Active Ageing in the Nordic Countries: Introduction

The year 2012 is designated as the European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations. The aim of the year is to raise awareness of the position of older people in a manner where they can enjoy a better quality of life and still play an active role in society. There are good reasons for designating 2012 as such a year.The OECD has estimated that by the year 2050, more than 33% of men and 38% of women in the EU25 will be 60 years or older compared with 18% and 24%, respectively, for the year 2000. The European Statistical Office projects that by 2060, there will be only two people of working age (15–64) in the EU for every person aged over 65, compared with a ratio of 4 to 1 today. Keeping in mind that an increasing share of the youth between 15 and 30 are studying, the consequences of these figures are even more challenging.Many politicians are seriously concerned about financing of the pensions and welfare systems. Another concern is how to allocate sufficient healthcare personnel to give the ageing population a decent service. These challenges are good reasons for the EU to include “solidarity between generations” as an element in the activity of this year.This special issue on active ageing is a contribution from the Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies to the year of active ageing. The articles examine work and ageing from different angles and horizons of understanding. Together, the articles question some of the myths that exist on ageing and work and assess some of the actions being taken to keep older workers in employment. This issue is therefore an important contribution to the development of our understanding of active ageing and measures used to develop an active ageing policy (...

Real-time standard scan plane detection and localisation in fetal ultrasound using fully convolutional neural networks

Fetal mid-pregnancy scans are typically carried out according to fixed protocols. Accurate detection of abnormalities and correct biometric measurements hinge on the correct acquisition of clearly defined standard scan planes. Locating these standard planes requires a high level of expertise. However, there is a worldwide shortage of expert sonographers. In this paper, we consider a fully automated system based on convolutional neural networks which can detect twelve standard scan planes as defined by the UK fetal abnormality screening programme. The network design allows real-time inference and can be naturally extended to provide an approximate localisation of the fetal anatomy in the image. Such a framework can be used to automate or assist with scan plane selection, or for the retrospective retrieval of scan planes from recorded videos. The method is evaluated on a large database of 1003 volunteer mid-pregnancy scans. We show that standard planes acquired in a clinical scenario are robustly detected with a precision and recall of 69 % and 80 %, which is superior to the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we show that it can retrospectively retrieve correct scan planes with an accuracy of 71 % for cardiac views and 81 % for non-cardiac views

Capture of genomic and T-DNA sequences during double-strand break repair in somatic plant cells

To analyze genomic changes resulting from double‐strand break (DSB) repair, transgenic tobacco plants were obtained that carried in their genome a restriction site of the rare cutting endonuclease I‐SceI within a negative selectable marker gene. After induction of DSB repair via Agrobacterium‐mediated transient expression of I‐SceI, plant cells were selected that carried a loss‐of‐function phenotype of the marker. Surprisingly, in addition to deletions, in a number of cases repair was associated with the insertion of unique and repetitive genomic sequences into the break. Thus, DSB repair offers a mechanism for spreading different kinds of sequences into new chromosomal positions. This may have evolutionary consequences particularly for plants, as genomic alterations occurring in meristem cells can be transferred to the next generation. Moreover, transfer DNA (T‐DNA), carrying the open reading frame of I‐SceI, was found in several cases to be integrated into the transgenic I‐SceI site. This indicates that DSB repair also represents a pathway for the integration of T‐DNA into the plant genome

Species-specific double-strand break repair and genome evolution in plants

Even closely related eukaryotic species may differ drastically in genome size. While insertion of retroelements represents a major source of genome enlargement, the mechanism mediating species‐ specific deletions is fairly obscure. We analyzed the formation of deletions during double‐strand break (DSB) repair in Arabidopsis thaliana and tobacco, two dicotyledonous plant species differing >20‐fold in genome size. DSBs were induced by the rare cutting restriction endonuclease I‐SceI and deletions were identified by loss of function of a negative selectable marker gene containing an I‐SceI site. Whereas the partial use of micro‐homologies in junction formation was similar in both species, in tobacco 40% of the deletions were accompanied by insertions. No insertions could be detected in Arabidopsis, where larger deletions were more frequent, indicating a putative inverse correlation between genome size and the average length of deletions. Such a correlation has been postulated before by a theoretical study on the evolution of related insect genomes and our study now identifies a possible molecular cause for the phenomenon, indicating that species‐specific differences in DSB repair might indeed influence genome evolution

A directed mutation operator for real coded genetic algorithms

Copyright @ Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.Developing directed mutation methods has been an interesting research topic to improve the performance of genetic algorithms (GAs) for function optimization. This paper introduces a directed mutation (DM) operator for GAs to explore promising areas in the search space. In this DM method, the statistics information regarding the fitness and distribution of individuals over intervals of each dimension is calculated according to the current population and is used to guide the mutation of an individual toward the neighboring interval that has the best statistics result in each dimension. Experiments are carried out to compare the proposed DM technique with an existing directed variation on a set of benchmark test problems. The experimental results show that the proposed DM operator achieves a better performance than the directed variation on most test problems

Thermocline management of stratified tanks for heat storage

Stratified tanks are useful for maximising the thermal energy efficiency of non-continuous and semi-continuous processes. Liquid at two or more dissimilar temperatures is stored within the same tank to provide a buffer for variations in heating and cooling loads. Control of the thermocline between the hot and cold fluid regions is needed to minimise thermocline growth and maximise operation of the storage tank. An experimental programme using a scale model of an industrial stratified tank (aspect ratio 3.5) and Perspex tank (aspect ratio 8.2) is reported. The behaviour and growth of the hot-cold thermocline under various operating conditions is presented. A siphoning method to re-establish the thermocline without interrupting the use of the tank is tested. Siphoning of the thermocline region from either 20%, 50% or 80% of the tank height is an effective strategy for uninterrupted interface re-establishment. However, the rate and position of siphoning and the load balance of the exit streams are critical variables for minimising the time for effective re-establishment of the two temperature zones

Versatile compact atomic source for high resolution dual atom interferometry

We present a compact $^{87}$Rb atomic source for high precision dual atom interferometers. The source is based on a double-stage magneto-optical trap (MOT) design, consisting of a 2-dimensional (2D)-MOT for efficient loading of a 3D-MOT. The accumulated atoms are precisely launched in a horizontal moving molasses. Our setup generates a high atomic flux ($>10^{10}$ atoms/s) with precise and flexibly tunable atomic trajectories as required for high resolution Sagnac atom interferometry. We characterize the performance of the source with respect to the relevant parameters of the launched atoms, i.e. temperature, absolute velocity and pointing, by utilizing time-of-flight techniques and velocity selective Raman transitions.Comment: uses revtex4, 9 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

A smoothing monotonic convergent optimal control algorithm for NMR pulse sequence design

The past decade has demonstrated increasing interests in using optimal control based methods within coherent quantum controllable systems. The versatility of such methods has been demonstrated with particular elegance within nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) where natural separation between coherent and dissipative spin dynamics processes has enabled coherent quantum control over long periods of time to shape the experiment to almost ideal adoption to the spin system and external manipulations. This has led to new design principles as well as powerful new experimental methods within magnetic resonance imaging, liquid-state and solid-state NMR spectroscopy. For this development to continue and expand, it is crucially important to constantly improve the underlying numerical algorithms to provide numerical solutions which are optimally compatible with implementation on current instrumentation and at same time are numerically stable and offer fast monotonic convergence towards the target. Addressing such aims, we here present a smoothing monotonically convergent algorithm for pulse sequence design in magnetic resonance which with improved optimization stability lead to smooth pulse sequence easier to implement experimentally and potentially understand within the analytical framework of modern NMR spectroscopy