For the last decade, I've been studying the topic of the driving impairment of smartphones. While this began as an exclusively academic project, it has increasingly compelled public engagement. One example of this came in an opinion piece I wrote in 2018 in response to a new traffic law. I take the opportunity here to fill out the academic backstory of this particular op-ed, reflect on how this larger project has evolved to include an unanticipated public-facing edge, and abstract some lessons about public writing.
Digitale Anwendungen werden im Gesundheitsbereich immer wichtiger. Die Arbeit leistet einen Betrag zur Untersuchung von eHealth-Anwendungen im praktischen Einsatz. Am Beispiel der Rehabilitation von Prostatakrebspatienten wird die Implementierung in den klinischen Alltag präsentiert. Der 'Beckenbodentrainer' verwendet Hypervideos, um Patienten bei der Durchführung therapeutischer Übungen zu unterstützen. Die Entwicklung basiert auf Theorien und Prinzipien zum Lernen mit multimedialen und interaktiven Medien, die in der Gesundheitskommunikation bisher wenig rezipiert wurden. In mehreren Studien wurden die Wirkungen der medialen Aufbereitung und der Hyperstruktur mit Patienten der Klinik untersucht. Hierbei waren insbesondere die Entwicklung der Nutzungsmuster, die Usability und der Wissenserwerb bei einer langfristigen Nutzung von Interesse. Insgesamt bestätigen die Ergebnisse, dass sich eHealth-Anwendungen auf Basis von Hypervideos für das untersuchte Anwendungsszenario eignen.
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Seit 2009 werden bei telefonisch durchgeführten wissenschaftlichen Markt- und Meinungsumfragen die Anrufe nicht mehr anonym durchgeführt, sondern die Rufnummer wird sichtbar übertragen. Diese Rückrufnummer kann von potentiellen Befragungspersonen angerufen werden, um Informationen über Sinn und Zweck des Anrufs, das Institut und die geplante Umfrage zu erhalten. Darüber hinaus besteht die Möglichkeit sich mit einem Ansprechpartner des Projektes verbinden zu lassen. Inwieweit diese Möglichkeit zur vorhergehenden oder auch nachträglichen Informationsgewinnung oder Recherche überhaupt genutzt wird, wird in diesem Beitrag auf der Datenbasis durchgeführter Telefonumfragen analysiert; mit dem Ergebnis, dass die überwiegende Mehrheit der Kontaktierten keine Veranlassung sah auf den eingegangenen Anruf mit einem Rückruf zu reagieren. Wenn Personen reagierten, legten sie mehrheitlich nach den ersten Sätzen des Ansagetextes den Hörer auf. Nur ein geringer Teil hörte sich den Ansagetext länger als 40 Sekunden an und nutzte per Tastendruck die Möglichkeit sich näher zu informieren oder sich mit einem Mitarbeiter verbinden zu lassen.
Before conducting a survey, researchers frequently ask themselves how large the resulting sample of respondents needs to be to answer their research questions. In this guideline, we discuss how sample size calculation is affected by the sampling design. We give practical advice on how to conduct sample size calculation for complex samples.
Of all the smartphone uses, the calling function is probably used the least. Rather, individuals more commonly use their smartphone for surfing the web, checking Facebook, and playing games. Highlighting the "smart" in smartphone, these phones often know more about their users' daily activities than the users. Without requiring any sort of input, smartphones can tell the user how many steps they walk each day, when it is time to leave for work (also, of course, determining the traveling time with the most up-to-date traffic reports), and when an item recently ordered on Amazon will be delivered. Smartphone users may instinctively know that they could dig into their phones' settings and turn off these features. They may also know that if their phones are telling them information about their daily activities, they are likely sharing that same information with third parties—targeted advertisements come to mind. Of course, all of the downloaded "apps" had some sort of agreement that the user probably did not read and just clicked "yes." The reality is that people enjoy the conveniences offered by smartphones and give little thought to any privacy implications. In practice, it seems smartphone users are willing to trade their privacy to play Angry Birds.
