27,262 research outputs found
Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design
Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study
Exploring the causes of adverse events in hospitals and potential prevention strategies
Objectives
To examine the causes of adverse events
(AEs) and potential prevention strategies to minimise the
occurrence of AEs in hospitalised patients.
Methods
For the 744 AEs identified in the patient record
review study in 21 Dutch hospitals, trained reviewers
were asked to select all causal factors that contributed
to the AE. The results were analysed together with data
on preventability and consequences of AEs. In addition,
the reviewers selected one or more prevention strategies
for each preventable AE. The recommended prevention
strategies were analysed together with four general
causal categories: technical, human, organisational and
patient-related factors.
Results
Human causes were predominantly involved in
the causation of AEs (in 61% of the AEs), 61% of those
being preventable and 13% leading to permanent
disability. In 39% of the AEs, patient-related factors were
involved, in 14% organisational factors and in 4%
technical factors. Organisational causes contributed
relatively often to preventable AEs (93%) and AEs
resulting in permanent disability (20%). Recommended
strategies to prevent AEs were quality assurance/peer
review, evaluation of safety behaviour, training and
procedures. For the AEs with human and patient-related
causes, reviewers predominantly recommended quality
assurance/peer review. AEs caused by organisational
factors were considered preventable by improving
procedures.
Discussion
Healthcare interventions directed at human
causes are recommended because these play a large
role in AE causation. In addition, it seems worthwhile to
direct interventions on organisational causes because the
AEs they cause are nearly always believed to be
preventable. Organisational factors are thus relatively
easy to tackle. Future research designs should allow
researchers to interview healthcare providers that were
involved in the event, as an additional source of
information on contributing factors.
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Diminished neural resources allocation to time processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders
Background: Interval timing, the ability to judge the duration of short events, has been shown to be compromised in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Timing abilities are ubiquitous and underlie behaviours as varied as sensory integration, motor coordination or communication. It has been suggested that atypical temporal processing in ASD could contribute to some of the disorder's symptoms, in particular motor clumsiness and difficulties in social interaction and communication. Recent behavioural investigations have suggested that interval timing in ASD is characterised by intact sensitivity but reduced precision in duration judgements.
Methods: In this study we investigated the processing of duration as compared to pitch in a group of high-functioning individuals with ASD using magnetoencephalography (MEG). 18 adolescents and adults with ASD and 18 age- and IQ-matched typically-developing control (TDC) individuals compared two consecutive tones according to their duration or pitch in separate experimental blocks. The analysis was carried out exclusively on physically identical stimuli (500 Hz tones lasting 600 ms), which served, according to instruction, as standard or probe in a Duration or Pitch task respectively.
Results: Our results suggest that compared to TDC individuals, individuals with ASD are less able to predict the duration of the standard tone accurately, affecting the sensitivity of the comparison process. In addition, contrary to TDC individuals who allocate resources at different times depending on the nature of the task (pitch or duration discrimination), individuals with ASD seem to engage less resources for the Duration task than for the Pitch task regardless of the context. Although individuals with ASD showed top-down adaptation to the context of the task, this neuronal strategy reflects a bias in the readiness to perform different types of tasks, and in particular a diminished allocation of resources to duration processing which could have cascading effect on learning and development of other cognitiv
Artificial neural networks for 3D cell shape recognition from confocal images
We present a dual-stage neural network architecture for analyzing fine shape
details from microscopy recordings in 3D. The system, tested on red blood
cells, uses training data from both healthy donors and patients with a
congenital blood disease. Characteristic shape features are revealed from the
spherical harmonics spectrum of each cell and are automatically processed to
create a reproducible and unbiased shape recognition and classification for
diagnostic and theragnostic use.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure
Bayesian Analysis of Two Stellar Populations in Galactic Globular Clusters II: NGC 5024, NGC 5272, and NGC 6352
We use Cycle 21 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations and HST archival
ACS Treasury observations of Galactic Globular Clusters to find and
characterize two stellar populations in NGC 5024 (M53), NGC 5272 (M3), and NGC
6352. For these three clusters, both single and double-population analyses are
used to determine a best fit isochrone(s). We employ a sophisticated Bayesian
analysis technique to simultaneously fit the cluster parameters (age, distance,
absorption, and metallicity) that characterize each cluster. For the
two-population analysis, unique population level helium values are also fit to
each distinct population of the cluster and the relative proportions of the
populations are determined. We find differences in helium ranging from
0.05 to 0.11 for these three clusters. Model grids with solar
-element abundances ([/Fe] =0.0) and enhanced -elements
([/Fe]=0.4) are adopted.Comment: ApJ, 21 pages, 14 figures, 7 table
Two electrons in a strongly coupled double quantum dot: from an artificial helium atom to a hydrogen molecule
We study the formation of molecular states in a two-electron quantum dot as a
function of the barrier potential dividing the dot. The increasing barrier
potential drives the two electron system from an artificial helium atom to an
artificial hydrogen molecule. To study this strongly coupled regime, we
introduce variational wavefunctions which describe accurately two electrons in
a single dot, and then study their mixing induced by the barrier. The evolution
of the singlet-triplet gap with the barrier potential and with an external
magnetic field is analyzed.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, added references, extended discussio
A stochastic derivation of the geodesic rule
We argue that the geodesic rule, for global defects, is a consequence of the
randomness of the values of the Goldstone field in each causally
connected volume. As these volumes collide and coalescence, evolves by
performing a random walk on the vacuum manifold . We derive a
Fokker-Planck equation that describes the continuum limit of this process. Its
fundamental solution is the heat kernel on , whose leading
asymptotic behavior establishes the geodesic rule.Comment: 12 pages, No figures. To be published in Int. Jour. Mod. Phys.
Single-Cell Analysis Reveals Functionally Distinct Classes within the Planarian Stem Cell Compartment
Planarians are flatworms capable of regenerating any missing body region. This capacity is mediated by neoblasts, a proliferative cell population that contains pluripotent stem cells. Although population-based studies have revealed many neoblast characteristics, whether functionally distinct classes exist within this population is unclear. Here, we used high-dimensional single-cell transcriptional profiling from over a thousand individual neoblasts to directly compare gene expression fingerprints during homeostasis and regeneration. We identified two prominent neoblast classes that we named ζ (zeta) and σ (sigma). Zeta-neoblasts encompass
specified cells that give rise to an abundant postmitotic lineage including epidermal cells, and are
not required for regeneration. By contrast, sigma-neoblasts proliferate in response to injury,
possess broad lineage capacity, and can give rise to zeta-neoblasts. These findings present a new
view of planarian neoblasts, in which the population is comprised of two major and functionally
distinct cellular compartments.Human Frontier Science Program (Strasbourg, France)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01GM080639
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