An architecture for organisational decision support

The Decision Support (DS) topic of the Network Enabled Capability for Through Life Systems Engineering (NECTISE) project aims to provide organisational through-life decision support for the products and services that BAE Systems deliver. The topic consists of five streams that cover resource capability management, decision management, collaboration, change prediction and integration. A proposed architecture is presented for an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) that combines the streams to provide a structured approach to addressing a number of issues that have been identified by BAE Systems business units as being relevant to DS: uncertainty and risk, shared situational awareness, types of decision making, decision tempo, triggering of decisions, and support for autonomous decision making. The proposed architecture will identify how either individuals or groups of decision makers (including autonomous agents) would be utilised on the basis of their capability within the requirements of the scenario to collaboratively solve the decision problem. Features of the scenario such as time criticality, required experience level, the need for justification, and conflict management, will be addressed within the architecture to ensure that the most appropriate decision management support (system/naturalistic/hybrid) is provided. In addition to being reliant on a number of human factors issues, the decision making process is also reliant on a number of information issues: overload, consistency, completeness, uncertainty and evolution, which will be discussed within the context of the architecture

Reviving a national strategy roadmap for organ and tissue donation in South Africa

In September 2019, a two-day workshop ahead of the Southern African Transplantation Society congress brought together South African champions for organ donation and leaders from the International Society of Organ Donation and Procurement (ISODP) at a high-level workshop focused on creating a national strategy roadmap to improve organ donation in South Africa. The full report is available via the supplementary materials on the African Journal of Nephrology website

Toward Interactive Dictation

Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the feasibility of allowing users to interrupt their dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. We introduce a new task and dataset, TERTiUS, to experiment with such systems. To support this flexibility in real-time, a system must incrementally segment and classify spans of speech as either dictation or command, and interpret the spans that are commands. We experiment with using large pre-trained language models to predict the edited text, or alternatively, to predict a small text-editing program. Experiments show a natural trade-off between model accuracy and latency: a smaller model achieves 30% end-state accuracy with 1.3 seconds of latency, while a larger model achieves 55% end-state accuracy with 7 seconds of latency.Comment: 17 pages, 5 tables, 4 figures; AC

[Accepted Manuscript] Galleria mellonella is low cost and suitable surrogate host for studying virulence of human pathogenic Vibrio cholerae.

Vibrio cholerae causes a severe diarrheal disease affecting millions of people worldwide, particularly in low income countries. V. cholerae successfully persist in aquatic environment and its pathogenic strains results in sever enteric disease in humans. This dual life style contributes towards its better survival and persistence inside host gut and in the environment. Alternative animal replacement models are of great value in studying host-pathogen interaction and for quick screening of various pathogenic strains. One such model is Galleria mellonella, a wax worm which has a complex innate immune system and here we investigate its suitability as a model for clinical human isolates of O1 El TOR, Ogawa serotype belonging to two genetically distinct subclades found in Pakistan (PSC-1 and PSC-2). We demonstrate that the PSC-2 strain D59 frequently isolated from inland areas, was more virulent than PSC-1 strain K7 mainly isolated from coastal areas (p=0.0001). In addition, we compared the relative biofilm capability of the representative strains as indicators of their survival and persistence in the environment and K7 showed enhanced biofilm forming capabilities (p=0.004). Finally we present the annotated genomes of the strains D59 and K7, and compared them with the reference strain N16961

Analisis Dampak Fluktuasi Harga Bbm terhadap USAha Penangkapan Ikan dengan Kapal Motor (Kasus : Kecamatan Sarudik Kabupaten Tapanuli Tengah)

