The effect of alternating and biphasic currents on humans' wound healing: a literature review

[Abstract] Although different types of currents, including bidirectional currents, have been used to promote healing, there is neither a summary about their effects nor consensus on best parameters to be used. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of current evidence on the effectiveness of bidirectional electrical stimulation on wound healing in accordance with the parameters used. Relevant articles were selected following a search of Medline, Cochrane, Embase, CINAHL, and PEDro for English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or French articles published between 1980 and 2011. Ten trials and four case-series were found that deal with pressure ulcers, diabetic ulcers, venous ulcers, skin flaps, and amputation. Eight trials were of low-quality. Five of ten controlled trials found a statistically significant difference on wound healing, and another four trials found positive trends. Both of the two skin flap trials, one of two diabetic trials, and two of five pressure ulcer trials found a significant difference in bidirectional stimulated groups. Both TENS and NMES types of currents were used, but many parameters were not specified. In general, bidirectional currents appear to increase wound healing rates and reduce size of wounds, above all in skin flaps. However, there is a lack of well-designed studies on biphasic and alternating stimulation, and there is a need for improvement in description of parameters and in uniformity of nomenclature

A hybrid systemic approach to scaling up regenerative agriculture in syntropic conditions in Portugal

Klassisk jordbruk med dets store mengder kunstgjødsel antas å gi en uendelig tilførsel og skalering av matproduksjon, men det er uholdbart fordi det ødelegger matjorda. Det er først nå enkelte får øyene opp rundt dagens matsikkerhet. Ved å etterligne naturen og binde karbon samtidig, bygger regenerativt landbruk tilbake mer robust over tid, samtidig som det tåler langt bedre ekstreme værforhold. To feltturer ble gjennomført; på reNature hovedkontor i Amsterdam og på gården i Quinta das Abelhas. Denne oppgaven undersøker Alentejo-regionen i Portugal gjennom en utforskende casestudie. Som en del av en systematisk studie undersøker jeg en agroøkologisk gård som ligger 1 1/2 time nordøst fra Lisboa for å identifisere barrierer og drivere for oppskalering av prosjektet, med ekstra oppmerksomhet rettet på det miljømessige og sosiale aspekteret. I tillegg er mange lokale, nasjonale og EU-interessenter involvert i denne saken mtp. en hybrid tilnærming fra topp-bunn og bunn-topp gjeldende utviklingen av regionen som et bærekraftig matfat. Videre identifiserer prosjektet sannsynligheten for mainstreaming og skalering av regenerativ praksis gjennom kunnskapsdeling og workshops, innovasjonskapasitet, pluss strategiske partnerskap for å sikre langsiktig bærekraft. Det er store forekomster av agroskogbruk og regenerativt jordbruk i det 600-hektar store landskapet i Herdade do Freio do Meios. Sammen arbeider interessentene med en flott blanding av regenerativt jordbruk for å bygge biologisk mangfold, kapre CO2 og øke avlingene for bøndene. Økosystemtjenester levert av sistnevnte og agroskogbruk inkluderer vannforsyning, karbonlagring og jorderosjonskontroll. Blant de mer enn 80 strategiske samarbeidspartnerne i reNature, har jeg identifisert fem for dette prosjektet: Farm21, Leopold Bachmann Foundation, Herdade do Freixo do Meio, GrowBack og Baker Consultants. Målet er å gjøre regenerativt landbruk mer lønnsomt og kjent gjennom innovasjon. Dokumentasjon, smarte sensorer og påvirkningsplattformer er avgjørende for å styrke forretningsmulighetene ytterligere. Videre fungerer en hybrid tilnærming med målesystem, standarder, forskrifter og rapporteringsmekanismer ved å benytte lokal kunnskap for reNature’s økte konkurranseevne. Videre vil Quinta das Abelhas' modenhet og skaleringsmuligheter bli diskutert omkring sammen med dets markedsmuligheter, barrierer og drivkrefter med flere synergier.In the past and on a continuous path today, traditional farming uses heavy portions of synthetic fertilisers to provide an infinite food supply. However, that is not sustainable since they destroy the topsoil. Regenerative agriculture (RA) builds robustness and resilience by mimicking nature and sequestering carbon simultaneously. This practice has led to an increase in nutrition and biodiversity compared to traditional monoculture operations. Two field trips were accomplished to reNature's HQ in Amsterdam and on-site in a rural area outside Lisbon, Portugal. This thesis presents an exploratory case study of the Alentejo region of Portugal. Using a systematic approach, I examine a farm 1 1/2 hours northeast to identify barriers, enablers, and drivers for scaling up the project, focusing on environmental and social factors. This issue involves many local, national, and EU stakeholders. Furthermore, the project identifies the likelihood of mainstreaming and scaling regenerative practices through knowledge sharing and workshops, innovation capacity, and strategic partnerships to ensure long-term sustainability. With a great mix of agroforestry, the 1-ha rented land works within the 600-hectare vital landscape of Herdade do Freio do Meios. Agroforestry and RA provide water supply, carbon storage, and soil erosion control. Among the more than 80 strategic partners in reNature, I have identified five for this project: Farm21, Leopold Bachmann Foundation, Herdade do Freixo do Meio, GrowBack, and Baker Consultants. As well as several similarities, they have a common goal: enhancing soil biodiversity so that regenerative agriculture becomes more profitable and known. Documentation, intelligent sensors, and impact platforms are essential to strengthen business opportunities further. Furthermore, a hybrid approach with innovative measurements, standards, regulations and reporting mechanisms works exceptionally by leveraging local knowledge for increased competitiveness for reNature on-site by utilising local knowledge. In addition, the global production networks (GPN) theory emphasises anchoring stakeholders and promoting transparency and clear communication within the agricultural value chain. Quinta das Abelhas' maturity and scaling possibilities will be discussed in reNatures' public timeline, along with market research, structure, and market opportunities

