Remote Medical Emergency Response Through Near-me Area Network

With the advancement in technology, there have been found ways in which even Healthcare can be made readily available. Technologies involving Body Sensor Networks, Wireless Communications and Security in wireless media, have helped to a great extent to make it possible. With this project, we are trying to make remote healthcare readily and quickly available. The secure automatic emergency response system that we develop helps in attending to patients quickly by propagating a help signal to potential healthcare provider. The signal propagates from sensors on a patient till it reaches the nearest Healthcare node and alerts it informing an authentic Healthcare provider near the patient, in case of emergency. For this kind of propagation, we take the help of a Networking technology called the "Near-me Area Network". A Near-me Area Network helps in full duplex communication between nodes in spatial proximity, precisely, sending the readings pulled from Body Sensor on the patient and receiving appropriate help from the healthcare provider. This avoids the need for human intervention from the side of patient in getting help for the health ailment. Given that communication is wireless, and several intermediate nodes are involved in the transmission process, security is an issue. We take care of securing the location and vitals information of the patient by encrypting all the data that is being transmitted. We also try to eliminate duplicate and unauthentic signals by posing a few constraints on the initial signal generation. Our simulation results show that the system determines the presence of a potential Healthcare Provider within 2 minutes and if the presence is positive, healthcare is provided to the patient readily by the identified health official.Computer Scienc

Municipal maintenance facility

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-94).a structure is placed in tompkins square park it is part of a network of civic spaces intended for civil contribution. to the passer-by or the passer-through this distraction, this construction, occupied by some others involves me somehow. at the end near the branch library is a clustering of facilities facilities related to political activity, organizational offices, places for discussions ones begun by two people yesterday or ones on-going for generations by countless many ones that started in this area (neighborhood! community?) or somewhere else pressing issues, burning desires, casual comments, silent observations the right to speak nonsense. voices whether i listen or not, are there with or without mine but with consequence for me my absence will be noted with my presence, i will be held accountable.by Alan Rainen Barlis.M.Arch

Near Optimal Broadcast with Network Coding in Large Sensor Networks

We study efficient broadcasting for wireless sensor networks, with network coding. We address this issue for homogeneous sensor networks in the plane. Our results are based on a simple principle (IREN/IRON), which sets the same rate on most of the nodes (wireless links) of the network. With this rate selection, we give a value of the maximum achievable broadcast rate of the source: our central result is a proof of the value of the min-cut for such networks, viewed as hypergraphs. Our metric for efficiency is the number of transmissions necessary to transmit one packet from the source to every destination: we show that IREN/IRON achieves near optimality for large networks; that is, asymptotically, nearly every transmission brings new information from the source to the receiver. As a consequence, network coding asymptotically outperforms any scheme that does not use network coding.Comment: Dans First International Workshop on Information Theory for Sensor Netwoks (WITS 2007) (2007

An inventory of river anomalies in the Po Plain, Northern Italy: evidence for active blind thrust faulting

The Po Plain is a low-relief area characterised by active shortening accommodated by blind thrust faulting. In this almost flat region depositional rates are similar to tectonic rates and deformation is seldom expressed by noticeable surface anticlines. We adopted a geomorphological approach based on the detailed analysis of the drainage network to identify the location of active thrust faults. A total of 36 anomalies represented by sudden river diversions and shifts in channel pattern were accurately mapped. After comparison with the location of subsurface buried anticlines and of historical seismicity, these anomalies could be related to a tectonic origin and included in a database. Their distribution highlights the activity of the buried outer thrust fronts of both the Southern Alps and the Northern Apennines. Among all the anomalies, we identified one related to the seismogenic source responsible for the 12 May 1802 earthquake (Me 5.7), which struck the Oglio River Valley near Soncino (Cremona). We propose that this earthquake was generated by an east-west trending, north-dipping, blind thrust fault that roots into the Alpine system. If this inference is correct, other faults along the Southern Alpine margin are potentially seismogenic

