A Wireless Implantable System for Facilitating Gastrointestinal Motility.

Gastrointestinal (GI) electrical stimulation has been shown in several studies to be a potential treatment option for GI motility disorders. Despite the promising preliminary research progress, however, its clinical applicability and usability are still unknown and limited due to the lack of a miniaturized versatile implantable stimulator supporting the investigation of effective stimulation patterns for facilitating GI dysmotility. In this paper, we present a wireless implantable GI modulation system to fill this technology gap. The system consists of a wireless extraluminal gastrointestinal modulation device (EGMD) performing GI electrical stimulation, and a rendezvous device (RD) and a custom-made graphical user interface (GUI) outside the body to wirelessly power and configure the EGMD to provide the desired stimuli for modulating GI smooth muscle activities. The system prototype was validated in bench-top and in vivo tests. The GI modulation system demonstrated its potential for facilitating intestinal transit in the preliminary in vivo chronic study using porcine models

Topological entanglement entropy for torus knot bipartitions and the Verlinde-like formulas

The topological R\'enyi and entanglement entropies depend on the bipartition of the manifold and the choice of the ground states. However, these entanglement quantities remain invariant under a coordinate transformation when the bipartition also undergoes the same transformation. In the context of topological quantum field theories, these coordinate transformations reduce to representations of the mapping class group on the manifold of the Hilbert space. We employ this invariant property of the R\'enyi and entanglement entropies under coordinate transformations for TQFTs in (2 + 1) dimensions on a torus with various bipartitions. By utilizing the replica trick and the surgery method to compute the topological R\'enyi and entanglement entropies, the invariant property results in Verlinde-like formulas. Furthermore, for the bipartition with interfaces as two non-intersecting torus knots, an $SL(2, \mathbb{Z})$ transformation can untwist the torus knots, leading to a simple bipartition with an effective ground state. This invariant property allows us to demonstrate that the topological entanglement entropy has a lower bound $-2 \ln D$, where $D$ is the total quantum dimensions of the system.Comment: ref.[20] is corrrected to Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 060401 (2007); Fig. 3.15 is also modifie

Cross-cultural comparative analysis of student motivation and autonomy in learning: perspectives from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom

IntroductionThis research project examines student perspectives on independent learning in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Independent learning describes learning undertaken by students outside of standard institutional learning environments. Prior research has suggested that motivations to undertake independent learning and the strategies involved may differ across cultural contexts, institutions, and individual learners.MethodsThis research employs primary qualitative research consisting of interviews with 16 students in Business Studies (eight British and eight Chinese). The study takes a social constructionist approach to better establish the ways in which culture may serve as a mediator for motivation to learn independently and the strategies pursued to this end.ResultsThe study’s findings note key differences in the motivations to complete independent learning across either cohort, as well as distinct conceptualizations of what strategies and practices facilitate effective independent learning.DiscussionThis research highlights significant cultural differences in the motivations, strategies, and skills related to independent learning between students in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. It also notes the potential for socioeconomic factors, institutional structures, and assessment methods, alongside culture, to contribute to these differences

Causes Of Delay In Diagnosis Of Pulmonary Tuberculosis In Patients Attending A Referral Hospital In Western Kenya

Objective: To determine the length of delays from onset of symptoms to initiation of treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB ). Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Chest/TB clinic, Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH ), Eldoret, Kenya. Subjects: Newly diagnosed smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) patients. Results: Two hundred and thirty patients aged between 12 and 80 (median; 28.5) years were included in the study. They comprised 148 (64.3%, median 30 years) males and 82 (35.7%, median 28 years) females. One hundred and two (44%) came from urban and 128 (56%) came from rural setting covering a median distance of 10 (range 0–100) kilometres and paying Kshs 20 (range 0–200) to facility. Cough was the commonest symptom reported by 228 (99.1%) of the patients followed by chest pain in 214 (80%). The mean patient delay was 11 ± 17 weeks (range: 1–78 weeks) with no significant difference between males and females, the mean system delay was 3 ± 5 weeks (range: 0-39 weeks). The median patient, health systems and total delays were 42, 2, and 44 days respectively for all the patients. Marital status, being knowledgeable about TB, distance to clinic and where help is sought first had significant effect on patient delay. Conclusion: Patient delay is the major contributor to delay in diagnosis and initiation of treatment of PTB among our patients. Therefore TB control programmes in this region must emphasise patient education regarding symptoms of tuberculosis and timely health seeking behaviour. East African Medical Journla Vol. 85 (6) 2008: pp. 263-26

