Annual Metro Regional Trail Count and Why Local Extrapolation Factors Matter

Metro, Portland\u27s regional governing agency, conducts annual two-hour counts along its regional trail every September. This upcoming fall (2017) will be the 10th year that the counts have been held, which means we at Metro can finally start seeing noticeable, long-lasting trends in the regional trail network. Perhaps more importantly, we are seeing how these data have directly impacted investments in future trail, bicycle, and pedestrian projects. This seminar will cover the history of the program, details of how it\u27s conducted and why it\u27s conducted that way, how data are used (including an inside look at future iterations of Metro\u27s interactive trail count map), and why creating local extrapolation factors for adjusting to annual traffic is so important.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/trec_seminar/1123/thumbnail.jp

Priorities and Principles for Investment in Aquaculture Research by NSW Department of Primary Industries

This review examined the characteristics of the main aquaculture industries in NSW with respect to current impediments to growth, market development and future opportunities. Within this context, it examined the nature, funding and impacts of the NSW Department of Primary Industries’ current and proposed investments in aquaculture R&D and industry development, as well as its alignment with DPI and industry priorities.aquaculture, research evaluation, public good, Agribusiness, Livestock Production/Industries, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q160,

From Kansas to Queensland: Global learning in preservice elementary teacher education

Communication of information between groups of humans has been extended through out history progressing from smoke signals, drum beats, message couriers, post, telegraph, telephone and now the ICT. The time between the utterance of a message and the reception of that message has progressively decreased. We are now able to communicate relatively cheaply, simultaneously sharing and responding to ideas and thoughts on a scale never previously possible. Although the technology exists to make possible easy access to people in all parts of the world, we still lack understandings of the aspirations and sensitivities of other cultures with whom we can communicate. This project supported pre-service elementary teachers in two countries – Australia and the United States – to engage in collaborative learning through Internet communications. The purpose of the project was to develop greater understanding of other’s cultures, and practices in teaching elementary students. Students attending an Australian preservice primary science methods course were matched with a cohort of undergraduate preservice elementary student teachers from a university in the United States studying an integrated mathematics science methods course. Over a six-week period the students engaged in the computer-mediated communication and were encouraged to learn about mutual cultural practices and primary/elementary science education in both countries. The outcomes demonstrated that students involved in the project benefited from an array of different and enriching learning experiences. Students benefited through enhanced understanding of the teaching of science and an appreciation of the common problems confronting science education in both countries. However, there was little engagement in debate or discussion of individual differences and the cultural context of each other’s country even when opportunities presented themselves. Nevertheless, the on-line tasks provided the pre-service teachers with the experience and confidence to engage their own students in similar global learning initiatives when they become teachers

Factors Affecting Access to Administrative Health Data for Research in Canada: A Study Protocol

In Canada, most provinces have established administrative health data repositories to facilitate access to these data for research. Anecdotally, researchers have described delays and substantial inter-provincial variations in the timeliness of data access approvals and receipt of data. Currently, the reasons for these delays and variations in timeliness are not well understood. This paper provides a study protocol for (1) identifying the factors affecting access to administrative health data for research within select Canadian provinces, and (2) comparing factors across provinces to assess whether and how they contribute to inter-provincial variations in access to administrative health data for research

Four Logics and a Protocol

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the protocol used to provide connectionless communication between hosts connected to the Internet. It provides a basic internetworking service to transport protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). These in turn provide both connection-oriented and connectionless services to applications such as file transfer (FTP) and WWW browsing. In this paper we present four separate specifications of the interface to the internetworking layer implemented by IP using four types of logic: classical, constructive, temporal and linear logic

Determination of output factor for CyberKnife using scintillation dosimetry and deep learning

Objective. Small-field dosimetry is an ongoing challenge in radiotherapy quality assurance (QA) especially for radiosurgery systems such as CyberKnife TM. The objective of this work is to demonstrate the use of a plastic scintillator imaged with a commercial camera to measure the output factor of a CyberKnife system. The output factor describes the dose on the central axis as a function of collimator size, and is a fundamental part of CyberKnife QA and integral to the data used in the treatment planning system. Approach. A self-contained device consisting of a solid plastic scintillator and a camera was build in a portable Pelicase. Photographs were analysed using classical methods and with convolutional neural networks (CNN) to predict beam parameters which were then compared to measurements. Main results. Initial results using classical image processing to determine standard QA parameters such as percentage depth dose (PDD) were unsuccessful, with 34% of points failing to meet the Gamma criterion (which measures the distance between corresponding points and the relative difference in dose) of 2 mm/2%. However, when images were processed using a CNN trained on simulated data and a green scintillator sheet, 92% of PDD curves agreed with measurements with a microdiamond detector to within 2 mm/2% and 78% to 1%/1 mm. The mean difference between the output factors measured using this system and a microdiamond detector was 1.1%. Confidence in the results was enhanced by using the algorithm to predict the known collimator sizes from the photographs which it was able to do with an accuracy of less than 1 mm. Significance. With refinement, a full output factor curve could be measured in less than an hour, offering a new approach for rapid, convenient small-field dosimetry. </p

