Continuous, long-term (up to 10 days) electrophysiological monitoring using hybrid intracranial electrodes is an emerging tool for presurgical epilepsy evaluation and fundamental investigations of ...seizure generation. Detection of high-frequency oscillations and microseizures could provide valuable insights into causes and therapies for the treatment of epilepsy, but requires high spatial and temporal resolution. Our group is currently using hybrid arrays composed of up to 320 micro- and clinical macroelectrode arrays sampled at 32 kHz per channel with 18-bits of A/D resolution. Such recordings produce approximately 3 terabytes of data per day. Existing file formats have limited data compression capabilities, and do not offer mechanisms for protecting patient identifying information or detecting data corruption during transmission or storage. We present a novel file format that employs range encoding to provide a high degree of data compression, a three-tiered 128-bit encryption system for patient information and data security, and a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check to verify the integrity of compressed data blocks. Open-source software to read, write, and process these files are provided.
Current referral practice for ultrasonically detected fetal abnormalities contributes to parental anxiety, inconvenience to patients, diagnostic inaccuracy, and general service inefficiency. To ...determine whether telemedicine would reduce these disadvantages, we established a 30-channel ISDN link between a district general hospital on an island and a subspecialty referral centre approximately 120 km away on mainland Britain. Live ultrasound images of the fetus were transmitted in realtime from a commercial scanner in the hospital using a total data transfer rate of 2 Mbit/s. After decompression at the receiving end, there was almost no perceptible loss of picture quality or frame rate. This report describes the technical aspects of the link and our preliminary experience with it. In the first two months of its operation, the link worked well and the consultants who used it found themselves confidently making diagnoses and carrying out counselling over it. If confirmed, the success of this technology has implications for future referral practice in fetal medicine.
Particle size distribution measurements were made at a coastal site in the United Kingdom. These are presented, and the behavior of recently formed ultrafine particles is discussed. No ultrafine ...particles were observed in maritime air masses; however, 3 to 7 nm particles were frequently observed at enhanced concentrations when the wind direction was from the land. Their formation was favored at lower temperatures, when 1 ppbv or more of SO2 was present and in air masses that had not been aged extensively. On days when enhanced ultrafine particle concentrations were observed, 3 nm particles increased sharply in the morning, approximately 30 to 90 min after the UV solar flux first increased. By early afternoon the ultrafine particle concentration had returned to background levels. Rapid measurements of 5 nm particles showed no correlation with turbulence parameters, although the boundary layer mixing scales were similar to growth times of freshly nucleated particles to 5 nm diameter. However, ultrafine particle concentrations do correlate with the availability of sulfuric acid vapor. A delay of approximately an hour between the increase of H2SO4, in the morning and a large increase in ultrafine particle concentrations is due to the growth of particles to observable sizes, not the nucleation process itself. An analysis of the timescales for growth showed that coagulation may be important immediately after the particles have nucleated but its effectiveness reduces as number concentration falls. Conversely, growth by condensation is initially slow due to the Kelvin effect but increases in importance as the particles reach observable sizes. (Author)
A subset of ultraluminous X-ray sources (those with luminosities < 10^40 erg/s) are thought to be powered by the accretion of gas onto black holes with masses of ~5-20 M_solar, probably via an ...accretion disc. The X-ray and radio emission are coupled in such Galactic sources, with the radio emission originating in a relativistic jet thought to be launched from the innermost regions near the black hole, with the most powerful emission occurring when the rate of infalling matter approaches a theoretical maximum (the Eddington limit). Only four such maximal sources are known in the Milky Way, and the absorption of soft X-rays in the interstellar medium precludes determining the causal sequence of events that leads to the ejection of the jet. Here we report radio and X-ray observations of a bright new X-ray source whose peak luminosity can exceed 10^39 erg/s in the nearby galaxy, M31. The radio luminosity is extremely high and shows variability on a timescale of tens of minutes, arguing that the source is highly compact and powered by accretion close to the Eddington limit onto a stellar mass black hole. Continued radio and X-ray monitoring of such sources should reveal the causal relationship between the accretion flow and the powerful jet emission.
Holyoak Keith James,Glass Arnold Lewis,Bower Gordon H. Les processus de décision dans la mémoire sémantique. In: Bulletin de psychologie, tome 29, numéro spécial, 1976. Spécial annuel 1976 : La ...mémoire sémantique. pp. 92-101.
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