An interlocking-directorates monitoring system The subject of the study was interlocking directorates in Polish joint stock companies. In order to explore this area a monitoring system has been developed which consists of a database and query system. Data is automatically introduced from printed announcements into the MySQL database using PHP scripts.The phenomenon of interlocking directorates in Polish joint stock companies is comparable with other countries. Board members in Poland are significantly younger than, for example, in (...) the USA. Women constitute an important group of board members. Insurance companies and investment funds are closely connected with other companies, but banks are not.The monitoring system developed enables us to identify who is, and who was, a board member of every joint stock company. It also enables us to identify, for every person, which board he or she now serves on, and has served on, in the past. The system also enables us to produce different reports concerning, for example, changes in certain indexes in subsequent years. The system is also accessible via the Internet. (shrink)

Brain monitoring combined with automatic analysis of EEGs provides a clinical decision support tool that can reduce time to diagnosis and assist clinicians in real-time monitoring applications (e.g., neurological intensive care units). Clinicians have indicated that a sensitivity of 95% with specificity below 5% was the minimum requirement for clinical acceptance. In this study, a high-performance automated EEG analysis system based on principles of machine learning and big data is proposed. This hybrid architecture integrates hidden Markov (...) models (HMMs) for sequential decoding of EEG events with deep learning-based postprocessing that incorporates temporal and spatial context. These algorithms are trained and evaluated using the Temple University Hospital EEG, which is the largest publicly available corpus of clinical EEG recordings in the world. This system automatically processes EEG records and classifies three patterns of clinical interest in brain activity that might be useful in diagnosing brain disorders: (1) spike and/or sharp waves, (2) generalized periodic epileptiform discharges, (3) periodic lateralized epileptiform discharges. It also classifies three patterns used to model the background EEG activity: (1) eye movement, (2) artifacts and (3) background. Our approach delivers a sensitivity above 90% while maintaining a specificity below 5%. We also demonstrate that this system delivers a low false alarm rate, which is critical for any spike detection application. (shrink)

The supervisor of the activities of a system user should benefit from the knowledge contained in the event logs of the user. They allow the monitoring of the sequential and parallel user activities. To make event logs more accessible to the supervisor, we suggest a process mining approach, including first the design of an understanding model of the activities of a system user. The model design is based on the relationships between the event logs and the activities (...) of a system user. An intervention model completes the understanding model to assist the supervisor. The intervention model enables an action of the supervisor on the critical activities, and the detection of anomalies. The models are automatically designed with a model-driven engineering approach. An experiment on a smart home system illustrates this tooled design, where the supervisor is a medical or paramedical staff member. (shrink)

