The Next Step In North Atlantic Whale Protection: A Closer Look At Whale-Watch Guidelines For The Northeast

All whales, dolphins, and porpoises in the northeast region are federally protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) and most... are further protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The fin, humpback, and northern right whales are all listed as endangered species, with the right whale population at less than 300 individuals. The fin, humpback, northern right, and minke whales are great whales common to the northeast region and Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Under the MMPA and the ESA, it is unlawful to harass, hunt, capture, or kill any of these marine mammals. Whale-watching is a popular recreational activity in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and throughout the Northeast Region. Watch vessels seek out the areas most highly populated with whales. Consequently, this has lead to an increase in the potential for whale harassment and injury. Over the past few years, NMFS has received complaints from the public accusing whale-watching, fishing, and pleasure craft vessels of harassing and injuring whales. Specifically, in 1997, a private citizen reported being aboard a whale-watching vessel when it hit a whale. Furthermore, in 1998, a whale-watching vessel struck two whales while returning to port. While there were no reported whale ship strikes by vessels engaged in whale-watching in 1999, there were three reports of harassment. This has led to voiced trepidation from those concerned with the whale-watching industry

UK Heart Surgery: What Patients Can Expect from their Surgeons

This report presents selected findings from the National Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit for heart operations that took place between 2001/2 and 2010/11, alongside other information about cardiac surgery in the UK

Evaluating surgical skills from kinematic data using convolutional neural networks

The need for automatic surgical skills assessment is increasing, especially because manual feedback from senior surgeons observing junior surgeons is prone to subjectivity and time consuming. Thus, automating surgical skills evaluation is a very important step towards improving surgical practice. In this paper, we designed a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to evaluate surgeon skills by extracting patterns in the surgeon motions performed in robotic surgery. The proposed method is validated on the JIGSAWS dataset and achieved very competitive results with 100% accuracy on the suturing and needle passing tasks. While we leveraged from the CNNs efficiency, we also managed to mitigate its black-box effect using class activation map. This feature allows our method to automatically highlight which parts of the surgical task influenced the skill prediction and can be used to explain the classification and to provide personalized feedback to the trainee.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 201

Universal and wide shear zones in granular bulk flow

We present experiments on slow granular flows in a modified (split-bottomed) Couette geometry in which wide and tunable shear zones are created away from the sidewalls. For increasing layer heights, the zones grow wider (apparently without bound) and evolve towards the inner cylinder according to a simple, particle-independent scaling law. After rescaling, the velocity profiles across the zones fall onto a universal master curve given by an error function. We study the shear zones also inside the material as function of both their local height and the total layer height.Comment: Minor corrections, accepted for PRL (4 pages, 6 figures