User characteristics: Professional vs. lay users

(User characteristics: professional use vs lay use by Cifter A and Dong H) The market success of a product largely depends on whether it correctly addresses the user needs. Understanding the user is increasingly becoming important in the design process. Different user models may determine different approaches to design. This paper identifies the characteristics of different types of users, with a specific focus on professional users and lay users. It gives a definition of professional users and lay users in the context of adapting products originally designed for professional use to the use of lay people (for example, home use medical devices). It summarises, and compares, the characteristics of professional users and lay users, suggesting that designers pay attention to user characteristics and the context of use so as to better address user perceptions and meet user needs

Lay-user characteristics reflected by their interaction with a digital camera and a blood pressure monitor

The material is posted here with the permission of the publishers. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material must be obtained from the publisher.There is an increasing and evolving demand from the end-user market for the adaptation of products originally designed for professional-use to the use of lay people, for example, home use medical devices. However, there is a lack of understanding of lay user characteristics by product designers. This paper reports a study investigating lay user characteristics reflected by their interaction with digital products. A digital camera and a digital blood pressure monitor were tested with different user groups: 10 able-bodied young people; 10 healthy older people (65+) and 10 disabled people; and lay user characteristics were summarised

Flow characteristics and exchange in complex biological systems as observed by pulsed-field-gradient magnetic-resonance imaging

Water flow through model porous media was studied in the presence of surface relaxation, internal magnetic field inhomogeneities and exchange with stagnant water pools with different relaxation behavior, demonstrating how the apparent flow parameters average velocity, volume flow and flow conducting area in these situations depend on the observation time. To investigate the water exchange process a two component biological model system consisting of water flowing through a biofilm reactor (column packed with methanogenic granular sludge beads) was used, before and after a heat treatment to introduce exchange. We show that correction of the stagnant fluid signal amplitude for relaxation at increasing observation time using the observed relaxation times reveals exchange between the two fractions in the system. Further it is demonstrated how this exchange can be quantifie

Proton NMR relaxometry as a useful tool to evaluate swelling processes in peat soils

Dramatic physical and physico-chemical changes in soil properties may arise due to temperature and moisture variations as well as swelling of soil organic matter (SOM) under constant conditions. Soil property variations may influence sorption/desorption and transport processes of environmental contaminants and nutrients in natural-organic-matterrich soils. Notwithstanding the studies reported in literature, a mechanistic model for SOM swelling is unavailable yet. The objective of the present study was the evaluation of the swelling of peat soils, considered as SOM models, by 1H NMR relaxometry and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Namely, information on the processes governing physical and physicochemical changes of peat during re-hydration were collected. The basic hypothesis of the present study was that the changes are slow and may affect water state as well as amounts of different water types into the peats. For this reason, such changes can be evidenced through the variations of mobility and thermal behaviour of the involved H2O molecules by using 1H NMR relaxometry and DSC. According to the experimental results, a mechanistic model, describing the fundamental processes of peat swelling, was obtained. Two different peats re-wetted at three temperatures were used. The swelling process was monitored by measuring spin-spin relaxation time (T2) over a hydration time of several months. Moreover, DSC, T1 – T2 and T2 – D correlation measurements were done at the beginning and at the end of the hydration. Supplementary investigations were also done in order to discriminate between the swelling effects and the contributions from soil solution, internal magnetic field gradients and/or soil microorganisms to proton relaxation. All the results revealed peat swelling. It was evidenced by pore size distribution changes, volumetric expansion and redistribution of water, increasing amounts of nonfreezable and loosely bound water, as well as formation of gel phases and reduction of the translational and rotational mobility of H2O molecules. All the findings implied that changes of the physical and physicochemical properties of peats were obtained. In particular, three different processes having activation energies comprised in the interval 5 – 50 kJ mol-1 were revealed. The mechanistic model which was, then, developed included water reorientation in bound water phases, water diffusion into the peat matrix and reorientation of SOM chains as fundamental processes governing SOM swelling. This study is of environmental significance in terms of re-naturation and re-watering of commercially applied peatlands and of sorption/desorption and transport processes of pollutants and nutrients in natural organic matter rich soil

Activity Identification and Local Linear Convergence of Douglas--Rachford/ADMM under Partial Smoothness

Convex optimization has become ubiquitous in most quantitative disciplines of science, including variational image processing. Proximal splitting algorithms are becoming popular to solve such structured convex optimization problems. Within this class of algorithms, Douglas--Rachford (DR) and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) are designed to minimize the sum of two proper lower semi-continuous convex functions whose proximity operators are easy to compute. The goal of this work is to understand the local convergence behaviour of DR (resp. ADMM) when the involved functions (resp. their Legendre-Fenchel conjugates) are moreover partly smooth. More precisely, when both of the two functions (resp. their conjugates) are partly smooth relative to their respective manifolds, we show that DR (resp. ADMM) identifies these manifolds in finite time. Moreover, when these manifolds are affine or linear, we prove that DR/ADMM is locally linearly convergent. When $J$ and $G$ are locally polyhedral, we show that the optimal convergence radius is given in terms of the cosine of the Friedrichs angle between the tangent spaces of the identified manifolds. This is illustrated by several concrete examples and supported by numerical experiments.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, published in the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Visio

