Messaging in mobile augmented reality audio

Monen käyttäjän välinen asynkroninen viestintä tapahtuu tyypillisesti tekstiä käyttäen. Mobiileissa käyttötilanteissa tekstinsyöttö voi kuitenkin olla hidasta ja vaivalloista. Sekä viestien kirjoittaminen että lukeminen vaatii huomion keskittämistä laitteen näyttöön. Tässä työssä kehitettiin viestintäsovellus, jossa tekstin sijaan käytetään puhetta lyhyiden viestien jakamiseen ryhmien jäsenten välillä. Näitä viestejä voidaan kuunnella heti niiden saapuessa tai niitä voi selata ja kuunnella myöhemmin. Sovellusta on tarkoitettu käytettävän mobiilin lisätyn äänitodellisuuden alustan kanssa, mikä mahdollistaa lähes häiriintymättömän ympäristön havaitsemisen samalla kun kommunikoi ääniviestien avulla. Pieni ryhmä käyttäjiä testasi sovellusta pöytätietokoneilla ja kannettavilla tietokoneilla. Yksi isoimmista eduista tekstipohjaiseen viestintään verrattuna todettiin olevan puheen mukana välittyvä ylimääräinen tieto verrattuna samaan kirjoitettuun viestiin, puheviestinnän ollessa paljon ilmeikkäämpää. Huonoja puolia verrattuna tekstipohjaiseen viestintään olivat hankaluus selata vanhojen viestien läpi sekä vaikeus osallistua useampaan keskusteluun samaan aikaan.Asynchronous multi-user communication is typically done using text. In the context of mobile use text input can, however, be slow and cumbersome, and attention on the display of the device is required both when writing and reading messages. A messaging application was developed to test the concept of sharing short messages between members of groups using recorded speech rather than text. These messages can be listened to as they arrive, or browsed through and listened to later. The application is intended to be used on a mobile augmented reality audio platform, allowing almost undisturbed perception of and interaction with the surrounding environment while communicating using audio messages. A small group of users tested the application on desktop and laptop computers. The users found one of the biggest advantages over text-based communication to be the additional information associated with a spoken message, being much more expressive than the same written message. Compared with text chats, the users thought it was difficult to quickly browse through old messages and confusing to participate in several discussions at the same time

BIOMECHANICS AND KINESIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO

We are all grateful to Professor Jerry Barham for his work in assembling this conference. Those of us at UNC value greatly his professional work and appreciate his effort in bringing this international symposium to Colorado. As a young university, this institution is especially gratified to host such a distinguished event. This session of the 3rd International Symposium on Biomechanics in Sport allows me to sketch for you a brief history of the kinesiology program--as it is called at the University of Northern Colorado. As you might expect, the preparation for this presentation gave me the opportunity to learn more about the history of the program. I have my suspicions that there are some internal political purposes behind this invitation--to know and better appreciate the program--but that is all well and good. Too seldom do administrators in a university have the opportunity to learn in detail the history of a program and a field. As you know, on most campuses we central administrators are supposedly confined to some tower from which we send edicts--at least that is the mythology. In fact, we are often trapped by demands placed on us by external constituencies such as legislatures and super boards. We came into academia in order to serve our own intellectual interests and ultimately to serve the intellectual interests of our faculty colleagues. And that remains the case for virtually all of us. However, we are often to be found warring over policies imposed and policies to be developed than we are looking at the intellectual aspects of one of the disciplines in the university. For all those reasons, I am pleased to be here and to join you for a little while

Western Governors University: University of the Future

Western Governors University was initiated by Western governors in response to perceived needs in the marketplace and as a supplement to the traditional institutions. WGU offers competency-based credentials at a distance. Students are required to sit for assessments that measure their skills and competencies. The curriculum for each degree is defined by competencies rather than courses. The programs are particularly suited to non-traditional students who are unable to attend residential institutions

