Future

Background and Purpose: The APTA Academy of Education identified a need to assess the status of physical therapist assistant (PTA) education given changes in contemporary physical therapist practice and health care. In response, a task force was charged to plan a summit that would engage stakeholders in formulation of prioritized recommendations to advance PTA education. Method and Results: The Summit Planning Task Force formulated a 3-phase process: phase 1—surveys emailed to PTA education stakeholders; phase 2—four online modules that informed participants about trends in PTA education and solicited data on perceived strengths and weaknesses; and phase 3—a 2-day facilitated virtual meeting of 37 stakeholders who collaboratively developed the Summit outcomes. More than 2500 individuals contributed to data gathered from phases 1 and 2. Phase 3 participants formulated 3 comprehensive recommendations with associated goal statements, objectives, and strategies intendeds to drive future work in PTA education. Discussion and Conclusions: This report presents detailed methods by which the consensus-driven recommendations were achieved, supporting the Summit Task Force's “vision of the PTA as the educated extender that supports the future of physical therapist practice.” There was not consensus on any one direction that PTA education should take. Findings, however, support an array of flexible opportunities by which career goals of current and future PTAs may be achieved while enhancing patient care by the physical therapist/PTA team. Work to implement recommendations must be shared by all relevant stakeholders in order to move PTA education forward.

DiffCo: Autodifferentiable Proxy Collision Detection With Multiclass Labels for Safety-Aware Trajectory Optimization

The objective of trajectory optimization algorithms is to achieve an optimal collision-free path between start and goal states. In real-world scenarios, where environments can be complex and nonhomogeneous, a robot needs to be able to gauge whether a state will be in collision with various objects in order to meet some safety metrics. The collision detector should be computationally efficient and, ideally, analytically differentiable to facilitate stable and rapid gradient descent during optimization. However, methods today lack an elegant approach to detect collision differentiably, relying rather on numerical gradients that can be unstable. We present DiffCo, the first, fully autodifferentiable, nonparametric model for collision detection. Its nonparametric behavior allows one to compute collision boundaries on the fly and update them, requiring no pretraining and allowing it to update continuously in dynamic environments. It provides robust gradients for trajectory optimization via backpropagation and is often 10–100 times faster to compute than its geometric counterparts. DiffCo also extends trivially to modeling different object collision classes for semantically informed trajectory optimization.

Power and Vitalism in the Balkan Wars: State of Forces, War Goals and Social Darwinism

L’initiative, à première vue disproportionnée, des petits États balkaniques de régler avec l’Empire ottoman leurs questions nationales par la force durant les Guerres balkaniques recèle encore une part de paradoxe. Cette disproportion place la question de la puissance au cœur des relations balkaniques. Cette notion s’entend ici non seulement comme la simple somme mécanique des forces concrètes d’un pays dans tous les domaines, du diplomatico-militaire au culturel en passant par l’économique et le social, mais aussi comme la mesure de sa vitalité en termes socio-darwinistes dans le champ de compétition belliqueuse limité des Balkans, et même dans un au-delà impérial dont il convient de circonscrire l’imaginaire.

2022 개정 초등학교 창의적 체험활동의 효과적인 설계와 실천

Objectives This study was to understand how creative experience activities are currently being operated in elementary schools and to find ways of the effective application and improvement of the creative experience activities of 2022 Revised Curriculum. In particular, the purpose of this study was to focus on how the domain and content of creative experience activities are being applied in elementary schools, and whether the creative experience activities are being revised by properly reflecting the opinions and experiences of teachers. Methods An qualitative research was used for the study, including in-depth interview and document analysis. 10 public elementary school teachers were invited as research participants. The researchers collected data about how elementary school teachers plan creative experience activities, and how they apply the plan. Various school curricula documents were also collected. For the analysis, the researchers followed the process of the comprehensive analysis procedure of qualitative research. Results First, most of the teachers responded that autonomous activities are a curriculum component when the schools and teachers could freely organize. Yet, in actual operation, the problem of teachers' lack of autonomy was revealed. Second, club activities were found to be the area where teachers' opinions and thoughts were most reflected. However, support for teachers was lacking and, contrary to the original intention, students' opinions were mostly ignored. Third, volunteer activities needed the most improvement among elementary school creative experience activities. Fourth, career activity was the area where teachers showed the greatest difference in perception and practice. Although new attempts and creative classes for effective management of career activities were observed, they were also operated in a way that was most unsuitable for the educational goals of elementary schools or the developmental level of the students. Conclusions At the elementary school level, teachers believe that creative experiential activities play as important role as the subjects, but in actual practice, they were unable to practice creative experiential activities according to the original purpose of the curriculum. Insufficient support and interest of teachers also hindered the effective implementation of creative experience activities. To solve the problems, solutions such as appropriate content distribution and balance between the four domains, restructuring goal statements of each domains, and enhancing teachers’ and students’ autonomy were suggested.

