Does it matter whether friends, parents, or peers drink walk? Identifying which normative influences predict young pedestrian's decisions to walk while intoxicated

Drink walking, that is walking in a public place while intoxicated, is associated with increased risk of injury and fatality. Young people and males are especially prone to engaging in this behaviour, yet little is known about the factors associated with individual’s decisions to drink walk. The present research explores the role of different normative influences (friendship group norm, parent group norm, university peer group norm) and perceived risk, within an extended theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework, in predicting young people’s self-reported drink walking intentions. One hundred and eighteen young people (aged 17-25 years) completed a survey including sociodemographic measures and extended TPB measures related to drink walking. Overall the extended TPB explained 72.8% of the variance in young people’s intentions to drink walk in the next six months with attitude, perceived behavioural control, friendship group norm, and gender (male) emerging as significant predictors. Males, as compared with females, had higher intentions to drink walk and lower perceptions of risk regarding drink walking. Together, these findings provide a clearer indication of the salient normative influences and gender differences in young pedestrian’s decisions to walk while intoxicated. Such findings can be used to inform future interventions designed to reduce injuries and fatalities associated with drink walking.

Foot massage and physiological stress in people with dementia : a randomized controlled trial

Background There is increasing interest in using complementary and alternative treatments to manage behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia such as agitation, aggression and depressed mood. Objective To compare the effect of foot massage (intervention) and quiet presence (control) on agitation and mood in people with dementia. Design A randomised controlled trial using a within-subjects, crossover design. Settings Five long-term care facilities in Brisbane, Australia. The primary outcome was the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory (CMAI) and the secondary outcome was the Observed Emotion Rating Scale (OERS). The screening and data collection research assistants, families, and care staff were blinded to participant allocation. Participants Participants of the study were 55 long-term care residents aged 74–103 years (mean age 86.5), with moderate to severe dementia and a history of agitated behaviour according to the Pittsburgh Agitation Scale. A computer-program randomised participants to 10-min foot massage (intervention) or quiet presence (control), every weekday for 3 weeks. Results A carry-over effect was identified in the data, and so the data was treated as a parallel groups RCT. The mean total CMAI increased in both groups (reflecting an increase in agitation) with this increase greater in the quiet presence group than the foot massage group (p=0.03). There was a trend towards a difference on OERS General Alertness, with a positive change in alertness for participants in the foot massage group (indicating reduced alertness) and a negative change for participants in the quiet presence group (indicating increased alertness) (F(1,51)=3.88, p=0.05, partial ή2=0.07). Conclusions The findings highlight the need for further research on the specific conditions under which massage might promote relaxation and improve mood for people with dementia. The unfamiliar research assistants and variations in usual activity may have contributed to the increase in agitation and this needs further research.

Random Gabor based templates for facial expression recognition in images with facial occlusion

Robust facial expression recognition (FER) under occluded face conditions is challenging. It requires robust algorithms of feature extraction and investigations into the effects of different types of occlusion on the recognition performance to gain insight. Previous FER studies in this area have been limited. They have spanned recovery strategies for loss of local texture information and testing limited to only a few types of occlusion and predominantly a matched train-test strategy. This paper proposes a robust approach that employs a Monte Carlo algorithm to extract a set of Gabor based part-face templates from gallery images and converts these templates into template match distance features. The resulting feature vectors are robust to occlusion because occluded parts are covered by some but not all of the random templates. The method is evaluated using facial images with occluded regions around the eyes and the mouth, randomly placed occlusion patches of different sizes, and near-realistic occlusion of eyes with clear and solid glasses. Both matched and mis-matched train and test strategies are adopted to analyze the effects of such occlusion. Overall recognition performance and the performance for each facial expression are investigated. Experimental results on the Cohn-Kanade and JAFFE databases demonstrate the high robustness and fast processing speed of our approach, and provide useful insight into the effects of occlusion on FER. The results on the parameter sensitivity demonstrate a certain level of robustness of the approach to changes in the orientation and scale of Gabor filters, the size of templates, and occlusions ratios. Performance comparisons with previous approaches show that the proposed method is more robust to occlusion with lower reductions in accuracy from occlusion of eyes or mouth.