Thesis title: Feasibility study of using collaborative UAVs for Emergency Response in Road Tunnels

Utilizing UAVs for assisting in emergency response missions is already a fact, both in open landscapes like forests and in restricted areas like sewers. However, using them in road tunnels has not yet been realised, and could possibly provide a huge help for the first responders in the form of surveillance, providing network coverage or announcing self-help assistance to the victims. There are certain challenges for this to be possible, some of them being lack of signal coverage, battery life and positional navigation in a GPS-denied environment. In this thesis the feasibility of this will be put into consideration by surveying available software and hardware for this utilization, as well as setting up a generalised energy consumption model to check where the different drone configurations can be used. The results implies that the state-of-the-art drone configurations are very capable of being used to assist in emergency situations in road tunnels, both when it comes to response time and length coverage. However, the main restricting factor will be cost, as modern drone swarm configurations with a reasonable battery capacity and sophisticated sensors comes at a high cost.Utilizing UAVs for assisting in emergency response missions is already a fact, both in open landscapes like forests and in restricted areas like sewers. However, using them in road tunnels has not yet been realised, and could possibly provide a huge help for the first responders in the form of surveillance, providing network coverage or announcing self-help assistance to the victims. There are certain challenges for this to be possible, some of them being lack of signal coverage, battery life and positional navigation in a GPS-denied environment. In this thesis the feasibility of this will be put into consideration by surveying available software and hardware for this utilization, as well as setting up a generalised energy consumption model to check where the different drone configurations can be used. The results implies that the state-of-the-art drone configurations are very capable of being used to assist in emergency situations in road tunnels, both when it comes to response time and length coverage. However, the main restricting factor will be cost, as modern drone swarm configurations with a reasonable battery capacity and sophisticated sensors comes at a high cost

