A novel satellite-based ocean monitoring system for Mexico

To analyze patterns in marine productivity, harmful algal blooms, thermal stress in coral reefs, and oceanographic processes, optical and biophysical marine parameters, such as sea surface temperature, and ocean color products, such as chlorophyll-a concentration, diffuse attenuation coefficient, total suspended matter concentration, chlorophyll fluorescence line height, and remote sensing reflectance, are required. In this paper we present a novel automatic Satellite-based Ocean Monitoring System (SATMO) developed to provide, in near real-time, continuous spatial data sets of the above-mentioned variables for marine-coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico, northeastern Pacific Ocean, and western Caribbean Sea, with 1 km spatial resolution. The products are obtained from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images received at the Direct Readout Ground Station (located at CONABIO) after each overpass of the Aqua and Terra satellites. In addition, at the end of each week and month the system provides composite images for several ocean products, as well as weekly and monthly anomaly composites for chlorophyll-a concentration and sea surface temperature. These anomaly data are reported for the first time for the study region and represent valuable information for analyzing time series of ocean color data for the study of coastal and marine ecosystems in Mexico, Central America, and the western Caribbean.

Feasibility of using in situ fusion for the determination of Co, Cr and Mn in Portland cement by direct solid sampling graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry

In situ fusion on the boat-type graphite platform has been used as a sample pretreatment for the direct determination of Co, Cr and Mn in Portland cement by solid sampling graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (SS-GF AAS). The 3-field Zeeman technique was adopted for background correction to decrease the sensitivity during measurements. This strategy allowed working with up to 200 mu g of sample. The in situ fusion was accomplished using 10 mu L of a flux mixture 4.0% m/v Na(2)CO(3) + 4.0% m/v ZnO + 0.1% m/v Triton (R) X-100 added over the cement sample and heated at 800 degrees C for 20 s. The resulting mould was completely dissolved with 10 mu L of 0.1% m/v HNO(3). Limits of detection were 0.11 mu g g(-1) for Co, 1.1 mu g g(-1) for Cr and 1.9 mu g g(-1) for Mn. The accuracy of the proposed method has been evaluated by the analysis of certified reference materials. The values found presented no statistically significant differences compared to the certified values (Student`s t-test, p<0.05). In general, the relative standard deviation was lower than 12% (n = 5). (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A web based decision support system for status assessment in advanced parkinson

The purpose of this work is to develop a web based decision support system, based onfuzzy logic, to assess the motor state of Parkinson patients on their performance in onscreenmotor tests in a test battery on a hand computer. A set of well defined rules, basedon an expert’s knowledge, were made to diagnose the current state of the patient. At theend of a period, an overall score is calculated which represents the overall state of thepatient during the period. Acceptability of the rules is based on the absolute differencebetween patient’s own assessment of his condition and the diagnosed state. Anyinconsistency can be tracked by highlighted as an alert in the system. Graphicalpresentation of data aims at enhanced analysis of patient’s state and performancemonitoring by the clinic staff. In general, the system is beneficial for the clinic staff,patients, project managers and researchers.

A fuzzy rule-based decision support system for Duodopa treatment in Parkinson

A decision support system (DSS) was implemented based on a fuzzy logic inference system (FIS) to provide assistance in dose alteration of Duodopa infusion in patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease, using data from motor state assessments and dosage. Three-tier architecture with an object oriented approach was used. The DSS has a web enabled graphical user interface that presents alerts indicating non optimal dosage and states, new recommendations, namely typical advice with typical dose and statistical measurements. One data set was used for design and tuning of the FIS and another data set was used for evaluating performance compared with actual given dose. Overall goodness-of-fit for the new patients (design data) was 0.65 and for the ongoing patients (evaluation data) 0.98. User evaluation is now ongoing. The system could work as an assistant to clinical staff for Duodopa treatment in advanced Parkinson’s disease.

An agent-based hybrid intelligent system for financial investment planning

Many complex problems including financial investment planning require hybrid intelligent systems that integrate many intelligent techniques including expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. However, hybrid intelligent systems are difficult to develop due to complicated interactions and technique incompatibilities. This paper describes a hybrid intelligent system for financial investment planning that was built from agent points of view. This system currently consists of 13 different agents. The experimental results show that all agents in the system can work cooperatively to provide reasonable investment advice. The system is very flexible and robust. The success of the system indicates that agent technologies can significantly facilitate the construction of hybrid intelligent systems.

An agent-based hybrid intelligent system for foreign exchange trading

The foreign exchange (FX) market has many features including (1) Each trader’s payoff depends not only on his own behavior, but also on other traders’ decisions; (2) The number of traders is too large to make them all know the other dealers’ methods of decision making; and (3) The FX market has many levels. The FX market is complex because of these features. A diversity of techniques are required to deal with such complex problems. That is hybrid solutions are crucial for the FX market. On the other hand, research into the FX market has revealed that it demonstrates some characteristics of multi-agent systems such as autonomy, interaction, and emergence. To this end, an agent-based hybrid intelligent system was developed for FX trading, which is based on our proposed agent-based hybrid framework. This paper is to discuss the analysis, design, and implementation such a system. Some experimental results and comparisons with related works are also provided. The interest of this paper does not reside in improving the predictive capabilities of different FX models, but rather in how to integrate different models into one system under the unifying agent framework. The success of this system indicates that agent perspectives are very appropriate to model complex problems such as the FX trading.

