The Use of ART in Elderly Patients after 2 years

Caries experience is high in the elderly, and barriers to care for older adults include fear and cost. Access to care is especially problematic in the case of frail and homebound elderly. Objective: to compare the survival of restorations placed using Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) and a conventional technique using rotary instruments and a resin-modified glass-ionomer (CT) to treat carious lesions in older patients. Methods: In this randomised clinical trial, 99 independently living adults (65-90 yrs) with carious lesions were recruited from a geriatric day hospital and a community centre and randomly allocated to receive either ART or conventional restorations. They received tailored oral hygiene instructions and scaling and polishing of teeth prior to restoration placement. The survival of restorations was assessed 6, 12 and 24 months after restoration placement by an independent examiner. Results: Ninety-nine patients participated in the trial, 46 males and 53 females, with a mean age of 73.2 (SD: 6.8). In total, 300 restorations were placed, 142 ART in 51 patients and 158 conventional restorations in 48 patients, with an average of 2.8 ART (SD: 1.83) and 3.2 conventional (SD: 2.62) restorations placed per patient. After 2 years, 88 ART and 117 conventional restorations were assessed. The restoration survival percentages were 93.1% and 94%, respectively. Conclusion: ART was found to be as effective as a conventional restorative approach to treat older adults after 2 years and could be a useful tool to provide dental care for older dentate adults.

Folly: Art after Architecture

FOLLY brings together Irish and international contemporary artists whose work has been inspired by iconic buildings of architectural modernism. From Eileen Gray’s seminal E1027 to Mies Van der Rohe’s restored Farnsworth House, Paul Rudolph’s demolished residences to Walter Gropius’s imagined Chicago Tribune Tower, the buildings referenced in FOLLY have had a mixed collection of fates.

Their presence in this exhibition affords them another afterlife. The qualities that make the architecture significant are played-with, exposed, re-canonised, made ambiguous, and eulogised. By creating fictional moments, questioning conventional documentation or excavating troubled histories of production, each artist invites you to think about how we experience and understand architecture today.

Distributed Sounding Art – Practices in Distributing Sound (eds. Barry Truax, Marcel Cobussen and Vincent Meelberg)

This chapter examines distributed sounding art by focusing on three key aspects that we consider essentially tied to the notion of distribution: assignment, transport and sharing. These aspects aid us in navigating through a number of nodes in a history of sounding art practices where sound becomes assigned, transported and shared between places and people. Sound or data become distributed, and in the process of distribution, meanings become assigned and altered through differing socio-cultural contexts of places and people. We have selected several works, commencing in the 1960’s as we consider this period as having produced some of the seminal works that address distribution.
We draw on works by composers, performers and sound artists and thus present a history of sounding art, which is amongst the many histories of sounding art in the 20th and 21st century.

Sound Art in Urban Architecture and Planning: An Introduction

This article will introduce a specially-commissioned edition of the JSS centering on articles developed from the International Symposium May 2014 by the Recomposing the City project.

Practical Lattice-Based Digital Signature Schemes

Digital signatures are an important primitive for building secure systems and are used in most real-world security protocols. However, almost all popular signature schemes are either based on the factoring assumption (RSA) or the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem (DSA/ECDSA). In the case of classical cryptanalytic advances or progress on the development of quantum computers, the hardness of these closely related problems might be seriously weakened. A potential alternative approach is the construction of signature schemes based on the hardness of certain lattice problems that are assumed to be intractable by quantum computers. Due to significant research advancements in recent years, lattice-based schemes have now become practical and appear to be a very viable alternative to number-theoretic cryptography. In this article, we focus on recent developments and the current state of the art in lattice-based digital signatures and provide a comprehensive survey discussing signature schemes with respect to practicality. Additionally, we discuss future research areas that are essential for the continued development of lattice-based cryptography.

Optimal Scheduling Methods to Integrate Plug-In Electric Vehicles with the Power System: A Review

The introduction of the Tesla in 2008 has demonstrated to the public of the potential of electric vehicles in terms of reducing fuel consumption and green-house gas from the transport sector. It has brought electric vehicles back into the spotlight worldwide at a moment when fossil fuel prices were reaching unexpected high due to increased demand and strong economic growth. The energy storage capabilities from of fleets of electric vehicles as well as the potentially random discharging and charging offers challenges to the grid in terms of operation and control. Optimal scheduling strategies are key to integrating large numbers of electric vehicles and the smart grid. In this paper, state-of-the-art optimization methods are reviewed on scheduling strategies for the grid integration with electric vehicles. The paper starts with a concise introduction to analytical charging strategies, followed by a review of a number of classical numerical optimization methods, including linear programming, non-linear programming, dynamic programming as well as some other means such as queuing theory. Meta-heuristic techniques are then discussed to deal with the complex, high-dimensional and multi-objective scheduling problem associated with stochastic charging and discharging of electric vehicles. Finally, future research directions are suggested.