Over the last decade, attention has crawled from out of the shadows into the philosophical limelight with several important books and widely read articles. Carolyn Dicey Jennings has been a key player in the attention revolution, actively publishing in the area and promoting awareness. This book was much anticipated by insiders and does not disappoint. It is in no way redundant with respect to other recent monographs, covering both a different range of material and developing novel positions throughout. The book (...) might have been called The Attending Self, since Jennings defines attention as mental prioritization controlled by the self. This invocation of the self is among her central innovations, and may prove to be the main source of controversy. I will highlight points of contention here, but want to emphasize at the outset that the book is essential reading for anyone interested in attention. Jennings also contributes to a range of other debates, which will help a broader audience appreciate the importance this topic.After a brief introduction, Jennings provides “a philosophical landscape” of attention (chap. 2), tracing the concept through history. This is an invaluable achievement that will be welcomed by both newcomers and veterans. Jennings exhibits enormous breadth, covering areas that contemporary philosophers of mind tend to neglect: medieval philosophy, Buddhist thought, and phenomenology, to name a few. We also get perspectives on attention from core figures in the Western canon, such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, as well as thinkers who gave the topic a more political inflection: Mary Wollstonecraft and W. E. B. DuBois. Jennings surveys contemporary literature as well, locating recent work in these older lineages. Some authors get more treatment later in the book (e.g., William James and Wayne Wu). Overall, Jennings provides the best overview of this history I have seen. She proves that attention is not a new topic, but one with deep roots and one that can inform current debates; Jennings draws on these roots throughout. I would love to see a companion piece surveying scientific theories, including “gain control” and “biased competition,” which get little airtime in the book. Some recent philosophical theories are under-explored as well, including Chris Mole’s concept of cognitive unison (Jennings discusses other aspects of his view), Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian’s exploration of attention’s diversity (we get a touch of this), and my own proposal that attention is a gateway to working memory (not mentioned here). That said, no extant survey is more complete.Chapter 3 begins with the empirical claim that attention is regulated by slow brainwaves, and then takes up two issues. The first is mental causation. Endorsing moderate emergentism, Jennings argues that slow brain waves are causally efficacious even though they are not reducible to lower-level processes. (The metaphysics and neuroscience are presented accessibly, aided by three appendixes.) Second, Jennings argues that these slow brain waves indicate that attention is controlled by the self. As someone who was never moved by the mental causation problem—I don’t think overdetermination threatens efficacy—I would have welcomed more development of this second issue. For one thing, in linking attention to subjective control, Jennings eschews the idea that there can be purely “bottom-up” attention driven by stimulus features alone. This goes against the orthodoxy in attention science, and makes it hard for her to accommodate phenomena such as “pop-out,” or the commonsense idea that attention can be “captured” by a sudden flash or loud sound. For another thing, I wanted to hear more on why Jennings relates slow brain waves to the self. Does this include the slow waves that occur during deep sleep? Is there even such a thing as the self? Is there one self or many? How do slow brain waves reflect our interests, projects, values, self-conceptions, autobiographical narratives, or social identities? Does the social self invoked by Wollstonecraft and DuBois gain a foothold here? The whole chapter campaigns against metaphysical reductionism, but arrives at a perspective on the self that will strike some readers as highly reductive.In the fourth chapter, Jennings sheds further light on her conjecture that attention involves the self by advancing the thesis that attention endows sensory information with meaning. On the face of it, this may sound implausible. Object recognition, reading, and many other meaning-involving processes can take place outside of attention and outside of consciousness. But Jennings has a richer notion of “meaning” in mind. She develops the idea of “subject unity,” which is imposition of structure on perception that reflects the interests of the perceiving subject. This, she claims, is what brings perception into the space of reasons. Along the way, she has interesting observations about binding, feature integration, and demonstrative reference. The material is highly original, and Jennings’s postulation of interest-based perceptual organization is compelling. At the same time, one might wonder whether interests are really relegated to the ambit of attentional control. Consider the cocktail party effect, wherein one’s own name captures attention. This implies a preattentive filter that reflects our interests. Emotionally charged words, facial expressions, and dangerous objects also work this way, and social biases can operate preattentively as well. If these reflect our interests, then meaning may arise outside attention.Jennings’s fifth chapter explores the relationship between attention and consciousness. Some authors have argued that attention is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Jennings focuses primarily on the necessity claim. She does not systematically review the empirical literature here, but she addresses some of the key findings, and effectively rebuts studies that allege to find consciousness outside attention. She does not rest her case there, however. Instead, she identifies a new class of examples that purport to establish the possibility of consciousness without attention. Her central example she calls “conscious entrainment,” which is what we experience when engaged in habitual or skilled activities. Other possible examples touched on in the chapter include hypervigilance in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), passive movie watching, dreaming, and “attentional neglect.” These states all involve intense focus, Jennings admits, but not attention. To some readers this may sound contradictory. Isn’t focus a kind of attention? Don’t these states of absorption involve stimulus selection and enhancement of relevant features, suppression of distractors, and other hallmarks of attention? Jennings says none of this is tantamount to attention. Recall that she thinks attention is controlled by the self. In these cases, we are invited to imagine that the self takes a passive role: control is either ceded to the world (movie watching) or to previously mastered routines (skills and habits). Thus, Jennings’s claim that there is no attention in these cases hangs on her contentious thesis that attention requires a controlling self. One might also push back by arguing that, in some of Jennings’s allegedly selfless examples, the self remains involved. Skilled activities and hypervigilance, for example, can reflect personal interests.Skills and hypervigilance get more airtime in chapter 6. There, Jennings turns to questions of responsibility—a neglected topic in attention research. The chapter begins with a manslaughter trial in which the teenage plaintiff was given a light sentence because the judge evidently believed that the teen’s ADHD compromised his ability to control his actions. The example may be a bit triggering for people who have a personal relationship with this diagnosis, but, putting that aside, Jennings uses it to introduce the important concept of attention-based control. With reduced control, Jennings argues, comes reduced responsibility. I am inclined to see ADHD as involving dysregulation of attention (difficulty disengaging and dividing attention, for example) rather than diminished attention, but that can still be characterized as an issue with control of attention; therefore ADHD still illustrates Jennings’s point that there is a link between responsibility and control of attention. This, it turns out, is only half of her story. Having argued for this link, one might expect Jennings to follow Wayne Wu, who contends that attention is necessary for action, and hence for responsibility. She does not. Instead, she says argues that responsibility can also arise in cases of “strategic automaticity.” This brings us back to skills. When skills are deployed, action is governed by learned pairings between stimuli and responses. The choice to exercise a skill requires attention, so attention is needed for being a responsible agent, but once a skill kicks in, attention is no longer required, and one can be held responsible for actions performed skillfully—thus attention is not required for responsibility tout court. Jennings addresses an opposing view (defended by Wu, Ellen Fridland, and Barbara Montero), according to which skills involve “automatic attention” rather than no attention. Jennings worries that this move will collapse the distinction between attention and other kinds of selection and filtering that occur throughout the nervous system, including the retina. She says that the attentional interpretation of skilled action is at odds with the lack of top-down reweighing of sensory inputs, regulated by lateral frontal cortex. These objections to automatic attention warrant response. My own view is that attention involves broadcasting to working memory, so retinal filtering is ruled out. Jennings’s insistence on top-down reweighing will not move those who believe attention can be purely bottom-up. For all that, I side with Jennings in wanting to allow for responsibility without attentional control. I think we can be responsible for implicit biases, for example. I also think attentional control is insufficient for responsibility, as when we act under duress.Jennings offers fresh perspective on the nature of attention, and its role in meaningful perception, consciousness, action, and responsibility. Each chapter can be read separately, but they hang together well, and each reflects her thesis that attention is essentially linked to the self. Though I am skeptical of that strong claim, we would do well to follow Jennings in regarding attention as interest-laden interface between mind and world. I look forward to a sequel in which attention is related to richer conceptions of identity, and where the political consequences of this link are actively explored. Meanwhile, one can hardly fault Jennings for covering too little. She tackles a remarkable range of topics, from metaphysics to ethics. Her arguments throughout demand response, repay careful study, and propel the field forward. (shrink)

