Geomorphic diversity as a river management tool and its application to the Ganga River,India

Understanding of geomorphic processes and the determination of geomorphic diversity in catchments are prerequisites for the sustainable rehabilitation of river systems and for reach‐scale assessment of river health. The Ganga River system in India is a large, complex system consisting of several long tributaries, some >1,000 km, originating from 2 distinct hinterlands—the Himalaya to the north and the cratons to the south. Traversing through a diverse climatic regime across the Plain and through precipitation zones ranging from 600 mm/year near Delhi to 1,200 mm/year in the eastern plains, the Ganga River system has formed very diverse landform assemblages in 3 major geomorphic domains. We have recognized 10 different river classes for the trunk river from Gangotri (source) to Farakka (upstream of its confluence with the Brahmaputra) based on (a) landscape setting, (b) channel and active floodplain properties, and (c) channel planform parameters. The mountainous stretch is characterized by steep valleys and bedrock channels and is dominated by large‐scale sediment production and transport through hill slope processes. The alluvial part of the river is characterized by 8 different river classes of varying reach lengths (60–300 km) many of which show sharp transitions in landscape setting. We have highlighted the application of this approach for the assessment of habitat suitability, environmental flows, and flood risk all of which have been significantly modified during the last few decades due to large‐scale anthropogenic disturbances. We suggest that the diversity embedded in this geomorphic framework can be useful for developing a sustainable river management programme to “work with” the contemporary character and behaviour of rivers.     

Gerontechnology acceptance by elderly Hong Kong Chinese: a senior technology acceptance model (STAM)

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a senior technology acceptance model (STAM) aimed at understanding the acceptance of gerontechnology by older Hong Kong Chinese people. The proposed STAM extended previous technology acceptance models and theories by adding age-related health and ability characteristics of older people. The proposed STAM was empirically tested using a cross-sectional questionnaire survey with a sample of 1012 seniors aged 55 and over in Hong Kong. The result showed that STAM was strongly supported and could explain 68% of the variance in the use of gerontechnology. For older Hong Kong Chinese, individual attributes, which include age, gender, education, gerontechnology self-efficacy and anxiety, and health and ability characteristics, as well as facilitating conditions explicitly and directly affected technology acceptance. These were better predictors of gerontechnology usage behaviour (UB) than the conventionally used attitudinal factors (usefulness and ease of use).

Practitioner Summary: Previous studies have not given much consideration to age-related health and associated abilities when examining acceptance of technology by the ageing population. By encompassing conventional technology acceptance constructs together with age-related health and ability characteristics, the present study was able to identify more factors affecting gerontechnology acceptance by older Hong Kong Chinese.     

Good ergonomics and team diversity reduce absenteeism and errors in car manufacturing

Prior research suggests that ergonomics work design and mixed teams (in age and gender) may compensate declines in certain abilities of ageing employees. This study investigates simultaneous effects of both team level factors on absenteeism and performance (error rates) over one year in a sample of 56 car assembly teams (N = 623). Results show that age was related to prolonged absenteeism and more mistakes in work planning, but not to overall performance. In comparison, high-physical workload was strongly associated with longer absenteeism and increased error rates. Furthermore, controlling for physical workload, age diversity was related to shorter absenteeism, and the presence of females in the team was associated with shorter absenteeism and better performance. In summary, this study suggests that both ergonomics work design and mixed team composition may compensate age-related productivity risks in manufacturing by maintaining the work ability of older employees and improving job quality.     

发展玻璃纤维产业纺织品

本文层层深入地介绍产业用纺织品发展与应用、玻璃纤维纺织品发展与应用,以及它们的国内外概况并给出一些意见,以期待玻璃纤维产业纺织品有更好的发展.     

广东高校大学生心理健康及对自杀态度的调查

为了解广东高校在校大学生的心理健康状况及其对自杀的认识,对广东五所高校近500名学生进行了心理健康装康即对自杀态度的调查,文章分析了调查的结果,并对结果进行讨论,希望能重视大学生的心理健康教育,减少因心理问题而导致大学生自杀的现象.     

PRIVACY LEAKAGE IN HEALTH SOCIAL NETWORKS

Members of health social networks may be susceptible to privacy leaks by the amount of information they leave behind. The threat to privacy increases when members of these networks reuse their pseudonyms in other social networks. The risk of re‐identifying users from such networks requires quantitative estimates to evaluate its magnitude. The estimates will enable managers and members of health social communities to take corrective measures. We introduce a new re‐identification attack, the social network attack, that takes advantage of the fact that users reuse their pseudonyms. To demonstrate the attack, we establish links between MedHelp and Twitter (two popular social networks) based on matching pseudonyms. We used Bayesian networks to model the re‐identification risk and used stylometric techniques to identify the strength of the links. On the basis of our model 7‐11. 8% of the MedHelp members in the sample population who reused their pseudonyms in Twitter were re‐identifiable compared with 1% who did not. The risk estimates were measured at the 5% risk threshold. Our model was able to re‐identify users with a sensitivity of 41% and specificity of 96%. The potential for re‐identification increases as more data is accumulated from these profiles, which makes the threat of re‐identification more serious.     