Preferential attachment during the evolution of a potential energy landscape

It has previously been shown that the network of connected minima on a potential energy landscape is scale-free, and that this reflects a power-law distribution for the areas of the basins of attraction surrounding the minima. Here, we set out to understand more about the physical origins of these puzzling properties by examining how the potential energy landscape of a 13-atom cluster evolves with the range of the potential. In particular, on decreasing the range of the potential the number of stationary points increases and thus the landscape becomes rougher and the network gets larger. Thus, we are able to follow the evolution of the potential energy landscape from one with just a single minimum to a complex landscape with many minima and a scale-free pattern of connections. We find that during this growth process, new edges in the network of connected minima preferentially attach to more highly-connected minima, thus leading to the scale-free character. Furthermore, minima that appear when the range of the potential is shorter and the network is larger have smaller basins of attraction. As there are many of these smaller basins because the network grows exponentially, the observed growth process thus also gives rise to a power-law distribution for the hyperareas of the basins.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Understanding Model-Based Reinforcement Learning and its Application in Safe Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to achieve successful results on various continuous control benchmarks, but the understanding of model-based methods is limited. We try to interpret how model-based method works through novel experiments on state-of-the-art algorithms with an emphasis on the model learning part. We evaluate the role of the model learning in policy optimization and propose methods to learn a more accurate model. With a better understanding of model-based reinforcement learning, we then apply model-based methods to solve safe reinforcement learning (RL) problems with near-zero violation of hard constraints throughout training. Drawing an analogy with how humans and animals learn to perform safe actions, we break down the safe RL problem into three stages. First, we train agents in a constraint-free environment to learn a performant policy for reaching high rewards, and simultaneously learn a model of the dynamics. Second, we use model-based methods to plan safe actions and train a safeguarding policy from these actions through imitation. Finally, we propose a factored framework to train an overall policy that mixes the performant policy and the safeguarding policy. This three-step curriculum ensures near-zero violation of safety constraints at all times. As an advantage of model-based method, the sample complexity required at the second and third steps of the process is significantly lower than model-free methods and can enable online safe learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in various continuous control problems and analyze the advantages over state-of-the-art approaches

Linking landscape characteristics, streamwater acidity and brown trout (Salmo trutta) distributions in a boreal stream network

Perturbations of stream ecosystems are often mediated by the terrestrial watershed, making the understanding of linkages between watersheds and streams essential. In this thesis I explore the connections between landscape characteristics, streamwater acidity and brown trout (Salmo trutta) distributions in Krycklan, a 67 km2 boreal stream network in northern Sweden. The study focuses on hydrochemical changes during the snowmelt-driven spring flood, a period of episodic acidity which is thought to place a restraint on acid-sensitive biota such as brown trout. pH ranged from 4.5-7.0 at different stream sites during winter baseflow, and declined by 0-2 pH units during spring flood. The magnitude of the pH drop at a given site was in large part controlled by changes in acid neutralizing capacity (ANC) and in natural organic acids associated with dissolved organic carbon (DOC). pH, ANC and DOC were all correlated with landscape characteristics such as proportion of peat wetlands, and stream hydrochemical response during spring flood could be explained by altered hydrological flowpaths through the catchment. The impact of acidity on brown trout distributions within the stream network was evaluated and compared to the apparent influence of other site and catchment-scale environmental factors. In situ bioassays demonstrated a strong relationship between spring flood pH and juvenile brown trout mortality, with a toxicity threshold at pH 4.8-5.4. In field surveys brown trout were not found at any sites which had pH <5.0 during spring flood, and were rare at sites which had pH <5.5 during spring flood, suggesting limitation by acidity for some streams. However, over the whole of the Krycklan stream network brown trout were more consistently associated with alluvial sediment deposits than with high pH or low inorganic aluminum concentrations. Acidity thus apparently influences trout distributions by setting a maximum potential distribution; within that potential distribution, actual dispersal is influenced by other factors, notably presence of physical substrate suitable for feeding and spawning habitat. Fulfilling chemical thresholds is therefore necessary but not sufficient for sustaining brown trout populations. In the context of environmental monitoring or stream restoration, consideration of physical habitat together with chemical conditions is advised

Quiet Sun internetwork magnetic fields from the inversion of Hinode measurements

We analyze Fe I 630 nm observations of the quiet Sun at disk center taken with the spectropolarimeter of the Solar Optical Telescope aboard the Hinode satellite. A significant fraction of the scanned area, including granules, turns out to be covered by magnetic fields. We derive field strength and inclination probability density functions from a Milne-Eddington inversion of the observed Stokes profiles. They show that the internetwork consists of very inclined, hG fields. As expected, network areas exhibit a predominance of kG field concentrations. The high spatial resolution of Hinode's spectropolarimetric measurements brings to an agreement the results obtained from the analysis of visible and near-infrared lines.Comment: To appear in ApJ letter

Cytoskeleton influence on normal and tangent fluctuation modes in the red blood cells

We argue that the paradoxal softness of the red blood cells (RBC) in fluctuation spectra experiments is apparent. We show that the effective surface shear modulus $\mu_s$ of the RBC obtained from fluctuation data and that measured in static deformation experiments have the same order of magnitude. A simple micromechanical model of the RBC developped for this purpose accounts for the influence of a finite-thickness cytoskeleton on the fluctuations of the composite membrane-cytoskeleton system. The spectrin network cytoskeleton with the bulk shear modulus estimated as $\mu\approx105\div 165$ Pa contributes to both normal and tangent fluctuations of the system and confines the fluctuations of the lipid membrane. The ratio of mean square amplitudes of the RBC normal and tangent fluctuations $/$ calculated in the frame of the model is 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller that it is in the free membrane with the same bending and shear moduliComment: 14 pages, 4 figure