Transformation of the paradigm in intestinal failure: future prognostication and quality of life, not just survival

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Rediscovering Renaissance Recipes: Digital Presentation for a 16th Century Text

This project seeks to create a web-based system for working with a French text from 1509, Platine en francoys, which has been transcribed into an XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based file format using the conventions of TEI. Through incorporation of several web technologies such as NodeJS, the application provides a section by section navigation capability that allows versions of the text to be seen in multiple configurations. The options include a side-by-side presentation mode that allows for easy compare/contrast of the original versus a regularized spelling or other variants. A facsimile-focused view is also planned, along with tools leveraging the specialized markup and focused searches on non-recipe text, recipes, and ingredients. It is expected that these features will allow for a deeper understanding of the text as well as function as a foundation for future development work as part of the ongoing cross-disciplinary computing/language collaboration efforts

Student experience of gamified learning: a qualitative approach

Student engagement and student outcomes in Higher Education continue to be the subject of academic concern, and thus receive research attention. To address these concerns, we aim to explore the use of gamification to enhance student engagement, and thereby improving student learning and performance. Gamification represents the use of game elements to enhance engagement in activities such as learning.  This paper highlights the use of game elements such as: leader boards, scores for activities, and multiplayer (group) activities.  The paper does this by exploring students’ learning journeys, as well as their experience of modules in which gamification had been introduced. Group-based competitive activities were introduced to modules undertaken by business students, student nurses, and paramedic students.  Students undertaking these modules were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews.  Twelve students drawn from the three disciplines took part in these semi-structured interviews, which were digitally recorded to enable production of accurate transcripts. Thematic analysis was used to identify key themes from the interviews. To explain student responses and their learning experience, four themes were developed; challenge, difference, group processes, and competition. Students often presented themselves as enjoying challenge, although this was sometimes contrasted with enjoyment of ‘easy’ activities.  Challenge was presented not only as a motivational factor, but also sometimes as a barrier to success.  This sense of challenge was often conceptually linked to students’ perception of difference within their gamified learning, which was pedagogically distinct from their typical learning experience.  Most, but not all, expressed positive views of this difference.  As with the theme of challenge, discussion of difference could be both positive and negative.  Participants highlighted competition as a positive factor.  The competition between groups influenced some group processes.  Some students noted previous challenges involved in group-work, such as unequal work distribution.  Participants observed the potential for intra-group friction, while identifying the positive learning outcomes of group work.  Taken together, the analysis suggests that competitive group work is a beneficial strategy for enhancing student engagement and performance

Less is more: energy-efficient mobile sensing with SenseLess

Workshop held as part of ACM SIGCOMM 2009We present SenseLess, a system that leverages the different energy consumption characteristics of sensors to maximise battery life in mobile-sensing applications. We use the less expensive sensors more often, thereby enabling us to use the more expensive sensors less frequently. In the context of location-aware services, experimental results indicate that for a typical indoor and outdoor walk, compared to a simple GPS-based system, our SenseLess system can reduce energy consumption by more than 58% when determining a user's location, while maintaining the fidelity of the sensed data. This extends the battery life of a typical handheld device from 9 hours to 22 hours.Postprin

Updated Force Model for Milling Nickel-based Superalloys

Nickel-based superalloys are commonly used in applications which require high strength and resistance to creep and oxidation in extreme conditions. All nickel-based superalloys are considered difficult to machine; however, cast gamma-prime-strengthened nickel-based superalloys are more difficult to machine than common nickel-based superalloys. Machining comprises a significant portion of manufacturing processes and with advancements in technology and material properties, the methods and models used must be adapted in order to keep pace. In this research, correlations are made, using fundamental principles, between measurements made with on-machine touch probes and the cutting tool\u27s wear state, those correlations are used in an adaptive algorithm to estimate the size of the tool wear, and the estimates are used in an updated mechanistic cutting force model to predict the progression of cutting forces in gamma-prime-strengthened Nickel-based superalloys. This work impacts machining operations on advanced and common materials by developing a tool wear estimation method with readily available equipment and a computationally tractable force model. It influences knowledge in the field through the fundamental relationships, robust adaptive approach, and modifications to the mechanistic force model. This research shows that on-machine touch probes are able to measure changes in the geometry of a cutting tool as it wears; however, measurement uncertainty results in 20 micrometers of variation in the wear estimation. The wear estimation was improved through the use of a Kalman filter. The average error from 24 estimations was 8 micrometers. Addressing the geometric changes in the tool due to wear, the mechanistic cutting force model estimated the progression of cutting forces with 30% more accuracy than without addressing the tool changes

Journalism and Human Rights: From the Abolition of the British Slave Trade, the AIDS Crisis, and Injustices Beyond and In-Between

The conception of human rights is one that is enshrined within the shared, collective history of humanity. Encompassing secular traditions, Asian religions and traditions, and monotheistic religions and perspectives as a base for what would come to evolve into universal human rights. Throughout history these traditions and religions have all played a role in shaping where we are at today in terms of human rights. Yet the road which led to a universal declaration of rights was not paved with ease. From the onset of Aristotle, Plato, Hammurabi, other secular authors, and culminating to the end of the French Revolution at the tail end of the eighteenth century, rights were not freely extended to all people. Certainly, white men, and specifically men who owned property have been well off, but there are several points in our shared history where not all of these rights were declared to everyone. The author argues that journalists have had a profound role in the advancement of human rights as there’s historical precedence to support this, and evidence to support that their work as journalists comes to support a growing concept of universal human rights. This thesis will examine the role one specific group of people who had a part in the evolution of human rights, and human rights movements: journalists. This thesis will examine the roles of three individual journalists over the course of time and how their work altered, and in many cases began, human rights movements. Focusing on Thomas Clarkson, Ida B. Wells, and Randy Shilts, the author argues that the contributions of journalists have had profound effects on human rights within the framework of rights struggles

A case study of the development, implementation, and evaluation of a combined physical and mental performance enhancement program for a high school cross-country runner

Researchers suggest that a combination of physical prowess and mental toughness is required for continued optimal athletic performance. More and more athletes are realizing the benefit of individualized, sport-specific training, which often includes physical conditioning and/or psychological skills training. While professional and elite amateur athletes are often research participants, data concerning the implementation of such training at the high school level is sparse. Thus, using a single-participant case study design, the complete process of developing, implementing, and evaluating a combined mental and physical training program for a high school athlete was conducted and described. The participant was an 18-year old male cross-country runner. Sport training involved both strength training sessions and sport psychology consultations. Data included the athlete\u27s and coach\u27s interviews. Goal Attainment Scales, the Profile of Mood States inventory, the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2, and performance statistics for the season. While the participant did not achieve all of the goals he originally set at the season\u27s start, he was able to set a new personal performance record during the season and he and the coach both endorsed the intervention

Small Molecules for Controlling Stem Cell Differentiation

Stem cell homeostasis and differentiation are controlled by the complex interplay of a wide range of signalling pathways and small molecules, including all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA). The endogenous effects elicited by ATRA, have led to its use in numerous in vitro protocols as a tool for cell differentiation. However, ATRA isomerises and degrades under standard laboratory conditions and furthermore, is rapidly metabolised in vivo, which leads to pleotropic effects and a high efficacious dose response. Consequently, synthetic analogues that are structurally and/or functionally equivalent to ATRA have been developed, as alternative pharmacological tools to further the understanding of this molecular pathway and control cell differentiation.In this study a small library of synthetic retinoids were prepared, which were designed to probe structural size, conformation and biological function, while being more resistant to cellular metabolism and isomerisation. Their stability towards fluorescent light was examined along with their activity in four different stem cell models. Two compounds, AH60 and AH61 were found to inhibit cellular proliferation and induce neural differentiation, through acting on the retinoic acid receptor pathway. Compared to ATRA, AH60 was approximately 10-fold more active, while AH61 was 100-fold more active in two of the cell models tested. These compounds are described comprehensively herein, and should be suitable and convenient alternatives to ATRA and 13cRA for use in in vitro studies carried out by cell and molecular biologists. In addition, an unrelated small molecule, neuropathiazol, has been synthesised to further characterise both the chemistry involved in its production and its biological activity in controlling cell differentiation. This compound was highlighted in the literature as an alternative to ATRA, for inducing neural differentiation in neural progenitor cells. We have further investigated its potential to differentiate other neural stem cell types and pluripotent stem cells. In addition potential analogues of neuropathiazol are discussed, as compounds of this nature are potentially highly useful for selectively controlling neural differentiation. 

