Blowtooth: a provocative pervasive game for smuggling virtual drugs through real airport security

In this paper, we describe a pervasive game, Blowtooth, in which players use their mobile phones to hide virtual drugs on nearby airline passengers in real airport check-in queues. After passing through airport security, the player must find and recover their drugs from the innocent bystanders, without them ever realising they were involved in the game. The game explores the nature of pervasive game playing in environments that are not, generally, regarded as playful or “fun”. This paper describes the game’s design and implementation as well as an evaluation conducted with participants in real airports. It explores the players’ reactions to the game through questionnaire responses and in-game activity. The technologies used in Blowtooth are, intentionally, simple in order for the enjoyment of the game to be reliant more on the physical environment rather than the enabling technologies. We conclude that situating pervasive games in unexpected and challenging environments, such as international airports, may provide interesting and unique gaming experiences for players. In addition, we argue that pervasive games benefit most from using the specific features and nature of interesting real-world environments rather than focusing on the enabling technologies.     

A family of NP-complete data aggregation problems

Summary We consider a family of general aggregation problems and prove each of its members to be NP-complete in the strong sense. These problems require that we partition a set of objects into aggregates. The goal is to minimize the expected cost of satisfying an anticipated collection of requests for subsets of the objects, where the cost of satisfying a request includes both the number and the sizes of the aggregates which must be retrieved. The aggregation problems are viewed as very basic versions of important database optimization problems, including: the partitioning of data items into record types, the clustering of records into physical blocks of storage, and the partitioning of a database into granules to support locking. The NP-completeness results demonstrate that such optimization problems are intractable, even when simplified to the extreme. The fact that the problems are NP-complete in the strong sense also rules out pseudopolynomial time solutions, unless P = NP.     

NMR in superfluid3He at very low temperatures

Just a few years ago it was generally believed that the NMR properties of superfluid³He far below T_c would not be qualitatively different from those found at higher temperatures. Surprisingly, the strange enhancement of relaxation processes at around 0.4 T_c named catastrophic relaxation, was then found. Recently an extremely long lived induction signal with new dynamical properties was discovered in the region of 100 K. Some of the newly discovered properties can be partly explained, although there are still many unsolved problems. The main aim of this article is to raise new questions for future investigations at the lowest temperatures presently possible.     

Prioritizing Information for the Discovery of Phenomena

We consider the problem of prioritizing a collection of discrete pieces of information, or transactions. The goal is to rank the transactions in such a way that the user can best pursue a subset of the transactions in hopes of discovering those which were generated by an interesting source. The problem is shown to differ from traditional classification in several fundamental ways. Ranking algorithms are divided into classes, depending on the amount of information they may utilize. We demonstrate that while ranking by the least constrained algorithm class is consistent with classification, such is not the case for a more constrained class of algorithms. We demonstrate also that while optimal ranking by the former class is easy, optimal ranking by the latter class is NP-hard. Finally, we present detectors which solve optimally restricted versions of the ranking problem, including symmetric anomaly detection.     

Advanced methods for displays and remote control of robots

An in-depth evaluation of the usability and situation awareness performance of different displays and destination controls of robots are presented. In two experiments we evaluate the way information is presented to the operator and assess different means for controlling the robot. Our study compares three types of displays: a “blocks” display, a HUD (head-up display), and a radar display, and two types of controls: touch screen and hand gestures. The HUD demonstrated better performance when compared to the blocks display and was perceived to have greater usability compared to the radar display. The HUD was also found to be more useful when the operation of the robot was more difficult, i.e., when using the hand-gesture method. The experiments also pointed to the importance of using a wide viewing angle to minimize distortion and for easier coping with the difficulties of locating objects in the field of view margins. The touch screen was found to be superior in terms of both objective performance and its perceived usability. No differences were found between the displays and the controllers in terms of situation awareness. This research sheds light on the preferred display type and controlling method for operating robots from a distance, making it easier to cope with the challenges of operating such systems.     

Towards a theory of granular plasticity

A theory of granular plasticity based on the time-averaged rigid-plastic flow equations is presented. Slow granular flows in hoppers are often modeled as rigid-plastic flows with frictional yield conditions. However, such constitutive relations lead to systems of partial differential equations that are ill-posed: they possess instabilities in the short-wavelength limit. In addition, features of these flows clearly depend on microstructure in a way not modeled by such continuum models. Here an attempt is made to address both short-comings by splitting variables into ‘fluctuating’ plus ‘average’ parts and time-averaging the rigid-plastic flow equations to produce effective equations which depend on the ‘average’ variables and variances of the ‘fluctuating’ variables. Microstructural physics can be introduced by appealing to the kinetic theory of inelastic hard-spheres to develop a constitutive relation for the new ‘fluctuating’ variables. The equations can then be closed by a suitable consitutive equation, requiring that this system of equations be stable in the short-wavelength limit. In this way a granular length-scale is introduced to the rigid-plastic flow equations.     

Port Placement Planning in Robot-Assisted Coronary Artery Bypass

Properly selected port sites for robot-assisted coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) improve the efficiency and quality of these procedures. In clinical practice, surgeons select port locations using external anatomic landmarks to estimate a patient's internal anatomy. This paper proposes an automated approach to port selection based on a preoperative image of the patient, thus avoiding the need to estimate internal anatomy. Using this image as input, port sites are chosen from a grid of surgeon-approved options by defining a performance measure for each possible port triad. This measure seeks to minimize the weighted squared deviation of the instrument and endoscope angles from their optimal orientations at each internal surgical site. This performance measure proves insensitive to perturbations in both its weighting factors and moderate intraoperative displacements of the patient's internal anatomy. A validation study of this port site selection was performed. cardiac algorithm also Six surgeons dissected model vessels using the port triad selected by this algorithm with performance compared to dissection using a surgeon-selected port triad and a port triad template described by Tabaie et al., 1999. With the algorithm-selected ports, dissection speed increased by up to 43% (p = 0.046) with less overall vessel trauma. Thus, this algorithmic approach to port site selection has important clinical implications for robot-assisted CABG which warrant further investigation.     

随机丝网印刷测试与检验

<正>为什么简化视觉数据进行一次性快速测试对改善工艺控制和生产力是明智之举?W.Edwards Deming在其关于制造的14条规则中敦促道:质量不能仅仅是"检验一下"就能保证的。Deming的思想是在战后的日本形成的,它们概括了在整个现代化电子制造时代关于检验作用的辩论。但是他关于检验的想法是否仍然实用于现     

2D Enzyme Cascade Network with Efficient Substrate Channeling by Swinging Arms

In living cells, compartmentalized or membrane‐associated enzymes are often assembled into large networks to cooperatively catalyze cascade reaction pathways essential for cellular metabolism. Here, we report the assembly of an artificial 2D enzyme network of two cascade enzymes—glucose‐6‐phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH)—on a wireframe DNA origami template. Swinging arms were used to facilitate the transport of the redox intermediate of NAD⁺/NADH between enzyme pairs on the array. The assemblies of 2D enzyme networks were characterized by gel electrophoresis and visualized by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The spatial arrangements of multiple enzyme pairs were optimized to facilitate efficient substrate channeling by exploiting the programmability of DNA origami to manipulate the key parameters of swinging arm length and stoichiometry. Compared with a single enzyme pair, the 2D organized enzyme systems exhibited higher reaction efficiency due to the promoted transfer of intermediates within the network.