陈家冲垃圾填埋场地下水环境健康风险评价

垃圾填埋是目前国内处理城市生活垃圾的主要方式,由垃圾渗滤液引发地下水环境污染已成为当前主要的水环境问题之一。选择武汉市陈家冲垃圾填埋场为研究对象,通过对该区周边地下水布孔取样和监测,分析了垃圾填埋场对其周围地下水环境的影响。结果表明:研究区地下水的主要污染因子为Pb、Cd和Fe,且各污染物的浓度与采样深度、井距呈负相关关系。垃圾填埋场产生污染的影响范围主要在距离800m以内、深度小于5.5m的地下水。为进一步了解该区地下水对人体健康危害的风险程度,对研究区地下水进行了水环境健康风险评价,结果显示:研究区各采样井地下水的总风险值在2.71×10~(-4)/a~7.12×10~(-3)/a,均超过国际辐射防护委员会(ICRP)推荐的最大可接受值5.0×10~(-5)/a,主要风险因子为基因毒物质Cd和Cr(VI)以及躯体毒物质硝态氮;其中,Cd和硝态氮所致的健康风险值超标率100%,而Cr(VI)的健康风险值超标率为50%,对暴露人群存在健康危害风险。此外,对男性和女性健康风险值的研究显示,研究区地下水环境中污染物的男性健康危害风险值普遍高于女性。     

Gquest: Modeling patient questionnaires and administering them through a mobile platform application

Background

The use of surveys is becoming popular in the health care industry for acquiring information useful to the accomplishment of several studies. Besides their exploitation on a large scale for conducting epidemiological studies, surveys are being increasingly carried out on a narrower perspective through the administration of questionnaires aimed at assessing the quality of life perceived by patients or their clinical status during mid- or long-term treatments. This is useful for managing resources or optimizing and individualizing treatments.

Objectives

This paper describes Gquest, a platform for modeling, generating and administering questionnaires through mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Gquest was motivated by the need of administering questionnaires during home treatments, albeit its applicability is rather general. The main requirement was to have a very simple, clean and easy to use platform able to support (a) physicians in the design and delivery of questionnaires and (b) outpatients in sending self-recorded outcomes to the clinical staff.

Methods

Gquest has two basic components. The first one is a model devised for representing questionnaires which is extremely flexible. It allows the generation of questions and answers of different types, supports adaptivity in the dialog with the user and enforces simple consistency rules for checking his input. The second component is an application able to run instances of those questionnaires. It downloads questionnaires over the air in terms of XML files from a server and stores them locally into the mobile repository. Questionnaires become then available to the user, who in our case is a patient or one of his relatives. The user can select which one to fill-in, according to his needs and/or the specific treatment protocol. The selected questionnaire may be filled-in all at once or be completed in subsequent steps over time since any input provided is persisted on a local database. Finally, when a questionnaire is closed all the answers are transparently synchronized to a server for further evaluation or statistical purposes.

Results

The platform has been exploited and tested in two medical domains where questionnaires have very different purposes; a quality of life pilot survey involving patients with atrial fibrillation within the EU-funded project MobiGuide, and an investigation of the users’ needs during the requirements elicitation phase of a telemedicine project for the safe discharge of fragile patients.

Conclusions

Gquest proved to be a suitable tool for dealing with a wide variety of question types and has been positively accepted by the patients enrolled in the pilot study.     

Event-driven,pattern-based methodology for cost-effective development of standardized personal health devices

Experiences applying standards in personal health devices (PHDs) show an inherent trade-off between interoperability and costs (in terms of processing load and development time). Therefore, reducing hardware and software costs as well as time-to-market is crucial for standards adoption. The ISO/IEEE11073 PHD family of standards (also referred to as X73PHD) provides interoperable communication between PHDs and aggregators. Nevertheless, the responsibility of achieving inexpensive implementations of X73PHD in limited resource microcontrollers falls directly on the developer. Hence, the authors previously presented a methodology based on patterns to implement X73-compliant PHDs into devices with low-voltage low-power constraints. That version was based on multitasking, which required additional features and resources. This paper therefore presents an event-driven evolution of the patterns-based methodology for cost-effective development of standardized PHDs. The results of comparing between the two versions showed that the mean values of decrease in memory consumption and cycles of latency are 11.59% and 45.95%, respectively. In addition, several enhancements in terms of cost-effectiveness and development time can be derived from the new version of the methodology. Therefore, the new approach could help in producing cost-effective X73-compliant PHDs, which in turn could foster the adoption of standards.     

Particle filtering for sensor fault diagnosis and identification in nonlinear plants

We propose a novel method for sensor monitoring and fault-tolerant estimation in systems described by general stochastic nonlinear and/or non-Gaussian state-space models. Faults are defined as abruptly occurring calibration errors, causing the sensor readings to be biased or scaled. Actuators and the process itself are assumed to be fault free. The main novelty of the work is an adaptive particle filter, whose configuration changes in order to diagnose sensor faults and to compensate for their effects. The presence, type and magnitude of sensor faults are determined through hypothesis testing and maximum likelihood estimation, based on the difference between the measurements and the particle filter estimates. The validity of the proposed approach was demonstrated through simulations on a drum-boiler model, although its effectiveness is not conditioned on any particular feature of the considered example.