The impact of travel time reliability and perceived service quality on airport ground access mode choice

This study makes two contributions to existing airport ground access mode choice models. The first is an assessment of travel time reliability on air passenger airport ground access mode choice decisions. Revealed preference questions were asked to determine the safety margin allowed for ground access journey to airports. The larger the safety margin allowances, the less reliable the passenger perceived the mode to be. Stated preference questions were also used to determine the impact of travel time reliability on mode choice decisions. The second contribution of this research is the incorporation of air passenger perceived service quality in the calibration of airport ground access mode choice model. With the use of the survey data, the effects of safety margin allowances, travel time reliability, and perceived service quality on ground access mode choices to Hong Kong International Airport are quantified by a multinomial logit-type mode choice model. For strategic planning, the calibrated model can be used by the airport authority and various transport operators for evaluating the changes in the service attributes on modal split pattern in international airports, hence improving the access mode services

Users’ intentions towards perceived risks on Internet SNS -base on Facebook and Wretch

With the rapid growth of the Internet over the past few years, people are relying more and more on the services it provides, such as online shopping, online chatting or online delivery. People can easily communicate or exchange information with friends online without any physical boundaries, and because of the convenience of the Internet, more and more Internet SNS are being launched to attract young people, and these have become one of the most popular pastimes of the current generation. Internet SNS provide instant communication and information sharing to users, and they are not only prevalent in western countries (Facebook and MySpace), but also in eastern countries (Wretch and Xiaonei). However, some potential problems are hidden behind the usage, and Internet SNS users have already found some of these during the past few years. In terms of cultural differences, users may have different perceptions of the online risks they perceive, such as financial and time risks. Besides, the other important factor influencing the SNS usage is the privacy issue, which has an impact on people’s subsequent trust in Internet SNS. The literature review in this research offers theories claimed by different authors, and shares their findings about this subject, and the data is collected by means of interviewing 15 participants from the UK and Taiwan. The results indicate that the usage of users is truly influenced by their level of perception of online risks, and cultural values also have a slight influence on users’ different perceptions. It is hoped that the exploration in this study will be helpful for the future design of Internet SNS

Auditable Homomorphic-based Decentralized Collaborative AI with Attribute-based Differential Privacy

In recent years, the notion of federated learning (FL) has led to the new paradigm of distributed artificial intelligence (AI) with privacy preservation. However, most current FL systems suffer from data privacy issues due to the requirement of a trusted third party. Although some previous works introduce differential privacy to protect the data, however, it may also significantly deteriorate the model performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel decentralized collaborative AI framework, named Auditable Homomorphic-based Decentralised Collaborative AI (AerisAI), to improve security with homomorphic encryption and fine-grained differential privacy. Our proposed AerisAI directly aggregates the encrypted parameters with a blockchain-based smart contract to get rid of the need of a trusted third party. We also propose a brand-new concept for eliminating the negative impacts of differential privacy for model performance. Moreover, the proposed AerisAI also provides the broadcast-aware group key management based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CPABE) to achieve fine-grained access control based on different service-level agreements. We provide a formal theoretical analysis of the proposed AerisAI as well as the functionality comparison with the other baselines. We also conduct extensive experiments on real datasets to evaluate the proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that our proposed AerisAI significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure