Wellbeing in adults who had a brush with death

Objectives: A Near-Death-Experience can be a lifechanging event initiating deep posttraumatic growth. Yet people can initially be left struggling with the internal changes and feel alienated from their life and social network. This study investigated whether Near-Death-Experiences also have an impact on people’s happiness, and if so, how long it lasts, and what kind of support they receive in making sense of the event. Method: Six semi-structured interviews were conducted with people who had a Near-Death-Experience and the data was subjected to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Results: Five master-themes emerged: Sense of self, Attitude toward life and death, Effects of Near-Death-Experience, Relationship with others, and Experience of happiness. Conclusion: Almost all participants reported feeling less apprehensive towards death and simultaneously found a greater ability to embrace and appreciate life. Some gained new and profound internal insights that manifested in a renewed sense of self, stronger and more pronounced feelings of life purpose, and could reflect on the Near-Death-Experience as a precious gift. The majority of participants experienced a greater degree of happiness that gradually grew over time. This was largely located internally, which freed them from ‘the hedonic treadmill’ of pursuing it in the outside world. Stigma and a lack of awareness still represent a hurdle for connecting with others and accessing support. Clinical and research implications were discussed

Meeting Them Halfway: Using YouTube in a First Year Information Fluency Program

First year college students are used to gathering information through resources such as YouTube and Google. They need to learn about the approach scholars take to disciplinary inquiry. We designed a standardized session that asked students to critically evaluate a message conveyed through a YouTube video. In the session, they used library and network resources to produce a short bibliography of academic articles and books on the topic

The circulation/reserves/ILL/reference/ITS/media equipment service desk: Swiss army knife or clown car?

Two years ago, the DeWitt Wallace Library made the choice to integrate all services into a single public service point. This included circulation, reference, reserves, interlibrary loan, equipment checkout, and ITS tech support. The means by which this was accomplished included a dizzying amount of collaboration between areas of the library as well as beyond its walls. In year two, we\u27ve also added Media Services equipment and collections, while further distributing supervision of the desk and processes across librarians and staff from various areas of the library. The success of this desk has depended equally on human resources, including a trust and willingness to work outside of comfort zones and to allow each other into our areas of expertise in new and exciting ways, and on technological resources, including google apps for better communication and collaboration, and staff and student worker websites that serve as quick access points for the ever-expanding wealth of information and resources needed to successfully navigate the wide range of processes and services that live at our desk. We will share our story--triumphs and disasters--and encourage discussion with all participants on methods for improving patron (and staff) experiences

Uncertainty-Aware Hand–Eye Calibration

We provide a generic framework for the hand–eye calibration of vision-guided industrial robots. In contrast to traditional methods, we explicitly model the uncertainty of the robot in a stochastically founded way. Albeit the repeatability of modern industrial robots is high, their absolute accuracy typically is much lower. This uncertainty—especially if not considered—deteriorates the result of the hand–eye calibration. Our proposed framework does not only result in a high accuracy of the computed hand–eye pose but also provides reliable information about the uncertainty of the robot. It further provides corrected robot poses for a convenient and inexpensive robot calibration. Our framework is computationally efficient and generic in several regards. It supports the use of a calibration target as well as self-calibration without the need for known 3-D points. It optionally enables the simultaneous calibration of the interior camera parameters. The framework is also generic with regard to the robot type and, hence, supports antropomorphic as well as selective compliance assembly robot arm (SCARA) robots, for example. Simulated and real experiments show the validity of the proposed methods. An extensive evaluation of our framework on a public dataset shows a considerably higher accuracy than 15 state-of-the-art methods

Impact of different trajectories on extrinsic self-calibration for vehicle-based mobile laser scanning systems

The trend toward further integration of automotive electronic control units functionality into domain control units as well as the rise of computing-intensive driver assistance systems has led to a demand for high-performance automotive computation platforms. These platforms have to fulfill stringent safety requirements. One promising approach is the use of performance computation units in combination with safety controllers in a single control unit. Such systems require adequate communication links between the computation units. While Ethernet is widely used, a high-speed serial link communication protocol supported by an Infineon AURIX safety controller appears to be a promising alternative. In this paper, a high-speed serial link IP core is presented, which enables this type of high-speed serial link communication interface for field-programmable gate array–based computing units. In our test setup, the IP core was implemented in a high-performance Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+, which communicated with an Infineon AURIX via high-speed serial link and Ethernet. The first bandwidth measurements demonstrated that high-speed serial link is an interesting candidate for inter-chip communication, resulting in bandwidths reaching up to 127 Mbit/s using stream transmissions

Supporting Data Use in Undergraduate Student Research: From Teaching Basic Data Literacy to Incorporating Data Documentation into Empirical Research Projects

Effectively managing data is an increasingly important part of the researcher\u27s responsibilities and an important skill that undergraduate students need to possess as they move through their academic career. As part of our ongoing information literacy efforts, librarians at Macalester College have developed strategies to support research data use in the classroom and in individual student research projects. In this session, we will highlight a series of online modules created to introduce undergraduate students to best practices for managing research data and will discuss a partnership with faculty, based on Haverford\u27s TIER Protocol, for documenting data use in empirical research to ensure transparent and reproducible research results. We will also share plans for assessing these efforts

Gene disruption and gene replacement in Streptomyces via single stranded DNA transformation of integration vectors

