Synchronized Chat Notifications

This disclosure presents a system and a method to generate or control synchronized notifications in co-located devices. The method is implemented via suitable software such as an app. The method assumes that the devices have clocks that are synchronized (at least at a human-perceptual-scale), and are therefore likely on the same network. In this case, the server assigns a date certain to the notification data received and the app simply waits until that time to execute the notification. The method ensures that the notification sounds will all emit at very similar times. A device that experiences network delays would be disregarded by the app and will not be part of the synchronized notification

The epidemiology of cardiovascular malformations

PhD ThesisThis thesis is submitted to Newcastle University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Work. It includes a series of published papers as well as new unpublished work. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to epidemiology, particularly in relation to the description and analysis of malformations and birth defects. Chapter 2 gives a brief introduction to the complex topic of cardiovascular malformations, in particular the problems of definitions and terminology and the importance of diagnostic hierarchy of multiple malformations. Chapter 3 describes the paediatric cardiology database and the preliminary studies which produced the first five published papers. Chapter 4 presents 10 important papers on aspects of the epidemiology of cardiovascular malformations – which together form the main part of this thesis. Chapter 5 presents a systematic review of published studies of the prevalence of congenital cardiovascular malformations which investigates whether there is any evidence of a real difference between populations. It finds wide variation in the reported prevalence at live birth of all congenital cardiovascular malformations (2-30 per 1000 live births) and of individual malformations and concludes that differences are almost certainly explained by various types of ascertainment bias. Specific malformations predicted to show least susceptibility to ascertainment bias show least variation in reported prevalence. The review makes recommendations for consistent methodology for future reports to allow proper comparison between different populations. Chapter 6 looks forward to consider the directions in which research might go in the future, looking in particular at outcome research and its use in performance analysis, and at future investigations into the aetiology of malformations.Northern Regional Health Authorit

Sustainable Place Making: Australian Exemplars

This paper provides the background to the case studies that will be presented at the conference. It is aimed at providing a concise view of what constitutes a sustainable place and the important subtleties in achieving an active, walkable and safe environment that is diverse, humane and attractive to people

Ambient Intelligence As The Bridge To The Future of Pervasive Computing

One prediction about this future of pervasive technology is that people will carry the tools needed to interface with technological resources sprinkled through out the environment. A problem with this vision is the dark side of the network effect: early adopters will end up carrying around interfaces for technology that largely does not yet exist, and building managers will question the value of installing technology with features that almost no one will be able to use. An intermediate solution is that certain buildings with specific needs for efficiency or security (such as hospitals) may become smart, with technology insinuated into particular spaces. Since many, or even most of the people in these spaces will not have the technology to interface directly with the new pervasive resources, we must think of the interaction idiom as initially being closer to the notion of smart environments. These environments will have to sense, interpret, and facilitate the actions of the inhabitants, possibly with very little help from technology attached to the people involved, or even their cooperation. We survey a body of work on perceptual tools for smart buildings, built on the sensor network model, and focused on the idea that statistical methods and population dynamics can provide valuable information even in situations where detection of individual instances of behavior may be difficult to detect. These are some of the tools which will fuel the building optimization applications that will justify the efforts of early adopters to build smart buildings studded with pervasive technology

Understanding expressive action

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Also available online at the MIT Theses Online homepage Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-120).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.We strain our eyes, cramp our necks, and destroy our hands trying to interact with computer on their terms. At the extreme, we strap on devices and weigh ourselves down with cables trying to re-create a sense of place inside the machine, while cutting ourselves off from the world and people around us. The alternative is to make the real environment responsive to our actions. It is not enough for environments to respond simply to the presence of people or objects: they must also be aware of the subtleties of changing situations. If all the spaces we inhabit are to be responsive, they must not require encumbering devices to be worn and they must be adaptive to changes in the environment and changes of context. This dissertation examines a body of sophisticated perceptual mechanisms developed in response to these needs as well as a selection of human-computer interface sketches designed to push the technology forward and explore the possibilities of this novel interface idiom. Specifically, the formulation of a fully recursive framework for computer vision called DYNA that improves performance of human motion tracking will be examined in depth. The improvement in tracking performance is accomplished with the combination of a three-dimensional, physics-based model of the human body with modifications to the pixel classification algorithms that enable them to take advantage of this high-level knowledge. The result is a novel vision framework that has no completely bottom-up processes, and is therefore significantly faster and more stable than other approaches.by Christopher R. Wren.Ph.D