Connecting the person with dementia and family : a feasibility study of a telepresence robot

Background Maintenance of communication is important for people with dementia living in long-term care. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of using “Giraff”, a telepresence robot to enhance engagement between family and a person with dementia living in long-term care. Methods A mixed-methods approach involving semi-structured interviews, call records and video observational data was used. Five people with dementia and their family member participated in a discussion via the Giraff robot for a minimum of six times over a six-week period. A feasibility framework was used to assess feasibility and included video analysis of emotional response and engagement. Results Twenty-six calls with an average duration of 23 mins took place. Residents showed a general state of positive emotions across the calls with a high level of engagement and a minimal level of negative emotions. Participants enjoyed the experience and families reported that the Giraff robot offered the opportunity to reduce social isolation. A number of software and hardware challenges were encountered. Conclusions Participants perceived this novel approach to engage families and people with dementia as a feasible option. Participants were observed and also reported to enjoy the experience. The technical challenges identified have been improved in a newer version of the robot. Future research should include a feasibility trial of longer duration, with a larger sample and a cost analysis.

Australia’s film industry owes a debt to Gough Whitlam

Filmmakers and audiences – indeed Australian arts and screen culture more broadly – owe a deep debt of gratitude to Gough Whitlam and the government he led. Although the foundations had been laid by Whitlam’s predecessors John Gorton and Billy McMahon, the Australian film revival of the 1970s only really took shape after Whitlam became Prime Minister in 1972...

Service-learning through multiple client-sponsored projects in an MBA marketing course

This paper outlines an approach for teaching Marketing Principles in an MBA course through service-learning to enable adult learners to connect the lectures’ marketing content to a real-world marketing project. During the course, 40 students in groups of four to five individuals were involved in eight different client-sponsored marketing projects executed simultaneously. The rationale, planning and management of this approach utilised current research on service-learning, living cases and client-sponsored projects in marketing education. The experimental curriculum design is presented in a timeline that mirrors the preparation and management of the group projects and the considerations to be taken into account when initiating and facilitating the projects. Reflections from this iteration of the service-learning design suggest the importance of: detailed project planning, the involvement of students in choosing the projects, the introduction of forms and feedback loops, the role of the instructor in facilitating the students and managing expectations, and the role of the company representative in supporting the groups.

Vanquishing the'Patent Trolls'

Patent law provides exclusive rights to exploit scientific inventions, which are novel, inventive, and useful. The regime is intended to promote innovation, investment in research and development, and access to scientific information. In recent times, there have been concerns that the patent system has been abused by opportunistic companies known by the phrase “patent trolls”. It has been alleged that such entities have stunted innovation and spurred unnecessary patent litigation. Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner discuss such pathologies of patent law in their book, Innovation and Its Discontents: How our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It. James Bessen and Michael Meurer have addressed such concerns in their recent text, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. There have been particular fears about the rise of “patent trolls” in the field of information technology. Peter Dekin, an assistant general counsel at Intel, used the phrase “patent troll” to describe firms, which acquired patents only to extract settlements from companies on dubious infringement claims.

The Wieruszowski ancestry : from the mid 1700’s to the late 1900’s /

Family trees of the descendants of the Wieruszowski and of the Apt families from the mid 1700’s to the late 1900’s, from family sources and from other places.

Residual noise covariance for Planck low-resolution data analysis

Aims: Develop and validate tools to estimate residual noise covariance in Planck frequency maps. Quantify signal error effects and compare different techniques to produce low-resolution maps. Methods: We derive analytical estimates of covariance of the residual noise contained in low-resolution maps produced using a number of map-making approaches. We test these analytical predictions using Monte Carlo simulations and their impact on angular power spectrum estimation. We use simulations to quantify the level of signal errors incurred in different resolution downgrading schemes considered in this work. Results: We find an excellent agreement between the optimal residual noise covariance matrices and Monte Carlo noise maps. For destriping map-makers, the extent of agreement is dictated by the knee frequency of the correlated noise component and the chosen baseline offset length. The significance of signal striping is shown to be insignificant when properly dealt with. In map resolution downgrading, we find that a carefully selected window function is required to reduce aliasing to the sub-percent level at multipoles, ell > 2Nside, where Nside is the HEALPix resolution parameter. We show that sufficient characterization of the residual noise is unavoidable if one is to draw reliable contraints on large scale anisotropy. Conclusions: We have described how to compute the low-resolution maps, with a controlled sky signal level, and a reliable estimate of covariance of the residual noise. We have also presented a method to smooth the residual noise covariance matrices to describe the noise correlations in smoothed, bandwidth limited maps.

