Spatial aspects of environmental equity in Japan

Whilst issues of environmental equity are internationally recognised as a major concern, Japan, a data rich country, has little evidence on whether or not they are present. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to investigate the situation of environmental equity in Japan by developing and employing novel approaches around the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). G This thesis firstly presents a GIS-based cross-sectional study of equity in proximity to waste facilities, air pollution exposure and school accessibility in Yokohama city, showing some evidence of disparities between social groups. A longitudinal model of park provision is then developed and presented to investigate whether affluent areas attracted new parks, or new parks attracted affluent people in Yokohama. The results show weak evidence of both processes, and also confirm direct park provision into the least affluent areas may be the most useful policy measure for equity. A limitation of many equity studies is that they have focused on environmental features that are only measurable in two dimensions. This is despite the fact that many environmental attributes require consideration vertical variations in features, such as building heights. To drive forward this research, a methodology was then developed and is presented to compute access to both sunlight and views in the city of Kyoto. The work illustrates how it is possible to model these three-dimensional attributes for large urban areas using virtual city modelling, and the findings suggest that disparities in access to both of these amenities are present, in the city. The overall conclusion of the thesis is that inequities are apparent in Japan and that these can be detected and quantified by the development of novel GIS techniques that utilise the rich sources of data present in the country.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Emergency medical support system for visualizing locations and vital signs of patients in Mass Casualty Incident

PerNEM 2012 : Pervasive Networks for Emergency Management , Mar 23, 2012 , Lugano, SwitzerlandThe triage tag is used in Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) to check the priority of patients treatments and conditions. However, it is difficult to grasp a change in the patient's information since it is a paper tag. In this paper, we propose a system using the electronic triage tag (eTriage) that facilitates emergency medical technicians to grasp patients locations and conditions through visualization. This system provides the following three views of the patients information: (1) Inter-site view which shows on a map an overview of the latest status in multiple first-aid stations including the number of technicians and patients of each triage category; (2) Intra-site view which shows detailed status of each first-aid station including the location, triage category, and vital signs of each patient on a 3D map created based on the environment mapping technique; and (3) Individual view which shows vital information of patients on a tablet PC according to its orientation using the augmented reality technique. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the proposed system with some preliminary evaluation results

Cheat detection for MMORPG on P2P environments

NetGames'06 : 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games , Oct 30-31, 2006 , SingaporeIn this paper, we propose a new method for detecting cheat in P2P-based MMORPG. We suppose a typical P2P-based event delivery architecture where the entire game space is divided into subareas and a responsible node (selected from player terminals) delivers each event happened in the sub-area to player nodes there every predetermined time interval called timeslot. In the proposed method, we introduce multiple monitor nodes (selected from player terminals) which monitor the game state and detect cheat when it happens. In order to allow monitor nodes to track the correct game states for the corresponding subarea, we let monitor nodes and a responsible node retain a random number seed and player nodes send their events not only to responsible node but also monitor nodes so that the monitor nodes and the responsible node can uniquely calculate the latest game state from the previous game state and game events which happened during the current timeslot. Either responsible node, monitor nodes or player nodes can detect cheat by comparing hash values of game state which are retained by those nodes periodically, and role back events happened since the last correct game state. Through experiments in PlanetLab, we show that our method achieves practical performance to detect cheats

UbiREAL: Realistic Smartspace Simulator for Systematic Testing

UbiComp 2006 : 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing , Sep 17-21, 2006 , Orange County, CA, USAIn this paper, we propose a simulator for facilitating reliable and inexpensive development of ubiquitous applications where each application software controls a lot of information appliances based on the state of external environment, user’s contexts and preferences. The proposed simulator realistically reproduces behavior of application software on virtual devices in a virtual 3D space. For this purpose, the simulator provides functions to facilitate deployment of virtual devices in a 3D space, simulates communication among the devices from MAC level to application level, and reproduces the change of physical quantities (e.g., temperature) caused by devices (e.g., air conditioners). Also, we keep software portability between virtual devices and real devices. As the most prominent function of the simulator, we provide a systematic and visual testing method for testing whether a given application software satisfies specified requirements

UbiREMOTE: framework for remotely controlling networked appliances through interaction with 3D virtual space

MMSys '10 : first annual ACM SIGMM conference on Multimedia systems , Feb 22-23, 2010 , Phoenix, Arizona, USAIn this paper, we propose a framework named ``UbiREMOTE'' for controlling information appliances connected to a home network with a unified and intuitive user interface from a remote place.The UbiREMOTE framework provides users with a way to control appliances in a home through a virtual space drawn on a mobile terminal screen which reflects the latest conditions of the real appliances and the rooms in the home. With UbiREMOTE, a user controls appliances by (1) moving to the front of an appliance, (2) choosing the appliance to control and (3) pushing buttons on the virtual remote controller which imitates the real remote controller for the appliance or the real console.In this paper, we propose a method to improve the drawing speed of 3D virtual space on mobile terminals and a method for automatically reflecting condition changes of the real space in the virtual space.We implemented the methods and evaluated the performance. The results showed that the proposed methods can be practically used on small mobile terminals

