Rehabilitation measures at the St. Marien's Cathedral in Zwickau. St. Marien's Cathedral in Zwickau is the evidence of an 880 years old and very changing history. The region around the three-span Gothic hall church subsided 4 m and shifted 1,30 m to south-east as a result of the coal mining. Considerable stresses, cracks and other damages occured in the structure. Measures of repair and rehabilitation and some aspects of monitoring of the structure are described in this paper.

Ambiguous keyboards provide efficient typing with low motor demands. In our project1 concerning the development of a communication aid, we emphasize adaptation with respect to the sensory input. At the same time, we wish to impose individualized language models on the text determination process. UKO--II is an open architecture based on the Emacs text editor with a server/client interface for adaptive language models. Not only the group of motor impaired people but also users of watch--sized devices can profit from this ambiguous typing.

In this paper, we investigate whether and how domain-specific corpora increase precision of word disambiguation for typing on an ambiguous keyboard. Basically, the disambiguation for our ambiguous keyboard with three letter keys is based on language-specific word frequencies of the lexicon CELEX (in this study English and German is dealt with). The more specific frequency information is extracted from texts in the special domains of school homework in three subjects and articles in two different scientific areas. All in all, we could not always reach a better performance by deploying domain-specific predictions. As a general solution we propose an interpolated language model combining both the general and the specific language model. For all our domains good results---compared to an ideal prediction on the basis of all available models---could be achieved by this method.

In the communication using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) aids, scanning volunteers an effective method to users who can operate at most three buttons. In this paper, we investigate scanning with ambiguous keyboards. Using an ambiguous keyboard means that words are entered by pressing the corresponding ambiguous key once for each letter. The user disambiguates the typed code by selecting the intended word in a list of words of the same length as the code provided by the system. Additionally, the list may contain predictions where the code is supposed to be a valid prefix of a suggestion. In both cases, the suggestion list, the user selects the intended word from, is extracted from a large lexicon. Our study comprises an evaluation for various layouts of ambiguous keyboards which outperform two non– ambiguous keyboard layouts with respect to the number of scanning steps in a two button mode.

Ambiguous keyboards provide efficient typing with low motor demands. In our project l concerning the development of a communication aid, we emphasize adaptation with respect to the sensory input. At the same time, we wish to impose individualized language models on the text determination process. UKO–II is an open architecture based on the Emacs text editor with a server/client interface for adaptive language models. Not only the group of motor impaired people but also users of watch–sized devices can profit from this ambiguous typing.

No AccessJournal of UrologyCLINICAL UROLOGY: Case Reports1 Jul 2002Polyorchidism: A Strange Anomaly With Unsuspected Properties Robert Spranger, Marcel Gunst, and Michael Kühn Robert SprangerRobert Spranger , Marcel GunstMarcel Gunst , and Michael KühnMichael Kühn View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5347(05)64868-9AboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail "Polyorchidism: A Strange Anomaly With Unsuspected Properties." The Journal of Urology, 168(1), p. 198 References 1 : Polyorchidism with normal spermatogenesis and equal sized testes: a theory of embryological development. J Urol1978; 120: 638. Link, Google Scholar 2 : Polyorchidism: a case report and review of the literature. Eur J Pediatr Surg1992; 2: 306. Google Scholar 3 : Neoplasms of the testis. In: Campbell's Urology. Edited by . Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co.1998: 2411. Google Scholar From the Departments of Urology, Universitätsklinik Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria, Kantonsspital Olten, Olten, Switzerland, and Johanniter-Klinikum Stendal, Stendal, Germany© 2002 by American Urological Association, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byBergholz R and Wenke K (2018) Polyorchidism: A Meta-AnalysisJournal of Urology, VOL. 182, NO. 5, (2422-2427), Online publication date: 1-Nov-2009. Volume 168Issue 1July 2002Page: 198 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2002 by American Urological Association, Inc.Keywordsurogenital abnormalitiestesticular neoplasmstestisMetricsAuthor Information Robert Spranger More articles by this author Marcel Gunst More articles by this author Michael Kühn More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

The EMBASSI project aims at developing Electronical Multi-Medial Operating and Service Assistance for applications of electronic devices in private, automotive and public environments. -- In order to assist "slow typers" in typing free texts and to speed up text entries in public terminal systems, a text prediction system is being developed that predicts text while the user is slowly writing. The system takes into account application dependent vocabulary, user dependent preferences in writing, and the user specific features of impairment- dependent Personal Mobile Control Devices (EMMA) with individual user interface layouts.