Outside directors’ regular board meeting attendance is important in improving the effectiveness of a governance system. Such attendance is evidence of their commitment to the firm as key other players in monitoring and decision making. Using a unique dataset for Korean firms, and three-level random coefficients models, we find that, foreign outside directors, an independent appointment process, professional knowledge of business operations and accumulated firm-specific knowledge are important factors that affect outside directors’ attendance of board (...) meetings. The results also confirm that both outside directors’ personal characteristics and the social context are crucial in understanding their board meeting attendance. Further analysis shows that a positive corporate environment that supports the outside director system encourages outside directors’ attendance at board meetings. (shrink)

Language sample analysis is an important practice for providing a culturally sensitive and accurate assessment of a child's language abilities. A child's usage of literate language devices in narrative samples has been shown to be a critical target for evaluation. While automated scoring systems have begun to appear in the field, no such system exists for conducting progress-monitoring on literate language usage within narratives. The current study aimed to develop a hard-coded scoring system called the Literate Language (...) Use in Narrative Assessment, to automatically evaluate six aspects of literate language in non-coded narrative transcripts. LLUNA was designed to individually score six literate language elements. The interrater reliability of LLUNA with an expert scorer, as well as its' reliability compared to certified undergraduate scorers was calculated using a quadratic weighted kappa. Results indicated that LLUNA met strong levels of interrater reliability with an expert scorer on all six elements. LLUNA also surpassed the reliability levels of certified, but non-expert scorers on four of the six elements and came close to matching reliability levels on the remaining two. LLUNA shows promise as means for automating the scoring of literate language in LSA and narrative samples for the purpose of assessment and progress-monitoring. (shrink)

Automatized scalable healthcare support solutions allow real-time 24/7 health monitoring of patients, prioritizing medical treatment according to health conditions, reducing medical appointments in clinics and hospitals, and enabling easy exchange of information among healthcare professionals. With recent health safety guidelines due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protecting the elderly has become imperative. However, state-of-the-art health wearable device platforms present limitations in hardware, parameter estimation algorithms, and software architecture. This paper proposes a complete framework for health systems composed of multi-sensor wearable (...) health devices, high-resolution parameter estimation, and real-time monitoring applications. The framework is appropriate for real-time monitoring of elderly patients' health without physical contact with healthcare professionals, maintaining safety standards. The hardware includes sensors for monitoring steps, pulse oximetry, heart rate, and temperature using low-power wireless communication. In terms of parameter estimation, the embedded circuit uses high-resolution signal processing algorithms that result in an improved measure of the HR. The proposed high-resolution signal processing-based approach outperforms state-of-the-art HR estimation measurements using the photoplethysmography sensor. (shrink)

?In everday language, the word ?attention? implies control of access to consciousness, and we adopt this usage here. Attention itself can be either voluntary or automatic. This can be readily modeled in the theory. Further, a contrastive analysis of spontaneously self?attributed vs. self?alien experiences suggests that ?self? can be interpreted as the more enduring, higher levels of the dominant context hierarchy, which create continuity over the changing flow of events. Since context is by definition unconscious in GW theory, self (...) in this sense is thought to be inherently unconscious as well. This proposal is consistent with a great deal of objective evidence. However, aspects of self may become known through ?conscious self-monitoring,? a process that ??is useful for self-evaluation and self?control. The results of conscious self-monitoring are combined with self?evaluation criteria, presumably of social origin, to produce a stable ?self?concept?, which functions as a supervisory system within the larger self organization. (shrink)

