Epidemiological monitoring in the vicinity of a coal-fired power plant

An epidemiological monitoring program has been designed and put into operation in response to a health monitoring requirement of a permit to build a coal-fired power plant. It will consist of four 350 megawatt units and is being built on the Mediterranean coast about halfway between Tel-Aviv and Haifa; the first unit became operational in 1981.The resident population within a 10 km. radius consists of about 69,000 persons. The permit to build this power plant required the installation of a comprehensive monitoring network including environmental, health and agricultural monitoring. Four types of studies are included in the epidemiological monitoring program: mortality analyses, monitoring of requests for health services, studies of pulmonary symptoms and lung function in school children, and panel studies of children and adults with chronic pulmonary conditions. Areas of maximal expected exposure risk and two other comparable areas of lesser risk were chosen, based on expected emissions, meteorological and topographical considerations; baseline data were gathered for a year prior to the operation of the first unit of the power plant. Subsequent data are planned to be collected for another 10 years. The program permits detection of short-term effects based on increases in health service requests, medium-term effects by repeat examination of panelists, and long-term effects based on pulmonary conditions among school children. The initial survey, before plant operations showed, among other things, lower flow rates for children in the area expected to have medium levels of exposure.     

America cannot afford to abandon its cities

When and where is local development not possible? When should places be assisted in their decline? When should they be enabled to develop? In this article I argue that public authorities should rarely give up on economic development in neighbourhoods, cities and regions that have been damaged by decline and decay. Such equitable policy is the decent thing to do, it protects even those who are better off, and in the long run it is efficient for the whole society. Using examples mainly from the United States, the paper argues that public policy often pushes in the opposite direction, working to make poor places and poor people invisible and to subsidize precisely those who need assistance the least. Better policies are available, but they are complicated politically and global trends mitigate against them.     

Sex, temperament, and family context: How the interaction of early factors differentially predict adolescent alcohol use and are mediated by proximal adolescent factors.

Adolescent alcohol use is common and has serious immediate and long-term ramifications. While concurrent individual and context factors are robustly associated with adolescent alcohol use, the influence of early childhood factors, particularly in interaction with child sex, are less clear. Using a prospective community sample of 362 (190 girls), this study investigated sex differences in the joint influence of distal childhood and proximal adolescent factors on Grade 10 alcohol use. All risk factors and two-way early individual-by-context interactions, and interactions of each of these with child sex, were entered into the initial regression. Significant sex interactions prompted the use of separate models for girls and boys. In addition to the identification of early (family socioeconomic status, authoritative parenting style) and proximal adolescent (mental health symptoms, deviant friends) risk factors for both girls and boys, results highlighted important sex differences. In particular, girls with higher alcohol consumption at Grade 10 were distinguished by the interaction of early temperamental disinhibition and exposure to parental stress; boys with higher alcohol consumption at Grade 10 were distinguished primarily by early temperamental negative affect. Results have implications for the timing and type of interventions offered to adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

FieldMAP: A Spatiotemporal Field Monitoring Application Prototyping Framework

The fundamental aim of monitoring is to identify abnormalities in the observed phenomena and allow inference of the likely cause. Faced with the common problems of spatially irregular sensor distribution and intermittent sensor measurement availability, key to fulfilling the monitoring aim is filling in the spatiotemporal gaps in the data. While wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technology, combined with microelectromechanical systems availability potentially offer sensing solutions for a variety of application domains, in the context of monitoring applications a conceptual shift is needed from currently available, point-measurement-based ldquosense-and-sendrdquo systems toward the provision of phenomena field representations, in real time, enabling effective visualization of the spatiotemporal patterns. This paper argues the case for a generic, rapid prototyping framework for end-to-end sensing systems that support the approach of providing field representations for visualization. A formal approach to framework development was taken, ensuring that resulting instrumentation systems are well specified. Both the framework development and its evaluation are linked to the full cycle of requirements setting, design, and deployment of a prototype instrumentation system for aerospace applications-specifically, health monitoring of a gas turbine engine. The field monitoring application prototyping (FieldMAP) framework supports multimodal sensing, provides a number of opportunities for data processing and information extraction, caters for monitoring of the instrumentation health, offers a modular field-mapping design component and allows for real-time phenomena visualization, data and information logging, and postanalysis. Experience with the FieldMAP has shown that sophisticated and robust prototypes can be developed in a short period of time.     

