Weeding the Circulating Collection at Bailey Library

The weeding process used at Nyack College’s Bailey Library involves a year-round, piecemeal approach during a five-year cycle. The weeding of the circulating collection involves roles for student assistants, librarians, and teaching faculty, and is designed to be user-friendly and yet contain necessary checks and balances

Reproducibility of the bronchoconstrictive response to eucapnic voluntary hyperpnoea

Background: Eucapnic voluntary hyperpnoea (EVH) is considered an effective bronchoprovocation challenge for identifying exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB). However, the reproducibility of the hyperpnoea-induced bronchoconstriction (HIB) response elicited by EVH remains unknown and was therefore the focus of this study. Methods: Two cohorts of 16 physically active males (each cohort comprised 8 controls and 8 with physician diagnosis of asthma) participated in two studies of the short- and long-term reproducibility of the bronchoconstrictive response to an EVH test with dry air. EVH was performed on days 0, 7, 14, and 21 (short-term study), and 0, 35, and 70 (long-term study). HIB was diagnosed by a ≥10% fall in forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) after EVH. Results: On day 0 of the short-term study, FEV1 fell by 2 ± 1% (P < 0.05) and 27 ± 18% (P < 0.01) from pre-to post-EVH in control and HIB-positive groups respectively. The post-EVH fall in FEV1 did not differ across the short-term study test days. In the HIB-positive group, the day-to-day coefficient of variation, reproducibility, and smallest meaningful change for the fall in FEV1 were 12%, 328 mL, and 164 mL, respectively. On day 0 of the long-term study, FEV1 fell by 2 ± 2% and 25 ± 18% (P < 0.01) after EVH in control and HIB-positive groups respectively. The post-EVH fall in FEV1 did not differ across the long-term study test days. In the HIB-positive group, the day-to-day coefficient of variation, reproducibility, and smallest meaningful change for the fall in FEV1 were 10%, 196 mL, and 98 mL respectively. Conclusion: The EVH test elicits a reproducible bronchoconstrictive response in physically active males with physician diagnosed asthma. These data thus support the clinical utility of the EVH test for EIB screening and monitoring

Three-dimensional Imaging of Microstructure in Gold Nanocrystals

X-ray diffraction using a coherent beam involves the mutual interference among all the extremities of small crystals. The continuous diffraction pattern so produced can be phased because it can be oversampled. We have thus obtained three-dimensional images of the interiors of Au nanocrystals that show 50 nm wide bands of contrast with f111g orientation that probably arise from internal twinning by dynamic recrystallization during their formation at high temperature

Reconstruction of the Shapes of Gold Nanocrystals using Coherent X-ray Diffraction

Inverse problems arise frequently in physics: The magnitude of the Fourier transform of some function is measurable, but not its phase. The “phase problem” in crystallography arises because the number of discrete measurements (Bragg peak intensities) is only half the number of unknowns (electron density points in space). Sayre first proposed that oversampling of diffraction data should allow a solution, and this has recently been demonstrated. Here we report the successful phasing of an oversampled hard x-ray diffraction pattern measured from a single nanocrystal of gold

Towards a comprehensive requirements architecture for privacy-aware social recommender systems

Social recommendations have been rapidly adopted as important components in social network sites. How-ever, they assume a cooperative relationship between parties involved. This assumption can lead to the creation of privacy issues and new opportunities for privacy infringements. Traditional recommendation techniques fail to address these issues, and as a con-sequence the development of privacy-aware coopera-tive social recommender systems give rise to an im-portant research gap. In this paper we identify key problems that arise from the privacy dimension of so-cial recommendations and propose a comprehensive requirements architecture for building privacy-aware cooperative social recommender systems. Copyright © 2010, Australian Computer Society, Inc

Grounding data purpose and data usage for better privacy requirements: An information system perspective

Data purpose is a central concept to modeling privacy requirements for information systems. Existing purpose-centric approaches for privacy protection have mainly focused on access control. The problem of ensuring the consistency between data purpose and data usage has been under-addressed. Given the lack of practical purpose-centric solutions, we argue that a grounded understanding of the underlying concepts of data purpose and usage is fundamental to modeling privacy requirements. In recognition of an existing "privacy rights" framework, this paper develops an ontological grounding of data purpose and usage that can be used to understand their implications on fundamental privacy rights for modeling privacy requirements for information systems

A practical risk management framework for intelligent information systems

This paper reports progress towards the development of a practical risk analysis and management framework for intelligent information systems based on the state-of-art techniques in uncertainty management. We provide an analysis of challenges raised by the need to manage risk and identify a set of key requirements for a practical framework that can support risk management in real environments that are open, complex and dynamic. We assess a number of relevant theories, approaches and techniques for their suitability in addressing the risk management challenges. Finally, we present our current multi-level risk analysis and modelling framework, and use benchmark problems in two entirely different domains to illustrate the broad range of our framework applicability