An Exploratory Analysis of Employment-Related Experiences of Educators with Learning Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to explore the general professional experiences of educators with learning disabilities, the unique skills and challenges among this group attributable to their experience as persons with learning disabilities, and their experience of schools as an employment context

A student-led global health education initiative: reflections on the Kenyan Village Medical Education Program

The Kenyan Village Medical Education Program is a student-led global health initiative that seeks to improve health outcomes in rural Kenya through culturally appropriate health education. The month-long program, which is organised by the Melbourne University Health Initiative (Australia), is conducted each January in southern rural Kenya

Reflecting the four nations? An analysis of reporting devolution on UK network news media

This article examines how the new political world of UK devolved politics is reported in UK-wide broadcast media. Drawing on a large-scale content analysis of 4687 news items, our study indicates that while devolution is not ignored, there remains an overwhelming focus upon England and Westminster politics. News about devolved politics or issues occupies a tiny part of everyday news coverage. When it is featured, coverage is often unhelpful in communicating the nature of devolved government across the UK. We found, in particular, a blurring of the distinction between England and the UK, a lapse that might misinform viewers and listeners that policy initiatives in England apply to Britain or the UK as a whole. There remains, we argue, an untapped potential for UK news media to explain domestic news items in the context of different polices followed by the various devolved administrations

C2Learn User Pilots: C2Learn project deliverable No. D5.3

In this document we report the activities of the second and third main pilot cycles, which have just been completed (end October 2015). Their end coincides with the completion of the C2Learn project overall, as foreseen by the C2 Learn User Evaluation Plan (deliverables D5.2.1 and D5.2.2). The current final iteration of this deliverable is an update of the previous iteration, D5.3.3, which in April 2015 reported on just the second main pilot cycle. The aim of piloting was to provide updated input to the iterative design, development and evaluation processes of the project, by testing the C2Learn technological solution in real-life educational settings. The present report on the pilot activities focuses more on the procedures and conditions of the pilot activities. The outcomes and user feedback informs all relevant processes and deliverables of the project, and among them predominantly D5.4.2 'Co-creativity Evaluation Analysis'

Detrimental effects of duplicate reads and low complexity regions on RNA- and ChIP-seq data

Background Adapter trimming and removal of duplicate reads are common practices in next-generation sequencing pipelines. Sequencing reads ambiguously mapped to repetitive and low complexity regions can also be problematic for accurate assessment of the biological signal, yet their impact on sequencing data has not received much attention. We investigate how trimming the adapters, removing duplicates, and filtering out reads overlapping low complexity regions influence the significance of biological signal in RNA- and ChIP-seq experiments. Methods We assessed the effect of data processing steps on the alignment statistics and the functional enrichment analysis results of RNA- and ChIP-seq data. We compared differentially processed RNA-seq data with matching microarray data on the same patient samples to determine whether changes in pre-processing improved correlation between the two. We have developed a simple tool to remove low complexity regions, RepeatSoaker, available at https://github.com/mdozmorov/RepeatSoaker, and tested its effect on the alignment statistics and the results of the enrichment analyses. Results Both adapter trimming and duplicate removal moderately improved the strength of biological signals in RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data. Aggressive filtering of reads overlapping with low complexity regions, as defined by RepeatMasker, further improved the strength of biological signals, and the correlation between RNA-seq and microarray gene expression data. Conclusions Adapter trimming and duplicates removal, coupled with filtering out reads overlapping low complexity regions, is shown to increase the quality and reliability of detecting biological signals in RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data