Sketching sound with voice and gesture

Voice and gestures are natural sketching tools that can be exploited to communicate sonic interactions. In product and interaction design, sounds should be included in the early stages of the design process. Scientists of human motion have shown that auditory stimuli are important in the performance of difficult tasks and can elicit anticipatory postural adjustments in athletes. These findings justify the attention given to sound in interaction design for gaming, especially in action and sports games that afford the development of levels of virtuosity. The sonic manifestations of objects can be designed by acting on their mechanical qualities and by augmenting the objects with synthetic and responsive sound

Scenarios about the long-time damage of silicon as material and detectors operating beyond LHC collider conditions

For the new hadron collider LHC and some of its updates in luminosity and energy, as SLHC and VLHC, the silicon detectors could represent an important option, especially for the tracking system and calorimetry. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the expected long-time degradation in the bulk of the silicon as material and for silicon detectors, in continuous radiation field, in these hostile conditions. The behaviour of silicon in relation to various scenarios for upgrade in energy and luminosity is discussed in the frame a phenomenological model developed previously by the authors. Different silicon material parameters resulting from different technologies are considered to evaluate what materials are harder to radiation and consequently could minimise the degradation of device parameters in conditions of continuous long time operation.Comment: submitted to Physica Scripta Work in the frame of CERN RD-50 Collaboratio

Extracting Patient-Centered Outcomes from Clinical Notes in Electronic Health Records: Assessment of Urinary Incontinence After Radical Prostatectomy

Objective: To assess documentation of urinary incontinence (UI) in prostatectomy patients using unstructured clinical notes from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Methods: We developed a weakly-supervised natural language processing tool to extract assessments, as recorded in unstructured text notes, of UI before and after radical prostatectomy in a single academic practice across multiple clinicians. Validation was carried out using a subset of patients who completed EPIC-26 surveys before and after surgery. The prevalence of UI as assessed by EHR and EPIC-26 was compared using repeated-measures ANOVA. The agreement of reported UI between EHR and EPIC-26 was evaluated using Cohen\u2019s Kappa coefficient. Results: A total of 4870 patients and 716 surveys were included. Preoperative prevalence of UI was 12.7 percent. Postoperative prevalence was 71.8 percent at 3 months, 50.2 percent at 6 months and 34.4 and 41.8 at 12 and 24 months, respectively. Similar rates were recorded by physicians in the EHR, particularly for early follow-up. For all time points, the agreement between EPIC-26 and the EHR was moderate (all p < 0.001) and ranged from 86.7 percent agreement at baseline (Kappa = 0.48) to 76.4 percent agreement at 24 months postoperative (Kappa = 0.047). Conclusions: We have developed a tool to assess documentation of UI after prostatectomy using EHR clinical notes. Our results suggest such a tool can facilitate unbiased measurement of important PCOs using real-word data, which are routinely recorded in EHR unstructured clinician notes. Integrating PCO information into clinical decision support can help guide shared treatment decisions and promote patient-valued care

A flexible service selection for executing virtual services

[EN] With the adoption of a service-oriented paradigm on the Web, many software services are likely to fulfil similar functional needs for end-users. We propose to aggregate functionally equivalent software services within one single virtual service, that is, to associate a functionality, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a set of selection rules. When an end user invokes such a virtual service through its GUI to answer his/her functional need, the software service that best responds to the end-user s selection policy is selected and executed and the result is then rendered to the end-user through the GUI of the virtual service. A key innovation in this paper is the flexibility of our proposed service selection policy. First, each selection policy can refer to heterogeneous parameters (e.g., service price, end-user location, and QoS). Second, additional parameters can be added to an existing or new policy with little investment. Third, the end users themselves define a selection policy to apply during the selection process, thanks to the GUI element added as part of the virtual service design. This approach was validated though the design, implementation, and testing of an end-to-end architecture, including the implementation of several virtual services and utilizing several software services available today on the Web.This work was partially supported in part by SERVERY (Service Platform for Innovative Communication Environment), a CELTIC project that aims to create a Service Marketplace that bridges the Internet and Telco worlds by merging the flexibility and openness of the former with the trustworthiness and reliability of the latter, enabling effective and profitable cooperation among actors.Laga, N.; Bertin, E.; Crespi, N.; Bedini, I.; Molina Moreno, B.; Zhao, Z. (2013). A flexible service selection for executing virtual services. 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Mapping gene associations in human mitochondria using clinical disease phenotypes

