The Social Networks of Rural Business Owners in East Central Alberta

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

VIRTUAL PACKAGING: A CHALLENGE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Agribusiness,

When Mind and Memory Flee …: Hymns and ministry to people with dementia

Drawing on his experience as a part-time hospital Chaplain, Graham Deans reflects on how in worship services for geriatric patients, the singing of familiar hymns very often had the effect of restoring lucidity and comprehension to the minds of dementia sufferers affected by memory loss and confusion. His paper considers therapeutic value of hymn singing and looks in some detail at particular examples of hymns focussed on ageing and dementia

No evidence of a significant role for CTLA-4 in multiple sclerosis

Variation in the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) gene plays a significant role in determining susceptibility to autoimmune thyroid disease and type 1 diabetes. Its role in multiple sclerosis is more controversial. In order to explore this logical candidate more thoroughly, we genotyped 771 multiple sclerosis trio families from the United Kingdom for the 3? untranslated region variable number tandem repeat, the CT60 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and five haplotype-tagging SNPs. No individual marker or common haplotype showed evidence of association with disease. These data suggest that any effect of CTLA-4 on multiple sclerosis susceptibility is likely to be very small

Magnetic Induction Imaging with Optical Atomic Magnetometers: Towards Applications to Screening and Surveillance

We propose a new approach, based on optical atomic magnetometers and magnetic induction tomography (MIT), for remote and non-invasive detection of conductive targets. Atomic magnetometers overcome the main limitations of conventional MIT instrumentation, in particular their poor low-frequency sensitivity, their large size and their limited scalability. Moreover, atomic magnetometers have been proven to reach extremely high sensitivities, with an improvement of up to 7 orders of magnitude in the 50 MHz to DC band, with respect to a standard pick-up coil of the same size. In the present scheme, an oscillating magnetic field induces eddy currents in a conductive target and laser-pumped atomic magnetometers, either stand-alone or in an array, detect the response of the objects. A phase-sensitive detection scheme rejects the background, allowing remote detection of the secondary field and, thus, mapping of objects, hidden in cargos, underwater or underground. The potential for extreme sensitivity, miniaturization, dynamic range and array operation paves the way to a new generation of non-invasive, active detectors for surveillance, as well as for real-time cargo screening. © (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only

A robust braille recognition system

Braille is the most effective means of written communication between visually-impaired and sighted people. This paper describes a new system that recognizes Braille characters in scanned Braille document pages. Unlike most other approaches, an inexpensive flatbed scanner is used and the system requires minimal interaction with the user. A unique feature of this system is the use of context at different levels (from the pre-processing of the image through to the post-processing of the recognition results) to enhance robustness and, consequently, recognition results. Braille dots composing characters are identified on both single and double-sided documents of average quality with over 99% accuracy, while Braille characters are also correctly recognised in over 99% of documents of average quality (in both single and double-sided documents)