Effect of Ambient Temperature on Daily Nebulized Asthma Hospital Visits in a Tropical City of Dhaka, Bangladesh

The acute effect of temperature on asthma morbidity in Bangladesh is not well understood. As climate varies extensively in different parts of the world, the relation between temperature and asthma might also differ. We investigated the association between temperature and asthma-related hospital visits in the tropical city of Dhaka. We analyzed information from a total of 5989 asthma patients who received ambulatory care in the form of nebulized medication at the National Asthma Center in Mohakhali, Dhaka from February to November 2013. A time-stratified case-crossover study was conducted to estimate the effect of daily temperature, with consideration of delayed effects and possible confounders such as relative humidity and political strikes. An inverse association was observed between temperature and the number of hospital visits. The effect was delayed for approximately a week. A degree centigrade decrease in mean temperature (averaged across lags 0-6) was associated with an increase of approximately 4.5% (95% CI 1.5, 7.5) in all asthma visits. The association was evident in adult males but marginal in elderly males. A positive association (lag 0) was observed among adult females, whereas no association was observed among children. Strikes significantly modified the effect among the elderly. Findings suggest temperature declines affect asthma outcomes in a warm climate, and this effect can be delayed and vary by sex and age group

Diagnosing nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy: A case study of two children

AbstractWe describe two children of nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy (NFLE) diagnosed using carefully observed nocturnal sleep EEGs and detailed patient histories.Case #1, a 14-year-old boy, showed repeated generalized tonic convulsions and frequent eyes opening seizures during sleep. Conventional EEGs – done with the patient awake or in sleep stage I – showed no abnormalities, while a nocturnal sleep EEG – done during in sleep stage II – revealed the repeated, sharp wave bursts predominantly in the right frontal lobe characteristic of NFLE. During these wave bursts, we noticed the boy's eyes opening, although his parents had not been aware this NFLE symptom.Case #2, a 12-year-old boy, showed one daytime generalized convulsion. He had also been suffering from repeated paroxysmal episodes similar to parasomnia – waking up, sitting, walking, screaming, and speaking – which always followed the same patterns lasting several minutes. During the nocturnal sleep EEG, episodes occurred twice, showing abnormal epileptic discharges predominantly in the frontal lobe. His parents did not mention the episodes to us until questioned, as they had recognized them as parasomnia. The previous conventional EEG showed abnormal slow waves in the frontal lobe, which led us to suspect frontal lobe epilepsy and to take a detailed patient history.The frequency and stereotypy of their symptoms during sleep caused us to perform nocturnal sleep EEGs and led us NFLE diagnosis. Detailed patient histories including sleep habits and carefully observed nocturnal sleep EEGs enabled us to recognize these NFLE clinical features

Phylogeography of Ostreopsis along West Pacific Coast, with Special Reference to a Novel Clade from Japan

BACKGROUND: A dinoflagellate genus Ostreopsis is known as a potential producer of Palytoxin derivatives. Palytoxin is the most potent non-proteinaceous compound reported so far. There has been a growing number of reports on palytoxin-like poisonings in southern areas of Japan; however, the distribution of Ostreopsis has not been investigated so far. Morphological plasticity of Ostreopsis makes reliable microscopic identification difficult so the employment of molecular tools was desirable. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDING: In total 223 clones were examined from samples mainly collected from southern areas of Japan. The D8-D10 region of the nuclear large subunit rDNA (D8-D10) was selected as a genetic marker and phylogenetic analyses were conducted. Although most of the clones were unable to be identified, there potentially 8 putative species established during this study. Among them, Ostreopsis sp. 1-5 did not belong to any known clade, and each of them formed its own clade. The dominant species was Ostreopsis sp. 1, which accounted for more than half of the clones and which was highly toxic and only distributed along the Japanese coast. Comparisons between the D8-D10 and the Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) region of the nuclear rDNA, which has widely been used for phylogenetic/phylogeographic studies in Ostreopsis, revealed that the D8-D10 was less variable than the ITS, making consistent and reliable phylogenetic reconstruction possible. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This study unveiled a surprisingly diverse and widespread distribution of Japanese Ostreopsis. Further study will be required to better understand the phylogeography of the genus. Our results posed the urgent need for the development of the early detection/warning systems for Ostreopsis, particularly for the widely distributed and strongly toxic Ostreopsis sp. 1. The D8-D10 marker will be suitable for these purposes