Neuroanatomical substrates for the volitional regulation of heart rate

The control of physiological arousal can assist in the regulation of emotional state. A subset cortical and subcortical brain regions are implicated in autonomic control of bodily arousal during emotional behaviors. Here, we combined human functional neuroimaging with autonomic monitoring to identify neural mechanisms that support the volitional regulation of heart rate, a process that may be assisted by visual feedback. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 15 healthy adults performed an experimental task in which they were prompted voluntarily to increase or decrease cardiovascular arousal (heart rate) during true, false, or absent visual feedback. Participants achieved appropriate changes in heart rate, without significant modulation of respiratory rate, and were overall not influenced by the presence of visual feedback. Increased activity in right amygdala, striatum and brainstem occurred when participants attempted to increase heart rate. In contrast, activation of ventrolateral prefrontal and parietal cortices occurred when attempting to decrease heart rate. Biofeedback enhanced activity within occipito-temporal cortices, but there was no significant interaction with task conditions. Activity in regions including pregenual anterior cingulate and ventral striatum reflected the magnitude of successful task performance, which was negatively related to subclinical anxiety symptoms. Measured changes in respiration correlated with posterior insula activation and heart rate, at a more lenient threshold, change correlated with insula, caudate, and midbrain activity. Our findings highlight a set of brain regions, notably ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, supporting volitional control of cardiovascular arousal. These data are relevant to understanding neural substrates supporting interaction between intentional and interoceptive states related to anxiety, with implications for biofeedback interventions, e.g., real-time fMRI, that target emotional regulation

Continuous lossless compression of streams of high-frequency multivariate financial market data

Data blir produsert med stadig høyere frekvenser. Disse datamengdene fører i økende grad til at nåværende lagrings systemer blir utilstrekkelige. Det trengs derfor mer effektive metoder for å håndtere datastrømmer. Høyoppløselig sensordata muliggjør overvåking og analyse av komplekse systemer og prosesser. Mer effektive representasjoner av slike strømmer muliggjør lagring av datapunkter i minne, og åpner et hav av muligheter for sanntidssystemer. Denne oppgaven ser på tapsfri komprimering av strømmer av høyfrekvente multivariate tidsserier, spesielt finansiell markedsdata. Markedsdata er unike i deres uforutsigbarhet. Tapsløs komprimering av slik data har interessante utfordringer. Vi argumenterer for at komprimering av multivariate strømmer i hovedsak er det samme som å komprimere flere univariate strømmer med en delt tidsdimensjon. Ved å utnytte teknikker fra moderne komprimerings-metoder i dette domenet, utfører vi et studie om komprimering av strømmer av høyfrekvente multivariate data. Ved bruk av teknikker som komparativ koding, kan vi komprimere multivariate datapunkter med høy tilfeldighet kontinuerlig og tapsløst, og dermed øke antallet nylige datapunkter som kan lagres i minne med en faktor på 4,4 i gjennomsnitt. Komprimeringshastigheter på én størrelsesorden høyere enn frekvensen til de mest aktivt handlede aktiva, og et-pass dekomprimering med blokker på mindre enn 550 kB, indikerer at slike teknikker kan være egnet for lagring av datapunkter i minne i dataintensive sanntidssystemer.Data is being produced at increasingly high frequencies. These magnitudes often leave current storage systems inadequate, calling for more efficient methods for handling streams of data. High-resolution sensor data enables monitoring and analysis of complex systems and processes. More efficient representations of such streams enable in-memory storage of data samples, opening a field of possibilities for real-time systems. This thesis takes a grasp at lossless compression of streams of high-frequency multivariate time series, financial market data in particular. Market data is unique in its unpredictability. Compressing such data while maintaining its information entirely yields exciting challenges. We argue that the compression of multivariate streams is essentially the same as compressing multiple univariate streams with a shared time dimension. By leveraging techniques from state-of-the-art compression schemes in this domain, we perform a novel study of compression of streams of high-frequency multivariate data. Using techniques such as comparative encoding, we can continuously compress multivariate samples of high randomness losslessly, increasing the number of recent samples storable in-memory by a factor of 4.4 on average. Compression speeds one order of magnitude higher than the frequency of the most actively traded assets, and one-pass decompression with blocks of less than 550 kB, indicates that such techniques may be suitable for in-memory storage in data-intense real-time systems

