641 research outputs found
MSUO Information Technology and Geographical Information Systems: Common Protocols & Procedures. Report to the Marine Safety Umbrella Operation
The Marine Safety Umbrella Operation (MSUO) facilitates the cooperation between Interreg
funded Marine Safety Projects and maritime stakeholders. The main aim of MSUO is to
permit efficient operation of new projects through Project Cooperation Initiatives, these
include the review of the common protocols and procedures for Information Technology (IT)
and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
This study carried out by CSA Group and the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG)
reviews current spatial information standards in Europe and the data management
methodologies associated with different marine safety projects.
International best practice was reviewed based on the combined experience of spatial data
research at NCG and initiatives in the US, Canada and the UK relating to marine security
service information and acquisition and integration of large marine datasets for ocean
management purposes.
This report identifies the most appropriate international data management practices that could
be adopted for future MSUO projects
USHER: an algorithm for particle insertion in dense fluids
The insertion of solvent particles in molecular dynamics simulations of
complex fluids is required in many situations involving open systems, but this
challenging task has been scarcely explored in the literature. We propose a
simple and fast algorithm (USHER) that inserts the new solvent particles at
locations where the potential energy has the desired prespecified value. For
instance, this value may be set equal to the system's excess energy per
particle, in such way that the inserted particles are energetically
indistinguishable from the other particles present. During the search for the
insertion site, the USHER algorithm uses a steepest descent iterator with a
displacement whose magnitude is adapted to the local features of the energy
landscape. The only adjustable parameter in the algorithm is the maximum
displacement and we show that its optimal value can be extracted from an
analysis of the structure of the potential energy landscape. We present
insertion tests in periodic and non-periodic systems filled with a
Lennard-Jones fluid whose density ranges from moderate values to high values.Comment: 10 pages (Latex), 8 figures (postscript); J. Chem. Phys. (in press)
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Multiscale modelling of liquids with molecular specificity
The separation between molecular and mesoscopic length and time scales poses
a severe limit to molecular simulations of mesoscale phenomena. We describe a
hybrid multiscale computational technique which address this problem by keeping
the full molecular nature of the system where it is of interest and
coarse-graining it elsewhere. This is made possible by coupling molecular
dynamics with a mesoscopic description of realistic liquids based on Landau's
fluctuating hydrodynamics. We show that our scheme correctly couples
hydrodynamics and that fluctuations, at both the molecular and continuum
levels, are thermodynamically consistent. Hybrid simulations of sound waves in
bulk water and reflected by a lipid monolayer are presented as illustrations of
the scheme
Deprivation as an outcome determinant in emergency medical admissions
Background: Deprivation in the general population predicts mortality. We have investigated its relevance to an acute medical admission, using a database of all emergency admissions to St James’ Hospital, Dublin, over a ten year period (2002-2011).
<p/>Methods: All emergency admissions, based on geocoding of residence, were allocated to a Small Area Health Research Unit (SAHRU) division, with a corresponding deprivation index. We then examined this index as a univariate (unadjusted) and independent (adjusted) predictor of 30-day in-hospital mortality.
<p/>Results: The 30-day in-hospital mortality, over the 10 year period was higher, for those in the upper half of the deprivation distribution (9.6% vs 8.6%: p = 0.002). Indeed, there was a stepwise increase in 30-day mortality over the quintiles of deprivation from 7.3% (Quintile 1) to 8.8%, 10.0%, 10.0% and 9.3% respectively. Univariate logistic regression of the deprivation indices (quintiles) against outcome showed an increased risk (p = 0.002) of a 30-day death with OR’s respectively (compared with lowest deprivation quintile) of 1.23 (95% CI 1.07, 1.40), 1.41 (95% CI 1.24, 1.60), 1.41 (95% CI 1.24, 1.61) and 1.30 (95% CI 1.14, 1.48). The deprivation index was an independent predictor of outcome in a model when adjusted for illness severity and co-morbidity. The fully adjusted OR for a 30-day death was increased by 31% (p=0.001) for patients in the upper half of the deprivation index distribution (OR 1.31: 95% CI 1.20, 1.44).
<p/>Conclusion: Deprivation independently of co-morbidity or acute illness severity is a powerful outcome predictor in acute medical admissions
Determination of the chemical potential using energy-biased sampling
An energy-biased method to evaluate ensemble averages requiring test-particle
insertion is presented. The method is based on biasing the sampling within the
subdomains of the test-particle configurational space with energies smaller
than a given value freely assigned. These energy-wells are located via unbiased
random insertion over the whole configurational space and are sampled using the
so called Hit&Run algorithm, which uniformly samples compact regions of any
shape immersed in a space of arbitrary dimensions. Because the bias is defined
in terms of the energy landscape it can be exactly corrected to obtain the
unbiased distribution. The test-particle energy distribution is then combined
with the Bennett relation for the evaluation of the chemical potential. We
apply this protocol to a system with relatively small probability of low-energy
test-particle insertion, liquid argon at high density and low temperature, and
show that the energy-biased Bennett method is around five times more efficient
than the standard Bennett method. A similar performance gain is observed in the
reconstruction of the energy distribution.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
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