Transient Flow Routing in Channel Networks

The formulation of a mathematical model to predict transient flows in hydraulic networks is presented. The network formulation consists of breaking the network into a series of connected reaches; reducing the finite difference equations for each reach into two "reach" equations; forming an exterior matrix consisting of the reach equations, external boundary conditions, and interior compatibility conditions; solving the external matrix for the end values of discharge and water surface elevation for all reaches and back-substituting for all interior values. Examples presented include the James River, USA, estuary model (twenty-four nodes and twenty-six reaches), the Cork Harbour, Ireland, estuary (thirteen-reach, double-looped network), and the Rio Bayamon basin, Puerto Rico. Results are very satisfactory when compared to known data

Digital enablers for integrated care – a design workshop

In ‘Region A’, like in many other regions and countries, diabetes is a prevalent condition affecting one in twenty people. Type 2 diabetes is rapidly increasing in ‘Region A’, and currently accounts for about 87% of the cases in total. Diabetes has been recognized as an exemplar long term condition, both in terms of the growing number of people with type 2 diabetes, and in terms of the serious and expensive complications it can bring to the sufferers. Maintaining and improving the quality of diabetes services, according to the ‘Region A’s government, against the backdrop of increase in patient numbers and the increased pressure on the health and care services is one of the key challenges. Those involved in diabetes care include the individual, the carer, broader social groups, and public services at multiple levels. However, as with many condition groups, flow of information and decision making is often disjointed with poor communications between these players. The digital health and care innovation centre organised a multidisciplinary and inter-sectoral ecosystem event to explore the potential opportunities for better management of diabetes with a person centred approach. This event resulted in a call for innovation into digital solutions for managing diabetes. Seven project proposals were accepted by the Innovation Centre for further development. These seven projects offered partial solutions for the management of diabetes. As a result of the analysis of these projects, a comprehensive conceptual framework for connected health and care for the management of diabetes, has been developed. This conceptual framework has the potential to be applied to any other chronic care condition or multi conditions

Human-Robot Team Performance Compared to Full Robot Autonomy in 16 Real-World Search and Rescue Missions: Adaptation of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Human operators in human-robot teams are commonly perceived to be critical for mission success. To explore the direct and perceived impact of operator input on task success and team performance, 16 real-world missions (10 hrs) were conducted based on the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. These missions were to deploy a heterogeneous team of robots for a search task to locate and identify artifacts such as climbing rope, drills and mannequins representing human survivors. Two conditions were evaluated: human operators that could control the robot team with state-of-the-art autonomy (Human-Robot Team) compared to autonomous missions without human operator input (Robot-Autonomy). Human-Robot Teams were often in directed autonomy mode (70% of mission time), found more items, traversed more distance, covered more unique ground, and had a higher time between safety-related events. Human-Robot Teams were faster at finding the first artifact, but slower to respond to information from the robot team. In routine conditions, scores were comparable for artifacts, distance, and coverage. Reasons for intervention included creating waypoints to prioritise high-yield areas, and to navigate through error-prone spaces. After observing robot autonomy, operators reported increases in robot competency and trust, but that robot behaviour was not always transparent and understandable, even after high mission performance.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Human-Robot Interactio

VISA CLOUD CONNECT

The present disclosure relates to a technique for providing payment processing infrastructure connectivity to cloud-based clients. The technique recites maintaining a virtual datacenter by the client at virtual private cloud hosted by a public cloud provider and a payment processor’s cloud connect is provided by payment processor enabling cloud-based clients to access its network infrastructure. The technique involves transmitting data from client VPC to payment processor’sVPC which in turn further transmits it to payment processor’s point of presence (PoP). The EA servers located at the payment processor’s PoP are accessed by the client via secure private link, eliminating the need for them to have their own hardware datacenters and further connecting payment processor’s PoPs with payment processing system to provide seamless connectivity between the cloud-based clients and payment processing system

Parker Solar Probe Imaging of the Night Side of Venus

We present images of Venus from the Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) telescope on board the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) spacecraft, obtained during PSP's third and fourth flybys of Venus on 2020 July 11 and 2021 February 20, respectively. Thermal emission from the surface is observed on the night side, representing the shortest wavelength observations of this emission ever, the first detection of the Venusian surface by an optical telescope observing below 0.8 μm. Consistent with previous observations at 1 μm, the cooler highland areas are fainter than the surrounding lowlands. The irradiances measured by WISPR are consistent with model predictions assuming a surface temperature of T = 735 K. In addition to the thermal emission, the WISPR images also show bright nightglow emission at the limb, and we compare the WISPR intensities with previous spectroscopic measurements of the molecular oxygen nightglow lines from Venus Express

Why 'scaffolding' is the wrong metaphor : the cognitive usefulness of mathematical representations.