AimsThis study evaluates a protocol for early, routine ethics consultation for patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to support decision-making in the context of clinical uncertainty with the aim of mitigating ethical conflict and moral distress.MethodsWe conducted a single-site qualitative analysis of EC documentation for all patients receiving ECMO support from 15 August 2018 to 15 May 2019. Detailed analysis of 20 ethically complex cases with protracted ethics involvement identifies four key ethical domains: limits of prognostication, bridge to nowhere, burden of (...) treatment and system-level concerns. There are three subthemes: relevant contextual factors, the role of EC and observed outcomes. Content analysis of transcripts from interviews with 20 members of the multidisciplinary ECMO team yields supplemental data on providers’ perceptions of the impact of the early intervention protocol.ResultsLimited outcome data for ECMO, unclear indications for withdrawal, adverse effects of treatment and an obligation to attend to programme metrics present significant ethical challenges in the care of this patient population. Upstream EC mitigates ethical conflict by setting clear expectations about ECMO as a time limited trial, promoting consistent messaging among multiple services and supporting surrogate decision-makers. When ECMO becomes a ‘bridge to nowhere’, EC facilitates decision-making that respects patient values yet successfully sets limits on non-beneficial use of this novel therapy.ConclusionData from this study support the conclusion that ECMO poses unique ethical challenges that necessitate a standardised protocol for early, routine EC—at least while this medical technology is in its nascent stages. (shrink)

Patient self-management of disease is increasingly supported by technologies that can monitor a wide range of behavioural and biomedical parameters. Incorporated into everyday devices such as cell phones and clothes, these technologies become integral to the psychosocial aspects of everyday life. Many technologies are likely to be marketed directly to families with ill members, and families may enlist the support of clinicians in shaping use. Current ethical frameworks are mainly conceptualised from the perspective of caregivers, researchers, developers and regulators in (...) order to ensure the ethics of their own practices. This paper focuses on families as autonomous decision-makers outside the regulated context of healthcare. We discuss some morally relevant issues facing families in their decisions to monitor the health-related behaviours of loved ones. An example – remote parental monitoring of adolescent blood glucose – is presented and discussed through the lens of two contrasting accounts of ethics; one reflecting the predominant focus on health outcomes within the health technology assessment (HTA) framework and the other that attends to the broader sociocultural contexts shaping technologies and their implications. Issues discussed include the focus of assessments, informed consent and child assent, and family co-creation of system characteristics and implications. The parents’ decisions to remotely monitor their child has relational implications that are likely to influence conflict levels and thus also health outcomes. Current efforts to better integrate outcome assessments with social and ethical assessments are particularly relevant for informed decision-making about health monitoring technologies in families. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires (...) two identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

Social-rank cues communicate social status or social power within and between groups. Information about social-rank is fluently processed in both visual and auditory modalities. So far, the investigation on the processing of social-rank cues has been limited to studies in which information from a single modality was assessed or manipulated. Yet, in everyday communication, multiple information channels are used to express and understand social-rank. We sought to examine the voluntary nature of processing of facial and vocal signals of social-rank using (...) a cross-modal Stroop task. In two experiments, participants were presented with face-voice pairs that were either congruent or incongruent in social-rank. Participants’ task was to label face social dominance while ignoring the voice, or label voice social dominance while ignoring the face. In both experiments, we found that face-voice incongruent stimuli were processed more slowly and less accurately than were the congruent stimuli in the face-attend and the voice-attend tasks, exhibiting classical Stroop-like effects. These findings are consistent with the functioning of a social-rank bio-behavioural system which consistently and automatically monitors one’s social standing in relation to others and uses that information to guide behaviour. (shrink)

This paper presents an approach for monitoring exercises of hand rehabilitation for post stroke patients. The developed solution uses a leap motion controller as hand-tracking device and embeds a supervised machine learning. The K-nearest neighbor methodology is adopted for automatically characterizing the physiotherapist or helper hand movement resulting a unique movement pattern that constitutes the basis of the rehabilitation process. In the second stage, an evaluation of the patients rehabilitation exercises results is compared to the movement pattern of the (...) patient and results are presented, saved and statistically analyzed. Physicians and physiotherapists monitor and assess patients’ rehabilitation improvements through a web application, furthermore, offer medical assisted rehabilitation processes through low cost technology, which can be easily exploited at home. Recorded tracked motion data and results can be used for further medical study and evaluating rehabilitation trends according to patient’s rehabilitation practice and improvement. (shrink)

This paper presents an approach for monitoring exercises of hand rehabilitation for post stroke patients. The developed solution uses a leap motion controller as hand-tracking device and embeds a supervised machine learning. The K-nearest neighbor methodology is adopted for automatically characterizing the physiotherapist or helper hand movement resulting a unique movement pattern that constitutes the basis of the rehabilitation process. In the second stage, an evaluation of the patients rehabilitation exercises results is compared to the movement pattern of the (...) patient and results are presented, saved and statistically analyzed. Physicians and physiotherapists monitor and assess patients’ rehabilitation improvements through a web application, furthermore, offer medical assisted rehabilitation processes through low cost technology, which can be easily exploited at home. Recorded tracked motion data and results can be used for further medical study and evaluating rehabilitation trends according to patient’s rehabilitation practice and improvement. (shrink)