Discrepancies between ideal and actual affect in schizophrenia: Implications for understanding negative symptoms

Anhedonia is a core symptom of schizophrenia (SZ). However, psychological mechanisms underlying anhedonia are unclear, making it difficult to develop personalized psychosocial treatments. The current study explored the novel hypothesis that anhedonia is driven by discrepancies between ideal and actual affect (i.e., how positive or negative someone wants to feel compared to how they do feel), which impact the frequency of recreational, goal-directed, and social behaviors. Participants included 32 outpatients with SZ and 29 healthy controls (CN) who completed the Affect Valuation Index and measures of negative symptom severity. Results indicated that individuals with SZ displayed greater positive and negative emotion discrepancy scores than CN, suggesting that they strongly desire to feel more positive and less negative in the future than they actually do. Additionally, greater ideal relative to actual positive and negative affect was associated with greater severity of anhedonia, avolition, and asociality. The discrepancy between ideal and actual affective states may be demotivating, leading individuals with SZ to develop dysfunctional beliefs after repeated experiences of failing to achieve their desired emotional goal state. These findings suggest that ideal affect may be a novel psychological mechanism underlying negative symptoms that could be targeted in psychosocial treatments.

Patient life aspirations in the context of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy: a mixed-methods case–control study

BackgroundAspirations refer to wishes, ways of defining quality of life (QOL), and life goals. Living with chronic illness likely impacts a person’s life aspirations. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is an inherited disorder characterized by the inevitable and progressive loss of ambulation and independence. The present cross-sectional case–control study investigated how aspirations differed between people with DMD and a stratified comparison group of nationally representative children/adults.MethodsA web-based survey was administered October through December 2020. Recruitment was stratified by age group: 8–12, 13–17, and > = 18, reflecting the DMD disability trajectory. Aspirations were measured using qualitative (open-ended) and quantitative (closed-ended) questions. Qualitative prompts asked participants about wishes, how they would define “QOL”; and goals; answers to the prompts were then coded by six trained raters. Quantitative questions included 29 closed-ended goal-delineation items from the QOL Appraisal Profilev2. These data were analyzed using multivariate models adjusting for propensity scores (demographic differences), and testing for the effects of role (patient or comparison), age, and role-by-age interactions.ResultsThe study sample of DMD (n = 285) and comparison (n = 292) participants provided open-text data: 577 wishes statements, 283 QOL-definition statements, and 149 goals statements. Inter-rater reliability (kappa = 0.77) reflected good agreement between different raters’ codes. Results suggested that people with DMD have aspirations that differ from their peers in several important ways. Both open-text and closed-ended data in both unadjusted and adjusted analyses generally showed that people with DMD were more focused on intrinsic aspirations such as health, healthcare, and independence than their peers. Compared to non-DMD persons, DMD individuals were much less focused on financial or housing concerns, community contributions, or spiritual growth. With age, patients’ aspirations focused less on extrinsic aspirations such as careers and work and increasingly emphasized emotion-oriented goals. Patients were markedly less likely to give a direct answer to the open-ended goals question.ConclusionThere were important differences in aspirations between people with DMD and their peers. These findings may be helpful for developing psychosocial interventions.

