Interactive wireless virtual colonoscopy

We present an interactive virtual colon navigation system on a PDA that is a client-server system over a wireless network. For improving the quality of the rendering results on the PDA, the overall rendering speed, and the user interactivity, we propose three novel methods and adapt a GPU-based direct volume rendering technique. Using these proposed methods, our system can support approximately a two times faster navigation speed and 17 percent better PSNR than previous remote visualization methods with a 512×512×361 volumetric colon CT data using a PDA device over 802.11b wireless network.     

Challenges and Promising Results in NoC Prototyping Using FPGAs

Although a significant amount of theoretical work supports the potential of NoC architectures, such results need to be demonstrated by actual implementations before the NoC paradigm becomes a reality. Besides demonstrating the feasibility of the overall approach, prototyping enables accurate evaluation of power, performance, area, and various design trade-offs. This article presents four NoC prototypes, discusses the challenges associated with their design, and assesses the potential of the NoC approach.     

Filaments for Incandescent Lamps with Energy Conserving Envelopes

The design considerations for filaments in energy conserving incandescent lamps are described. Such lamps require compact high emissivity filaments to absorb infrared radiation reflected from heat mirrored focusing envelopes. The relationships between the electrical parameters in the radiation returning environment and in the clear surroundings are developed. Efficiency experiments with filaments of various geometries under conditions of radiation return were performed. A highly compact coiled coil filament seems most promising for development. A calculation is presented of the filament emissivity as a function of spacing of the windings in a coil. Measurements of the emissivity as a function of the pitch of a coiled coil filament agree with the calculation.     

Fire and smoke observed from the Earth Observing System MODIS instrument--products,validation, and operational use

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, launched on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Terra satellite at the end of 1999, was designed with 36 spectral channels for a wide array of land, ocean, and atmospheric investigations. MODIS has a unique ability to observe fires, smoke, and burn scars globally. Its main fire detection channels saturate at high brightness temperatures: 500 K at 4 µm and 400 K at 11 µm, which can only be attained in rare circumstances at the 1 km fire detection spatial resolution. Thus, unlike other polar orbiting satellite sensors with similar thermal and spatial resolutions, but much lower saturation temperatures (e.g. Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer and Along Track Scanning Radiometer), MODIS can distinguish between low intensity ground surface fires and high intensity crown forest fires. Smoke column concentration over land is for the first time being derived from the MODIS solar channels, extending from 0.41 µm to 2.1 µm. The smoke product has been provisionally validated both globally and regionally over southern Africa and central and south America. Burn scars are observed from MODIS even in the presence of smoke, using the 1.2 to 2.1 µm channels. MODIS burned area information is used to estimate pyrogenic emissions. A wide range of these fire and related products and validation are demonstrated for the wild fires that occurred in northwestern USA in Summer 2000. The MODIS rapid response system and direct broadcast capability is being developed to enable users to obtain and generate data in near real-time. It is expected that health and land management organizations will use these systems for monitoring the occurrence of fires and the dispersion of smoke within two to six hours after data acquisition.     

Investigation of Aerosol Penetration Through Individual Protective Equipment in Elevated Wind Conditions

A methodology to characterize particle penetration characteristics of individual protective equipment (IPE) under elevated wind conditions was developed. Performance of a complete IPE system can be determined from the knowledge of the performance characteristics of the IPE subsystems, or components. Here, particle penetration characteristics of a cylindrical-shaped component, consisting of an outer fabric sleeve enclosing an inner appendage, were studied as a function of particle size and ambient wind conditions. A component particle penetration model was developed by combining a potential flow model to calculate flow through and around a component with a filtration model. The filtration model combines classical filtration theory with simple bench-top experiments to determine net particle penetration. The component model predictions of particle penetration through a cylindrical component suggest that its filtration performance is strongly dependent on particle size and ambient wind velocities. To test model predictions, wind-tunnel experiments were conducted over an ambient wind velocity range of 10–80 mph (5–40 m s^?1) and particle diameter range of 10 nm to 2 μm. The experimental results validated model predictions of particle penetration through a cylindrical component. The component model can be extended to model the integrated IPE system considering it to be composed of a combination of cylindrical components.

Copyright 2013 American Association for Aerosol Research     

Future directions in pediatric and clinical child psychology.

Examined future directions in pediatric and clinical child psychology, utilizing a "Delphi" survey of 80 experts. Experts were asked to identify future trends in research, training, and clinical service. Findings suggest considerable overlap for the two subspecialties. Differences were predominantly related to the characteristics of the settings within which the professionals practiced. Implications with regard to research, training, and clinical service are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accounting for Individual Effort in Cooperative Learning Teams

An “autorating” (peer rating) system designed to account for individual performance in team projects was used in two sophomore‐level chemical engineering courses in which the students did their homework in cooperative learning teams. Team members confidentially rated how well they and each of their teammates fulfilled their responsibilities, the ratings were converted to individual weighting factors, and individual project grades were computed as the product of the team project grade and the weighting factor. Correlations were computed between ratings and grades, self‐ratings and ratings from teammates, and ratings received and given by men and women and by ethnic minorities and non‐minorities. Incidences of “hitchhikers” (students whose performance was considered less than satisfactory by their teammates), “tutors” (students who received top ratings from all of their teammates), dysfunctional teams, and teams agreeing on a common rating were also determined. The results suggest that the autorating system works exceptionally well as a rule, and the benefits it provides more than compensate for the relatively infrequent problems that may occur in its use.     

A conservation law based approximate analysis for a class of simultaneous resource possession problems

In this paper we analyze a single server queueing model in which there are two types of jobs, one of which must wait in an external queue until a token is available, and only then may join the service queue. The interarrival times and service requirements for both types of jobs are assumed to be independent and exponentially distributed.

We derive the stability condition for such a model where the service queue discipline is either FCFS (First-Come-First-Serve) or PS (Processor-Sharing). We then propose analytic approximations for the mean waiting times for both types of jobs, relying heavily on the M/G/1 conservation law. Numerical results show that our approximations are very accurate (within a few percent of the simulated results) even when the system is heavily loaded. The approximations are also shown to be asymptotically exact as the number of tokens N → ∞.