Human factors and ergonomics to improve performance in intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested the very elements of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) to their maximum. HFE is an established scientific discipline that studies the interrelationship between humans, equipment, and the work environment. HFE includes situation awareness, decision making, communication, team working, leadership, managing stress, and coping with fatigue, empathy, and resilience. The main objective of HF is to optimise the interaction of humans with their work environment and technical equipment in order to maximise patient safety and efficiency of care. This paper reviews the importance of HFE in helping intensivists and all the multidisciplinary ICU teams to deliver high-quality care to patients in crisis situations

Asymmetric aziridination of alkenes.

The work contained in this thesis is essentially concerned with the development of methods for the asymmetric aziridination of prochiral alkenes using N-nitrenes. The studies carried out are a necessary first step in a strategy directed towards the enantiospecific functionalization of alkenes. The addition of the N-nitrenes derived by oxidation of the chiral 1-amino-2-(l ,2,2-trimethylpropyl) benzimidazole and chiral 3-amino-2-(l,2,2-trimethylpropyl)quinazolin-4 (3H)-one (in the presence of TFA) to prochiral alkenes are found to proceed with moderate to high diastereoselectivities. The asymmetric inductions obtained are rationalized in most cases by a transition state geometry for the addition of the N-nitrene to the alkene. A method of carrying out chiral oxoquinazolinyl nitrene additions to alkenes both at low temperature (-60°C) (with the expected increase in diastereoselectivity) and with ~ molar equivalents of the alkene (with little loss of yield of the aziridine) is also developed. Conformational studies on the 7-(3,4-dihydro-2-(l,2,2-trimethyl- propyl) -4-oxoquinazolin-3-yl) -2-oxa-7-aza-spiro [4,2] -heptane-1-one are also carried out and reveal an unexpected orientation around the N-N bond, by comparison with other hydrazines, both in the crystal and in solution

OCCLUSION-AWARE HMM-BASED TRACKING BY LEARNING

Recently, an emerging class of methods, namely tracking by detection, achieved quite promising results on challenging tracking data sets. These techniques train a classifier in an online manner to separate the object from its background. These methods only take input location of the object and a random feature pool; then, a classifier bootstraps itself by using the current tracker state and extracted positive and negative samples. Following these approaches, a novel tracking system is proposed. A feature selection method is introduced to increase the discriminative power of the classifier. During tracking, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is utilized to filter the features that improve the performance. Moreover, a state of the proposed HMM is allocated to handle occlusions. The proposed tracker is tested on publicly available challenging video sequences and superior tracking results are achieved in real-time

Rationalising the effect of reducing agent on the oxazaborolidine-mediated asymmetric reduction of N-substituted imines

Comparing the effect of borane-based reducing agents on the stereochemical outcome of oxazaborolidine-mediated ketone and N-substituted imine reduction highlights the potential importance of reducing agent structure on the asymmetric sense of imine reduction. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.</p

Laminated microbial ecosystems on sheltered beaches in Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands

Laminated microbial sediment ecosystems which develop in the upper tidal zone of Scapa Flow beaches, Orkney Islands were investigated with respect to depth profiles of chlorophyll a, bacteriochlorophyll a, pH, redox, oxygen and the following inorganic sulfur compounds: free sulfide, FeS, polysulfides, polythionates, elemental sulfur and thiosulfate. In addition, particle size distribution and light penetration were determined at all sampling locations. Three main types of laminated sediment ecosystems were recognized, designated the ‘classical’ type (layer of cyanobacteria underlain by layer of purple sulfur bacteria), the ‘single-layer’ type (chlorophyll a containing organisms absent, purple sulfur bacteria at sediment surface), and the ‘inverted’ type (chlorophyll a containing organisms underlying purple sulfur bacteria). The dominant purple sulfur bacterium was Thiocapsa roseopersicina and Chromatium vinosum was observed less commonly. The principal cyanobacterium found in these sulfureta was Oscillatoria sp. The depth horizon at which maximum populations of purple sulfur bacteria were recorded often did not coincide with the sulfide/oxygen interface but was located closer to the sediment surface where polysulfides, polythionates, elemental sulfur and occasionally thiosulfate were present. The structure of these sulfureta is discussed in relation to the chemolithotrophic growth capacities of Thiocapsa in the presence of oxyge