Pressure Ulcer Prevention System

Pressure ulcers, also known as bedsores, are a widespread but often understated problem. A pressure ulcer is an injury that develops with constant pressure on an area of skin for a long time. They range from bruises to open wounds to even exposed bone. These injuries especially impact bedridden and elderly hospital inpatients, since these people must depend on nursing staff for mobility. Pressure ulcers can seem to be a solved problem. Solutions that completely eliminate pressure ulcers do exist. These solutions, however, are too expensive for widespread use, at thousands of dollars per bed. Other solutions, such as relying on nursing staff to move all patients is not reliable, and nurses develop chronic back pain from the strain of moving so many patients so often. The Pressure Ulcer Prevention System is designed specifically to be an affordable solution for these injuries in a hospital or assisted living setting. The system collects data from a gyroscopic sensor and multiple pressure sensors mounted on the patient, and sends an alert to the nurses’ station if a patient is at risk of developing a pressure ulcer, and needs attending. The system does not replace nurse care, nor does it change the most common solution of manually moving patients, but it instead helps nursing staff be more efficient

Market Timing And Model Uncertainty: An Exploratory Study For The Swiss Stock Market

We use statistical model selection criteria and Avramov's (2002) Bayesian model averaging approach to analyze the sample evidence of stock market predictability in the presence of model uncertainty. The empirical analysis for the Swiss stock market is based on a number of predictive variables found important in previous studies of return predictability. We find that it is difficult to discard any predictive variable as completely worthless, but that the posterior probabilities of the individual forecasting models as well as the cumulative posterior probabilities of the predictive variables are time-varying. Moreover, the estimates of the posterior probabilities are not robust to whether the predictive variables are stochastically detrended or not. The decomposition of the variance of predicted future returns into the components parameter uncertainty, model uncertainty, and the uncertainty attributed to forecast errors indicates that the respective contributions strongly depend on the time period under consideration and the initial values of the predictive variables. In contrast to AVRAMOV (2002), model uncertainty is generally not more important than parameter uncertainty. Finally, we demonstrate the implications of model uncertainty for market timing strategies. In general, our results do not indicate any reliable out-of-sample return predictability. Among the predictive variables, the dividend-price ratio exhibits the worst external validation on average. Again in contrast to AVRAMOV (2002), our analysis suggests that the out-of-sample performance of the Bayesian model averaging approach is not superior to the statistical model selection criteria. Consequently, model averaging does not seem to help improve the performance of the resulting short-term market timing strategie

Guest editor’s presentation

Guest editor's presentation of the special issue: The Philosophical Legacy of Jerry Fodor

A Discussion of Thin Client Technology for Computer Labs

Computer literacy is not negotiable for any professional in an increasingly computerised environment. Educational institutions should be equipped to provide this new basic training for modern life. Accordingly, computer labs are an essential medium for education in almost any field. Computer labs are one of the most popular IT infrastructures for technical training in primary and secondary schools, universities and other educational institutions all over the world. Unfortunately, a computer lab is expensive, in terms of both initial purchase and annual maintenance costs, and especially when we want to run the latest software. Hence, research efforts addressing computer lab efficiency, performance or cost reduction would have a worldwide repercussion. In response to this concern, this paper presents a survey on thin client technology for computer labs in educational environments. Besides setting out the advantages and drawbacks of this technology, we aim to refute false prejudices against thin clients, identifying a set of educational scenarios where thin clients are a better choice and others requiring traditional solutions

Diagrammatic Analysis of Charmless Three-Body B Decays

We express the amplitudes for charmless three-body B decays in terms of diagrams. In addition, we show how to use Dalitz-plot analyses to obtain decay amplitudes which are symmetric or antisymmetric under the exchange of two of the final-state particles. When annihilation-type diagrams are neglected, as in two-body decays, many of the exact, purely isospin-based results are modified, leading to new tests of the standard model (SM). Some of the tests can be performed now, and we find that present data agree with the predictions of the SM. Furthermore, contrary to what was thought previously, it is possible to cleanly extract weak-phase information from three-body decays, and we discuss methods for B -> K pi pi, K K Kbar, K Kbar pi and pi pi pi.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, reference updated, sentences added regarding indirect CP violation and CP of the final state. Significant text added describing how to obtain symmetric/antisymmetric decay amplitudes, results of the comparison of the predictions of the SM with present data for several decays, and the momentum dependence of the diagram