There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure

Arthur Chickering is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Memphis State University. On leave from the Directorship of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Memphis State, he is Visiting Professor at George Mason University. Zelda Gamson is a sociologist who holds appointments at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education: Faculty Inventory. Institutional Inventory.

There is no escaping fact that a huge amount of unexploited resources lies underwater which covers almost 70% of the Earth. Yet, the aquatic world has mainly been unaffected by the recent advances in the area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their pervasive penetration in modern day research and industrial development. The current pace of research in the area of underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is slow due to the difficulties arising in transferring the state-of-the-art WSNs to their underwater equivalent. Maximum underwater deployments rely on acoustics for enabling communication combined with special sensors having the capacity to take on harsh environment of the oceans. However, sensing and subsequent transmission tend to vary as per different subsea environments; for example, deep sea exploration requires altogether a different approach for communication as compared to shallow water communication. This paper particularly focuses on comprehensively gathering most recent developments in UWSN applications and their deployments. We have classified the underwater applications into five main classes, namely, monitoring, disaster, military, navigation, and sports, to cover the large spectrum of UWSN. The applications are further divided into relevant subclasses. We have also shown the challenges and opportunities faced by recent deployments of UWSN.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2015/896832

Underwater sensor network applications: a comprehensive survey

Electronic-nose (e-nose) instruments, derived from numerous types of aroma-sensor technologies, have been developed for a diversity of applications in the broad fields of agriculture and forestry. Recent advances in e-nose technologies within the plant sciences, including improvements in gas-sensor designs, innovations in data analysis and pattern-recognition algorithms, and progress in material science and systems integration methods, have led to significant benefits to both industries. Electronic noses have been used in a variety of commercial agricultural-related industries, including the agricultural sectors of agronomy, biochemical processing, botany, cell culture, plant cultivar selections, environmental monitoring, horticulture, pesticide detection, plant physiology and pathology. Applications in forestry include uses in chemotaxonomy, log tracking, wood and paper processing, forest management, forest health protection, and waste management. These aroma-detection applications have improved plant-based product attributes, quality, uniformity, and consistency in ways that have increased the efficiency and effectiveness of production and manufacturing processes. This paper provides a comprehensive review and summary of a broad range of electronic-nose technologies and applications, developed specifically for the agriculture and forestry industries over the past thirty years, which have offered solutions that have greatly improved worldwide agricultural and agroforestry production systems.

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Diverse Applications of Electronic-Nose Technologies in Agriculture and Forestry

There is an increasing need for environmental measurement systems to further science and thereby lead to improved policies for sustainable management. Marine environments are particularly hostile and extremely difficult for deploying sensitive measurement systems. As a consequence the need for data is greatest in marine environments, particularly in the developing economies/regions. Expense is typically the most significant limiting factor in the number of measurement systems that can be deployed, although technical complexity and the consequent high level of technical skill required for deployment and servicing runs a close second. This paper describes the Smart

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SEMAT — The Next Generation of Inexpensive Marine Environmental Monitoring and Measurement Systems

A worldwide demographic shift is in progress and the aged population proportion is projected to more than double across the next four decades. Our current healthcare models may not be adequate to handle this shift in demography, which may have serious consequences for the ageing population who are more prone to chronic diseases. One proposed remediation is to provide in-home assisted healthcare with technology-intervened approaches. Telemedicine, telehealth, e-health are paradigms found in scientific literature that provide clinical treatment through a technology intervention. In evidence-based medical science, these technology interventions are evaluated through clinical trials, which are targeted to measure improvements in medical conditions and the treatment's cost effectiveness. However, effectiveness of a technology also depends on the interaction pattern between the technology and its' users, especially the patients. This paper presents (1) a meta-synthesis of clinical trials for technology-intervened treatments of type 2 diabetes and (2) the Clinical User-Experience Evaluation (CUE). CUE is a recommendation for future telemedicine clinical trials that focuses on the patient as the user from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective and was developed as part of this research. The clinical trials reviewed were interpreted from a technology perspective and the non-medical or non-biological improvements of the users (patients) rather than the medical outcome. Results show that technology-intervened treatments provide positive behavior changes among patients and are potentially highly beneficial for chronic illness management such as type 2 diabetes. The results from the CUE method show how it complements clinical trials to capture patients' interaction with a technology.

