A Systematic Review of End-of-Life Visual Impairment in Open-Angle Glaucoma: An Epidemiological Autopsy

PURPOSE: Glaucoma patients are still at risk of becoming blind. It is of clinical significance to determine the risk of blindness and its causes to prevent its occurrence. This systematic review estimates the number of treated glaucoma patients with end-of-life visual impairment (VI) and blindness and the factors that are associated with this.

METHODS: A systematic literature search in relevant databases was conducted in August 2014 on end-of-life VI. A total of 2574 articles were identified, of which 5 on end-of-life VI. Several data items were extracted from the reports and presented in tables.

RESULTS: All studies had a retrospective design. A considerable number of glaucoma patients were found to be blind at the end of their life; with up to 24% unilateral and 10% bilateral blindness. The following factors were associated with blindness: (1) baseline severity of visual field loss: advanced stage of glaucoma or substantial visual field loss at the initial visit; (2) factors influencing progression: fluctuation of intraocular pressure (IOP) during treatment, presence of pseudoexfoliation, poor patient compliance, higher IOP; (3) longer time period: longer duration of disease and older age at death because of a longer life expectancy; and (4) coexistence of other ocular pathology.

CONCLUSIONS: Further prevention of blindness in glaucoma patients is needed. To reach this goal, it is important to address the risk factors for blindness identified in this review, especially those that can be modified, such as advanced disease at diagnosis, high and fluctuating IOP, and poor compliance.

Imagined and occasional co-presence in open adoption: how adoptive parents mediate birth connections.

This chapter explores the ways that adopted children and their birth parents can remain co-present following adoption. It focuses specifically on public adoption of children who have been in the care of child welfare services, and draws on adoptive parents’ accounts of their experiences of adoption openness. The distinctive features of co-presence between children and their birth parents after adoption are: that it is mediated by negotiated contact agreements and through on-going adoptive family practices; and that it is occasional, with its infrequency displaying the status and significance of birth relationships. Physical co-presence can in some cases be achieved through face-to-face contact meetings, however, even when this not possible, birth parents can be present in the hearts and minds of the adoptive family, constituting a form of imagined co-presence. The chapter explores how adopters achieve, delimit and mediate imagined and physical co-presence between their child and birth parent and concludes by considering the emergence of virtual co-presence via online social media.

Dependable wireless real-time communications for open environments

Wireless communication technologies have become widely adopted, appearing in heterogeneous applications ranging from tracking victims, responders and equipments in disaster scenarios to machine health monitoring in networked manufacturing systems. Very often, applications demand a strictly bounded timing response, which, in distributed systems, is generally highly dependent on the performance of the underlying communication technology. These systems are said to have real-time timeliness requirements since data communication must be conducted within predefined temporal bounds, whose unfulfillment may compromise the correct behavior of the system and cause economic losses or endanger human lives. The potential adoption of wireless technologies for an increasingly broad range of application scenarios has made the operational requirements more complex and heterogeneous than before for wired technologies. On par with this trend, there is an increasing demand for the provision of cost-effective distributed systems with improved deployment, maintenance and adaptation features. These systems tend to require operational flexibility, which can only be ensured if the underlying communication technology provides both time and event triggered data transmission services while supporting on-line, on-the-fly parameter modification. Generally, wireless enabled applications have deployment requirements that can only be addressed through the use of batteries and/or energy harvesting mechanisms for power supply. These applications usually have stringent autonomy requirements and demand a small form factor, which hinders the use of large batteries. As the communication support may represent a significant part of the energy requirements of a station, the use of power-hungry technologies is not adequate. Hence, in such applications, low-range technologies have been widely adopted. In fact, although low range technologies provide smaller data rates, they spend just a fraction of the energy of their higher-power counterparts. The timeliness requirements of data communications, in general, can be met by ensuring the availability of the medium for any station initiating a transmission. In controlled (close) environments this can be guaranteed, as there is a strict regulation of which stations are installed in the area and for which purpose. Nevertheless, in open environments, this is hard to control because no a priori abstract knowledge is available of which stations and technologies may contend for the medium at any given instant. Hence, the support of wireless real-time communications in unmanaged scenarios is a highly challenging task. Wireless low-power technologies have been the focus of a large research effort, for example, in the Wireless Sensor Network domain. Although bringing extended autonomy to battery powered stations, such technologies are known to be negatively influenced by similar technologies contending for the medium and, especially, by technologies using higher power transmissions over the same frequency bands. A frequency band that is becoming increasingly crowded with competing technologies is the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band, encompassing, for example, Bluetooth and ZigBee, two lowpower communication standards which are the base of several real-time protocols. Although these technologies employ mechanisms to improve their coexistence, they are still vulnerable to transmissions from uncoordinated stations with similar technologies or to higher power technologies such as Wi- Fi, which hinders the support of wireless dependable real-time communications in open environments. The Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered Protocol (WFTT) is a master/multi-slave protocol that builds on the flexibility and timeliness provided by the FTT paradigm and on the deterministic medium capture and maintenance provided by the bandjacking technique. This dissertation presents the WFTT protocol and argues that it allows supporting wireless real-time communication services with high dependability requirements in open environments where multiple contention-based technologies may dispute the medium access. Besides, it claims that it is feasible to provide flexible and timely wireless communications at the same time in open environments. The WFTT protocol was inspired on the FTT paradigm, from which higher layer services such as, for example, admission control has been ported. After realizing that bandjacking was an effective technique to ensure the medium access and maintenance in open environments crowded with contention-based communication technologies, it was recognized that the mechanism could be used to devise a wireless medium access protocol that could bring the features offered by the FTT paradigm to the wireless domain. The performance of the WFTT protocol is reported in this dissertation with a description of the implemented devices, the test-bed and a discussion of the obtained results.

