Telemedicine: An expanding new science on land and sea

Several medical and technical men in San Diego County are concerned with the need in many rural communities for a 24-hour day, 7-days a week access to adequate medical care. People isolated from urban areas by travel-times of 40-minutes tend to delay seeking early and effective medical care. The authors were able to assemble quality technology which permits narrow-band video-pictures, better known in the CB trade as ROBOT slow-scan television (SSTV), to be transmitted over telephone lines, by micro-wave, through satellite-bounce, or by HF-radio. These 'ROBOT' pictures can be accompanied with explanatory audio communication and with diagnostic signals from electronic instruments

Two-Dimensional Intercomparison of Stratospheric Models

A detailed record is provided for the examination of fundamental differences in photochemistry and transport among atmospheric models. The results of 16 different modeling groups are presented for several model experiments

A feasibility study of wind turbine blade surface crack detection using an optical inspection method

A new image processing technique was investigated to assess its ability to detect surface flaws on an on-tower wind turbine blade (WTB). The method was tested by varying the parameters of the surface flaws as well as the parameters of the method. It was found that detecting and quantifying cracks as small as hair thickness with computer-based optical inspection is feasible and the orientation of a crack was not sensitive to image processing so that the inspection camera does not need to be set up at a specific angle to detect cracks. It was also found that uneven background illumination was significantly reduced by optimizing the threshold value using the Canny method. In addition, the accuracy of quantifying a crack was improved by reducing noise with the intersection of two processed images from Sobel and Canny methods

A Probabilistic View of Problems in Form Error Estimation

Form error estimation techniques based on discrete point measurements can lead to significant errors in form tolerance evaluation. By modeling surface profiles as random variables, we show how sample size and fitting techniques affect form error estimation. Depending on the surface characteristics, typical sampling techniques can result in estimation errors of as much as 50 percent. Another issue raised in the fitting approach is the metric p selection for the fitting objective. We show that for p = 2 and p = ∞, the selection does not appear to significantly affect the estimation of form error