Muscle thickness measurements to estimate gluteus mediusand minimus activity levels

The clinical assessment of gluteus medius and minimus force sharing requires non-invasive measurements of individual activity levels. Do ultrasound measurements of change of muscle thickness substitute invasive electromyography (EMG)? Isometric hip abduction in 20–80% maximal voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC) was measured using dynamometry, M-mode ultrasound for gluteus medius and minimus thickness and EMG using (1) surface electrodes on gluteus medius, n = 15, (2) fine-wire electrodes in deep gluteus medius and minimus, n = 6. Gluteus medius thickened by 5.0 (SD 2.5) mm at 80% MVIC while gluteus minimus thickness was constant in the surface EMG study and decreased by 1.6 (SD 1.6) mm at the more ventral location in the fine-wire EMG study. Thickness change of gluteus medius enabled prediction of torque (r2 0.66) and of surface EMG amplitude (r2 0.57). Surface EMG enabled higher torque prediction (r2 0.84) than thickness change. Thickness change of gluteus minimus did not enable a practically relevant estimation of torque production. Ultrasound examination revealed a differential thickening behaviour of gluteus medius and minimus which enabled estimation of isometric torque production only for gluteus medius but with lower precision than surface EMG

Planning for World Heritage: Experiences and Future Directions for Use of Geographical Information Systems

Events leading to the World Heritage listing of north Queensland rainforests and subsequent ban on timber harvesting result from a number of factors including insufficient education of an increasingly articulate and environmentally aware public. Foresters should meet this challenge by renewing efforts to collect reliable information on the multi-resource values of forest areas. GIS has the potential to contribute to this process, particularly when applied as part of a multi-resource decision support system. Source data for multi-resource management could be collected in conjunction with timber inventory, provided additional funding is made available. Use of a GIS as a map overlaying tool can be prone to error unless its users are fully aware of limitations that can arise with this approach. Any multi-resource strategy should be phased into existing timber inventory programmes. Full scale adoption of a multi-resource decision support system in forest services is not likely to occur until the full cost of land use conflicts is included in the cost benefit equation

Operationalising a large research programme tackling complex urban and planetary health problems: A case study approach to critical reflections

Addressing increasingly urgent global challenges requires the rapid mobilisation of new research groups that are large in scale, co-produced, and focused explicitly on investigating root causes at a systemic level. This requires new ways of operationalising and funding research programmes to better support effective interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ID/TD) partnerships between a wide range of academic disciplines and stakeholder groups. Understanding of the challenges and approaches that teams can follow to overcome them can come through critical reflection on experiences initiating new research programmes of this nature and sharing of these reflections. We aimed to offer a framework for critical reflection and an overview of how we developed it, and to share our reflections on operationalising a newly formed large-scale ID/TD research programme. We present a framework of 10 areas for critical reflection: Systems, Unknowns and Imperfection; ID/TD Understanding; Values; Societal Impact; Context and Stakeholder Knowledge; Project Understanding and Direction; Team Cohesion; Decision-Making; Communications; and Method Development. We reflect on our experience of operationalising the research programme in these areas. Based on this critical examination of our experiences and the processes we adopted, we make recommendations for teams seeking to tackle important and highly complex global challenges, and for those who fund or support such research groups. Our reflections point to an overarching challenge of the structural and institutional barriers for cross-disciplinary research of this nature

Performing thinking in action: the meletē of live coding

Within this article, live coding is conceived as a meletē, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of critical — even ethical — action. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through 'showing the screen', live coding involves 'making visible' the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of 'thinking-in-action', a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or 'know how' activated through action. Live coding involves the live negotiation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, in performing 'thinking-in-action', live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future-present, proposing even a quality of atemporality or aliveness