Goal-aware generative adversarial imitation learning from imperfect demonstration for robotic cloth manipulation

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) can learn policies without explicitly defining the reward function from demonstrations. GAIL has the potential to learn policies with high-dimensional observations as input, e.g., images. By applying GAIL to a real robot, perhaps robot policies can be obtained for daily activities like washing, folding clothes, cooking, and cleaning. However, human demonstration data are often imperfect due to mistakes, which degrade the performance of the resulting policies. We address this issue by focusing on the following features: (1) many robotic tasks are goal-reaching tasks, and (2) labeling such goal states in demonstration data is relatively easy. With these in mind, this paper proposes Goal-Aware Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GA-GAIL), which trains a policy by introducing a second discriminator to distinguish the goal state in parallel with the first discriminator that indicates the demonstration data. This extends a standard GAIL framework to more robustly learn desirable policies even from imperfect demonstrations through a goal-state discriminator that promotes achieving the goal state. Furthermore, GA-GAIL employs the Entropy-maximizing Deep P-Network (EDPN) as a generator, which considers both the smoothness and causal entropy in the policy update, to achieve stable policy learning from two discriminators. Our proposed method was successfully applied to two real-robotic cloth-manipulation tasks: turning a handkerchief over and folding clothes. We confirmed that it learns cloth-manipulation policies without task-specific reward function design. Video of the real experiments are available at this URL.

Siblings’ life aspirations in the context of Duchenne muscular dystrophy: a mixed-methods case-control study

BackgroundThe inevitable and progressive loss of independence in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) patients may have an impact on their siblings’ life aspirations. The present cross-sectional case-control study investigated how aspirations differed between brothers and sisters of people with DMD and a stratified comparison group of nationally representative children/adults.MethodsA web-based survey was administered October through December 2020. Aspirations were measured using qualitative (open-ended) and quantitative (closed-ended) questions. Qualitative prompts asked participants about wishes, goals, and how they define quality of life (QOL) and were coded by six trained raters. Quantitative questions included 29 closed-ended goal-delineation items from the QOL Appraisal Profilev2. These data were analyzed using multivariate models adjusting for propensity scores (demographic differences) and testing for the effects of role (sibling or comparison), age, and role-by-age interactions.ResultsThe study sample of DMD sibling (n = 349) and comparison (n = 619) participants provided open-ended data on 968 wishes statements, 390 QOL-definition statements, and 328 goals statements. Inter-rater reliability (kappa = 0.77) reflected good agreement between raters. Results of both open-ended and closed-ended data, and of both unadjusted and adjusted analyses suggested that DMD siblings, with age, were more focused on DMD-related, family/community, intimacy, and work concerns than their peers. They were less focused on improving mood, independence, pragmatics, or subtle fine-tuning of problem-solving in life. In contrast, the comparison group was more focused on goals related to growth, purpose, and reflection. Some group differences were amplified amongst older siblings.ConclusionThis is the first study to evaluate DMD siblings’ aspirations in comparison to their peers. While there were many similarities between groups, the differences in aspirations between DMD siblings and their peers encompassed not just DMD, family/community, and intimacy, but also more work concerns. Directions for future quantitative and qualitative research are discussed.

Action-value processing underlies the role of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in performance monitoring during self-regulation of affect

In this study, we merged methods from engineering control theory, machine learning, and human neuroimaging to critically test the putative role of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in goal-directed performance monitoring during an emotion regulation task. Healthy adult participants (n = 94) underwent cued-recall and re-experiencing of their responses to affective image stimuli with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysiological response recording. During cued-recall/re-experiencing trials, participants engaged in explicit self-regulation of their momentary affective state to match a pre-defined affective goal state. Within these trials, neural decoding methods measured affect processing from fMRI BOLD signals across the orthogonal affective dimensions of valence and arousal. Participants’ affective brain states were independently validated via facial electromyography (valence) and electrodermal activity (arousal) responses. The decoded affective states were then used to contrast four computational models of performance monitoring (i.e., error, predicted response outcome, action-value, and conflict) by their relative abilities to explain emotion regulation task-related dACC activation. We found that the dACC most plausibly encodes action-value for both valence and arousal processing. We also confirmed that dACC activation directly encodes affective arousal and also likely encodes recruitment of attention and regulation resources. Beyond its contribution to improving our understanding of the roles that the dACC plays in emotion regulation, this study introduced a novel analytical framework through which affect processing and regulation may be functionally dissociated, thereby permitting mechanistic analysis of real-world emotion regulation strategies, e.g., distraction and reappraisal, which are widely employed in cognitive behavioral therapy to address clinical deficits in emotion regulation.

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities

Academic Orthodontic Opportunities