Tested the 2-process theory of detection, search, and attention presented by the current authors in a series of experiments. The studies demonstrate the qualitative difference between 2 modes of information processing: automatic detection and controlled search; trace the course of the learning of automatic detection, of categories, and of automatic-attention responses; and show the dependence of automatic detection on attending responses and demonstrate how such responses interrupt controlled processing and interfere with the focusing of attention. The (...) learning of categories is shown to improve controlled search performance. A general framework for human information processing is proposed. The framework emphasizes the roles of automatic and controlled processing. The theory is compared to and contrasted with extant models of search and attention. (shrink)

Computation of seismic parameters and its interpretation from the recorded earthquake signal is empowered by digital data acquisition systems. This enables seismologist to automatically compute all the relevant parameters. Futuristic applications require extensive software development to implement seismic prediction and forecasting models. While developing such models, software developer prefer to write their own in-house analysis & modeling software with complete control over the required computations and models. This paper presents simplified mathematical framework of the seismic events and back-end computational software (...) logic & algorithm to provide a simple framework to software engineers develop customized seismic analysis & computation software. (shrink)

This article discusses the development and application of various types of corporate social monitoring systems. Boycotts are a relatively simple form of social monitoring system which aim to produce changes in corporate social behavior. Boycotts may be organized by a single group, or by a number of groups simultaneously. Rating systems may be organized around a single issue, such as the Sullivan Principles rating scheme, or may include multiple companies and multiple issues, such as shopping guides or (...) ethical investment systems.Monitoring systems may be unidimensional or multidimensional, qualitative or quantitative, and absolute or relative. Consumers and investors appear to be the groups most likely to be targeted in these schemes. The importance of these monitoring systems appears to be increasing as both consumers and investors become more interested in using social criteria in decision-making. (shrink)

Rivers et al. raise two ethical issues in relation to the use of medication event monitoring systems (MEMS). The first issue, identified as an 'economic' concern, centres on the waste of health resources caused by patient failure to adhere to medication programmes. The second is the danger that MEMS may pose to 'the trust that should exist between patient and prescriber'. In what follows I offer an analysis of these issues, and their relationship to each other.

In the context of the telegraphic distribution of Greenwich time, while the early experiments, the roles of successive Astronomers Royal in its expansion, and its impacts on the standardization of time in Victorian Britain have all been evaluated, the attempts of George Biddell Airy and his collaborators in constructing the Royal Observatory's time signals as the authoritative source of standard time have been underexplored within the existing historical literature. This paper focuses on the wide-ranging activities of Airy, his assistant astronomers, (...) telegraph engineers, clockmakers and others, which served to increase the reliability of the Royal Observatory's time service between the 1850s and 1870s. Airy and his collaborators aimed to mechanize and automate their telegraphic time distribution system in order to improve its accuracy and reliability. The accomplishment of such technological innovations was disseminated via public lectures, journal articles and correspondence with experts, secondary distributors of standard time and the general public. These communications were used to build public trust in the Greenwich time service. However, the unexplored archival material used in the present paper provides fresh insight into the unstable nature of the Greenwich time system, including its clear limits in terms of its scale of automation and degree of accuracy. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an Internet of Things to enhancing the experience of personal gardening as a method of therapy for mental-health patients, given a belief in its role in a person’s mood and general positivity, The proposed prototype continuously senses and monitors the state of an indoor plant through different sensors. The user is notified of the plant’s needs for water, sunlight, etc., through generated notifications from channels over cloud in-real time. Thus, we were able to successfully create (...) a humanised experience of recovery where the user can accessibly ‘talk’ with its plant through a smartphone. (shrink)

High degrees of uncertainty and a lack of effective therapeutic treatments have characterized the COVID-19 pandemic and the provision of drug products outside research settings has been controversial. International guidelines for providing patients with experimental interventions to treat infectious diseases outside of clinical trials exist but it is unclear if or how they should apply in settings where clinical trials and research are strongly regulated. We propose the Professional Oversight of Emergency-Use Interventions and Monitoring System as an alternative (...) pathway based on guidance developed for the ethical provision of experimental interventions to treat COVID-19 in Singapore. We support our proposal with justifications that establish moral duties for physicians to record outcomes data and for institutions to establish monitoring systems for reporting information on safety and effectiveness to the relevant authorities. Institutions also have a duty to support generation of evidence for what constitutes good clinical practice and so should ensure the unproven intervention is made the subject of research studies that can contribute to generalizable knowledge as soon as practical and that physicians remain committed to supporting learning health systems. We outline key differences between POEIMS and other pathways for the provision of experimental interventions in public health emergencies. (shrink)