Farming for Health: Aspects from Germany

Until now, the term ‘Farming for Health’ is unknown in Germany but it would cover a wide spectrum of different kinds of social agriculture already existing in Germany, such as farms that integrate disabled people or drug therapy into their farming system, or farms that integrate children, pupils or older people. Relevant work in Germany is done in ‘Sheltered Workshops’, where supporting and healing powers of farming and gardening are used for disabled people with a diversity of work possibilities. Relevant activities also take place in work-therapy departments using horticultural therapy and in animalassisted therapy. There are an estimated number of 1000 different projects for mentally ill, disabled and elderly people in hospitals, Sheltered Workshops, on farms and other projects in Germany with a multitude of individual work places. The upcoming idea of Farming for Health may be met by the term ‘multifunctionality’ as one of the future goals of agriculture: to combine the production of cash crops with social functions, like providing space for recreation, care for landscapes and care for disabled people. Research showed that farms that work together with clients in their farming system have more time and financial support to integrate aims like caring for biotopes and landscape measures into their work schedule

Forced-air warming: a source of airborne contamination in the operating room?

Forced-air-warming (FAW) is an effective and widely used means for maintaining surgical normothermia, but FAW also has the potential to generate and mobilize airborne contamination in the operating room

Petrology, geochemistry and U-Pb geochronology of magmatic rocks from the high-sulfidation epithermal Au-Cu Chelopech deposit, Srednogorie zone, Bulgaria

The Chelopech deposit is one of the largest European gold deposits and is located 60km east of Sofia, within the northern part of the Panagyurishte mineral district. It lies within the Banat-Srednegorie metallogenic belt, which extends from Romania through Serbia to Bulgaria. The magmatic rocks define a typical calc-alkaline suite. The magmatic rocks surrounding the Chelopech deposit have been affected by propylitic, quartz-sericite, and advanced argillic alteration, but the igneous textures have been preserved. Alteration processes have resulted in leaching of Na2O, CaO, P2O5, and Sr and enrichment in K2O and Rb. Trace element variation diagrams are typical of subduction-related volcanism, with negative anomalies in high field strength elements (HFSE) and light element, lithophile elements. HFSE and rare earth elements were relatively immobile during the hydrothermal alteration related to ore formation. Based on immobile element classification diagrams, the magmatic rocks are andesitic to dacitic in compositions. Single zircon grains, from three different magmatic rocks spanning the time of the Chelopech magmatism, were dated by high-precision U-Pb geochronology. Zircons of an altered andesitic body, which has been thrust over the deposit, yield a concordant 206Pb/238U age of 92.21 ± 0.21Ma. This age is interpreted as the crystallization age and the maximum age for magmatism at Chelopech. Zircon analyses of a dacitic dome-like body, which crops out to the north of the Chelopech deposit, give a mean 206Pb/238U age of 91.95 ± 0.28Ma. Zircons of the andesitic hypabyssal body hosting the high-sulfidation mineralization and overprinted by hydrothermal alteration give a concordant 206Pb/238U age of 91.45 ± 0.15Ma. This age is interpreted as the intrusion age of the andesite and as the maximum age of the Chelopech epithermal high-sulfidation deposit. 176Hf/177Hf isotope ratios of zircons from the Chelopech magmatic rocks, together with published data on the Chelopech area and the about 92-Ma-old Elatsite porphyry-Cu deposit, suggest two different magma sources in the Chelopech-Elatsite magmatic area. Magmatic rocks associated with the Elatsite porphyry-Cu deposit and the dacitic dome-like body north of Chelopech are characterized by zircons with ɛHfT90 values of ∼5, which suggest an important input of mantle-derived magma. Some zircons display lower ɛHfT90 values, as low as −6, and correlate with increasing 206Pb/238U ages up to about 350Ma, suggesting assimilation of basement rocks during magmatism. In contrast, zircon grains in andesitic rocks from Chelopech are characterized by homogeneous 176Hf/177Hf isotope ratios with ɛHfT90 values of ∼1 and suggest a homogeneous mixed crust-mantle magma source. We conclude that the Elatsite porphyry-Cu and the Chelopech high-sulfidation epithermal deposits were formed within a very short time span and could be partly contemporaneous. However, they are related to two distinct upper crustal magmatic reservoirs, and they cannot be considered as a genetically paired porphyry-Cu and high-sulfidation epithermal related to a single magmatic-hydrothermal system centered on the same intrusio

