Intelligent design guidance

This paper presents results from an investigation regarding the use of the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) as a means to guide a designer through the calculation of numerical relationships within the early design system Designer. Characteristics, relationships and goals are used within Designer to enable the evaluation and approximation of the design model and are represented within the system as a digraph. Despite being a useful representation of the interactions within the design model, the digraph does not aid the designer in identifying a sequence of activities that need to be performed in order to evaluate the model. The DSM system was used to represent the characteristics and the dependencies obtained through the relationships. The sequence of characteristics within the DSM was optimised and used to produce a design process to guide the designer in model evaluation. The objective of the optimisation was to minimise the amount of iteration within the design process. The process enabled a designer who is unfamiliar with the model to evaluate it and satisfy the design goals and requirements. Both the DSM system and the Designer system are generic in nature andmay be applied to any design problem

Comparison of markets for organic food in six EU states.

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Recent research confirms that the decision to convert is now highly influenced by financial incentives arising from EU regulations but the exact mix of incentives depends on prevailing government policies and access to premium markets so that the organic sector in most countries is now referred to as either government-led or market-driven. The objective of the paper is to compare development of the sector along these two polarities but set within the context of "common elements of interest" within new agrifood methodologies: time, space, power, and meaning (Cooke, Uranga and Etxebarria 1998; Morgan and Murdoch 2000). The paper presents preliminary findings relating to six EU States: UK, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Portugal and Italy, and through the application of "worlds of production" to market outlets and suggests discourses that define these outlets. The analysis aims to inform the further study of farmer marketing decisions and practices

P-Code-Enhanced Encryption-Mode Processing of GPS Signals

A method of processing signals in a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver has been invented to enable the receiver to recover some of the information that is otherwise lost when GPS signals are encrypted at the transmitters. The need for this method arises because, at the option of the military, precision GPS code (P-code) is sometimes encrypted by a secret binary code, denoted the A code. Authorized users can recover the full signal with knowledge of the A-code. However, even in the absence of knowledge of the A-code, one can track the encrypted signal by use of an estimate of the A-code. The present invention is a method of making and using such an estimate. In comparison with prior such methods, this method makes it possible to recover more of the lost information and obtain greater accuracy

QFMatch: multidimensional flow and mass cytometry samples alignment

Part of the flow/mass cytometry data analysis process is aligning (matching) cell subsets between relevant samples. Current methods address this cluster-matching problem in ways that are either computationally expensive, affected by the curse of dimensionality, or fail when population patterns significantly vary between samples. Here, we introduce a quadratic form (QF)-based cluster matching algorithm (QFMatch) that is computationally efficient and accommodates cases where population locations differ significantly (or even disappear or appear) from sample to sample. We demonstrate the effectiveness of QFMatch by evaluating sample datasets from immunology studies. The algorithm is based on a novel multivariate extension of the quadratic form distance for the comparison of flow cytometry data sets. We show that this QF distance has attractive computational and statistical properties that make it well suited for analysis tasks that involve the comparison of flow/mass cytometry samples

Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD): A True Metric for Comparing Biomarker Expression Levels in Cell Populations

Changes in the frequencies of cell subsets that (co)express characteristic biomarkers, or levels of the biomarkers on the subsets, are widely used as indices of drug response, disease prognosis, stem cell reconstitution, etc. However, although the currently available computational “gating” tools accurately reveal subset frequencies and marker expression levels, they fail to enable statistically reliable judgements as to whether these frequencies and expression levels differ significantly between/among subject groups. Here we introduce flow cytometry data analysis pipeline which includes the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) metric as solution to this problem. Well known as an informative quantitative measure of differences between distributions, we present three exemplary studies showing that EMD 1) reveals clinically-relevant shifts in two markers on blood basophils responding to an offending allergen; 2) shows that ablative tumor radiation induces significant changes in the murine colon cancer tumor microenvironment; and, 3) ranks immunological differences in mouse peritoneal cavity cells harvested from three genetically distinct mouse strains

Evaluating Barriers to Health in Homebound Individuals

Introduction. Homebound individuals in Vermont often have multiple comorbidities and can face significant food insecurity. In response to this problem, the Chittenden County Emergency Food Shelf (CEFS) Homebound Delivery Program (HDP) delivers one week of food per month to 130 individuals in Chittenden County, Vermont.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1084/thumbnail.jp