Lederes utfordringer i arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet : Opplevelser av arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet i en norsk arbeidslivskontekst

Forskningen indikerer at organisasjoner som har høy grad av psykologisk trygghet, presterer bedre. Kombinasjonen av at psykologisk trygghet er viktig, og at mange organisasjoner sliter med dette, har ført til stor etterspørsel etter kunnskap om psykologisk trygghet. Psykologisk trygghet handler om opplevelsen av å kunne ta mellommenneskelig risiko på arbeidsplassen, uten frykt for å bli sanksjonert for dette. Forskningen har fokusert mest på de positive sidene av psykologisk trygghet, og hvilke forutsetninger som skal til for å skape psykologisk trygghet. Denne masterutredningen undersøker utfordringer i arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet. Gjennom en kvalitativ casestudie har vi intervjuet ni toppledere og fire coacher på tvers av bransjer for å kartlegge utfordringer de opplever i arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet. Funnene i studien baserer seg på deres personlige erfaringer fra forskjellige organisasjoner de har jobbet for, og danner grunnlaget for å belyse studiens problemstilling. Hovedfunnene kan oppsummeres i tre deler. For det første finner vi at det eksisterer misforståelser om hva psykologisk trygghet faktisk betyr og hva man bør gjøre for å oppnå det. Funnene våre antyder at det er vanskelig å forstå hva psykologisk trygghet innebærer, hvorfor man vil ha det og hvordan man skal arbeide med det. For det andre har vi sett utfordringer knyttet til individuelle forskjeller. Spesielt dreier dette seg om individers selvfølelse, samt hvordan lederen og ansattes grad av empati, kan være mulige utfordringer for arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet. For det tredje mener vi at det kan være iboende utfordringer for psykologisk trygghet i den strukturelle utformingen av organisasjoner. Her finner vi at uklare kriterier for oppsigelser, maktforholdet mellom leder og ansatt, samt utilstrekkelig håndtering av kompetanseforskjeller i et team, alle kan være utfordrende for arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet. Samlet bidrar vår studie med teoretisk innsikt ved å utforske og avklare misforståelser rundt psykologisk trygghet selv erfarne toppledere strever med, og hvordan det kan påvirkes av individuelle forskjeller og strukturelle faktorer i organisasjonene. De praktiske implikasjonene av studien tilsier at arbeidet med psykologisk trygghet krever kontinuerlig innsats over lang tid, og at det er helt sentralt for lederen å forstå at det potensielt finnes flerfoldige utfordringer som kan hindre lederen i dette arbeidet. Hvis man er seg bevisst de mulige utfordringene, er sjansen større for å skape et arbeidsmiljø hvor ansatte tør å engasjere seg fullt ut, og på den måten legge til rette for bedre prestasjoner.nhhma

The cingulate gyrus: Additional motor area and cortical autonomic regulator

No Abstract.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/49976/1/901120118_ftp.pd

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Resilience Optimization in 5G RAN

Resilience is defined as the ability of a network to resist, adapt, and quickly recover from disruptions, and to continue to maintain an acceptable level of services from users' perspective. With the advent of future radio networks, including advanced 5G and upcoming 6G, critical services become integral to future networks, requiring uninterrupted service delivery for end users. Unfortunately, with the growing network complexity, user mobility and diversity, it becomes challenging to scale current resilience management techniques that rely on local optimizations to large dense network deployments. This paper aims to address this problem by globally optimizing the resilience of a dense multi-cell network based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, our proposed solution can dynamically tilt cell antennas and reconfigure transmit power to mitigate outages and increase both coverage and service availability. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated to simultaneously satisfy resiliency constraints while maximizing the service quality in the network area in order to minimize the impact of outages on neighbouring cells. Extensive simulations then demonstrate that with our proposed solution, the average service availability in terms of user throughput can be increased by up to 50-60% on average, while reaching a coverage availability of 99% in best cases