Preliminary study of the effects of carbon nanotubes on Cpu cooling

Managing heat produced by computer processors is an important issue today, especially when the size of processors is decreasing rapidly while the number of transistors in the processor is increasing rapidly. This poster describes a preliminary study of the process of adding carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to a standard silicon paste covering a CPU. Measurements were made in two rounds of tests to compare the rate of cool-down with and without CNTs present. The silicon paste acts as an interface between the CPU and the heat sink, increasing the heat transfer rate away from the CPU. To the silicon paste was added 0.05% by weight of CNTs. These were not aligned. A series of K-type thermocouples was used to measure the temperature as a function of time in the vicinity of the CPU, following its shut-off. An Omega data acquisition system was attached to the thermocouples. The CPU temperature was not measured directly because attachment of a thermocouple would have prevented its automatic shut-off A thermocouple in the paste containing the CNTs actually reached a higher temperature than the standard paste, an effect easily explained. But the rate of cooling with the CNTs was about 4.55% better.

CTFS-ForestGEO: a worldwide network monitoring forests in an era of global change

Global change is impacting forests worldwide, threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services including climate regulation. Understanding how forests respond is critical to forest conservation and climate protection. This review describes an international network of 59 long-term forest dynamics research sites (CTFS-ForestGEO) useful for characterizing forest responses to global change. Within very large plots (median size 25ha), all stems 1cm diameter are identified to species, mapped, and regularly recensused according to standardized protocols. CTFS-ForestGEO spans 25 degrees S-61 degrees N latitude, is generally representative of the range of bioclimatic, edaphic, and topographic conditions experienced by forests worldwide, and is the only forest monitoring network that applies a standardized protocol to each of the world's major forest biomes. Supplementary standardized measurements at subsets of the sites provide additional information on plants, animals, and ecosystem and environmental variables. CTFS-ForestGEO sites are experiencing multifaceted anthropogenic global change pressures including warming (average 0.61 degrees C), changes in precipitation (up to +/- 30% change), atmospheric deposition of nitrogen and sulfur compounds (up to 3.8g Nm(-2)yr(-1) and 3.1g Sm(-2)yr(-1)), and forest fragmentation in the surrounding landscape (up to 88% reduced tree cover within 5km). The broad suite of measurements made at CTFS-ForestGEO sites makes it possible to investigate the complex ways in which global change is impacting forest dynamics. Ongoing research across the CTFS-ForestGEO network is yielding insights into how and why the forests are changing, and continued monitoring will provide vital contributions to understanding worldwide forest diversity and dynamics in an era of global change.

Database Independent Human Emotion Recognition with Meta-Cognitive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System

Facial emotions are the most expressive way to display emotions. Many algorithms have been proposed which employ a particular set of people (usually a database) to both train and test their model. This paper focuses on the challenging task of database independent emotion recognition, which is a generalized case of subject-independent emotion recognition. The emotion recognition system employed in this work is a Meta-Cognitive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (McFIS). McFIS has two components, a neuro-fuzzy inference system, which is the cognitive component and a self-regulatory learning mechanism, which is the meta-cognitive component. The meta-cognitive component, monitors the knowledge in the neuro-fuzzy inference system and decides on what-to-learn, when-to-learn and how-to-learn the training samples, efficiently. For each sample, the McFIS decides whether to delete the sample without being learnt, use it to add/prune or update the network parameter or reserve it for future use. This helps the network avoid over-training and as a result improve its generalization performance over untrained databases. In this study, we extract pixel based emotion features from well-known (Japanese Female Facial Expression) JAFFE and (Taiwanese Female Expression Image) TFEID database. Two sets of experiment are conducted. First, we study the individual performance of both databases on McFIS based on 5-fold cross validation study. Next, in order to study the generalization performance, McFIS trained on JAFFE database is tested on TFEID and vice-versa. The performance The performance comparison in both experiments against SVNI classifier gives promising results.

