Gestalt Theory in Visual Screen Design — A New Look at an old subject

Although often presented as a single basis for educational visual screen design, Gestalt theory is not a single small set of visual principles uniformly applied by all designers. In fact, it appears that instructional visual design literature often deals with only a small set of Gestalt laws. In this project Gestalt literature was consulted to distil the most relevant Gestalt laws for educational visual screen design. Eleven laws were identified. They deal with balance/symmetry, continuation, closure, figure-ground, focal point, isomorphic correspondence, prŠgnanz, proximity, similarity, simplicity, and unity/harmony. To test the usefulness of these laws in visual screen design they were applied to the redesign of an instructional multimedia application, 'WoundCare', designed to teach nursing students wound management. The basic text-based screens in the original WoundCare application were replaced with graphical user interface screens, that were designed according to these principles. The new screen designs were then evaluated by asking students and others to compare the designs. The viewers were also asked to rate directly the value of using the eleven Gestalt design principles in the redesign, both for improving the product's appearance and improving its value for learning. The evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive. Both the new design and the value of applying the eleven Gestalt laws to improve learning were strongly supported by the students' opinions. However, some differences in the value of applying particular Gestalt laws to the interface design were identified and this forms a useful direction for future research

Cheers: a linear-scaling KBE+GKBA code

The interaction of electrons with quantized phonons and photons underlies the ultrafast dynamics of systems ranging from molecules to solids, giving rise to a plethora of physical phenomena experimentally accessible using time-resolved techniques. Green's function methods offer an invaluable interpretation tool since scattering mechanisms of growing complexity can be selectively incorporated in the theory. cheers is a general-purpose nonequilibrium Green's function code that implements virtually all known many-body approximations and is designed for first principles studies of ultrafast processes in molecular and model solid state systems. The aims of generality, extensibility, efficiency, and user friendliness of the code are achieved through the underlying theory development and the use of modern software design practices. Here, we motivate the necessity for the creation of such a code and overview its design and capabilities.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Time-linear quantum transport simulations with correlated nonequilibrium Green's functions

We present a time-linear scaling method to simulate open and correlated quantum systems. The method inherits from many-body perturbation theory the possibility to choose selectively the most relevant scattering processes in the dynamics, thereby paving the way to the real-time characterization of correlated ultrafast phenomena in quantum transport. The open system dynamics is described in terms of an embedding correlator from which the time-dependent current can be calculated using the Meir-Wingreen formula. We show how to efficently implement the method through a simple grafting into recently proposed time-linear Green's function schemes for closed systems. Electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions can be treated on equal footing while preserving all fundametal conservation laws.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Regional Eradication of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae From Pig Herds and Documentation of Freedom of the Disease

The objectives of this study were to 1) screen all sow herds in a region for M. hyopneumoniae, 2) to effectuate an eradication programme in all those herds which were shown to be infected with M. hyopneumoniae, and 3) to follow the success of the screening and the eradication programmes. The ultimate goal was to eradicate M. hyopneumoniae from all member herds of a cooperative slaughterhouse (153 farrowing herds + 85 farrowing-to-finishing herds + 150 specialised finishing herds) before year 2000. During 1998 and 1999, a total of 5067 colostral whey and 755 serum samples (mean, 25 samples/herd) were collected from sow herds and analysed for antibodies to M. hyopneumoniae by ELISA. Antibodies were detected in 208 (3.6%) samples. Two farrowing herds (1.3%) and 20 farrowing-to-finishing herds (23.5%) were shown to be infected with M. hyopneumoniae. A programme to eradicate the infection from these herds was undertaken. During March 2000, a survey was made to prove the success of the screening and the eradication programmes. In total, 509 serum samples were collected randomly from slaughtered finishing pigs. Antibodies to M. hyopneumoniae were not detected in 506 of the samples, whereas 3 samples were considered suspicious or positive. Accordingly, 3 herds were shown to be infected. One of the herds was previously falsely classified as non-infected. Two of the herds were finishing herds practising continuous flow system (CF). Unlike finishing herds which practice all-in/all-out management routines on herd level, CF herds do not get rid of transmissible diseases spontaneously between batches, for which reason a screening was made in the rest of the CF herds (total n = 7). Consequently, 2 more infected herds were detected. In addition to the results of the survey, a decreasing prevalence of lung lesions at slaughter (from 5.2% to 0.1%) and lack of clinical breakdowns indicated that all member herds were finally free from M. hyopneumoniae in the end of year 2000

Discrete-Time Observer Design for Sensorless Synchronous Motor Drives

This paper deals with the speed and position estimation of interior permanent-magnet synchronous motor (IPM) and synchronous reluctance motor (SyRM) drives. A speed-adaptive full-order observer is designed and analyzed in the discrete-time domain. The observer design is based on the exact discrete-time motor model, which inherently takes the delays in the control system into account. The proposed observer is experimentally evaluated using a 6.7-kW SyRM drive. The analysis and experimental results indicate that major performance improvements can be obtained with the direct discrete-time design, especially if the sampling frequency is relatively low compared to the fundamental frequency. The ratio below 10 between the sampling and fundamental frequencies is achieved in experiments with the proposed discrete-time design.Peer reviewe

Processing and Interconnections of Finely Segmented Semiconductor Pixel Detectors for Applications in Particle Physics and Photon Detection

Radiation hardness is in the focus of the development of particle tracking and photon imaging detector installations. Semiconductor detectors, widely used in particle physics experiments, have turned into capacitive-coupled (AC-coupled) detectors from the originally developed conductively coupled (DC-coupled) detectors. This is due to the superior isolation of radiation-induced leakage current in AC-coupled detectors. However, some modern detector systems, such as the tracking detectors in the CERN LHC CMS or ATLAS experiments, are still DC-coupled. This originates from the difficulty of implementing AC coupling on very small pixel detector areas. In this report, we describe our advances in the detector processing technology. The first topic is the applications of the atomic layer deposition processing technology, which enables the very high densities of capacitance and resistance that are needed when the dimensions of the physical segmentation of pixel detectors need to be scaled down. The second topic is the flip-chip/bump-bonding interconnection technology, which is necessary in order to manufacture pixel detector modules on a large scale with a more than 99% yield of noise-free and faultless pixels and detector channels.Peer reviewe

Novel Data Acquisition System for Silicon Tracking Detectors

We have developed a novel data acquisition system for measuring tracking parameters of a silicon detector in a particle beam. The system is based on a commercial Analog-to-Digital VME module and a PC Linux based Data Acquisition System. This DAQ is realized with C++ code using object-oriented techniques. Track parameters for the beam particles were reconstructed using off-line analysis code and automatic detector position alignment algorithm. The new DAQ was used to test novel Czochralski type silicon detectors. The important silicon detector parameters, including signal size distributions and signal to noise distributions, were successfully extracted from the detector under study. The efficiency of the detector was measured to be 95 %, the resolution about 10 micrometers, and the signal to noise ratio about 10.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 5 eps figures. PSN TUGP00

P-Type Silicon Strip Sensors for the new CMS Tracker at HL-LHC

Peer reviewe

Smoking status and abdominal obesity among normal- and overweight/obese adults : Population-based FINRISK study

Peer reviewe