Hillemann D, Pühler A, Wohlleben W. Gene disruption and gene replacement in Streptomyces via single stranded DNA transformation of integration vectors. Nucleic Acids Research. 1991;19(4):727-731.For the isolation of single stranded plasmid DNA, various E. coli and E. coli- Streptomyces shuttle plasmids were equipped with the f1 replication origin. The transformation of some representative Streptomyces species with plasmid vectors occurred irrespective of whether single or double stranded DNA was used. In contrast, the transformation of Streptomyces was 10 to 100 times more efficient when an integration vector was in the single stranded form as opposed to the double stranded form. Streptomyces viridochromogenes was transformed by single stranded DNA integration vectors in order to replace the pat by the tsr gene and generate mutants unable to synthesize phosphinothricin - tripeptide (PTT)

Messverfahren zur Bestimmung der Partikelanzahlkonzentration in Umweltaerosolen

Die natürliche Umgebungsluft enthält Aerosolpartikel, deren Größe von wenigen Nanometern bis zu einigen Mikrometern reicht. Insbesondere anthropogenen ultrafeinen Partikeln, die kleiner als 100 nm sind, werden negative Wirkungen auf die menschliche Gesundheit zugeschrieben. Die gravimetrische Messung der Partikelmassekonzentration erfasst ultrafeine Partikel nur ungenügend, da die Masse dieser Partikel sehr gering ist. Deutlich empfindlicher gelingt die Quantifizierung ultrafeiner Partikel durch die Messung der Partikelanzahlkonzentration. Die Arbeit beschreibt ein Verfahren zur Messung der Anzahlkonzentration von Partikeln in Umweltaerosolen. Es verknüpft die elektrische Aufladung der Partikel mit deren Klassierung im elektrischen Feld und ihre Mengenbestimmung anhand der elektrischen Ladung. Mittels des entwickelten Sensormodells gelingt die Verbindung der gemessenen Rohdaten mit der Anzahlgrößenverteilung der Partikel durch eine Kernfunktion in einer Fredholmschen Integralgleichung erster Art. Zur Dateninversion wird diese Gleichung in diskreter Form als lineares Gleichungssystem genutzt. Dessen Koeffizienten bilden die Kernmatrix, welche mit einer neu entwickelten Methode experimentell bestimmt wird. Vergleichsmessungen zeigen eine gute Übereinstimmung des Verfahrens mit Referenzverfahren der Aerosolmesstechnik und unterstreichen die Eignung des Verfahrens zur Partikelquantifizierung in Umweltmessnetzen

Selbstkalibrierung mobiler Multisensorsysteme mittels geometrischer 3D-Merkmale

Ein mobiles Multisensorsystem ermöglicht die effiziente, räumliche Erfassung von Objekten und der Umgebung. Die Kalibrierung des mobilen Multisensorsystems ist ein notwendiger Vorverarbeitungsschritt für die Sensordatenfusion und für genaue räumliche Erfassungen. Bei herkömmlichen Verfahren kalibrieren Experten das mobile Multisensorsystem in aufwändigen Prozeduren vor Verwendung durch Aufnahmen eines Kalibrierobjektes mit bekannter Form. Im Gegensatz zu solchen objektbasierten Kalibrierungen ist eine Selbstkalibrierung praktikabler, zeitsparender und bestimmt die gesuchten Parameter mit höherer Aktualität. Diese Arbeit stellt eine neue Methode zur Selbstkalibrierung mobiler Multisensorsysteme vor, die als Merkmalsbasierte Selbstkalibrierung bezeichnet wird. Die Merkmalsbasierte Selbstkalibrierung ist ein datenbasiertes, universelles Verfahren, das für eine beliebige Kombination aus einem Posenbestimmungssensor und einem Tiefensensor geeignet ist. Die fundamentale Annahme der Merkmalsbasierten Selbstkalibrierung ist, dass die gesuchten Parameter am besten bestimmt sind, wenn die erfasste Punktwolke die höchstmögliche Qualität hat. Die Kostenfunktion, die zur Bewertung der Qualität verwendet wird, basiert auf Geometrischen 3D-Merkmalen, die wiederum auf den lokalen Nachbarschaften jedes Punktes basieren. Neben der detaillierten Analyse unterschiedlicher Aspekte der Selbstkalibrierung, wie dem Einfluss der Systemposen auf das Ergebnis, der Eignung verschiedener Geometrischer 3D-Merkmale für die Selbstkalibrierung und dem Konvergenzradius des Verfahrens, wird die Merkmalsbasierte Selbstkalibrierung anhand eines synthethischen und dreier realer Datensätze evaluiert. Diese Datensätze wurden dabei mit unterschiedlichen Sensoren und in unterschiedlichen Umgebungen aufgezeichnet. Die Experimente zeigen die vielseitige Einsetzbarkeit der Merkmalsbasierten Selbstkalibrierung hinsichtlich der Sensoren und der Umgebungen. Die Ergebnisse werden stets mit einer geeigneten objektbasierten Kalibrierung aus der Literatur und einer weiteren, nachimplementierten Selbstkalibrierung verglichen. Verglichen mit diesen Verfahren erzielt die Merkmalsbasierte Selbstkalibrierung bessere oder zumindest vergleichbare Genauigkeiten für alle Datensätze. Die Genauigkeit und Präzision der Merkmalsbasierten Selbstkalibrierung entspricht dem aktuellen Stand der Forschung. Für den Datensatz, der die höchsten Sensorgenauigkeiten aufweist, werden beispielsweise die Parameter der relativen Translation zwischen dem Rigid Body eines Motion Capture Systems und einem Laserscanner mit einer Genauigkeit von ca. $1\,\mathrm{cm}$ bestimmt, obwohl die Distanzmessgenauigkeit dieses Laserscanners nur $3\,\mathrm{cm}$ beträgt