Continued concern for animal welfare may be alleviated when welfare would be monitored on farms. Monitoring can be characterized as an information system where various stakeholders periodically exchange relevant information. Stakeholders include producers, consumers, retailers, the government, scientists, and others. Valuating animal welfare in the animal-product market chain is regarded as a key challenge to further improve the welfare of farm animals and information on the welfare of animals must, therefore, be assessed objectively, for instance, through monitoring. (...) Interviews with Dutch stakeholder representatives were conducted to identify their perceptions about the monitoring of animal welfare. Stakeholder perceptions were characterized in relation to the specific perspectives of each stakeholder. While producers tend to perceive welfare from a production point of view, consumers will use visual images derived from traditional farming and from the animals’ natural environments. Scientists’ perceptions of animal welfare are affected by the need to measure welfare with quantifiable parameters. Retailers and governments (policy makers) have views of welfare that are derived from their relationships with producers, consumers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and scientists. All interviewed stakeholder representatives stated that animal welfare is important. They varied in the extent to which they weighted economic considerations relative to concern for the animals’ welfare. Many stakeholders emphasized the importance of communication in making a monitoring system work. Overall, the perspectives for the development of a sustainable monitoring system that substantially improves farm animal welfare were assessed as being poor in the short term. However, a reliable system could be initiated under certain conditions, such as integrated chains and with influential and motivated stakeholders. A scheme is described with attention points for the development of sustainable monitoring systems for farm animal welfare in the long term. (shrink)

The Medication Event Monitoring System (MEMS) is a relatively new device designed to overcome some of the disadvantages of traditional adherence-measuring techniques. MEMS has also been found useful in tracking adherence behaviour without the need to visit patients frequently. In this study each patient was given a pre-filled, labelled MEMS bottle and cap. Patients were monitored for 24 weeks. For patients specifically studied, there were periods when drug levels may have been low and some exhibited erratic medication-taking behaviour. (...) It is concluded that MEMS can measure adherence behaviour objectively, and so might be used to improve prescribing decisions, identify drug wastage and improve carer support. Further research is needed before the routine use of electronic medication monitoring can be recommended. (shrink)

For a better detection in Network information security monitoring system, the author proposes a method based on adaptive depth detection. A deep belief network was designed and implemented, and the intrusion detection system model was combined with a support vector machine. The data set adopts the NSL-KDD network communication data set, and this data set is authoritative in the security field. Redundant cleaning, data type conversion, normalization, and other processing operations are performed on the data set. Using (...) the data conversion method based on the probability mass function probability mass function coding, a standard data set with low redundancy and low dimensionality can be obtained. Research indicates that when the batch size reaches 64, the accuracy of the test set reaches its maximum value. As the batch size increases, the accuracy first increases and then decreases. When the batch size continues to increase, the model will inevitably fall into the local optimal state, resulting in the degradation of the detection performance of the system. In terms of the false alarm rate, the DBN-SVM model is also the highest; however, it is only 10.73%. Under the premise of increasing the detection rate, the false alarm rate is improved; for the overall detection performance of the model, it is within an acceptable range. In terms of accuracy, the DBN-SVM model also scored the highest. The accuracy rate is the ratio of normal and correct classification for intrusion detection. It can explain the detection ability of the model. In summary, the overall detection ability of the DBN-SVM model is the best. The good classification ability to use SVM is proved, and the classification of low-dimensional features is expected to increase the detection rate of the system. (shrink)

In this paper, through research and analysis of the communication network of the physical activity monitoring system, we combine wearable technology and identification technology and design a physical health monitoring bracelet that integrates multifaceted physical data collection and effective identity matching function. We match the identity through the chip and collect the physical fitness data generated in the process of exercise and centralized test by the sensor in real-time. Finally, the data transmission is realized through the WIFI (...) communication function to achieve the purpose of monitoring physical exercise and improving physical quality. To ensure the continuity and stability of information transmission, the joint transmission method of direct transmission and indirect transmission is essential. Besides, considering the energy causality limitation of sensor nodes and relay nodes, a collaborative transmission model of wireless body area network based on wireless cognitive network is constructed. And, a power allocation algorithm based on maximum ratio merging and wireless cognitive network is proposed, which puts forward a new idea for the future research of wireless body area network resource allocation. (shrink)

This paper describes an automatic monitoring system that constantly checks partial update in Web pages and notifies them to a user. While one of the most important advantages of the WWW is update of Web pages, we need to constantly check them out and this task takes much cognitive load. Thus applications to automatically check update of Web pages have been developed, however they can not deal with partial update like update in a particular cell in a (...) table in a Web page. Hence we developed a automatic monitoring system that checks such partial update. A user can give a system regions in which he/she wants to know the update in a Web page as training examples, and it is able to learn rules to identify the partial update by classification learning. By this learning, a user do not need to directly describe the rules. We implemented our system and some executed examples were presented. (shrink)

