Short GSM mobile phone exposure does not alter human auditory brainstem response

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There are about 1.6 billion GSM cellular phones in use throughout the world today. Numerous papers have reported various biological effects in humans exposed to electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phones. The aim of the present study was to advance our understanding of potential adverse effects of the GSM mobile phones on the human hearing system.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) was recorded with three non-polarizing Ag-AgCl scalp electrodes in thirty young and healthy volunteers (age 18–26 years) with normal hearing. ABR data were collected before, and immediately after a 10 minute exposure to 900 MHz pulsed electromagnetic field (EMF) emitted by a commercial Nokia 6310 mobile phone. Fifteen subjects were exposed to genuine EMF and fifteen to sham EMF in a double blind and counterbalanced order. Possible effects of irradiation was analyzed by comparing the latency of ABR waves I, III and V before and after genuine/sham EMF exposure.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Paired sample t-test was conducted for statistical analysis. Results revealed no significant differences in the latency of ABR waves I, III and V before and after 10 minutes of genuine/sham EMF exposure.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The present results suggest that, in our experimental conditions, a single 10 minute exposure of 900 MHz EMF emitted by a commercial mobile phone does not produce measurable immediate effects in the latency of auditory brainstem waves I, III and V.</p

Assessment of potential effects of the electromagnetic fields of mobile phones on hearing

BACKGROUND: Mobile phones have become indispensable as communication tools; however, to date there is only a limited knowledge about interaction between electromagnetic fields (EMF) emitted by mobile phones and auditory function. The aim of the study was to assess potential changes in hearing function as a consequence of exposure to low-intensity EMF's produced by mobile phones at frequencies of 900 and 1800 MHz. METHODS: The within-subject study was performed on thirty volunteers (age 18–30 years) with normal hearing to assess possible acute effect of EMF. Participants attended two sessions: genuine and sham exposure of EMF. Hearing threshold levels (HTL) on pure tone audiometry (PTA) and transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE's) were recorded before and immediately after 10 min of genuine and/or sham exposure of mobile phone EMF. The administration of genuine or sham exposure was double blind and counterbalanced in order. RESULTS: Statistical analysis revealed no significant differences in the mean HTLs of PTA and mean shifts of TEOAE's before and after genuine and/or sham mobile phone EMF 10 min exposure. The data collected showed that average TEOAE levels (averaged across a frequency range) changed less than 2.5 dB between pre- and post-, genuine and sham exposure. The greatest individual change was 10 dB, with a decrease in level from pre- to post- real exposure. CONCLUSION: It could be concluded that a 10-min close exposure of EMFs emitted from a mobile phone had no immediate after-effect on measurements of HTL of PTA and TEOAEs in young human subjects and no measurable hearing deterioration was detected in our study

Electromagnetic Treatment to Old Alzheimer's Mice Reverses β-Amyloid Deposition, Modifies Cerebral Blood Flow, and Provides Selected Cognitive Benefit

Few studies have investigated physiologic and cognitive effects of “long-term" electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure in humans or animals. Our recent studies have provided initial insight into the long-term impact of adulthood EMF exposure (GSM, pulsed/modulated, 918 MHz, 0.25–1.05 W/kg) by showing 6+ months of daily EMF treatment protects against or reverses cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's transgenic (Tg) mice, while even having cognitive benefit to normal mice. Mechanistically, EMF-induced cognitive benefits involve suppression of brain β-amyloid (Aβ) aggregation/deposition in Tg mice and brain mitochondrial enhancement in both Tg and normal mice. The present study extends this work by showing that daily EMF treatment given to very old (21–27 month) Tg mice over a 2-month period reverses their very advanced brain Aβ aggregation/deposition. These very old Tg mice and their normal littermates together showed an increase in general memory function in the Y-maze task, although not in more complex tasks. Measurement of both body and brain temperature at intervals during the 2-month EMF treatment, as well as in a separate group of Tg mice during a 12-day treatment period, revealed no appreciable increases in brain temperature (and no/slight increases in body temperature) during EMF “ON" periods. Thus, the neuropathologic/cognitive benefits of EMF treatment occur without brain hyperthermia. Finally, regional cerebral blood flow in cerebral cortex was determined to be reduced in both Tg and normal mice after 2 months of EMF treatment, most probably through cerebrovascular constriction induced by freed/disaggregated Aβ (Tg mice) and slight body hyperthermia during “ON" periods. These results demonstrate that long-term EMF treatment can provide general cognitive benefit to very old Alzheimer's Tg mice and normal mice, as well as reversal of advanced Aβ neuropathology in Tg mice without brain heating. Results further underscore the potential for EMF treatment against AD