The endemic gastropod fauna of Lake Titicaca : correlation between molecular evolution and hydrographic history

Lake Titicaca, situated in the Altiplano high plateau, is the only ancient lake in South America. This 2- to 3-My-old (where My is million years) water body has had a complex history that included at least five major hydrological phases during the Pleistocene. It is generally assumed that these physical events helped shape the evolutionary history of the lake´s biota. Herein, we study an endemic species assemblage in Lake Titicaca, composed of members of the microgastropod genus Heleobia, to determine whether the lake has functioned as a reservoir of relic species or the site of local diversification, to evaluate congruence of the regional paleohydrology and the evolutionary history of this assemblage, and to assess whether the geographic distributions of endemic lineages are hierarchical. Our phylogenetic analyses indicate that the Titicaca/Altiplano Heleobia fauna (together with few extralimital taxa) forms a species flock. A molecular clock analysis suggests that the most recent common ancestor (MRCAs) of the Altiplano taxa evolved 0.53 (0.28–0.80) My ago and the MRCAs of the Altiplano taxa and their extralimital sister group 0.92 (0.46–1.52) My ago. The endemic species of Lake Titicaca are younger than the lake itself, implying primarily intralacustrine speciation. Moreover, the timing of evolutionary branching events and the ages of two precursors of Lake Titicaca, lakes Cabana and Ballivián, is congruent. Although Lake Titicaca appears to have been the principal site of speciation for the regional Heleobia fauna, the contemporary spatial patterns of endemism have been masked by immigration and/or emigration events of local riverine taxa, which we attribute to the unstable hydrographic history of the Altiplano. Thus, a hierarchical distribution of endemism is not evident, but instead there is a single genetic break between two regional clades. We also discuss our findings in relation to studies of other regional biota and suggest that salinity tolerance was the most likely limiting factor in the evolution of Altiplano species flocks

Initial Conditions for Bubble Universes

The "bubble universes" of Coleman and De Luccia play a crucial role in string cosmology. Since our own Universe is supposed to be of this kind, bubble cosmology should supply definite answers to the long-standing questions regarding cosmological initial conditions. In particular, it must explain how an initial singularity is avoided, and also how the initial conditions for Inflation were established. We argue that the simplest non-anthropic approach to these problems involves a requirement that the spatial sections defined by distinguished bubble observers should not be allowed to have arbitrarily small volumes. Casimir energy is a popular candidate for a quantum effect which can ensure this, but [because it violates energy conditions] there is a danger that it could lead to non-perturbative instabilities in string theory. We make a simple proposal for the initial conditions of a bubble universe, and show that our proposal ensures that the system is non-perturbatively stable. Thus, low-entropy conditions can be established at the beginning of a bubble universe without violating the Second Law of thermodynamics and without leading to instability in string theory. These conditions are inherited from the ambient spacetime.Comment: Further clarifications; 28 pages including three eps files. This is the final [accepted for publication] versio

Orbital Freezing in FeCr2S4 Studied by Dielectric Spectroscopy

Broadband dielectric spectroscopy has been performed on single-crystalline FeCr2S4 revealing a transition into a low-temperature orbital glass phase and on polycrystalline FeCr2S4 where long-range orbital order is established via a cooperative Jahn-Teller transition. The freezing of the orbital moments is revealed by a clear relaxational behavior of the dielectric permittivity, which allows a unique characterization of the orbital glass transition. The orbital relaxation dynamics continuously slows down over six decades in time, before at the lowest temperatures the glass transition becomes suppressed by quantum tunneling.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure