SARS Another Emerging Disease

Severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, is an illness that has been recently reported in Asia, North America, Europe and Africa. SARS appears to be a new disease. The first known case of atypical pneumonia occurred on 16 November 2002 in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China. However, its significance was not known until later. The disease soon spread to the rest of the Guangdong Province and then further points in South East Asia. The World Health Organization (WHO) started to track the disease actively during mid-February 2003

The Slovakian Long-term Care System. ENEPRI Research Report No. 86, 15 June 2010

Launched in January 2009, ANCIEN is a research project that runs for a 44-month period and involves 20 partners from EU member states. The project principally concerns the future of long-term care (LTC) for the elderly in Europe and addresses two questions in particular: 1) How will need, demand, supply and use of LTC develop? 2) How do different systems of LTC perform? This case study on Slovakia is part of the first stage in the project aimed at collecting the basic data and necessary information to portray long-term care in each country of the EU. It will be followed by analysis and projections of future scenarios on long-term care needs, use, quality assurance and system performance. State-of-the-art demographic, epidemiologic and econometric modelling will be used to interpret and project needs, supply and use of long-term care over future time periods for different LTC systems

Analysis of Minimal LDPC Decoder System on a Chip Implementation

This paper presents a practical method of potential replacement of several different Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check (QC-LDPC) codes with one, with the intention of saving as much memory as required to implement the LDPC encoder and decoder in a memory-constrained System on a Chip (SoC). The presented method requires only a very small modification of the existing encoder and decoder, making it suitable for utilization in a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform. Besides the analysis of the effects of necessary variable-node value fixation during the Belief Propagation (BP) decoding algorithm, practical standard-defined code parameters are scrutinized in order to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed LDPC setup simplification. Finally, the error performance of the modified system structure is evaluated and compared with the original system structure by means of simulation

Comprobación de asertos en bases de datos relacionales

In this work we consider the problem of detecting errors in large sets of SQL relations. In order to detect possible bugs the user can introduce assertions using a simple, set-like language indicating properties like inclusion or membership. Then, the system checks these assertions, reporting to the user if any assertion violation is detected. The assertions include options that allow the system to consider relations both as sets and as multisets and also to take the tuple order into account. These options can be included by the user at the same time the assertions are defined. We present a working prototype developing these ideas

Hovercam

Quadcopters are widely used in recreational areas and often have video cameras mounted to them. The Hovercam increases the range of usefulness of quadcopters and allow the user to record him or herself while performing any task. The Hovercam will use GPS to track and follow a target. A smartphone application will be used to control the Hovercam in its basic functions of taking off, hovering, and landing

Clonal selection of rootstocks by means of determination of hard bast layers

Determination of the number of closed circles of hard bast plates on matured shoot cuttings, which is used for wood maturity control, was applied as selection method to four rootstocks: Vitis berlandieri x V. riparia Kober 5 BB, Teleki 5 C, Craciunel 2 and V. riparia x V. rupestris Schwarzmann. For each selected vine stock the linear regression of wood maturity was calculated, considering the distance from the base of the cane. From the linear regression equation the average length of the matured wood part was calculated for each stock The results of 3-year investigations show that the degree of rootstock wood maturity is not only dependent on the meteorological conditions of the years but is also genetically conditioned