The comparative in situ hygrothermal performance of Hemp and Stone Wool insulations in vapour open timber frame wall panels

An in situ experiment in a full scale timber frame test building was carried out to compare the hygrothermal performance of Hemp and Stone Wool insulations of identical thermal conductivity. Hemp and Stone Wool insulations were installed in timber frame wall panels without vapour barrier. The comparison was made in terms of heat transfer properties, likelihood of mould growth and condensation. Step changes in internal relative humidity were performed to explore the effect of high and normal internal moisture load on the wall panels. No significant difference between the average equivalent thermal transmittance (U-values) of the panels incorporating Hemp and Stone Wool insulations was observed. The average equivalent U-values of the panels were closer to the calculated U-values of the panels based on the manufacturers’ declared thermal conductivity of Hemp and Stone Wool insulations. It was observed that the placement of heat flux sensor along the depth of the insulation had significant influence on the measured equivalent U-value of the panels during high internal moisture load. The frequency and likelihood of condensation was higher in the interface of Stone Wool and Oriented Strand Board (OSB). In terms of the parametric assessment of mould germination potential, relative humidity, temperature and exposure conditions in the insulation-OSB interfaces were found to be favourable to germination of mould spore. However, when the insulations were dismantled, no mould was visually detected.

Open source data sensing software for ultrasonic non-invasive temperature estimation

In this paper, an open source solution for measurement of temperature and ultrasonic signals (RF-lines) is proposed. This software is an alternative to the expensive commercial data acquisition software, enabling the user to tune applications to particular acquisition architectures. The collected ultrasonic and temperature signals were used for non-invasive temperature estimation using neural networks. The existence of precise temperature estimators is an essential point aiming at the secure and effective applica tion of thermal therapies in humans. If such estimators exist then effective controllers could be developed for the therapeutic instrumentation. In previous works the time-shift between RF-lines echoes were extracted, and used for creation of neural networks estimators. The obtained estimators successfully represent the temperature in the time-space domain, achieving a maximum absolute error inferior to the threshold value defined for hyperthermia/diathermia applications.

A scalable and open source linear positioning system controller

This paper is on the implementation of a dual axis positioning system controller. The system was designed to be used for space-dependent ultrasound signal acquisition problems, such as pressure field mapping. The work developed can be grouped in two main subjects: hardware and software. Each axis includes one stepper motor connected to a driver circuit, which is then connected to a processing unit. The graphical user interface is simple and clear for the user. The system resolution was computed as 127 mu m with an accuracy of 2.44 mu m. Although the target application is ultrasound signal acquisition, the controller can be applied to other devices that has up to four stepper motors. The application was developed as an open source software, thus it can be used or changed to fit different purposes.

Working Paper: Open Government Data

In diesem Working Paper sollen wesentliche Erkenntnisse und Forderungen aus der - bisher vor allem englischsprachigen - Diskussion über die webgerechte Freigabe öffentlicher Daten zusammengefaßt werden. Das Paper versteht sich als Ausgangspunkt für Diskussion und Strategieentwicklung, ohne letztere selbst leisten zu können. Die Entwicklungspotentiale von Open Government Data (OGD) sollen zunächst aus der Sicht verschiedener Beteiligter dargestellt werden. Mit den in den Sebastopol-Prinzipien formulierten grundlegenden Anforderungen an OGD wird der Begriff schließlich definiert. Anhand von Veröffentlichungen des W3C kann schließlich die Bedeutung der Verwendung und (Weiter-)Entwicklung offener Standards für OGD gezeigt werden, daneben aber auch die Hauptprobleme eines entsprechenden Change Managements im öffentlichen Sektor. Abschließend werden einige modellhafte Beispiele für die praktische Umsetzung von OGD angeführt.