Session initiation protocol (SIP) based event notification system architecture for telemedicine applications

Mobility service for hospital technicians involved in telemedicine applications is one of the key issues in providing more flexible and efficient in-house or remote health care services. Today, the Internet based communication has widened the opportunity of event monitoring systems in the medical field. The session initiation protocol (SIP) can work on a variety of devices and can be used to create a medical event notification system. Its adoption as the protocol of choice for third generation wireless networks allows for a robust and scalable environment. One of the advantages of SIP is that it supports personal mobility through the separation of user addressing and device addressing. In this paper, the authors propose a possible solution framework for telemedicine alert notification system based SIP-specific event notification.

Latex-based nanocomposites

Nanoparticles have been widely used as filler in polymer because of their unique reinforcing effect. There are many compounding methods for nanocomposites. The recent development on latex nanocomposites, a group of special nanocomposites, is reviewed in this chapter. They include carbon black/latex nanocomposite, silica/latex nanocomposite, layered silicate/latex nanocomposite, ZnO/latex nanocomposite, carbon nanotubellatex nanocomposite, lignin/latex nanocomposite, starch/latex nanocomposite, nano-fiber/latex nanocomposite, and Chitin whiskers/latex nanocomposite. Advanced compounding techniques and the latest advance on these latex nanocomposites are described. The nanoreinforcing theories of latex nanocomposites are also studied.

Prevalence and cost of musculoskeletal disorders: a population-based, public hospital system healthcare consumption approach.

Objective: To use a population-level, public-hospital approach to compare the prevalence and cost of musculoskeletal diseases (MSD) with other clinical specialties.

Methods: A healthcare utilization survey of 4 million individual records over 4 years, from all major public hospitals in the state of Victoria (estimated population 4.8 million residents in 2000/01) from 1997/98 to 2000/01. Main outcome measures were inpatient episodes of care, bed-days, and outpatient clinic encounters. MSD was defined as the combination of orthopedics and rheumatology.

Results: After obstetrics, MSD was the most frequent outpatient service, with orthopedics accounting for 9.9% of all visits in 2000/01. The proportion of MSD outpatient encounters (on average 11.6% of the total) was constant over the study period. Among 26 medical specialties, MSD had the sixth highest number of inpatient episodes (6.2% in 2000/01), following renal dialysis (14.6%), general surgery (8.2%), obstetrics (7.6%), gastroenterology (7.1%), and general medicine (6.7%). MSD was the fifth highest consumer of bed-days, occupying on average 7.7% of all beds per annum in the period 1997/98 to 2000/01, behind psychiatry (10.1%), respiratory medicine (8.5%), rehabilitation (8.3%), and general medicine (7.8%). MSD was the third most-costly discipline in 2000/01, with total costs of over A dollars 169 million (9.7% of total inpatient costs that year), behind respiratory medicine (11.6%) and general surgery (11.5%).

Conclusion: Compared to other diseases, MSD consumes a substantial proportion of healthcare resources in Victorian public hospitals. These data have important implications for allocation of healthcare resources, clinical care pathways, and prevention strategies.

A principles-based Anglo governance system is not a science but an art

Anglo governance systems rely of a number of controls to align shareholder and boards of director’s interests. In general they are referred to as market control, regulatory control, and political and cultural control. Agency theory proposes that these control mechanisms are necessary as human nature is such that directors and managers act in a self-interested and boundedly rational manner in decision-making that can result in sub optimality. Notwithstanding that each country within the Anglo system accepts such controls are necessary they have their own foci and priorities, being a product of their own system’s characteristics. This paper through interviewing a number of Australian business executives adds to the academic literature by providing evidence from the field of the important characteristics of the Australian governance system, the drivers of change and the effectiveness of the principles-based approach. It argues that debate needs to move beyond the principles versus rules approach to look at how firms can be provided with more guidance in operationalising some of the principles that appear to be key to governance effectiveness. It concludes that there is a need for a holistic model of governance that is broader than that focusing on the control/legalistic approach; that top management is important in setting and driving the in-firm governance agenda; that the public needs to be informed and educated about governance and its importance; and that disclosure still requires an improvement in quality.

MVGL analyser for multi-classifier based spam filtering system

In the last decade, the rapid growth of the Internet and email, there has been a dramatic growth in spam. Spam is commonly defined as unsolicited email messages and protecting email from the infiltration of spam is an important research issue. Classifications algorithms have been successfully used to filter spam, but with a certain amount of false positive trade-offs, which is unacceptable to users sometimes. This paper presents an approach to overcome the burden of GL (grey list) analyzer as further refinements to our multi-classifier based classification model (Islam, M. and W. Zhou 2007). In this approach, we introduce a ldquomajority voting grey list (MVGL)rdquo analyzing technique which will analyze the generated GL emails by using the majority voting (MV) algorithm. We have presented two different variations of the MV system, one is simple MV (SMV) and other is the ranked MV (RMV). Our empirical evidence proofs the improvements of this approach compared to the existing GL analyzer of multi-classifier based spam filtering process.

Context-based e-health system access control mechanism

E-Health systems logically demand a sufficiently fine-grained authorization policy for access control. The access to medical information should not be just role-based but should also include the contextual condition of the role to access data. In this paper, we present a mechanism to extend the standard role-based access control to incorporate contextual information for making access control decisions in e-health application. We present an architecture consisting of authorisation and context infrastructure that work cooperatively to grant access rights based on context-aware authorization policies and context information.