Functional imaging of plants: A nuclear magnetic resonance study of a cucumber plant

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to study transients of biophysical parameters in a cucumber plant in response to environmental changes. Detailed flow imaging experiments showed the location of xylem and phloem in the stem and the response of the following flow characteristics to the imposed environmental changes: the total amount of water, the amount of stationary and flowing water, the linear velocity of the flowing water, and the volume flow. The total measured volume flow through the plant stem was in good agreement with the independently measured water uptake by the roots. A separate analysis of the flow characteristics for two vascular bundles revealed that changes in volume flow of the xylem sap were accounted for by a change in linear-flow velocities in the xylem vessels. Multiple-spin echo experiments revealed two water fractions for different tissues in the plant stem; the spin-spin relaxation time of the larger fraction of parenchyma tissue in the center of the stem and the vascular tissue was down by 17% in the period after cooling the roots of the plant. This could point to an increased water permeability of the tonoplast membrane of the observed cells in this period of quick recovery from severe water los

MRI in soils: determination of water concent changes due to root water uptake by means of a multi-slice-multi-echo sequence (MSME)

Root water uptake by ricinus communis (castor bean) in fine sand was investigated using MRI with multiecho sampling. Before starting the experiments the plants germinated and grew for 3 weeks in a cylindrical container with a diameter of 9 cm. Immediately before the MRI experiments started, the containers were water-saturated and sealed, so water content changes were only caused by root water uptake. In continuation of a preceding work, where we applied SPRITE we tested a multi-echo multi-slice sequence (MSME). In this approach, the water content was imaged by setting TE = 6.76 ms and nE = 128 with an isotropic resolution of 3.1mm. We calculated the water content maps by biexponential fitting of the multi-slice echo train data and normalisation on reference cuvettes filled with glass beads and 1 mM NiCl2 solution. The water content determination was validated by comparing to mean gravimetric water content measurements. By coregistration with the root architecture, visualised by a 3D fast spin echo sequence (RARE), we conclude that the largest water content changes occurred in the neighbourhood of the roots and in the upper layers of the soil

Density-Matrix Algorithm for Phonon Hilbert Space Reduction in the Numerical Diagonalization of Quantum Many-Body Systems

Combining density-matrix and Lanczos algorithms we propose a new optimized phonon approach for finite-cluster diagonalizations of interacting electron-phonon systems. To illustrate the efficiency and reliability of our method, we investigate the problem of bipolaron band formation in the extended Holstein Hubbard model.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, Workshop on High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering, Stuttgart 200

Improved surgical technique for the establishment of a murine model of aortic transplantation.

Aortic allotransplantation is a reliable procedure to study the evolvement of chronic rejection in mice. The progressive nature of this process in mice is characterized by diffuse and concentric myointimal proliferation which is inevitably associated with variable degrees of luminal constriction. These vascular changes are comparable to those that are witnessed in organ allografts undergoing chronic rejection in humans, underscoring its utility as a model of choice for the study of the development of this lesion. Whilst improved surgical technique has resulted in markedly enhanced graft survival, the results are far from being acceptable. Realizing this limitation, we embarked on developing a modified technique for aortic transplantation which would allow for improved graft survival in mice. A bypass conduit was created by end-to-side anastomosis of a segment of the donor's thoracic aorta into the infrarenal portion of the recipient's abdominal aorta. Using this technique, the graft survival was >98% with evidence in allotransplanted aorta of morphological changes pathognomonic of chronic rejection. On the contrary, no histopathological anomalies were discerned in aortic grafts transplanted across syngeneic animals. This modified surgical approach ameliorates the unacceptably high graft loss associated with earlier techniques, further extending the utility of this model as a tool to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms rudiment to the evolvement of chronic rejection

Quantitative NME microscopy of iron transport in methanogenic aggregates

Transport of micronutrients (iron, cobalt, nickel, etc.) within biofilms matrixes such as methanogenic granules is of high importance, because these are either essential or toxic for the microorganisms living inside the biofilm. The present study demonstrates quantitative measurements of metal transport inside these biofilms using T1 weighted 3D RARE. It is shown that iron(II)-EDTA diffusion within the granule is independent of direction or the inner structure of the granules. Assuming position dependence of the spin-lattice relaxivity, Fick’s law for diffusion in a sphere can be applied to simulate the diffusion within the methanogenic granules under investigation. A relatively low diffusion coefficient of 2.5*10-11 m2·s-1 was obtained for iron diffusion within the methanogenic granul