Geothermal power generation affects chemical processes within reservoirs and in turn chemical reactions affect geothermal power generation. Reactive transport modeling is a technique that provides opportunities to help reduce costs and environmental impact due to geothermal power generation. Additionally numerical simulation is a means to investigate and approximate the long term performance of installed wells of geothermal plants. The following set of practical chemical problems, which should be and could be studied in detail by reactive transport modeling, arise from industrial experience: The first part of this chapter gives a short overview of numerical simulations performed by other authors investigating the mentioned topics. In the second part a detailed investigation is presented of the long term performance of the geothermal potential Stralsund (Germany).

In order to deal with the complexity of natural systems simplified models are employed to illustrate the principal and regulatory factors controlling a chemical system. Following the aphorism of Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”, models need not to be completely realistic to be useful (Stumm and Morgan 1996), but need to meet a successful balance between realism and practicality. Properly constructed, a model is neither too simplified that it is unrealistic nor too detailed that it cannot be readily evaluated and applied to the problem of interest (Bethke 1996). The results of a model have to be at least partially observable or experimentally verifiable (Zhu and Anderson 2002). Geochemical modeling theories are presented here in a sequence of increasing complexity from geochemical equilibrium models to kinetic, reaction path, and finally coupled transport and reaction models. The description is far from complete but provides the needs for the set up of reactive transport models of hydrothermal systems as done within subsequent chapters. Extensive reviews of geochemical models in general can be found in the literature (Appelo and Postma 1999, Bethke 1996, Melchior and Bassett 1990, Nordstrom and Ball 1984, Paschke and van der Heijde 1996).

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Typing commands is the access of choice for many experienced computer users because of the speed and flexibili ty frequent interactions can take place and the ease of defining and using macros. One specific group of persons who can be counted as frequent computer users are speech impaired people relying on electronic devices for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). But many speech impaired users are severely motor impaired, too. Therefore, the usage of a physical or on-screen keyboard is prohibitively costly for them with a standard keyboard layout. This paper presents a communication aid based on a highly ambiguous keyboard with word completion for communication, interaction and navigation. 1. Electronic communication for severely speech impaired users One outstanding feature of the information society nowadays is the importance of text as communication media in emails, SMS, newsgroups, and webpages. Even in synchronous situations like chatting electronic devices (computers, mobile phones, hand-helds) are used to transmit textual information . The success of ubiquituous communication has partly its reasons in the advantages of written messages via SMS: 1. they may be used for a synchronous or asynchronous dialogue as wanted; 2. they can be absorbed very fast and 3. they can be displayed in private (an important point for the use in classrooms). Likewise, chats, e-mails and newsgroups have become attractive alternative channels of synchronous or asynchronous communication for a varity of virtual communities (groups of interests). For the fraction of population affected by analphabetism, this development establishes a new barrier for participating in society. On the other hand, electronic communication could become an equally accessible communication channel for speech impared members of tomorrow’s information society. However, many strongly speech impaired people have severe motion impairments, too, because of the same causation: by birth (e.g. cerebral palsy), by accident or by disease (e.g. stroke, Lou Gehrig's or multiple sclerosis). For them, typing text with a standard keyboard or the usage of a graphical input device might be impossible. Often only the operation of a single or very few switch signals via buttons, joystick, eye tracking, EEG or other sensors is possible. There are several solutions available for substituting the physical keyboard of a computer by a virtual, on-screen keyboard with different layouts that can be operated with one or two physical switches by scanning: In the simple case of linear scanning, the user presses a switch A repeatedly to step from one key of the virtual keyboard to the next key of the scanning cycle until he reaches the desired key that is then activated by pressing a switch B. For rowcolumn scanning, the user first steps through rows of keys with switch A, selects the wanted row by switch B and then steps through the columns of keys in this row, finally activating the desired key again with switch B. In case only one physical switch is operated, one of the switches can be substituted by self-activation after a certain delay. Thus, the operation of a keyboard is simulated with one or two physical switches, but typing text letter by letter this way is cumbersome: in general, the typing of a word of six letters on a 32 keys keyboard by row-column scanning wil l take dozens of scanning steps. The achieved written communication rate ranges from less than 1 to 5 wpm (words per minute) — a typist's rate in comparison ranges from 10 to 20 wpm depending on her level of expertise (Darragh and Witten, 1992). 2. Ambiguous keyboards and word prediction Instead of reducing the number of required keystrokes for a word by using an enlarged keyboard with e.g. iconic codings, Kushler (1998) proposes the use of an ambiguous keyboard with multiple letter key assignments in the way phone keys are used for the so called vanity phone numbers: every phone digit key from 2 to 9 is additionally labeled with at least three letters. Instead of memorizing digit sequences for the phone number of telephone services, it suffices to dial the phone keys labeled with the letters of e.g. the name of the provider. If arbitrary words are coded this way many encodings will be the same for different words, i.e. the decoding function is not injective. Therefore, the user has to select the intended word in a list of word suggestions (ordererd e.g. by word frequencies) whenever the mapping between the encoding and the intended word is not one-to-one. Nevertheless, as Witten (1982) already pointed out, with nine letter keys only eight percent of 24,500 words actually are encoded ambiguously and thus need adisambiguation step. Following studies (Foulds et al., 1987) concentrated on ambiguous typing where only the next character is predicted based on n-grams and corrected if necessary, as the size of an electronic full word or even syllable dictionary would have been too limited (Arnott & Javed, 1992). The drawback of this character-based disambiguation is that the user has to pay attention to the predicted word prefix after each keystroke. Today, the storage of large vocabulary in main memory of a standard computer is not a serious problem anymore. The advantages of an ambiguous keyboard with eight keys and word disambiguation are enumerated by Kushler (1998) for users of alternative and augmentative communication devices as follows: 1. The efficiency of an ambiguous keyboard is near to one keystroke per letter. 2. Apart from literacy, no memorization of special encodings is required. 3. Attention to the display is required only after the word has been typed. 4. A keyboard with fewer keys can have larger keys for direct selection. 5. The average time to select a key by scanning is reduced considerably. 6. Simple, linear scanning can be used efficiently to select a key. 7. Fewer keys may allow direct selection with various input devices. Surely, the main arguments for a character-based text input with an ambiguous keyboard are that the keystroke per letter efficiency is very high and that there is no need for the user to learn any special encodings besides standard orthography. Further, if the user did a typing mistake, this error is corrected more easily as if the typing mistake is done via scanning on a 100+ keys keyboard. Finally, a character-based vocabulary can be extended very easily with new words, whereas an iconic language system has to depend on the user to memorize the icon word associations and reaches its limits, if we do not restrict ourselves to a base vocabulary of a few thousand words. The use of an ambiguous keyboard is compatible with another technique to accelerate typing input: the prediction and completion of user input. Actually, the completing prediction of commands and other user input (e.g. Darragh and Witten, 1992) to accelerate keyboard input for motion impaired users is a well-known and much used feature of standard software like word processors or command shells nowadays. The key idea is to present the user at every step of user input a ranked list of predictions what the user is going to type next based on a statistical model of the recent input. On top of reducing the typing costs there is another advantage of this input enhancing feature for users who do not always memorize exactly the set of admitted inputs in a certain context: The user can type the prefix of the intended input and request a list to be displayed for possible completion alternatives, thus reducing the cognitive load of memorization for orthography (Newell et al., 1995). 3. The UKO pilot study UKO is the abbreviation for German “Unbekanntes Kommunikationsobjekt” (i.e. “unidentified communication object” ) – the name given to our communication aid by its pilot user, a fifteen-year old girl with cerebral palsy who visits a regular school. This communication aid consists of an ambiguous keyboard with four letter keys plus an “enter” and a “delete” key. The keys are scanned cyclically. A second physical switch is used to activate the word completion with the word suggestions depicted on the right side (as in Figure 1). Figure 1. The UKO virtual keyboard (after selecting the first key four times) In his diploma thesis, Garbe (2000) followed an evolutionary optimisation approach to find an ambiguous letter key assignment for a keyboard with six keys that is to be used by cyclic scanning (cf. Levine and GoodenoughTrepagnier, 1990). The UKO system includes keyboard layouts for German and English and the corresponding lexica from the CELEX lexicon database with 360,000 resp. 160,000 word form entries (Baayen et al., 1995). Using the 360,000 German word form lexicon including word frequencies information, the ambiguous word form lists do not grow longer than 34 entries. This motivated us to look further for even smaller keyboards, and, actually, a keyboard with only three letter keys is used now, with a fourth key functioning as a quasimodal command key (Raskin, 2000) that is used in connection with one of the letter keys to invoke the “enter”, “delete” and “complete” function of the UKO system. These three plus one keys wil l be selected directly by our pilot user who formerly has used two-switch-scanning until now. Therefore, another considerable typing speed-up is expected. But even with linear scanning the six keys of the UKO keyboard as depicted in Figure 1, experimental results compared with an iconic communication system are encouraging: an time improvement of 18% could be achieved on a small test set of ten sentences with ten words in average, mainly since there were on average two unknown words per sentence using the iconic vocabulary, which then had to be spelled rather costly. Using the larger CELEX lexicon for the UKO system, only two of the 101 words in total were unknown for the ten sentences. The sentences with no unknown words have been entered in approximately the same time of 8.56 seconds