The Internet of Things is an emerging information industry. Applying the information collection, transmission, and processing technologies in the Internet of Things technology to environmental monitoring, environmental emergency, and other environmental protection supervision fields will greatly improve the speed and accuracy of environmental supervision and facilitate the scientific development of environmental protection. Through the Internet of Things, people can obtain a large amount of reliable real-time information, and it is not easy to be affected by time, place, and environment, (...) while the wireless sensor network has the advantages of easy installation and low cost, so environmental monitoring through the Internet of Things is the future development trend. In this paper, in view of the current situation of water scarcity and serious water pollution in China, combined with the development trend and advantages of the Internet of Things, and based on the inadequacy of the existing microbial sensor data collection equipment, we propose a design scheme of microbial concentration monitoring system for waters based on IoT. The system is based on Zig Bee wireless sensor network to build a common data acquisition platform and design special hardware to carry out high-precision microbial sensor data acquisition in water and through the PC to complete the real-time measurement data storage, waveform display, and data processing. In this paper, the schematic diagram and PCB board design of the system hardware module NUC120 main control board, CC2530 RF board, Wi-Fi wireless communication module, and high-precision ADC acquisition module are completed and fabricated. Then, the four modules are combined to realize the development of the data aggregation node and data acquisition node of the dedicated Zig Bee wireless network hardware device. (shrink)

Landslide is a critical natural geological hazard that causes severe damage to property, infrastructure, and humans. In general, some location-specific factors trigger a landslide. Wireless sensor network is an enabling technology to monitor most of the parameters associated with these factors. A challenge in landslide monitoring through WSN is that each sensed data item might be critical whereas the underlying wireless communication is often unreliable. In case of landslides, the terrains have irregular shapes, providing harsh conditions for wireless communication (...) thereby more data loss may be expected. This study focuses on the effect of lossy communication in WSN on the efficiency and accuracy of landslide monitoring systems. To this end, collaborative local data analysis is used to enable each node to decide locally whether its sensed data corresponds to a potential event-of-interest. Through extensive simulations, the performance of various landslide prediction and detection models has been evaluated. By and large, the study lets a significant insight into landslide monitoring before implementing a parameterized application for real-world deployment. (shrink)

We design and implement an intelligent IoT-based motion monitoring system to realize the monitoring of three important parameters, namely, the type of movement, the number of movements, and the period of movement in physical activities, and optimize the system to support the simultaneous use by multiple users. Considering the motion monitoring scenario for smart fit, the framework of an IoT-based motion monitoring system is proposed. The framework contains components such as active acquisition nodes, (...) wireless access points, data processing servers, and terminals. In terms of algorithm optimization, research related to active pattern recognition and periodic calculation methods is conducted. For active pattern recognition, two types of classification algorithms with different complexity are proposed based on Support Vector Machine and deep neural networks, respectively, to adapt to scenarios with different computational capabilities. For period calculation, a method based on over-zero detection and wavelet transform is proposed to count the number of actions and calculate the period of each action. In 100 times action cycle calculation experiments, the count statistic calculation method achieves 100% calculation accuracy and the active cycle calculation results are close to the real value, which proves the effectiveness of the cycle calculation method. The system provides a multiuser-oriented communication method and realizes accurate and reliable human movement monitoring, which has a wide application prospect in the fields of physical education and rehabilitation training. (shrink)

The article first proposes a reflection on the status quo of classroom teaching in public universities, selects a large number of educational scenes, and analyzes these selected educational concepts in detail from a theoretical perspective. Through the establishment of a teaching quality monitoring system based on careful observation and analysis, several major problems in public university classrooms have been discovered: poor classroom interaction mode, single classroom interaction mode, low classroom interaction efficiency, and inefficient classroom interaction feedback. Specific manifestations (...) include the alienation of teacher–student relationship, insufficient student coverage, lack of interaction channels, lack of interaction context, only formalized teacher–student interaction, low impact, and simplification of teacher–student interaction. Summarizing the causes of classroom interaction problems, the article summarizes three factors: teachers, students, and the macro environment. In the experiment, 85% of the students thought that the teacher–student relationship was relatively ordinary. Among the 11 students who participated in the experiment, 60% of the students were very active in interactive classroom discussions. Therefore, based on the analysis of problems and factors, the article puts forward an optimization strategy to create a classroom interaction atmosphere, improve classroom interaction mode, improve classroom interaction efficiency, and strengthen classroom interaction feedback. In particular, it promotes the integration of teacher–student relationship, emphasizes the role of students, improves the level of classroom interaction, creates conditions for classroom interaction, improves teacher–student interaction control ability, enhances student interactive speech ability, strengthens error correction and feedback, and increases multiple feedback methods. (shrink)

Following the widespread occurrence of birth defects from the use of thalidomide to treat nausea during pregnancy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Food and Drug Administration became particularly vigilant about the use of therapeutic agents during pregnancy and in women of childbearing potential. The FDA developed a list that categorizes an agent according to the known risks to a fetus. The drug thalidomide falls into Category X: agents that have demonstrated clear risk of fetal abnormalities and whose risks outweigh (...) the benefits of use during pregnancy.Another Category X drug is isotretinoin, commonly known by its trade name Accutane. Isotretinoin is an oral medication prescribed for severe recalcitrant, nodular acne in patients who are unresponsive to conventional therapy. Isotretinoin has been available since 1982, and it remains the only effective treatment for this condition. (shrink)