/pdf/a-meta-synthesis-of-behavioral-outcomes-from-telemedicine-2jvfb7ywv0.pdf

A Meta-Synthesis of Behavioral Outcomes from Telemedicine Clinical Trials for Type 2 Diabetes and the Clinical User-Experience Evaluation (CUE)

Flexible online delivery of tertiary ICT programs is experiencing rapid growth. Creating an online environment that develops team building and interpersonal skills is difficult due to factors such as student isolation and the individual-centric model of online learning that encourages discrete study rather than teamwork. Incorporating teamwork into classes can be problematic due to uneven effort of group members, getting everyone to participate and making sure everyone is actually contributing in the team. Despite this, employers still state that a key learning objective of ICT graduates is the ability to work in team environments as this mirrors work force requirements. This paper presents a discussion of preliminary findings from a pilot study to determine best practices for developing interpersonal skills for students while working in virtual groups using synchronous and asynchronous online technologies.

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Cultivating ICT students' interpersonal soft skills in online learning environments using traditional active learning techniques

Current designs of modern office workplaces focus on health and safety standards but minimally address worker comfort and satisfaction. However, physical and mental wellness indicators directly affect the output of the worker according to existing studies that illustrate the strong relationship between workplace conditions and productivity. Personal and environmental sensed data can inform smarter workplace design and operations to potentially increase productivity and benefit all stakeholders in the modern workplace. This paper introduces a project that will measure environmental variables and personal physical and mental parameters of employees in different office environments to determine correlations with productivity. In-vivo measurements are obtained via a combination of environmental sensor modules and personal monitoring devices that record the interplay between variables affecting comfort and productivity in a workplace. The office spaces included in the study vary in age, heating/cooling management systems and the internal environmental efficiency of the buildings' design. This paper presents the pilot study that obtained bio-metric data from body area network sensors for each participant and environmental data on the state for workplace including thermal, humidity and light measurements. The participants were given self-reflective micro-surveys on productivity during the time of data collection. The preliminary results indicate that despite climate controlled conditions (i.e., a sealed air conditioned building), natural variance and sub-optimal conditions directly affected reported productivity.

Sensor networks in workplaces: Correlating comfort and productivity

Geological visualisation while working in the field often requires expensive specialised equipment that is conventionally hard to master. Knowledge and prior experience of the specific techniques and formats used by the different devices is required to create data. This paper presents a new method that applies Augmented Reality (AR) with generic smart phones and tablets to view existing geological data sets. AR is an emerging technology that is a synthesised hybrid between the virtual world and the real world. Here, this method negates the need to understand mapping techniques when referencing three-dimensional (3D) models to the above ground terrain. Geologists can explore subterranean phenomenon with datasets visually laid accurately over the environment so the need to reference diagrams and maps to the physical world while in the field is no longer necessary. Geologists can see data as though it were part of the environment, analogous to giving them x-ray vision in the field. We present a prototype that can be applied in fields of education or as device to assist the mining industry to enhance understanding of subterranean geological structures. For example, volcanic structures, faults and fractures can be seen as they would appear from the surface or mine data such as tunnels, ventilation, ore bodies and rock types. AR techniques used for geological visualisation in the field is a new application area with potential for wider commercial applications.

Trina Myers

Papers

SEMAT — The Next Generation of Inexpensive Marine Environmental Monitoring and Measurement Systems

A Meta-Synthesis of Behavioral Outcomes from Telemedicine Clinical Trials for Type 2 Diabetes and the Clinical User-Experience Evaluation (CUE)

Cultivating ICT students' interpersonal soft skills in online learning environments using traditional active learning techniques

Sensor networks in workplaces: Correlating comfort and productivity

Geological Visualisation with Augmented Reality