Nuclear genes encode most mitochondrial proteins, and their mutations cause diverse and debilitating clinical disorders. To date, 1,200 of these mitochondrial genes have been recorded, while no standardized catalog exists of the associated clinical phenotypes. Such a catalog would be useful to develop methods to analyze human phenotypic data, to determine genotype-phenotype relations among many genes and diseases, and to support the clinical diagnosis of mitochondrial disorders. Here we establish a clinical phenotype catalog of 174 mitochondrial disease genes and study associations of diseases and genes. Phenotypic features such as clinical signs and symptoms were manually annotated from full-text medical articles and classified based on the hierarchical MeSH ontology. This classification of phenotypic features of each gene allowed for the comparison of diseases between different genes. In turn, we were then able to measure the phenotypic associations of disease genes for which we calculated a quantitative value that is based on their shared phenotypic features. The results showed that genes sharing more similar phenotypes have a stronger tendency for functional interactions, proving the usefulness of phenotype similarity values in disease gene network analysis. We then constructed a functional network of mitochondrial genes and discovered a higher connectivity for non-disease than for disease genes, and a tendency of disease genes to interact with each other. Utilizing these differences, we propose 168 candidate genes that resemble the characteristic interaction patterns of mitochondrial disease genes. Through their network associations, the candidates are further prioritized for the study of specific disorders such as optic neuropathies and Parkinson disease. Most mitochondrial disease phenotypes involve several clinical categories including neurologic, metabolic, and gastrointestinal disorders, which might indicate the effects of gene defects within the mitochondrial system. The accompanying knowledgebase (http://www.mitophenome.org/) supports the study of clinical diseases and associated genes

Trade Liberalisation, Market Deregulation and Agricultural Performance in Central America

One frequently encounters the argument that trade liberalisation and deregulation of domestic markets in developing countries result in increased incentives for agriculture. This proposition is considered for the Central American countries, all of which passed through fundamental policy change either in the 1980s or 1990s. After characterising the policy regimes in each country over various periods, the analysis moves to an inspection of agricultural trade performance. The evidence indicates that liberalisation of foreign trade and deregulation of domestic markets has not been associated with improved agricultural performance. It is suggested that the failure of agriculture to respond positively to policy changes can be in part explained by an unfavourable trend in world prices of the region's major tradable commodities.

p53 as a potential predictive factor of response to chemotherapy: feasibility of p53 assessment using a functional test in yeast from trucut biopsies in breast cancer patients

Assessment of the predictive value of p53 requires the testing of large numbers of samples from patients enrolled in prospective phase III clinical trials. The goal of this study was to determine whether p53 status can be determined by p53 yeast functional assay using the limiting amounts of material that can typically be obtained in prospective phase III trials (particularly when chemotherapy is given before surgery). All patients presenting with a clinically palpable tumour which could be considered large enough to perform a trucut biopsy (⩾2 cm breast tumour) were eligible for this study. Two trucut biopsies and one incisional biopsy were performed on the surgical specimens (mastectomy or tumourectomy). Samples were snap frozen and cryostat sections were taken for histology and p53 testing. Thirty patients were included. Three samples out of 90 failed to give any p53 PCR products, probably because these samples contained almost entirely fibrous tissue. Of the 87 samples that could be tested, the incisional and trucut biopsies results were fully concordant in every case. p53 could be defined in 97% of patients by double trucut biopsy. Eight out of 30 tumours tested were mutant for p53 (27%). p53 status can be reliably determined by yeast assay from single frozen sections of trucut biopsies. Histological examination before p53 testing is essential to exclude cases where the p53 result may reflect only the status of the normal cells in the biopsy