Mathematical Programming manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor)

Globally convergent limited memory bundle method for large-scale nonsmooth optimization Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract Many practical optimization problems involve nonsmooth (that is, not necessarily differentiable) functions of thousands of variables. In the paper [Haarala, Miettinen, Mäkelä, Optimization Methods and Software, 19, (2004), pp. 673–692] we have described an efficient method for large-scale nonsmooth optimization. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of this method and prove its global convergence for locally Lipschitz continuous objective functions, which are not necessarily differentiable or convex. In addition, we give some encouraging results from numerical experiments

Interfacing Intellectual Property Rights and Open Innovation

As the paradigm of innovation becomes more user oriented and collaborative, to benefit from this changing paradigm, firms need to adjust their intellectual property rights management strategy and devise tools to manage openness. Crucially, firms need to resolve is how to interface the “closed innovation” paradigm required to acquire intellectual property rights in law and to introduce openness in the process of innovation and decentralised innovation process. While the topic of open innovation has produced numerous works especially in the area of business administration and organizational studies, literature on interfacing open innovation with intellectual property law is rare or rather focused on specific subject matters of IP. For example, legal research on open innovation focus on computer, open source software or user generated contents types. This leaves out vast areas of technology uncovered and under researched. Based on literature review and qualitative case studies on a group of Finnish firms, this paper aims to identify tools that are required to manage openness, in response to legal context, and examine to what degree the protection of intellectual property, in particular patent, can be adapted or interfaced with open innovation paradigm. The paper finds that (1) open innovation is dynamic, (2) all commercial open innovation is always managed or controlled, and that (3) actors and modalities of exchanges are heterogeneous and dynamic. Two of these aspects make it difficult to regulate open innovation with intellectual property law, that in open innovation (1) there are always multiple claim holders who have heterogeneous interests and that open innovation requires (2) openness in the communication and exchange. Multiple claim holders – as contributors, investors, co-inventors, collaborator call for a governance structure over how their claims can be prioritised. This paper argues that intellectual property law does regulate the question of co-inventor, co-creator, and co-owner but does not regulate how these rights may be coordinated or managed, in what hierarchy. To prevent disputes, we find proactive private ordering is necessary. Furthermore, open innovation benefits from open exchange in communication, in the absence of clear and certain rules on how such exchange lead to loss of right, “open” communication may not occur. In other words, unless openness is managed, the fluid communications that are crucial in open innovation will not occur. Thus we find that openness in innovation is always managed either formally (through formal governance means i.e. contract, explicit firm policy) or informally (through community norms, trust and implicit corporate culture.) The paper argues that governance means are best provided by the firms either as a contracts, or general policy over information exchanges, in other words a broader form of contract (Private ordering). As a secondary option, a certain proposals to the patent law revision can also be made through introduction of limitation and exception to the right. This paper has two practical implications. First, in the absence of proper legal safeguard for own collaborative input, the paper advocates contract based governance approach. Reflecting this, open and collaborative innovation requires firms to more actively and strategically involve in the governance of intellectual property. Secondly, as a proposal for patent law reform, the paper suggests law and policy makers to explore a creation of particular defence for joint collaborators against the claims of infringement in patent law

Engaged scholarship for exploring applicability of relational contracting to nuclear industry projects

Abstract We employed engaged scholarship as a research strategy for exploring the applicability of relational contracting in nuclear power projects. Insights from a series of workshops with nuclear industry practitioners in Finland indicated that although project alliancing is not a familiar contractual approach in the nuclear industry, the benefits of its implementation are increasingly recognised

Discrete gradient methods

In this chapter, the notion of a discrete gradient is introduced and it is shown that the discrete gradients can be used to approximate subdifferentials of a broad class of nonsmooth functions. Two methods based on such approximations, more specifically, the discrete gradient method (DGM) and its limited memory version (LDGB), are described. These methods are semi derivative-free methods for solving nonsmooth and, in general, nonconvex optimization problems. The performance of the methods is demonstrated using some academic test problems. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020