Five-year experience with setup and implementation of an integrated database system for clinical documentation and research

In radiation oncology, where treatment concepts are elaborated in interdisciplinary collaborations, handling distributed, large heterogeneous amounts of data efficiently is very important, yet challenging, for an optimal treatment of the patient as well as for research itself. This becomes a strong focus, as we step into the era of modern personalized medicine, relying on various quantitative data information, thus involving the active contribution of multiple medical specialties. Hence, combining patient data from all involved information systems is inevitable for analyses. Therefore, we introduced a documentation and data management system integrated in the clinical environment for electronic data capture. We discuss our concept and five-year experience of a precise electronic documentation system, with special focus on the challenges we encountered. We specify how such a system can be designed and implemented to plan, tailor and conduct (multicenter) clinical trials, ultimately reaching the best clinical performance, and enhancing interdisciplinary and clinical research.     

Coping with blackouts: A practice theory approach to household preparedness

The article focuses on how rural households cope with blackouts caused by winter storms. We approach household preparedness using a practice theory perspective, and argue that preparedness is mundanely preformed as part of everyday practices. The data material consists of at home visits to 14 households from Norway and Sweden. The results demonstrate that households cope with blackouts by activating and mobilising competences, meanings and materials belonging to different practices, and that this is an ongoing process to ensure the continuation of everyday life during disruption. The article concludes by arguing for the need to bring forward studies on informal preparedness activities, in a research field where household preparedness tends to be framed using a top‐down perspective on crisis management.     

User-oriented evaluation of mechanical single-channel axial pipettes

Hand tools should be designed so that they are comfortable to use, fit the hand and are user-oriented. Six different manual, single-channel axial pipettes were evaluated for such objective outcomes as muscular activity, wrist postures and efficiency, as well as for subjective outcomes concerning self-assessed features of pipette usability and musculoskeletal strain. Ten experienced laboratory employees volunteered for the study. The results showed that light and short pipettes with better tool comfort resulted in reduced muscular activity and perceived musculoskeletal strain when they were compared with a long and heavy pipette. There were no differences in the efficiency between the different pipettes. Combining both the objective and subjective measures enabled a broader evaluation of product usability. The results of this study can be used both in product development and as information on which to base the purchase of new pipettes for laboratory work.     

Psychophysiological, somatic, and affective changes across the menstrual cycle in women with panic disorder.

This study explored menstrual symptoms, somatic focus, negative affect, and psychophysiological responding across the menstrual cycle in women with panic disorder and controls. Women with and without panic disorder completed a psychophysiological task and self-report measures of menstrual symptoms, somatic focus, and negative affect on 4 occasions across 2 menstrual cycles (twice during intermenstrual and premenstrual phases). Women in the panic disorder group exhibited greater skin conductance magnitude and more frequent skin conductance responses to anxiety-provoking stimuli during the premenstrual phase than did controls. Compared to controls, women with panic disorder endorsed more severe menstrual symptoms relating to bodily sensations, anxiety sensitivity, state and trait anxiety, fear of body sensations, and illness-related concerns. The applicability of anxiety sensitivity to understanding the relation of menstrual reactivity and panic disorder is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A combined analysis of plant connectivity and alarm logs to reduce the number of alerts in an automation system

A process alarm arises when normal operation limits are exceeded and an alarm management system alerts the operator of a process plant. Due to the material, energy and information flow in a plant, single disturbances can cause multiple consequent alarm messages, and the alarm messages may overload the operator by presenting many redundant alarms. This undesired situation is called an ‘alarm flood’. In such situations, the operator might not be able to fulfil his required tasks to keep the plant within safe operation limits and to find the root cause of the disturbance. The aim of the work presented in this paper is to reduce the number of alerts presented to the operator. If alarms are related to one another, those alarms should be grouped and presented as one alarm problem. For the implementation of the concept, a software prototype has been developed to perform this reduction automatically. The analysis process starts with the alarm history which is a log containing all past alarm messages. This is combined with the plant topology of the controlled system and a set of rules. The rules describe typical interrelations between alarm messages which have a common cause. The combination of these three elements yields an effective alarm management strategy that can help plant owners and operators to comply with standards for alarm management such as ANSI/ISA 18.2 (2009) and EEMUA 191 (2007) which set limits on the number of alarms per unit time for an operator. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by two industrial examples where a significant reduction of alarms has been achieved.     

Exploring indicators for quantifying surface urban heat islands of European cities with MODIS land surface temperatures

The term urban heat island describes the phenomenon of altered temperatures in urban areas compared to their rural hinterlands. A surface urban heat island encompasses the patterns of land surface temperatures in urban areas. The classical indicator to describe a surface urban heat island is the difference between urban and rural surface temperatures. However, several other indicators for this purpose have been suggested in the literature. In this study, we compared the eleven different indicators for quantifying surface urban heat islands that were most frequently used in recent publications on remote sensing-based urban heat island assessments. The dataset used here consists of 263 European cities with monthly mean temperatures from MODIS data products for July 2002, January 2003 and July 2003. We found that (i) the indicators individually reveal diurnal and seasonal patterns but show rather low correlations over time, and (ii) for single points in time, the different indicators show only weak correlations, although they are supposed to quantify the same phenomenon. Differentiating cities according to thermal climate zones increased the relationships between the indicators. Thus, we can identify temporal aspects and indicator selection as important factors determining the estimation of urban heat islands. We conclude that research should take into account the differences and instabilities of the indicators chosen for quantifying surface urban heat islands and should use several indicators in parallel for describing the surface urban heat island of a city.     

关于密码协议攻击的研究

该文通过具体实例从不同的角度讨论了对密码协议的各种攻击,并阐述了这些攻击产生的原因及防止它们的一般方法。