"Surveys often contain sensitive questions, that is, questions about private, illegal, or socially undesirable behavior. When asked directly in standard survey modes, respondents tend to underreport these behaviors, yielding biased results. One method that promises more valid estimates than direct questioning (DQ) is the item count technique (ICT). In this paper, methodological benefits and disadvantages of the ICT, as compared to DQ, are empirically evaluated with regard to questions on self-reported delinquency. We present findings from a face-to-face survey of 552 respondents who had been convicted under criminal law prior to the survey. The results show that, first, subjective measures of survey quality such as trust in anonymity or willingness to respond are not affected positively by the ICT with the exception that interviewers feel less uncomfortable asking sensitive questions in ICT mode than in DQ mode. Second, all prevalence estimates of self-reported delinquent behaviors are significantly higher in ICT than in DQ mode. Third, a regression model on determinants of response behavior indicates that the effect of the ICT on response validity varies by gender. All in all, our results are in favor of the ICT. This technique is a promising alternative to other special questioning techniques such as the much more complicated randomized response technique (RRT)." (author's abstract)
Archaeological studies on battlefields may see great benefits from simulated military engagements: simulations help testing hypotheses based on historical data and may also help with validating methodologies used on the site. Such methods, however, require high-performance computing expertise and considerable computational power. With the emergence of on-demand computing instances in the cloud, distributed computations have become available to technically every organization or individual. This puts large-scale battlefield simulations within the reach of archaeologists, and the cloud paradigm also lowers the required technological expertise, potentially leading to a more widespread adoption of such simulation methods. ; Sponsorship : HPC-EUROPA2, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010
A research was carried out with the construction of a model of a low-pressure nozzle with aerodynamic fuel atomization, which shows the advantages of nozzles of this type. In order to reduce the time at the stage of development and calculations, modern computer design systems were used. The research was carried out in the Flow Simulation module of the SolidWorks software package, which allows you to calculate and build a model of the internal flow around the nozzle using already known parameters. These parameters were set through the program conditions panel: fuel consumption per second; air flow rate at the inlet to the nozzle; static pressure in the combustion chamber. The calculations performed by the module made it possible to evaluate the manufacturability of the design, as well as the internal processes of mixing fuel with air. To determine the quality of fine dispersion of the fuel atomization, a model of the velocity field was calculated over the entire section of the nozzle, from which it can be seen that the maximum flow rate of the fuel is achieved in the outlet channels of the fuel atomizer of the nozzle. The results obtained indicate the operation of the low-pressure principle while maintaining high-quality fuel atomization. The use of low-pressure nozzle with aerodynamic fuel atomization is possible in modern gas turbine engines of civil aircraft, as well as in gas turbine.
Due to their effects on reducing recombination, chromosomal inversions may play an important role in speciation by establishing and/or maintaining linked blocks of genes causing reproductive isolation (RI) between populations. This view fits empirical data indicating that inversions typically harbor loci involved in RI. However, previous computer simulations of infinite populations with two to four loci involved in RI implied that, even with gene flux as low as 10–8 per gamete, per generation between alternative arrangements, inversions may not have large, qualitative advantages over collinear regions in maintaining population differentiation after secondary contact. Here, we report that finite population sizes can help counteract the homogenizing consequences of gene flux, especially when several fitness-related loci reside within the inversion. In these cases, the persistence time of differentiation after secondary contact can be similar to when gene flux is absent and notably longer than the persistence time without inversions. Thus, despite gene flux, population differentiation may be maintained for up to 100,000 generations, during which time new incompatibilities and/or local adaptations might accumulate and facilitate progress toward speciation. How often these conditions are met in nature remains to be determined. ; This study was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-014272), FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/BIA-EVF/113805/2009), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain (PGC2018-101927-B-I00, MINECO/FEDER, UE), by the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (PT17/0009/0020), and by "Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu," funded by the MINECO (ref: MDM-2014-0370). MR was funded by the Hasselblad Foundation (Grant for Female Scientists), European Research Council and the Swedish Research Councils VR and Formas (Linnaeus grant to the Centre for Marine Evolutionary Biology), and by an additional grant from Formas (to MR; grant number 2019-00882). JLF was funded by support from the National Science Foundation and United States Department of Agriculture NIFA program. RF was funded by FCT (SFRH/BPD/89313/2012) and by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 706376; and is currently funded by FEDER through the Operational Competitiveness Factors Program COMPETE and by National Funds through the FCT project "Hybrabbid" (PTDC/BIA-EVL/30628/2017 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030628). The simulations were performed on resources at Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering (C3SE), and at National Supercomputer Centre at Linköping University (NSC) provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2018–05973. ; Peer reviewed
