Exposure assessment to support on-farm risk characterisation for pesticides

C. D. Brown, K. Lewis, and A. Hart, ‘Exposure assessment to support on-farm risk characterisation for pesticides’ paper presented at the European Meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), 26 -29 August 20001, Copenhagen, Denmark.Peer reviewe

Reducing Nursing Home Use Through Consumer-Directed Personal Care Services

Highlights findings on how the Cash and Counseling program, which allows Medicaid enrollees with personal care services to hire their own care workers, affected nursing facility use and expenditures as well as personal care and Medicaid costs in Arkansas

Building Place-Based Initiatives for Boys and Men of Color and Vulnerable Populations: A Community Planning Guide

This guide provides information about how communities can implement the next phase of achieving priority outcomes for boys and men of color. It focuses on two critical areas of work: 1) how to conduct a policy review and formulate recommendations for action and 2) how to develop an action plan. The following sections contain specific guidelines for taking these next steps. In addition, the appendices include a template for organizing the policy review and suggested components of the action plan

User interface evaluation of serious games for students with intellectual disability

We have designed and evaluated around 10 serious games under the EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation Project: Game On Extra Time (GOET) project http://goet-project.eu/. The project supports people with learning disabilities and additional sensory impairments in getting and keeping a job by helping them to learn, via games-based learning; skills that will help them in their working day. These games help students to learn how to prepare themselves for work, dealing with everyday situations at work, including money management, travelling independently etc. This paper is concerned with the potential of serious games as effective and engaging learning resources for people with intellectual disabilities. In this paper we will address questions related to the design and evaluation of such games, and our design solutions to suit the individual learning needs of our target audiences

Divide-and-Conquer Distributed Learning: Privacy-Preserving Offloading of Neural Network Computations

Machine learning has become a highly utilized technology to perform decision making on high dimensional data. As dataset sizes have become increasingly large so too have the neural networks to learn the complex patterns hidden within. This expansion has continued to the degree that it may be infeasible to train a model from a singular device due to computational or memory limitations of underlying hardware. Purpose built computing clusters for training large models are commonplace while access to networks of heterogeneous devices is still typically more accessible. In addition, with the rise of 5G networks, computation at the edge becoming more commonplace, and inspired by the successes of the folding@home project utilizing crowdsourced computation, we consider the scenario of the crowdsourcing the computation required for training of a neural network particularly appealing. Distributed learning promises to bridge the widening gap between singular device performance and large-scale model computational requirements, but unfortunately, current distributed learning techniques do not maintain privacy of both the model and input with- out an accuracy or computational tradeoff. In response, we present Divide and Conquer Learning (DCL), an innovative approach that enables quantifiable privacy guarantees while offloading the computational burden of training to a network of devices. A user can divide the training computation of its neural network into neuron-sized computation tasks and dis- tribute them to devices based on their available resources. The results will be returned to the user and aggregated in an iterative process to obtain the final neural network model. To protect the privacy of the user’s data and model, shuffling is done to both the data and the neural network model before the computation task is distributed to devices. Our strict adherence to the order of operations allows a user to verify the correctness of performed computations through assigning a task to multiple devices and cross-validating their results. This can protect against network churns and detect faulty or misbehaving devices

Modification of the Kenworthy Snorkel Camera System

The Kenworthy Snorkel Camera System is a periscope type of lens system designed for use in cinematography. Its primary applications are in the photographing of small scale models and in close-up work. Since its introduction in 1967, the system has been used extensively for these purposes, and has been especially useful in advertising work. It was hypothesised that the system could be modified without any loss in image quality by changing the relay system from a single relay lens to a telecentric relay system composed of two equal focal length lenses. A diaphragm could also be added to the system (placed between the relay lenses) with this relay set-up. If these modifications could be made, then the versatility of the system could be increased. The modifications were made to the system, and the subjective results point towards the hypothesis being true. However, in the final analysis, the hypothesis could not be proven true because the appropriate data could not be gathered. This was due to the fact that this lens system requires extremely exact alignment of the optical components. Unfortunately, it was beyond the scope of this work to build a final modified system which could be aligned with the degree of accuracy required

Undeserving Heirs?--The Case of the Terminated Parent

Every state has an intestate succession statute that prescribes how the property of those who die without a will should be distributed. Every state also by statute authorizes the government to intervene in the parent-child relationship in the most draconian manner possible by involuntarily terminating parental rights. This article explores how the law functions at the intersection of these two statutory schemes-the inheritance regime, as expressed through intestate succession statutes, and the child welfare regime, as expressed through termination of parental rights statutes ( TPR statutes )