The metaphor of scaffolding has become current in discussions of the cognitive help we get from artefacts, environmental affordances and each other. Consideration of mathematical tools and representations indicates that in these cases at least (and plausibly for others), scaffolding is the wrong picture, because scaffolding in good order is immobile, temporary and crude. Mathematical representations can be manipulated, are not temporary structures to aid development, and are refined. Reflection on examples from elementary algebra indicates that Menary is on the right track with his ‘enculturation’ view of mathematical cognition. Moreover, these examples allow us to elaborate his remarks on the uniqueness of mathematical representations and their role in the emergence of new thoughts.Peer reviewe

PomBase: a comprehensive online resource for fission yeast.

PomBase (www.pombase.org) is a new model organism database established to provide access to comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date molecular data and biological information for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe to effectively support both exploratory and hypothesis-driven research. PomBase encompasses annotation of genomic sequence and features, comprehensive manual literature curation and genome-wide data sets, and supports sophisticated user-defined queries. The implementation of PomBase integrates a Chado relational database that houses manually curated data with Ensembl software that supports sequence-based annotation and web access. PomBase will provide user-friendly tools to promote curation by experts within the fission yeast community. This will make a key contribution to shaping its content and ensuring its comprehensiveness and long-term relevance

Putting people with Parkinson's in control: exploring the impact of quality social care

INTRODUCTION Parkinson’s is a progressive and incurable condition. Cost-effective social care services are a priority in the future delivery of adult social care. This study aimed to explore how the provision of quality social care interventions impacts on quality of life, health and wellbeing and future care costs for people with Parkinson’s and their carers. METHODS The study was conducted in three stages and adopted case study, individual interview and focus group methods. The research developed insight into social care needs and requirements, criteria for a segmentation model, pen portraits, an economic model, and a communications strategy. These are all available in the full report from Parkinson's UK. KEY FINDINGS Finding out and accessing what’s available There was a consistent theme that people with Parkinson's did not know what was available or how to access it in terms of social care. What’s important about social care Control, choice and maintaining independence emerged as important aspects of social care for all. Valued aspects of social care that were specific to Parkinson's requirements were that services: • Understand Parkinson’s • Understand medication (especially timing) • Allow the person with Parkinson’s time • Understand the person with Parkinson's is the expert • Recognise the impact of social inclusion • Have regular reassessment of needs relating to Parkinson's symptoms and treatment Benefits of social care Benefits of social care were interrelated - for example if there is a benefit to the person with Parkinson's (e.g. improved safety) this might reduce the burden for the carer, or result in the avoidance of wider societal costs such as residential care or hospital admissions. While some of the benefits take immediate effect, some of these benefits also have long term implications and can result in prevented events and reductions in the need for increased health and social care resource in the future. The Impact Gap The study developed the concept of the ‘Impact Gap’ illustrating how the costs of social care can be reduced by the timeliness and quality of "Parkinson's aware" social care

DeepWeeds: a multiclass weed species image dataset for deep learning

Robotic weed control has seen increased research of late with its potential for boosting productivity in agriculture. Majority of works focus on developing robotics for croplands, ignoring the weed management problems facing rangeland stock farmers. perhaps the greatest obstacle to widespread uptake of robotic weed control is the robust classification of weed species in their natural environment. the unparalleled successes of deep learning make it an ideal candidate for recognising various weed species in the complex rangeland environment. This work contributes the first large, public, multiclass image dataset of weed species from the Australian rangelands; allowing for the development of robust classification methods to make robotic weed control viable. The DeepWeeds dataset consists of 17,509 labelled images of eight nationally significant weed species native to eight locations across northern Australia. This paper presents a baseline for classification performance on the dataset using the benchmark deep learning models, Inception-v3 and ResNet-50. These models achieved an average classification accuracy of 95.1% and 95.7%, respectively. We also demonstrate real time performance of the ResNet-50 architecture, with an average inference time of 53.4 ms per image. These strong results bode well for future field implementation of robotic weed control methods in the Australian rangelands