Life-Forms in the Flora of Minnesota

A life-form study, using the Raunkiaer classification, was mode of the spermatophytes of Minnesota. Three life-form spectra ore presented: Minnesota (Ph 13.0%, Ch 3.0%, H 49.0%, Cr 22.0%, Th 13.0%); Cloy County, a grassland area (Ph 12.3%, Ch 1.7%, H 53.7%, Cr 19.5%, Th 12 .8%); and St. Louis and Lake counties, within the Boreal Coniferous Forest (Ph 14.9%, Ch 2.9%, H 47.2%, Cr 25.5%, Th 9.5%. (These data indicate that a hemicryptophytic climate prevails in Minnesota and ore generally in harmony with Raunkiaer\u27s assertions concerning the relation between life-form spectra and latitude

Patterns Formation in Drying Drops of Blood

The drying of a drop of human blood exhibits coupled physical mechanisms, such as Marangoni flow, evaporation and wettability. The final stage of a whole blood drop evaporation reveals regular patterns with a good reproducibility for a healthy person. Other experiments on anaemic and hyperlipidemic people were performed, and different patterns were revealed. The flow motion inside the blood drop is observed and analyzed with the use of a digital camera: the influence of the red blood cells (RBCs) motion is revealed at the drop periphery as well as its consequences on the final stage of drying. The mechanisms which lead to the final pattern of the dried blood drops are presented and explained on the basis of fluid mechanics in conjunction with the principles of haematology. The blood drop evaporation process is evidenced to be driven only by Marangoni flow. The same axisymetric pattern formation is observed, and can be forecast for different blood drop diameters. The evaporation mass flux can be predicted with a good agreement, assuming only the knowledge of the colloids mass concentration.Comment: 1 page + conference APS 2011 (1 movie for the gallery + 1 movie for ArXiv

Société et Utopie chez Liu Cixin

Cet article décrit le courant utopiste en littérature dans la Chine contemporaine à travers l’analyse des nouvelles « Prendre soin de Dieu » et « Prendre soin des hommes » du célèbre auteur de science-fiction Liu Cixin. Il cherche à démontrer que ces nouvelles constituent une forme de résistance éthique face aux travers de l’ordre capitaliste mondial dans lequel la Chine s’est intégrée depuis la période des réformes. Poursuivant la tradition utopiste moderne et s’opposant aux réalités contemporaines, ces nouvelles offrent l’espoir d’un ordre social plus juste malgré les difficultés apparemment insurmontables auxquelles doit faire face le monde aujourd’hui

A Telehealth Privacy and Security Self-Assessment Questionnaire for Telehealth Providers: Development and Validation

Background: Telehealth is a great approach for providing high quality health care services to people who cannot easily access these services in person. However, because of frequently reported health data breaches, many people may hesitate to use telehealth-based health care services. It is necessary for telehealth care providers to demonstrate that they have taken sufficient actions to protect their patients’ data security and privacy. The government provided a HIPAA audit protocol that is highly useful for internal security and privacy auditing on health care systems, however, this protocol includes extensive details that are not always specific to telehealth and therefore is difficult to be used by telehealth practitioners.Objective: The goal of this study was to develop and validate a telehealth privacy and security self-assessment questionnaire for telehealth providers. Methods: In our previous work, we performed a systematic review on the security and privacy protection offered in various telehealth systems. The results from this systematic review and the HIPAA audit protocol were used to guide the development of the self-assessment questionnaire. The draft of the questionnaire was created by the research team and distributed to a group of telehealth providers for evaluating the relevance and clarity of each statement in the draft. The questionnaire was adjusted and finalized according to the collected feedback and face-to-face discussions by the research team. A website was created to distribute the questionnaire and manage the answers from study participants. A psychometric analysis was performed to evaluate the reliability of the questionnaire.Results: There were 84 statements in the draft questionnaire. Five telehealth providers provided their feedback to the statements in this draft. They indicated that a number of these statements were either redundant or beyond the capacity of telehealth care practitioners, who typically do not have formal training in information security. They also pointed out that the wording of some statements needed to be adjusted. The final released version of the questionnaire had 49 statements. In total, 31 telehealth providers across the nation participated in the study by answering all the statements in this questionnaire. The psychometric analysis indicated that the reliability of this questionnaire was high.   Conclusion: With the availability of this self-assessment questionnaire, telehealth providers can perform a quick self-assessment on their telehealth systems. The assessment results may be used to identify possible vulnerabilities in telehealth systems and practice or demonstrate to patients the sufficient security and privacy protection to patients’ data

Representation of Color Space Transformations for Effective Calibration and Control

We propose the minvar algorithm for computing continuous, continuously invertible, piecewise linear (PL) approximations of color space transformations that can serve as functional replacements wherever look-up tables are presently used. After motivating the importance of invertible approximants in color space management applications, we review the parameterization and computational implementation of PL functions as representing one useful instance of this notion. Finally, we describe the present version of the minvar algorithm and compare the approximations it yields with standard industrial practice — interpolation of look-up table data

Modeling and Control of Color Xerographic Processes

The University of Michigan and Xerox\u27s Wilson Research Center have been collaborating on problems in color management systems since 1996, supported in part by an NSF GOALI grant. The paper is divided into three sections. The first discusses the basics of xerography and areas where systems methodology can have a potential impact. The second section describes the authors\u27 approach to the approximation of color space transformations using piecewise linear approximants and the graph intersection algorithm, with a brief review of some of the analytical and numerical results. The last section expounds on some of the benefits and difficulties of industry-university-government collaboration

A message-passing system for the large-grain data-flow machine

The Large-Grain Data-Flow (LGDF) Machine is a tightly-coupled multi-processor consisting of several independent nodes, upon each of which may run one or more tasks. These tasks must be able to communicate and synchronize with each other. This document describes a message-passing system developed to meet these requirements. The message-passing system allows any task on an arbitrary node to send information to any other task on an arbitrary, possibly the same, node. The system is based on the use of shared memory. Messages may be of any length, subject only to the constraints of memory size. Except for a header of control information, the system places no interpretation upon the contents of the message. Using performance data automatically provided, the user can easily tune the system to enhance performance. The first section of this paper presents a brief introduction to the concept of large-grain data-now. This is followed by a description of the message-passing system. All components of the system from the hardware to the high level system calls are discussed. The third section is a user's manual. This is a guide to the low level system calls, to system tunable parameters, and to deadlock conditions. The paper is concluded with a discussion of possible problems with and extensions to the system

Toward a Control Oriented Model of Xerographic Marking Engines

This paper presents some preliminary results from a research collaboration concerning the modeling and control of color xerography. In this first communication of our work, we describe our efforts to develop a model for a monochrome marking engine. We adopt the technique of principal component analysis for choice of output coordinates and demonstrate preliminary experimental evidence suggesting that this procedure yields accuracy in data reconstruction superior to present industry practice. Preliminary analysis of the experimental evidence suggests that the process has a nonlinear component that we seek to model using a mixture of physical and empirical insight

The Juncaginaceae in the southeastern United States

Volume: 69Start Page: 1End Page: 2

The specific epithet of the pecan

Volume: 63Start Page: 296End Page: 29