An early assessment of silicone hydrogel safety : pearls and pitfalls, and current status

The contact lens industry has evolved and now provides many choices, including continuous wear, overnight orthokeratology, frequent-replacement lenses, daily-disposable lenses, and many alternatives in systems of care and maintenance. Epidemiologic studies to date have shown that how a lens is worn, particularly if worn overnight, can increase the risk of microbial keratitis. However, the risk of silicone hydrogel contact lenses worn on a continuous-wear basis has been evaluated only recently. This article summarizes the recent research data on extended-wear silicone hydrogel lenses and discusses the challenges of early evaluations of silicone hydrogel lens safety. Finally, the relevance of this information is discussed to practitioners and contact lens wearers making choices about the risks and benefits of different products and how they are used.

Health big data analytics : current perspectives, challenges and potential solutions

Modern health information systems can generate several exabytes of patient data, the so called "Health Big Data", per year. Many health managers and experts believe that with the data, it is possible to easily discover useful knowledge to improve health policies, increase patient safety and eliminate redundancies and unnecessary costs. The objective of this paper is to discuss the characteristics of Health Big Data as well as the challenges and solutions for health Big Data Analytics (BDA) – the process of extracting knowledge from sets of Health Big Data – and to design and evaluate a pipelined framework for use as a guideline/reference in health BDA.

Acoustic emission condition monitoring : an application for wind turbine fault detection

Low speed rotating machines which are the most critical components in drive train of wind turbines are often menaced by several technical and environmental defects. These factors contribute to mount the economic requirement for Health Monitoring and Condition Monitoring of the systems. When a defect is happened in such system result in reduced energy loss rates from related process and due to it Condition Monitoring techniques that detecting energy loss are very difficult if not possible to use. However, in the case of Acoustic Emission (AE) technique this issue is partly overcome and is well suited for detecting very small energy release rates. Acoustic Emission (AE) as a technique is more than 50 years old and in this new technology the sounds associated with the failure of materials were detected. Acoustic wave is a non-stationary signal which can discover elastic stress waves in a failure component, capable of online monitoring, and is very sensitive to the fault diagnosis. In this paper the history and background of discovering and developing AE is discussed, different ages of developing AE which include Age of Enlightenment (1950-1967), Golden Age of AE (1967-1980), Period of Transition (1980-Present). In the next section the application of AE condition monitoring in machinery process and various systems that applied AE technique in their health monitoring is discussed. In the end an experimental result is proposed by QUT test rig which an outer race bearing fault was simulated to depict the sensitivity of AE for detecting incipient faults in low speed high frequency machine.

Informing healthy building design with biophilic urbanism design principles : a review and synthesis of current knowledge and research

Links between human health and wellbeing, and contact with nature are well understood in the fields of health and psychology, and more recently are gaining attention in the built environment industry. In 1984, E.O. Wilson coined the term ‘biophilia’ to describe the tendency for humans to have an innately emotional response to other living organisms. A growing number of researchers around the world are now exploring the impact of nature in urban environments (i.e. biophilic urbanism) on the human condition, including many indicators of human physical and mental health, recovery and performance. There is also an emergence of research on the potential for biophilic urbanism to address other challenges related to climate change mitigation and adaptation. This paper presents key findings from a review of key literature to date, discussing opportunities for biophilic urbanism to both improve occupant experience and performance, as well as addressing other sustainability objectives including climate change mitigation and adaptation. The paper presents an emerging framework for considering biophilic design opportunities and highlights implications for the built environment industry. This research draws on an Australian project considering biophilic urbanism in the response to climate change, within the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre. This includes findings from a literature review, a survey pilot study and two workshops undertaken in Perth and Brisbane with a variety of industry and government stakeholders.

Current trends and issues in geographical education

In this introductory chapter to Schmeinck, D. and Lidstone, J. (2014) “Current trends and issues in geographical education” in Schmeinck, D. and Lidstone, J. (2014) Eds) Standards and Research in Geographical Education: Current Trends and International Issues. Berlin. Mensch und Buch Verlag. Pp. 5 - 16. , the authors review and analyse eleven papers originally presented to the Congress of the International Geographical Union held in Cologne in 2012. Taking the collection of papers as a single corpus representing the “state of the art” of geography education, they applied lexical and bibliometric analyses in an innovative attempt to identify the nature of geographical education as represented by this anthology of peer reviewed chapters presented at the start of the second decade of the Twenty-first century?