Selective Dynamic Analysis of Virtualized Whole-System Guest Environments

Dynamic binary analysis is a prevalent and indispensable technique in program analysis. While several dynamic binary analysis tools and frameworks have been proposed, all suffer from one or more of: prohibitive performance degradation, a semantic gap between the analysis code and the execution under analysis, architecture/OS specificity, being user-mode only, and lacking flexibility and extendability. This dissertation describes the design of the Dynamic Executable Code Analysis Framework (DECAF), a virtual machine-based, multi-target, whole-system dynamic binary analysis framework. In short, DECAF seeks to address the shortcomings of existing whole-system dynamic analysis tools and extend the state of the art by utilizing a combination of novel techniques to provide rich analysis functionality without crippling amounts of execution overhead. DECAF extends the mature QEMU whole-system emulator, a type-2 hypervisor capable of emulating every instruction that executes within a complete guest system environment. DECAF provides a novel, hardware event-based method of just-in-time virtual machine introspection (VMI) to address the semantic gap problem. It also implements a novel instruction-level taint tracking engine at bitwise level of granularity, ensuring that taint propagation is sound and highly precise throughout the guest environment. A formal analysis of the taint propagation rules is provided to verify that most instructions introduce neither false positives nor false negatives. DECAF’s design also provides a plugin architecture with a simple-to-use, event-driven programming interface that makes it both flexible and extendable for a variety of analysis tasks. The implementation of DECAF consists of 9550 lines of C++ code and 10270 lines of C code. Its performance is evaluated using CPU2006 SPEC benchmarks, which show an average overhead of 605% for system wide tainting and 12% for VMI. Three platformneutral DECAF plugins - Instruction Tracer, Keylogger Detector, and API Tracer - are described and evaluated in this dissertation to demonstrate the ease of use and effectiveness of DECAF in writing cross-platform and system-wide analysis tools. This dissertation also presents the Virtual Device Fuzzer (VDF), a scalable fuzz testing framework for discovering bugs within the virtual devices implemented as part of QEMU. Such bugs could be used by malicious software executing within a guest under analysis by DECAF, so the discovery, reproduction, and diagnosis of such bugs helps to protect DECAF against attack while improving QEMU and any analysis platforms built upon QEMU. VDF uses selective instrumentation to perform targeted fuzz testing, which explores only the branches of execution belonging to virtual devices under analysis. By leveraging record and replay of memory-mapped I/O activity, VDF quickly cycles virtual devices through an arbitrarily large number of states without requiring a guest OS to be booted or present. Once a test case is discovered that triggers a bug, VDF reduces the test case to the minimum number of reads/writes required to trigger the bug and generates source code suitable for reproducing the bug during debugging and analysis. VDF is evaluated by fuzz testing eighteen QEMU virtual devices, generating 1014 crash or hang test cases that reveal bugs in six of the tested devices. Over 80% of the crashes and hangs were discovered within the first day of testing. VDF covered an average of 62.32% of virtual device branches during testing, and the average test case was minimized to a reproduction test case only 18.57% of its original size