Dealing with Prosody in a Text-to-Speech System

The task of assigning appropriate intonation to syntheticspeech is one that requires knowledge of linguistic structure as well ascomputational possibilities. This paper surveys the basic challengesfacing the designer of a text-to-speech system, and reviews some of theperspectives on these problems that have been developed in thelinguistic literature.     

Gaussian beam techniques for illuminating reflector antennas

Simple design procedures are presented for use when a Gaussian beam is used to illuminate a classical reflector antenna. Displacement of the location of the beamwaist toward the focusing element in the case of electrically small antennas where the aperture is in the near field of the feed was calculated together with modification of the required beamwaist radius. Dual reflector antennas were discussed and design procedures appropriate for systems with large and small focal length to diameter ratio developed. Cases where a reflector or subreflector is electrically small, or in the near field of a feed, are readily treated. For elliptical beam antennas, a simple illumination system using only a scalar horn and a single cylindrical lens can generally be found; this has no ray optics analogue. A configuration of this type is discussed, with a practical case study of a 28-by-80-λ elliptical Cassegrain antenna operating at a wavelength of 3 mm. The design process for designing the feed system is discussed in detail. Despite the small size and relatively large aperture blockage, an aperture efficiency of 0.48 was measured, which compared quite well with the expected efficiency of 0.53, thus verifying the validity of the Gaussian beam design approach     

Automatic Creation of Object Hierarchies for Ray Tracing

Intersection calculations dominate the run time of canonical ray tracers. A common algorithm to reduce the number of intersection tests required is the intersection of rays with a tree of extents, rather than the whole database of objects. A shortcoming of this method is that these trees are difficult to generate. Additionally, manually generated trees can be poor, greatly reducing the run-time improvement available. We present methods for evaluation of these trees in approximate number of intersection calculations required and for automatic generation of good trees. These methods run in O(nlogn) expected time where n is the number of objects in the scene. We report some examples of speedups.     

Dartmouth Medical School bicentennial

To investigate the regulation of cell-to-cell coupling in myocardial ischaemia, the three-dimensional expression of connexin43 (Cx43) during experimental ischaemia was examined using a confocal laser scanning microscope. After induction of myocardial infarction in rats, serial optical sections were obtained from the left ventricular myocardium at various times (3 h to 60 days after ligation). The expression of Cx43 was detected immunohistochemically with FITC-labelled anti-rat Cx43 antibody. Fluorescent dots of Cx43 remained along the intercalated disc and decreased in number around the infarct up to 12 h after ligation. Cx43-expression disappeared completely within 48 h after ligation. After day 4, and especially on days 8 and 15 after ligation, the edges of the cardiomyocytes bordering the infarcted area manifested numerous sarcoplasmic tentacles that reacted positively to anti-desmin antibody. Distinct expression of Cx43 was observed extensively on the tentacles, although no cardiomyocytes remained viable around them. By day 60 after ligation, atypical expression of Cx43 had disappeared. These findings suggest that ischaemia induces temporally abnormal expression of Cx43, which might be responsible for abnormal conduction around the infarct.     

On the capacity of the vector MAC with feedback

In this correspondence, we determine the feedback capacity region of a two user Gaussian multiple-access channel (MAC) with multiple antennas at the base station and a single antenna at each user. The vector MAC with a single antenna at the base station and multiple antennas at each user is shown to be equivalent to a scalar MAC. We also determine the capacity enhancement due to feedback at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the scalar and vector MAC for any number of users. Extensions of the high SNR results to the vector broadcast channel are also provided.