Toxicity is an important factor in failed drug development, and its efficient identification and prediction is a major challenge in drug discovery. We have explored the potential of microscopy images of fluorescently labeled nuclei for the prediction of toxicity based on nucleus pattern recognition. Deep learning algorithms obtain abstract representations of images through an automated process, allowing them to efficiently classify complex patterns, and have become the state-of-the art in machine learning for computer vision. Here, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) were trained to predict toxicity from images of DAPI-stained cells pre-treated with a set of drugs with differing toxicity mechanisms. Different cropping strategies were used for training CNN models, the nuclei-cropping-based Tox_CNN model outperformed other models classifying cells according to health status. Tox_CNN allowed automated extraction of feature maps that clustered compounds according to mechanism of action. Moreover, fully automated region-based CNNs (RCNN) were implemented to detect and classify nuclei, providing per-cell toxicity prediction from raw screening images. We validated both Tox_(R)CNN models for detection of pre-lethal toxicity from nuclei images, which proved to be more sensitive and have broader specificity than established toxicity readouts. These models predicted toxicity of drugs with mechanisms of action other than those they had been trained for and were successfully transferred to other cell assays. The Tox_(R)CNN models thus provide robust, sensitive, and cost-effective tools for in vitro screening of drug-induced toxicity. These models can be adopted for compound prioritization in drug screening campaigns, and could thereby increase the efficiency of drug discovery. ; This study was supported by grants BIO2014-62200-EXP and PI16/02132 from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (http://www.ciencia.gob.es/portal/site/ MICINN/), and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 641639 (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/ horizon2020/) to MCM. ADS received a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation (https:// obrasociallacaixa.org/es/). AQA was supported by a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) "BIOPOL" No 641639 (https://ec.europa.eu/ programmes/horizon2020/). Work in the MAdP laboratory was supported by grants SAF201451876-R and SAF2017-83130-R from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (http://www.ciencia.gob.es/portal/site/MICINN/) and grant 15-0404 from Worldwide Cancer Research (https://www.worldwidecancerresearch. org/) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 641639 (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/ horizon2020/). The CNIC is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (http://www.ciencia.gob.es/portal/site/ MICINN/) and the Pro CNIC Foundation (https:// www.fundacionprocnic.es/fundacion.php), and is a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence (SEV-20150505) ; Sí
6 pags., 4 figs., 1 tab. -- Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 4.0 ; The first 2(+) and 3(-) states of the doubly magic nucleus Sn-132 are populated via safe Coulomb excitation employing the recently commissioned HIE-ISOLDE accelerator at CERN in conjunction with the highly efficient MINIBALL array. The Sn-132 ions are accelerated to an energy of 5.49 MeV/nucleon and impinged on a Pb-206 target. Deexciting gamma rays from the low-lying excited states of the target and the projectile are recorded in coincidence with scattered particles. The reduced transition strengths are determined for the transitions 0(g.s)(+) -> 2(1)(+), 0(g.s)(+) -> 3(1)(-), and 2(1)(+) -> 3(1)(-) in Sn-132. The results on these states provide crucial information on cross-shell configurations which are determined within large-scale shell-model and Monte Carlo shell-model calculations as well as from random-phase approximation and relativistic random-phase approximation. The locally enhanced B(E2; 0(g.s)(+) -> 2(1)(+)) strength is consistent with the microscopic description of the structure of the respective states within all theoretical approaches. The presented results of experiment and theory can be considered to be the first direct verification of the sphericity and double magicity of Sn-132. ; The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 654002. This work was supported by the German BMBF under Contract No. 05P15PKCIA and Verbundprojekt No. 05P2015, in part by the High Performance Computing Infrastructure Strategic Program (Grant No. hp150224), in part by MEXT and Joint Institute for Computational Fundamental Science and a priority issue (elucidation of the fundamental laws and evolution of the universe) to be tackled by using the Post "K" Computer (Grants No. hp160211 and No. hp170230), in part by the HPCI system research project (Grant No. hp170182), by the CNS-RIKEN joint project for large-scale nuclear-structure calculations, in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through Project No. FPA2017-87568-P, by FWO-Vlaanderen (Belgium), by GOA/2010/010 (BOF KU Leuven), and by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BriX network P7/12). A. V. and L. K. thank the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy for financial support. J. P. and D. M. C. acknowledge the Academy of Finland (Contract No. 265023). G. R. acknowledges support by Bulgarian National Science Fund under Grant No. DN08/23/16. L. P. G. has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska- Curie Grant Agreement No. 665779. ; Peer Reviewed
Due to their effects on reducing recombination, chromosomal inversions may play an important role in speciation by establishing and/or maintaining linked blocks of genes causing reproductive isolation (RI) between populations. This view fits empirical data indicating that inversions typically harbor loci involved in RI. However, previous computer simulations of infinite populations with two to four loci involved in RI implied that, even with gene flux as low as 10-8 per gamete, per generation between alternative arrangements, inversions may not have large, qualitative advantages over collinear regions in maintaining population differentiation after secondary contact. Here, we report that finite population sizes can help counteract the homogenizing consequences of gene flux, especially when several fitness-related loci reside within the inversion. In these cases, the persistence time of differentiation after secondary contact can be similar to when gene flux is absent and notably longer than the persistence time without inversions. Thus, despite gene flux, population differentiation may be maintained for up to 100,000 generations, during which time new incompatibilities and/or local adaptations might accumulate and facilitate progress toward speciation. How often these conditions are met in nature remains to be determined. ; This study was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-014272), FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/BIA-EVF/113805/2009), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain (PGC2018-101927-B-I00, MINECO/FEDER, UE), by the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (PT17/0009/0020), and by "Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu," funded by the MINECO (ref: MDM-2014-0370). MR was funded by the Hasselblad Foundation (Grant for Female Scientists), European Research Council and the Swedish Research Councils VR and Formas (Linnaeus grant to the Centre for Marine Evolutionary Biology), and by an additional grant from Formas (to MR; grant number 2019-00882). JLF was funded by support from the National Science Foundation and United States Department of Agriculture NIFA program. RF was funded by FCT (SFRH/BPD/89313/2012) and by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 706376; and is currently funded by FEDER through the Operational Competitiveness Factors Program COMPETE and by National Funds through the FCT project "Hybrabbid" (PTDC/BIA-EVL/30628/2017 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030628). The simulations were performed on resources at Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering (C3SE), and at National Supercomputer Centre at Linköping University (NSC) provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2018–05973