The United States Food and Drug Administration , in collaboration with pharmaceutical manufacturers, have recently implemented a heavily revised risk-management program for patients on isotretinoin , a drug with known and pronounced teratogenic effects. This revised risk management plan places significant burdens on both providers and patients in the hopes of achieving its goal of reducing fetal exposure to isotretinoin. The main focus of this paper is to discuss the burdens of various aspects of the program in relationship to potential (...) corresponding benefits. In particular, we evaluate the pregnancy rates of women on isotretinoin therapy compared with that of the general population and the rate changes based on the risk management programs. Additionally, we investigate whether the benefits of the program for women have increased as the benefits have risen. We devote special attention to the ethical implications of the intent of the program and to an analysis of the ethical justification of the restrictions placed on women of childbearing potential as it compares to the risk-benefit relationship of using isotretinoin. (shrink)

Research on automatic attention to emotional faces offers mixed results. Therefore we examined validity effects for facial expressions of different emotions with a dot-probe paradigm in seven studies. Systematic variations of type of emotion, CTI, task, cue size, and masking allow for a differentiated assessment of attentional capture by emotions and possible moderating factors. Results indicate a general absence of emotional validity effects as well as a lack of significant interactions with either of the manipulated factors, indicating that facial (...) expressions of emotions do not capture attention in a fully automatic fashion. These findings suggest that situational and contextual factors have to be taken into account when investigating attentional capture of emotional faces. (shrink)

Privacy issues are frequently discussed amongst researchers, practitioners and patients in healthcare. However, psychiatric patients’ privacy issues get less attention in information system development (ISD), whereby they are one of the most important stakeholders. This paper applies Carew and Stapleton’s ISD privacy framework to psychiatric monitoring systems to understand the issues that are related to monitoring psychiatric patients’ behaviour. By understanding the privacy issues amongst patients, the research will be able to provide guidance to system developers (...) to produce a privacy-sensitive system that can contribute to the system engineering for international stability. We will elaborate each factor in the framework (physical, social, psychological and informational) and then explain the relationship to the privacy of psychiatric patient. (shrink)

This paper proposes a third meditation-category—automatic self-transcending— to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automaticself-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the monitoring process. Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG. Focused attention, (...) characterized by beta/gamma activity, included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist, Buddhist, and Chinese traditions. Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions. Automaticself-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic and Chinese traditions. Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects. (shrink)

Digital Pills are an innovative drug-device technology that permits to combine traditional medications with a monitoring system that automatically records data about medication adherence as well as patients’ physiological data. Although DP are a promising innovation in the field of digital medicine, their use has also raised a number of ethical concerns. These ethical concerns, however, have been expressed principally from a theoretical perspective, whereas an ethical analysis with a more empirically oriented approach is lacking. There is also (...) a lack of clarity about the empirical evidence available concerning the application of this innovative digital medicine. To map the studies where DP have been tested on patients and discuss the ethically relevant issues evident therein, we performed a scoping review of the empirical literature concerning DP. Our search allowed us to identify 18 papers reporting on studies where DP were tested on patients. These included studies with different designs and involving patients with a variety of conditions. In the empirical literature, a number of issues with ethical relevance were evident. At the patient level, the ethical issues include users’ interaction with DP, personal sphere, health-related risks and patients’ benefits. At the provider level, ethically relevant issues touch upon the doctor-patient relationship and the question of data access. At the societal level, they concern the benefits to society, the quality of evidence and the dichotomy device-medicine. We conclude that evidence concerning DP is not robust and that more research should be performed and study results made available to evaluate this digital medicine. Moreover, our analysis of the ethically relevant aspects within empirical literature underscores that there are concrete and specific open questions that should be tackled in the ethical discussion about this new technological solution. (shrink)

A learning health system (LHS) seeks to establish a closer connection between clinical care and research and establishes new responsibilities for healthcare providers as well as patients. A new set of technological approaches in medication adherence monitoring can potentially yield valuable data within an LHS, and raises the question of the scope and limitations of patients’ responsibilities to use them. We argue here that, in principle, it is plausible to suggest that patients have a prima facie obligation to (...) use novel adherence monitors. However, the strength of the obligations depends considerably on the extent to which data that adherence monitors generate are, in fact, used to further the goals of LHSs. The way in which data ownership is structured in the USA poses a considerable challenge here, while the European Union framework offers a more promising alternative. (shrink)

To shorten the travel time and improve comfort, the automatic train driving system is considered to replace manual driving. In this article, an automatic control method of computer application data-processing system based on artificial intelligence is proposed. An automatic train operation (ATO) introduced the structure and function of an autopilot system (train), optimized the train running on the target curve, introduced the basic principle of fuzzy generalized predictive control (PC) algorithm, and combined with the (...) characteristics of ATO system design the speed controller based on optimization algorithm, the target curve to make use of the designed controller to track and simulation validation. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that when the train runs to 90 s, the displacement difference reaches about 40 m, which proves that the fuzzy PC has better displacement tracking, punctual arrival, and higher stopping accuracy. (shrink)