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis perbedaan lama hari melaut, jarak daerah penangkapan ikan, jumlah penggunaan solar, dan jumlah biaya operasional per trip penangkapan ikan sebelum dan sesudah Perubahan harga solar yang terjadi selama periode fluktuasi harga (18 November 2014, 1 Januari 2015, dan 19 Januari 2015). Metode analisis yang digunakan adalah analisis uji beda dengan model Dependent Sample T-test (Paired Sample T-test) dan analisis deskriptif. Sampel kapal motor ditentukan sebanyak 30 sampel dengan metode Purposive Sampling dan dibagi atas tiga strata berdasarkan kriteria ukuran tonnage kapal. Hasil penelitian menyimpulkan bahwa tidak terdapat perbedaan yang nyata lama hari melaut dan jumlah penggunaan solar per trip sebelum dan sesudah kenaikan harga solar pada tanggal 18 November 2014. Terdapat perbedaan yang nyata jarak daerah penangkapan dan jumlah biaya operasional per trip sebelum dan sesudah kenaikan harga solar pada tanggal 18 November 2014. Terdapat perbedaan yang nyata lama hari melaut per trip, jarak daerah penangkapan per trip, jumlah penggunaan solar per trip, dan jumlah biaya operasional per trip sebelum dan sesudah penurunan harga solar pada tanggal 1 Januari 2015. Terdapat perbedaan yang nyata lama hari melaut per trip, jarak daerah penangkapan per trip, jumlah penggunaan solar per trip, dan jumlah biaya operasional per trip sebelum dan sesudah penurunan harga solar pada tanggal 19 Januari 2015. Masalah yang dihadapi nelayan akibat fluktuasi harga BBM adalah pada saat terjadi kenaikan harga solar modal yang harus dikeluarkan nelayan untuk penangkapan ikan per trip semakin tinggi, adanya ketidakpastian pendapatan karena tidak adanya kestabilan dan perlindungan harga BBM. Upaya yang dilakukan nelayan untuk mengatasi masalah akibat fluktuasi harga BBM adalah nelayan pemilik meminjam bantuan modal, nelayan menjual ikan pada tempat pelelangan ikan dengan harga jual yang lebih tinggi atau langsung ke pasar ikan, dan nelayan meminta perlindungan harga BBM khususnya solar kepada lembaga pemerintahan di tingkat lokal

Influence of intensive melt shearing on the microstructure and mechanical properties of an Al-Mg alloy with high added impurity content

The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and ASM International 2011We have investigated the influence of melt conditioning by intensive shearing on the mechanical behavior and microstructure of Al-Mg-Mn-Fe-Cu-Si alloy sheet produced from a small book mold ingot with high added impurity content. The melt conditioned ingot has fine grains throughout its cross section, whereas a conventionally cast ingot, without melt shearing, has coarser grains and shows a wider variation of grain size. Both needle-shaped and coarse Chinese script iron bearing intermetallic particles are found in the microstructure at the center of the conventionally processed ingot, but for the melt conditioned ingot, only fine Chinese script intermetallic particles are observed. In addition to the iron bearing intermetallics, Mg2Si particles are also observed. The ingots were rolled to thin sheet and solution heat treated (SHT). During rolling, the iron-based intermetallics and Mg2Si particles are broken and aligned along the rolling direction. Yield strength (YS), ultimate tensile strength (UTS), and elongation of the intensively melt sheared and processed sheet are all improved compared to the conventionally cast and processed sheet. Fractographic analysis of the tensile fracture surfaces shows that the clustered and coarse iron bearing intermetallic particles are responsible for the observed reduction in mechanical properties of the conventionally cast sheet. We have shown that by refining the initial microstructure of the ingot by intensive shear melt conditioning, it is possible to achieve improved mechanical properties at the final sheet gage of an AlMgMn alloy with a high content of impurities.This study is under the Technology Strategy Board funded REALCAR projec

Bilharzia in a small irrigation community: an assessment of water and toilet usage

A study on the hygienic usage of pit- latrines to avert bilharziasis in rural Zimbabwe.A questionnaire study was conducted in the Mushandike small scale irrigation schemes in Zimbabwe to investigate the following: 1) to establish whether field latrines are used or not; 2) to find out why people visit natural water bodies for bathing and laundry instead of using water from boreholes for these purposes; 3) to assess people’s knowledge on the transmission and control of schistosomiasis. Results of the study indicated that die field latrines tire utilized and that the borehole water is not preferred for bathing and laundry because of its hardness and oily nature. The results further indicated that the community was aware of schistosomiasis but their knowledge on transmission and control of the disease was limited. Possible reasons for tire observations made tire discussed in die paper and recommendations emanating from the study are stated