Relay binary circuit Patent

Counter-divider circuit for accuracy and reliability in binary circuit

Key Components and Best Practices for Environmental Impact Assessments

New and emerging activities pose risks to the conservation and sustainable development of ABNJ in the absence of prior assessment, and remain a significant gap under UNCLOS. Environmental impact assessments and strategic environmental assessments are widely accepted as valuable tools for incorporating environmental and social concerns into decision making processes with respect to specific projects or activities (EIAs) or policies, plans or programmes (SEAs). The development of a new international instrument to address the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction ("international Instrument") is an opportunity to incorporate best practices for EIAs and SEAs already found under a number of multilateral and regional agreements, and apply lessons learned from their application. Importantly, the new Instrument should also provide the mechanism for the assessment of cumulative impacts of activities and climate change

The impact of a new regional air ambulance service on a large general hospital

Background: Helicopter air ambulance crews are influenced in their selection of the destination hospital for their patients by several factors including: distance from the scene; facilities, on site specialties, and senior cover of the receiving hospital; and the proximity of the helicopter landing area to the emergency department (ED). Only a limited number of hospitals have landing sites adjacent to the ED from which patients can be taken directly into the department (primary landing sites). Helicopter crews will often elect to over fly hospitals that do not have primary landing sites because secondary land transfers will add delays in delivering patients. Birmingham Heartlands Hospital has an elevated helideck adjacent to the ED. In October 2003, the Warwickshire and Northamptonshire Air Ambulance (WNAA) service was launched; the hospital sits on the western periphery of the area served by the service. Methods: Prospective data was collated on all patients brought by WNAA to Heartlands Hospital between 1 October 2003 and 31 August 2004. Results: In the 10 month period after the launch of the service, the helicopter delivered 83 patients to the ED; 74 of these were "off patch". This additional workload generated 163 ward days, 19 operative procedures, and 85 intensive care unit, high dependency unit, or coronary care unit days. The direct costs of this additional workload approached £160 000. Conclusions: In future discussions on the cost effectiveness of air ambulances, it will be important to consider both the direct and indirect costs to the receiving hospitals arising from the redistribution of emergency workload. Abbreviations: ED, emergency department; HDU, high dependency unit; HEMS, helicopter emergency medical service; ICU, intensive care unit; ISS, injury severity score; WNAA, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire Air Ambulance; WMCAA, West Midlands County Air Ambulance

Mindfulness mirror

This paper explores the use of an interactive Genetic Algorithm for creating a piece of visual art intended to assist in promoting the state of mindfulness. This is determined by a Bluetooth gaming electroencephalography (EEG) headset as the fitness function. The visual display consisted of an infinity mirror with over two hundred Neopixels with fade times and colour of zones controlled by two Ardu-inos running the software. Whilst we have observed some convergence of solu-tions, the results and user observations raised some interesting questions about how this strategy might be improved

A survey of the benefits and issues arising from the deployment of physical artefacts in computer science teaching

This paper describes the introduction of the use of physical artefacts in the teaching of the curriculum in the Department of Computer Science at Middlesex University. The rationale for the change is discussed, together with a description of the various technologies and the areas in which they were deployed. We conclude with a discussion of the outcomes of the work and the conclusions reached, prime amongst which are that the policy has been successful in motivating and engaging students, with a resultant improvement in student progression. In addition to their value in the taught part of the curriculum, these technologies have enabled students to become involved in real-world projects, interacting with external organizations and producing products of value in diverse areas such as the arts and assistive technologies

Smart feedback and the challenges of virtualisation

The use of audio feedback is becoming more prevalent and it would be possible to use avatars for this purpose. When audio feedback is recorded by a human tutor, the recording contains not only the text of the feedback, but also additional information associated with the intonation and manner of delivery of the voice. Experiments were conducted to investigate student’s responses to the use of audio in comparison with other forms of feedback. Students were generally positive about audio feedback; results also indicated that the conveyed emotion or intent is significant and that it is perceived by the student as an important part of the feedback. We also explore this in the context of strategies for the deployment of virtual agents in the provision of feedback

Towards a brain controller interface for generating simple Berlin School style music with interactive genetic algorithms

A novel approach to generating music is presented using two interactive Genetic Algorithms with electroencephalogram inputs from two subjects as their fitness functions. Many interactive Genetic Algorithm approaches for generating music employ constrained solution spaces that only utilise notes from a given scale. Our work incorporates the use of mutation to extend the solution space through the inclusion of accidental notes. A thresholding approach is adopted, that allows riffs to be repeated until fitness drops, together with a ‘killswitch’ to ensure unpleasant sounding riffs are removed from the population. The development is ongoing, with more testing and calibration required to ensure that there are no timing errors in communication between the microcontroller boards and to identify the most appropriate threshold and mutation ranges, in addition to determining the most appropriate mixes for the users to hear

Embedding creativity in the university computing curriculum

We explore the need for embedding creativity in the UK Higher Education computing curriculum and some of the challenges associated with this. We identify some of the initiatives and movements in this area and discuss some of the work that has been carried out. We then describe some of the ways we have tried to meet these challenges and reflect on our degree of success with respect to the goal of producing graduates who are fit for the myriad of job opportunities they will come across in a rapidly changing technology landscape. Finally, we make a number of recommendations

The Role of Visualization, Force Feedback, and Augmented Reality in Minimally Invasive Heart Valve Repair

New cardiovascular techniques have been developed to address the unique requirements of high risk, elderly, surgical patients with heart valve disease by avoiding both sternotomy and cardiopulmonary bypass. However, these technologies pose new challenges in visualization, force application, and intracardiac navigation. Force feedback and augmented reality (AR) can be applied to minimally invasive mitral valve repair and transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) techniques to potentially surmount these challenges. Our study demonstrated shorter operative times with three dimensional (3D) visualization compared to two dimensional (2D) visualization; however, both experts and novices applied significantly more force to cardiac tissue during 3D robotics-assisted mitral valve annuloplasty than during conventional open mitral valve annuloplasty. This finding suggests that 3D visualization does not fully compensate for the absence of haptic feedback in robotics-assisted cardiac surgery. Subsequently, using an innovative robotics-assisted surgical system design, we determined that direct haptic feedback may improve both expert and trainee performance using robotics-assisted techniques. We determined that during robotics-assisted mitral valve annuloplasty the use of either visual or direct force feedback resulted in a significant decrease in forces applied to cardiac tissue when compared to robotics-assisted mitral valve annuloplasty without force feedback. We presented NeoNav, an AR-enhanced echocardiograpy intracardiac guidance system for NeoChord off-pump mitral valve repair. Our study demonstrated superior tool navigation accuracy, significantly shorter navigation times, and reduced potential for injury with AR enhanced intracardiac navigation for off-pump transapical mitral valve repair with neochordae implantation. In addition, we applied the NeoNav system as a safe and inexpensive alternative imaging modality for TAVI guidance. We found that our proposed AR guidance system may achieve similar or better results than the current standard of care, contrast enhanced fluoroscopy, while eliminating the use of nephrotoxic contrast and ionizing radiation. These results suggest that the addition of both force feedback and augmented reality image guidance can improve both surgical performance and safety during minimally invasive robotics assisted and beating heart valve surgery, respectively