Standards and Research in Geographical Education: Current Trends and International Issues

What is the state of geographical education in the second decade of the 21st century? This volume presents a selection of peer reviewed papers presented at the 2012 Cologne Congress of the International Geographical Union (IGU) sessions on Geographical Education as representative of current thinking in the area. It then presents (perhaps for the first time) a cross-case analysis of the common factors of all these papers as a current summary of the “state of the art” of geographical education today. The primary aim of the individual authors as well as the editors is not only to record the current state of the art of geographical education but also to promote ongoing discussions of the longer term health and future prospects of international geographical education. We wish to encourage ongoing debate and discussion amongst local, national, regional and international education journals, conferences and discussion groups as part of the international mission of the Commission on Geographical Eduction. While the currency of these chapters in terms of their foci, breadth and recency of the theoretical literature on which they are based and the new research findings they present justifies considerable confidence in the current health of geographical education as an educational and research endeavour, each new publication should only be the start of new scholarly inquiry. Where should we, as a scholarly community, place our energies for the future? If readers are left with a new sense of direction, then the aims of the authors and editors will have been amply met.

In-vehicle extremity injuries from improvised explosive devices : current and future foci

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been epitomized by the insurgents’ use of the improvised explosive device against vehicle-borne security forces. These weapons, capable of causing multiple severely injured casualties in a single incident, pose the most prevalent single threat to Coalition troops operating in the region. Improvements in personal protection and medical care have resulted in increasing numbers of casualties surviving with complex lower limb injuries, often leading to long-term disability. Thus, there exists an urgent requirement to investigate and mitigate against the mechanism of extremity injury caused by these devices. This will necessitate an ontological approach, linking molecular, cellular and tissue interaction to physiological dysfunction. This can only be achieved via a collaborative approach between clinicians, natural scientists and engineers, combining physical and numerical modelling tools with clinical data from the battlefield. In this article, we compile existing knowledge on the effects of explosions on skeletal injury, review and critique relevant experimental and computational research related to lower limb injury and damage and propose research foci required to drive the development of future mitigation technologies.

Application of machine learning technique in wind turbine fault diagnosis

In this study, a machine learning technique called anomaly detection is employed for wind turbine bearing fault detection. Basically, the anomaly detection algorithm is used to recognize the presence of unusual and potentially faulty data in a dataset, which contains two phases: a training phase and a testing phase. Two bearing datasets were used to validate the proposed technique, fault-seeded bearing from a test rig located at Case Western Reserve University to validate the accuracy of the anomaly detection method, and a test to failure data of bearings from the NSF I/UCR Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS). The latter data set was used to compare anomaly detection with SVM, a previously well-known applied method, in rapidly finding the incipient faults.

Fault diagnosis of low speed bearing based on acoustic emission signal and multi-class relevance vector machine

This study presents an acoustic emission (AE) based fault diagnosis for low speed bearing using multi-class relevance vector machine (RVM). A low speed test rig was developed to simulate the various defects with shaft speeds as low as 10 rpm under several loading conditions. The data was acquired using anAEsensor with the test bearing operating at a constant loading (5 kN) andwith a speed range from20 to 80 rpm. This study is aimed at finding a reliable method/tool for low speed machines fault diagnosis based on AE signal. In the present study, component analysis was performed to extract the bearing feature and to reduce the dimensionality of original data feature. The result shows that multi-class RVM offers a promising approach for fault diagnosis of low speed machines.

Fault detection of slow speed rolling element bearing with noise removal techniques

Rolling Element Bearings (REBs) are vital components in rotating machineries for providing rotating motion. In slow speed rotating machines, bearings are normally subjected to heavy static loads and a catastrophic failure can cause enormous disruption to production and human safety. Due to its low operating speed the impact energy generated by the rotating elements on the defective components is not sufficient to produce a detectable vibration response. This is further aggravated by the inability of general measuring instruments to detect and process the weak signals at the initiation of the defect accurately. Furthermore, the weak signals are often corrupted by background noise. This is a serious problem faced by maintenance engineers today and the inability to detect an incipient failure of the machine can significantly increases the risk of functional failure and costly downtime. This paper presents the application of noise removal techniques for enhancing the detection capability for slow speed REB condition monitoring. Blind deconvolution (BD) and adaptive line enhancer (ALE) are compared to evaluate their performance in enhancing the source signal with consequential removal of background noise. In the experimental study, incipient defects were seeded on a number of roller bearings and the signals were acquired using acoustic emission (AE) sensor. Kurtosis and modified peak ratio (mPR) were used to determine the detectability of signal corrupted by noise.

