Earthquake Early Warning and Beyond: Systems Challenges in Smartphone-based Seismic Network

Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems can effectively reduce fatalities, injuries, and damages caused by earthquakes. Current EEW systems are mostly based on traditional seismic and geodetic networks, and exist only in a few countries due to the high cost of installing and maintaining such systems. The MyShake system takes a different approach and turns people's smartphones into portable seismic sensors to detect earthquake-like motions. However, to issue EEW messages with high accuracy and low latency in the real world, we need to address a number of challenges related to mobile computing. In this paper, we first summarize our experience building and deploying the MyShake system, then focus on two key challenges for smartphone-based EEW (sensing heterogeneity and user/system dynamics) and some preliminary exploration. We also discuss other challenges and new research directions associated with smartphone-based seismic network.Comment: 6 pages, conference paper, already accepted at hotmobile 201

Decisions About Caring and Working: A Qualitative Study

The Department o f Labour and the National Advisory Council on the Employment o f Women (NACEW) commissioned research to identify the factors that influence people 's decisions surrounding paid work, and to provide a better picture of the decision making process. Fifty qualitative interviews were undertaken with people with primary caring responsibilities for children and/or adults, or in a few cases, shared caring responsibility with their partner. This study found that multiple factors influence people's choices about paid work, and that different approaches suit different people in different situations. Participants made decisions that, as far as possible, balanced their beliefs about caring with their commitment to work and their need for intellectual satisfaction, social contact and money. Their decisions were based on their personal preferences, rather than on information about financial benefits or services that might support them in their role. The research also highlighted the importance of providing an environment that supports people's choices to be involved in employment, and to care for their loved ones. The study has identified a number of areas for further work

Adapting Sequence Models for Sentence Correction

In a controlled experiment of sequence-to-sequence approaches for the task of sentence correction, we find that character-based models are generally more effective than word-based models and models that encode subword information via convolutions, and that modeling the output data as a series of diffs improves effectiveness over standard approaches. Our strongest sequence-to-sequence model improves over our strongest phrase-based statistical machine translation model, with access to the same data, by 6 M2 (0.5 GLEU) points. Additionally, in the data environment of the standard CoNLL-2014 setup, we demonstrate that modeling (and tuning against) diffs yields similar or better M2 scores with simpler models and/or significantly less data than previous sequence-to-sequence approaches.Comment: EMNLP 201

Forecasting with an adaptive control algorithm

We construct a parsimonious model of the U.S. macro economy using a state space representation and recursive estimation. At the core of the estimation procedure is a prediction/correction algorithm based on a recursive least squares estimation with exponential forgetting. The algorithm is a Kalman filter-type update method which minimizes the sum of discounted squared errors. This method reduces the contribution of past errors in the estimate of the current period coefficients and thereby adapts to potential time variation of parameters. The root mean square errors of out-of-sample forecast of the model show improvement over OLS forecasts. One period ahead in-sample forecasts showed better tracking than OLS in-sample forecasts.Forecasting

Comparison of DC and SRF Photoemission Guns For High Brightness High Average Current Beam Production

A comparison of the two most prominent electron sources of high average current high brightness electron beams, DC and superconducting RF photoemission guns, is carried out using a large-scale multivariate genetic optimizer interfaced with space charge simulation codes. The gun geometry for each case is varied concurrently with laser pulse shape and parameters of the downstream beamline elements of the photoinjector to obtain minimum emittance as a function of bunch charge. Realistic constraints are imposed on maximum field values for the two gun types. The SRF and DC gun emittances and beam envelopes are compared for various values of photocathode thermal emittance. The performance of the two systems is found to be largely comparable provided low intrinsic emittance photocathodes can be employed

Workplace violence and the effect of the working environment and social support within a human service organisation : a thesis presented to Massey University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology

At the present time, there is an increasing awareness of the risk of workplace violence that certain occupational groups face within their professions. This study investigated violence within a human service organisation responsible for looking after profoundly intellectually handicapped individuals with little chance of being mainstreamed into normal society. Three hundred and forty three employees responded to a questionnaire about incidents of violence encountered at work, stressors within their job, and their perceptions of social support and the work environment. The hypotheses were (1) that symptoms of stress and traumatic stress increase in frequency and intensity following involvement in a violent incident, and will be cumulative and additive following repetitive exposure (2) that positive perceptions of the working environment decrease the symptoms of stress and traumatic stress ; and (3) that higher perceptions of the effectiveness of social support decrease the symptoms of stress and traumatic stress. The results showed that violence affected employees mentally, emotionally and physically. Perceptions of the work environment was found to have an effect on responses to violence but social support was not. Recommendations made included reducing violence by redesigning the physical environment, or the use of training to help with stress management. These results could help with the investigation of violence within the health care field

A comparative sociopsychological assessment of attitude toward physical activity in selected male members of running clubs

This study was designed to survey expressed attitudes toward physical activity in selected male senior and master running club members. These attitudes were contained in a conceptual model developed by Gerald S. Kenyon. The six attitudes included the following: physical activity as a social experience, physical activity for health and fitness, physical activity as the pursuit of vertigo, physical activity as an aesthetic experience, physical activity as a catharsis, and physical activity as an ascetic experience. Specifically, the study was conducted to compare attitudes toward physical activity between senior runners aged 25 to 39 and master runners aged 40 and over as measured by Gerald S. Kenyon’s six dimensions of physical activity. In addition, within the senior and master groups, comparisons of these six attitudes toward physical activity were to be investigated

Young women negotiating maternal subjectivities: the significance of social class

In this review article, we explore discursive configurations of motherhood and the ways in which class informs how young women engage with these in the construction of their biographies. Our theoretical starting point is principally sociological; we contend that the meanings and identities associated with 'the maternal' have been transformed by the impact of neo-liberalism, and that these produce dilemmas for young women as they constitute themselves as learners and future workers. This article reviews contemporary literature which engages with the ways in which the maternal is a key feature in the (re)making of classed and gendered identities