Main concepts and a classification of different types of geothermal systems are presented in this chapter. Particular attention is given to chemical, physical, and geometric features of the geothermal systems inferred from active geothermal areas or reconstructed from geological observations. Additionally, different types of water existing in geothermal reservoirs worldwide are reviewed here. They are discussed and related to the basic processes that dominate their chemistry. The chemistry of geothermal waters discharged from wells provides specific information about the deep fluids in geothermal systems and how they relate to natural discharges from springs at Earth’s surface. This knowledge can be used to obtain essential information about reservoir behavior before and during exploitation and to set up conceptual models of reservoirs. Derivation of the hydrologic and chemical structure of geothermal systems forms the basis for reactive transport simulation, here and in general.

In many geologic processes, water-rock interactions are driven by continues supply of reactants provided by flowing groundwater. When water that carries dissolved chemical species moves through a permeable matrix or a network of fractures a variety of chemical reactions can occur. Reactive transport processes are important when there is a potential for fluid flow coexisting with spatial variations in the thermodynamic states of the system. The resulting patterns of dissolution, precipitation, and rock alteration depend on the reaction kinetics and the rate at which reactants in solution can be delivered to the reaction site by advection and diffusion.Five fundamental end-member types of reactive transport environments, setting up the basis for the discussion of specific features of coupled flow and reaction within this chapter, are distinguished in the following: “Flow across mineralogical boundaries” describes the equilibrium approach of a water body moving into a geological environment with a different assemblage of minerals (time independent). “Moving reaction fronts” are characterized by a mineralogical boundary propagating in flow direction because of the time dependent depletion of the originally reacting mineral. “Reactions within thermal gradients” are caused by variations in temperature across a region where the mineral assemblage might otherwise be constant. “Mixing zone environments” exhibit reactions due to variation in aqueous composition. The mixture of two different waters, both in equilibrium with respect to the same mineral assemblage, may result in a mixing disequilibrium due to the nonlinearity of chemical reactions. “Local flow enhancement due to faults” depicts fluid transport through otherwise impermeable layers. This focusing of fluid flow may lead to or accelerate precipitation or dissolution of minerals. These five distinct systems lead to flow induced spatial reaction patterns. However, it is most likely to encounter overlapping end-member types within natural environments. Specific examples, presented here, are preferential flow path development and diagenesis due to thermal convection. Before proceeding to discuss individual processes, the key for understanding the majority of reactive transport phenomena, changes of permeability due to reactive porosity increase or decrease, is investigated. The porosity-permeability relationship represents the basis for the coupling of flow and transport.