Mammographic density-a review on the current understanding of its association with breast cancer

There has been considerable recent interest in the genetic, biological and epidemiological basis of mammographic density (MD), and the search for causative links between MD and breast cancer (BC) risk. This report will critically review the current literature on MD and summarize the current evidence for its association with BC. Keywords 'mammographic dens*', 'dense mammary tissue' or 'percent dens*' were used to search the existing literature in English on PubMed and Medline. All reports were critically analyzed. The data were assigned to one of the following aspects of MD: general association with BC, its relationship with the breast hormonal milieu, the cellular basis of MD, the generic variations of MD, and its significance in the clinical setting. MD adjusted for age, and BMI is associated with increased risk of BC diagnosis, advanced tumour stage at diagnosis and increased risk of both local recurrence and second primary cancers. The MD measures that predict BC risk have high heritability, and to date several genetic markers associated with BC risk have been found to also be associated with these MD risk predictors. Change in MD could be a predictor of the extent of chemoprevention with tamoxifen. Although the biological and genetic pathways that determine and perhaps modulate MD remain largely unresolved, significant inroads are being made into the understanding of MD, which may lead to benefits in clinical screening, assessment and treatment strategies. This review provides a timely update on the current understanding of MD's association with BC risk.

Recursive actuator fault detection and diagnosis for emergency landing of UASs

This paper presents a practical recursive fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) scheme for online identification of actuator faults for unmanned aerial systems (UASs) based on the unscented Kalman filtering (UKF) method. The proposed FDD algorithm aims to monitor health status of actuators and provide indication of actuator faults with reliability, offering necessary information for the design of fault-tolerant flight control systems to compensate for side-effects and improve fail-safe capability when actuator faults occur. The fault detection is conducted by designing separate UKFs to detect aileron and elevator faults using a nonlinear six degree-of-freedom (DOF) UAS model. The fault diagnosis is achieved by isolating true faults by using the Bayesian Classifier (BC) method together with a decision criterion to avoid false alarms. High-fidelity simulations with and without measurement noise are conducted with practical constraints considered for typical actuator fault scenarios, and the proposed FDD exhibits consistent effectiveness in identifying occurrence of actuator faults, verifying its suitability for integration into the design of fault-tolerant flight control systems for emergency landing of UASs.

Objective measurement of physical activity in youth : current issues, future directions

Second-generation activity monitors have revolutionized the way in which we measure youth physical activity. Use of the monitors avoids the problems associated with self-report methods and allows for the estimation of physical activity patterns over time. This article examines important methodological issues related to the use of activity monitors in children and adolescents.

Five-level current-source inverters with buck-boost and inductive-current balancing capabilities

This paper presents new five-level current-source inverters (CSIs) with voltage/current buck-boost capability, unlike existing five-level CSIs where only voltage-boost operation is supported. The proposed inverters attain self-inductive-current-balancing per switching cycle at their dc front ends without having to include additional balancing hardware or complex control manipulation. The inverters can conveniently be controlled by using the well-established phase-shifted carrier modulation scheme with only two additional linear references and a mapping logic table needed. Existing modulators can therefore be conveniently retrofitted for controlling the presented inverters. By appropriately coordinating the inverter gating signals, their implementations can be realized by using the least number of components without degrading performance. These enhanced features of the inverters have already been verified in simulation and experimentally using a scaled-down laboratory platform.

Alternating current electrohydrodynamics induced nanoshearing and fluid micromixing for specific capture of cancer cells

We report a new tuneable alternating current (ac) electrohydrodynamics (ac-EHD) force referred to as “nanoshearing” which involves fluid flow generated within a few nanometers of an electrode surface. This force can be externally tuned via manipulating the applied ac-EHD field strength. The ability to manipulate ac-EHD induced forces and concomitant fluid micromixing can enhance fluid transport within the capture domain of the channel (e.g., transport of analytes and hence increase target–sensor interactions). This also provides a new capability to preferentially select strongly bound analytes over onspecifically bound cells and molecules. To demonstrate the utility and versatility of nanoshearing phenomenon to specifically capture cancer cells, we present proof-of-concept data in lysed blood using two microfluidic devices containing a long array of asymmetric planar electrode pairs. Under the optimal experimental conditions, we achieved high capture efficiency (e.g., approximately 90%; %RSD=2, n=3) with a 10-fold reduction in nonspecific dsorption of non-target cells for the detection of whole cells expressing Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2 (HER2). We believe that our ac-EHD devices and the use of tuneable nanoshearing phenomenon may find relevance in a wide variety of biological and medical applications.