Regional Knowledge Maps - Potential and Challenges

Regional knowledge map is a tool recently demanded by some actors in an institutional level to help regional policy and innovation in a territory. Besides, knowledge maps facilitate the interaction between the actors of a territory and the collective learning. This paper reports the work in progress of a research project which objective is to define a methodology to efficiently design territorial knowledge maps, by extracting information of big volumes of data contained in diverse sources of information related to a region. Knowledge maps facilitate management of the intellectual capital in organisations. This paper investigates the value to apply this tool to a territorial region to manage the structures, infrastructures and the resources to enable regional innovation and regional development. Their design involves the identification of information sources that are required to find which knowledge is located in a territory, which actors are involved in innovation, and which is the context to develop this innovation (structures, infrastructures, resources and social capital). This paper summarizes the theoretical background and framework for the design of a methodology for the construction of knowledge maps, and gives an overview of the main challenges for the design of regional knowledge maps.

Challenges and Potentials for Keyword Extraction from Company Websites for the Development of Regional Knowledge Maps

Regional Innovation Systems describe the relations between actors, structures and infrastructures in a region in order to stimulate innovation and regional development. For these systems the collection and organization of information is crucial. In the present paper we investigate the possibilities to extract information from websites of companies. First we describe regional innovation systems and the information types that are necessary to create them. Then we discuss the possibilities of text mining and keyword extraction techniques to extract this information from company websites. Finally, we describe a small scale experiment in which keywords related to economic sectors and commodities are extracted from the websites of over 200 companies. This experiment shows what the main challenges are for information extraction from websites for regional innovation systems.

Entwicklung eines Verfahrens zur automatischen Sammlung, Erschließung und Bereitstellung multimedialer Open-Access-Objekte mittels der Infrastruktur von Wikimedia Commons und Wikidata

Idee zum Projektantrag der TIB Hannover und Hochschule Hannover in der DFG-Ausschreibung: „Open-Access-Transformation“ vom 2.6.2014 im Bereich „Wissenschaftliche Literaturversorgungs- und Informationssysteme“ (LIS), eingereicht am 30.10.2014

Potenziale von Linked Open Data in Öffentlichen Bibliotheken

Das Thema Linked Open Data hat in den vergangenen Jahren im Bereich der Bibliotheken viel Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Unterschiedlichste Projekte werden von Bibliotheken betrieben, um Linked Open Data für die Einrichtung und die Kunden nutzbringend einzusetzen. Ausgangspunkt für diese Arbeit ist die These, dass Linked Open Data im Bibliotheksbereich das größte Potenzial freisetzen kann. Es wird überprüft, inwiefern diese Aussage auch auf Öffentliche Bibliotheken zutrifft und aufgezeigt, welche Möglichkeiten sich daraus ergeben könnten. Die Arbeit führt in die Grundlagen von Linked Open Data (LOD) ein und betrachtet die Entwicklungen im Bibliotheksbereich. Dabei werden besonders Initiativen zur Behandlung bibliothekarischer Metadaten und der aktuelle Entwicklungsstand von LOD-fähigen Bibliothekssystemen behandelt. Danach wird eine Auswahl an LOD-Datensets vorgestellt, die bibliothekarische Metadaten liefern oder deren Daten als Anreicherungsinformationen in Kataloganwendungen eingesetzt werden können. Im Anschluss wird das Projekt OpenCat der Öffentlichen Bibliothek Fresnes (Frankreich) sowie das LOD-Projekt an der Deichmanske Bibliothek Oslo (Norwegen) vorgestellt. Darauf folgt ein Einblick in die Möglichkeiten, welche durch die Verwendung von LOD in Öffentlichen Bibliotheken verwirklicht werden könnten sowie erste Handlungsempfehlungen für Öffentliche Bibliotheken.

Coastal storm snow event : November 20-22, 2006 open-file report

This report describes climatologically, the snow storm that occurred from November 20-22, 2006.

Role of Automated Open Source Systems in the Intelligence Analysis of a High-Level Domain Expert

Open-domain web-based multiple document : question answering for list questions with support for temporal restrictors

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Ciências da Computação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015