5,242 research outputs found
Assessing Atmospheric Pollution and Its Impacts on the Human Health
This reprint contains articles published in the Special Issue entitled "Assessing Atmospheric Pollution and Its Impacts on the Human Health" in the journal Atmosphere. The research focuses on the evaluation of atmospheric pollution by statistical methods on the one hand, and on the other hand, on the evaluation of the relationship between the level of pollution and the extent of its effect on the population's health, especially on pulmonary diseases
Ciguatoxins
Ciguatoxins (CTXs), which are responsible for Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP), are liposoluble toxins produced by microalgae of the genera Gambierdiscus and Fukuyoa. This book presents 18 scientific papers that offer new information and scientific evidence on: (i) CTX occurrence in aquatic environments, with an emphasis on edible aquatic organisms; (ii) analysis methods for the determination of CTXs; (iii) advances in research on CTX-producing organisms; (iv) environmental factors involved in the presence of CTXs; and (v) the assessment of public health risks related to the presence of CTXs, as well as risk management and mitigation strategies
More Than Machines?
We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing »a little bit alive« with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance
Recommended from our members
The Go-GN Open Research Handbook
This Handbook draws together work done between 2020 and 2023 by members of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). GO-GN is a network of PhD candidates around the world whose research projects include a focus on open education. GO-GN is currently funded through the OER programme of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and administered by the Open Education Research Hub from the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK.
In our current phase of activity, we began these collaborative writing efforts with a Research Methods Handbook which was created during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. Working together at distance provided an important way to strengthen community links when meeting in person was not possible. The Research Methods Handbook was well received by a much larger audience than we anticipated, and went on to win an Open Research Award. We followed this up with a sister publication, our Conceptual Frameworks Guide. This explores a less well traversed (but nonetheless important) area of scholarly focus. Together, these two explore open approaches to the theory and practice of research in open education. One distinctive feature of our presentation is to foreground the authentic experiences of doctoral researchers who have used specific approaches in researching open education. While it is not possible to cover all approaches in this detail, we hope that important insights are presented in this form of open practice.
Throughout 2020-2022 we also regularly engaged our membership through collective reviews of recently published papers and articles. The Research Reviews serve as an overview of recent research but also as a snapshot of the critical responses recorded by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers working in relevant areas.
No one volume can claim to comprehensively contain the diversity and variety of open approaches, and this is no exception. But one virtue of openness is that we can draw on the openly licensed works of others to increase our coverage of relevant areas. The Additional Resources at the end of this volume bring together a range of openly licensed texts on open education research and suggests places for further reading and research.
Consequently, the information contained here represents a wide range of contributors and collaborators. The original and intended audience for this volume is the doctoral student working on an open education research project - in short, the typical student member of GO-GN and the profile the network exists to support.
However, we’ve learned through feedback and analytics that the potential audience for works like this is much larger. Many people who wouldn’t describe themselves as researchers still do research and evaluation. Presenting accessible insights into research foundations and practices helps with this and can be understood as a form of open practice
Google search and the mediation of digital health information: a case study on unproven stem cell treatments
Google Search occupies a unique space within broader discussions of direct-to-consumer marketing of stem cell treatments in digital spaces. For patients, researchers, regulators, and the wider public, the search platform influences the who, what, where, and why of stem cell treatment information online. Ubiquitous and opaque, Google Search mediates which users are presented what types of content when these stakeholders engage in online searches around health information. The platform also sways the activities of content producers and the characteristics of the content they produce. For those seeking and studying information on digital health, this platform influence raises difficult questions around risk, authority, intervention, and oversight.
This thesis addresses a critical gap in digital methodologies used in mapping and characterising that influence as part of wider debates around algorithmic accountability within STS and digital health scholarship. By adopting a novel methodological approach to Blackbox auditing and data collection, I provide a unique evidentiary base for the analysis of ads, organic results, and the platform mechanisms of influence on queries related to stem cell treatments. I explore the question: how does Google Search mediate information that people access online about ‘proven’ and ‘unproven’ stem cell treatments?
Here I show that, in spite of a general ban on advertisements of stem cell treatments, users continue to be presented with content promoting unproven treatments. The types, frequency, and commercial intent of results related to stem cell treatments shifted across user groups including geography and, more troublingly, those impacted by Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis.