Evaluación y adaptación de diez variedades de maíz (Zea mays L.) en la zona de Jalapa

La evaluación de los cultivares se realizó con el propósito de evaluar la adaptabilidad y rendimiento de 10 variedades de maíz y contribuir al incremento a la producción de maíz. El presente estudio se desarrollo en el Centro de Enseñanza Técnico Agropecuario (CETA-Jalapa), del municipio de Jalapa, departamento de Nueva Segovia, en la comarca La Angélica a 4 kilómetros de la ciudad de Jalapa, se estableció un diseño en Bloques Completamente Azar con tres Repeticiones y 10 Tratamiento cada uno; los factores en estudio fueron 10 cultivares híbridos de maíz (ACX-945 Y, ACX-844 Y, BILLY No 1, BIG TIME, 844, 8100 Y, 8101 WAC, PRIMA X, NUTRINTA AMARILLO y TLAYOLLY) las mismas fueron introducidas por el INTA, siendo estas, variedades dulces color amarillo de porte bajo, exceptuando la variedad TLAYOLLY que es una variedad de grano blanco y de porte alto. Los datos obtenidos fueron objeto de un análisis de variancia (ANDEVA) y separación de medias (Tukey = 0.05 %). Los cultivares evaluados presentaron diferencias en la mayorías de las variables evaluadas, como peso de la mazorca, alturas de planta, precocidad y área foliar, la variedades TLAYOLLY y NUTRINTA AMARILLO, fueron estadísticamente iguales en el rendimiento, pero cuantitativamente la variedad TLAYOLLY superó al testigo con 7069.50 kg/ha. El cultivar TLAYOLLY demostró adaptación durante este periodo a las condiciones edafoclimáticas de la zona del municipio de Jalapa, producto de varios factores que influyeron en ese momento tales como: altura de planta, precocidad tardía y mayor área foliar, todo esto unido al buen manejo agronómico y semilla de buena calidad, sin embargo se necesitan realizar más estudios y así validar otras variables para ver totalmente su adaptabilidad en las zonas húmedas, ya que no se tomaron en cuenta, en este momento por ser las primeras evaluaciones que se realiza en la zona con estos cultivares.

Resource survey of Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary, 1983

Forward: Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary (LKNMS) was designated in 1981 to protect and promote the study, teaching, and wise use of the resources of Looe Key Sanctuary (Plate A). In order to wisely manage this valuable resource, a quantitative resource inventory was funded by the Sanctuary Programs Division (SPD), Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in cooperation with the Southeast Fisheries Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA; the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS), University of Miami; the Fisher Island Laboratory, United States Geological Survey; and the St. Petersburg Laboratory, State of Florida Department of Natural Resources. This report is the result of this cooperative effort. The objective of this study was to quantitatively inventory selected resources of LKNMS in order to allow future monitoring of changes in the Sanctuary as a result of human or natural processes. This study, referred to as Phase I, gives a brief summary of past and present uses of the Sanctuary (Chapter 2); and describes general habitat types (Chapter 3), geology and sediment distribution (Chapter 4), coral abundance and distribution (Chapter 5), the growth history of the coral Montastraea annularis (Chapter 6), reef fish abundance and distribution (Chapter 7), and status of selected resources (Chapter 8). An interpretation of the results of the survey are provided for management consideration (Chapter 9). The results are expected to provide fundamental information for applied management, natural history interpretation, and scientific research. Numerous photographs and illustrations were used to supplement the report to make the material presented easier to comprehend (Plate B). We anticipate the information provided will be used by managers, naturalists, and the general public in addition to scientists. Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs were taken at Looe Key Reef by Dr. James A. Bohnsack. The top photograph in Plate 7.8 was taken by Michael C. Schmale. Illustrations were done by Jack Javech, NMFS. Field work was initiated in May 1983 and completed for the most part by October 1983 thanks to the cooperation of numerous people and organizations. In addition to the participating agencies and organizations we thank the Newfound Harbor Marine Institute and the Division of Parks and Recreation, State of Florida Department of Natural Resources for their logistical support. Special thanks goes to Billy Causey, the Sanctuary Manager, for his help, information, and comments. We thank in alphabetical order: Scott Bannerot, Margie Bastian, Bill Becker, Barbara Bohnsack, Grant Beardsley, John Halas, Raymond Hixon, Irene Hooper, Eric Lindblad, and Mike Schmale. We dedicate this effort to the memory of Ray Hixon who participated in the study and who loved Looe Key. (PDF contains 43 pages)