This study investigates the optimality of the shape of a snake robot in relation to the obstacles in the environment around it. A certain focus is given to the challenge of finding an optimal set of contact forces based on some optimality criteria. A controller scheme for realizing these contact forces on a dynamic snake model with obstacle compliance was presented, but further development and ...

Many studies have found an inverse correlation between religious/spiritual involvement and depression. Yet several obstacles impede spiritually integrated treatment of depressed individuals. These include specialization and fragmentation of care, inexperience of clinicians and spiritual care providers, ideological bias, boundary and ethical concerns, and the lack of an accepted conceptual frame...

In this paper we formally define the problem of automatic detection of thematic categories in a semantically indexed document, and identify the main obstacles to overcome in this process. Furthermore, we explain how detection of thematic categories can be achieved, with the use of a fuzzy quasi-taxonomic relation. Our approach relies on a fuzzy hierarchical clustering algorithm; this algorithm ...

background and purpose: physical activity may be classified as intense, moderate, and low. despite their health-related benefits, iranian women have a low rate of physical activity. women face numerous obstacles and challenges for participating in physical activity programs, most notably are household chores and taking caring of children, long distance between home and workplace and the other p...

This paper has a marked practical aspect. We wish to encourage and facilitate the use of Q methodology amongst psychologists interested in qualitative research. The paper duly answers a number of pertinent ‘how to do Q’ questions. Yet our primary intention is not to produce an exhaustive ‘how to do Q’ guide. In discussing issues of theory, method and interpretation in Q methodology, the main ai...

This paper reports the relation between text readability and word distribution in the Japanese language. There was no similar study in the past due to three major obstacles: (1) unclear definition of Japanese “word”, (2) no balanced corpus, and (3) no readability measure. Compilation of the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ) and development of a readability predictor remov...

We consider the problem of online planning for a mobile robot among obstacles, where it is impractical to test all possible future paths. One approach is for the runtime task to test some subset of the possible paths and select a path that does not collide with obstacles while advancing the robot toward its goal. Performance depends on the choice of path set. In this paper we assume the path se...

In our research to use information extraction to help populate the semantic web, we have encountered significant obstacles to interoperability between the technologies. We believe these obstacles to be endemic to the basic paradigms, and not quirks of the specific implementations we have worked with. In particular, we identify five dimensions of interoperability that must be addressed to succes...

Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery In times of economic crisis, with the government cutting funds in various sectors, including science and technology, with serious consequences in scientific research and, consequently, the production of good articles, periodicals must learn to reinvent themselves in order to be most read/accessed by attracting more interesting studies. To make matters...

We study numerically the tortuosity-porosity relation in a microscopic model of a porous medium arranged as a collection of freely overlapping squares. It is demonstrated that the finite-size, slow relaxation and discretization errors, which were ignored in previous studies, may cause significant underestimation of tortuosity. The simple tortuosity calculation method proposed here eliminates th...