Additionally, I find evidence that the technological structure of Google Search itself enables primary and secondary commercial activities around the mediation and dissemination of health information online. It suggests that Google Search’s algorithmically-mediated rendering of search results – including both commercial and non-commercial activities - has critical implications for the present and future of digital health studies
Robust, Energy-Efficient, and Scalable Indoor Localization with Ultra-Wideband Technology
Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has been rediscovered in recent years for its potential to provide centimeter-level accuracy in GNSS-denied environments. The large-scale adoption of UWB chipsets in smartphones brings demanding needs on the energy-efficiency, robustness, scalability, and crossdevice compatibility of UWB localization systems. This thesis investigates, characterizes, and proposes several solutions for these pressing concerns. First, we investigate the impact of different UWB device architectures on the energy efficiency, accuracy, and cross-platform compatibility of UWB localization systems. The thesis provides the first comprehensive comparison between the two types of physical interfaces (PHYs) defined in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard: with low and high pulse repetition frequency (LRP and HRP, respectively). In the comparison, we focus not only on the ranging/localization accuracy but also on the energy efficiency of the PHYs. We found that the LRP PHY consumes between 6.4–100 times less energy than the HRP PHY in the evaluated devices. On the other hand, distance measurements acquired with the HRP devices had 1.23–2 times lower standard deviation than those acquired with the LRP devices. Therefore, the HRP PHY might be more suitable for applications with high-accuracy constraints than the LRP PHY.
The impact of different UWB PHYs also extends to the application layer. We found that ranging or localization error-mitigation techniques are frequently trained and tested on only one device and would likely not generalize to different platforms. To this end, we identified four challenges in developing platform-independent error-mitigation techniques in UWB localization, which can guide future research in this direction.
Besides the cross-platform compatibility, localization error-mitigation techniques raise another concern: most of them rely on extensive data sets for training and testing. Such data sets are difficult and expensive to collect and often representative only of the precise environment they were collected in. We propose a method to detect and mitigate non-line-of-sight (NLOS) measurements that does not require any manually-collected data sets. Instead, the proposed method automatically labels incoming distance measurements based on their distance residuals during the localization process. The proposed detection and mitigation method reduces, on average, the mean and standard deviation of localization errors by 2.2 and 5.8 times, respectively.
UWB and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are frequently integrated in localization solutions since they can provide complementary functionalities: BLE is more energy-efficient than UWB but it can provide location estimates with only meter-level accuracy. On the other hand, UWB can localize targets with centimeter-level accuracy albeit with higher energy consumption than BLE. In this thesis, we provide a comprehensive study of the sources of instabilities in received signal strength (RSS) measurements acquired with BLE devices. The study can be used as a starting point for future research into BLE-based ranging techniques, as well as a benchmark for hybrid UWB–BLE localization systems.
Finally, we propose a flexible scheduling scheme for time-difference of arrival (TDOA) localization with UWB devices. Unlike in previous approaches, the reference anchor and the order of the responding anchors changes every time slot. The flexible anchor allocation makes the system more robust to NLOS propagation than traditional approaches. In the proposed setup, the user device is a passive listener which localizes itself using messages received from the anchors. Therefore, the system can scale with an unlimited number of devices and can preserve the location privacy of the user. The proposed method is implemented on custom hardware using a commercial UWB chipset. We evaluated the proposed method against the standard TDOA algorithm and range-based localization. In line of sight (LOS), the proposed TDOA method has a localization accuracy similar to the standard TDOA algorithm, down to a 95% localization error of 15.9 cm. In NLOS, the proposed TDOA method outperforms the classic TDOA method in all scenarios, with a reduction of up to 16.4 cm in the localization error.Cotutelle -yhteisväitöskirj
Elements of Ion Linear Accelerators, Calm in The Resonances, Other_Tales
The main part of this book, Elements of Linear Accelerators, outlines in Part
1 a framework for non-relativistic linear accelerator focusing and accelerating
channel design, simulation, optimization and analysis where space charge is an
important factor. Part 1 is the most important part of the book; grasping the
framework is essential to fully understand and appreciate the elements within
it, and the myriad application details of the following Parts. The treatment
concentrates on all linacs, large or small, intended for high-intensity, very
low beam loss, factory-type application. The Radio-Frequency-Quadrupole (RFQ)
is especially developed as a representative and the most complicated linac form
(from dc to bunched and accelerated beam), extending to practical design of
long, high energy linacs, including space charge resonances and beam halo
formation, and some challenges for future work. Also a practical method is
presented for designing Alternating-Phase- Focused (APF) linacs with long
sequences and high energy gain. Full open-source software is available. The
following part, Calm in the Resonances and Other Tales, contains eyewitness
accounts of nearly 60 years of participation in accelerator technology.
(September 2023) The LINACS codes are released at no cost and, as always,with
fully open-source coding. (p.2 & Ch 19.10)Comment: 652 pages. Some hundreds of figures - all images, there is no data in
the figures. (September 2023) The LINACS codes are released at no cost and,
as always,with fully open-source coding. (p.2 & Ch 19.10
Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research
This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research
Journal of Applied Hydrography
Fokusthema: International Issue: Joint publication by AFHy and DHyG for HYDRO 2
Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes
This reprint includes 22 research papers and an editorial, collected from the Special Issue "Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes", highlighting recent research advances and emerging research directions in complex industrial processes. This reprint aims to promote the research field and benefit the readers from both academic communities and industrial sectors
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