Ion chambers simplify absolute intensity measurements in the vacuum ultraviolet

Single or double ion chamber technique measures absolute radiation intensities in the extreme vacuum ultraviolet region of the spectrum. The ion chambers use rare gases as the ion carrier. Photon absorbed by the gas creates one ion pair so a measure of these is a measure of the number of incident photons

Nurses' views of using computerized decision support software in NHS Direct

Background. Nurses working in NHS Direct, the 24-hour telephone advice line in England, use computerized decision support software to recommend to callers the most appropriate service to contact, or to advise on self-care. Aims. To explore nurses' views of their roles and the computerized decision support software in NHS Direct. Methods. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 24 NHS Direct nurses in 12 sites. Findings. Nurses described both the software and themselves as essential to the clinical decision-making process. The software acted as safety net, provider of consistency, and provider of script, and was relied upon more when nurses did not have clinical knowledge relevant to the call. The nurse handled problems not covered by the software, probed patients for the appropriate information to enter into the software, and interpreted software recommendations in the light of contextual information which the software was unable to use. Nurses described a dual process of decision-making, with the nurse as active decision maker looking for consensus with the software recommendation and ready to override recommendations made by the software if necessary. However, nurses' accounts of the software as a guide, prompt or support did not fully acknowledge the power of the software, which they are required to use, and the recommendation of which they are required to follow under some management policies. Over time, the influence of nurse and software merges as nurses internalize the software script as their own knowledge, and navigate the software to produce recommendations that they feel are most appropriate. Conclusions. The nurse and the software have distinct roles in NHS Direct, although the effect of each on the clinical decision-making process may be difficult to determine in practice

OpenForensics:a digital forensics GPU pattern matching approach for the 21st century

Pattern matching is a crucial component employed in many digital forensic (DF) analysis techniques, such as file-carving. The capacity of storage available on modern consumer devices has increased substantially in the past century, making pattern matching approaches of current generation DF tools increasingly ineffective in performing timely analyses on data seized in a DF investigation. As pattern matching is a trivally parallelisable problem, general purpose programming on graphic processing units (GPGPU) is a natural fit for this problem. This paper presents a pattern matching framework - OpenForensics - that demonstrates substantial performance improvements from the use of modern parallelisable algorithms and graphic processing units (GPUs) to search for patterns within forensic images and local storage devices

Turning on the tap: the benefits of using 'real-life' vignettes in qualitative research interviews

The use of vignettes that are based upon fictionalised accounts is well-established in contemporary social science. Vignettes have been used in a variety of ways to contribute to studies with both a quantitative and a qualitative orientation. This paper reflects on two recent qualitative studies which have made innovative use of ‘real-life’ vignettes. In each case, the paper describes some of the unanticipated and overlapping benefits that accrued from their incorporation into the research design and reflects on the advantages that ‘real-life’ vignettes might bring to future research. Drawing on two different research projects, the paper highlights the further potential contribution of ‘real-life’ vignettes to the repertoire of research methods currently available to social scientists

Development of high efficiency (14 percent) solar cell array module

Most effort was concentrated on development of procedures to provide large area (3 in. diameter) high efficiency (16.5 percent AM1, 28 C) P+NN+ solar cells. Intensive tests with 3 in. slices gave consistently lower efficiency (13.5 percent). The problems were identified as incomplete formation of and optimum back surface field (BSF), and interaction of the BSF process and the shallow P+ junction. The problem was shown not to be caused by reduced quality of silicon near the edges of the larger slices

Development of High Efficiency (14%) Solar Cell Array Module

High efficiency solar cells required for the low cost modules was developed. The production tooling for the manufacture of the cells and modules was designed. The tooling consisted of: (1) back contact soldering machine; (2) vacuum pickup; (3) antireflective coating tooling; and (4) test fixture

On the spacetime connecting two aeons in conformal cyclic cosmology

As quotient spaces, Minkowski and de Sitter are fundamental, non-gravitational spacetimes for the construction of physical theories. When general relativity is constructed on a de Sitter spacetime, the usual Riemannian structure is replaced by a more general structure called de Sitter-Cartan geometry. In the contraction limit of an infinite cosmological term, the de Sitter-Cartan spacetime reduces to a singular, flat, conformal invariant four-dimensional cone spacetime, in which our ordinary notions of time interval and space distance are absent. It is shown that such spacetime satisfies all properties, including the Weyl curvature hypothesis, necessary to play the role of the bridging spacetime connecting two aeons in Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology.Comment: 15 pages. V2: presentation changes aiming at clarifying the text, matches published versio

An engineered Tetrahymena tRNA(Gln) for in vivo incorporation of unnatural amino acids into proteins by nonsense suppression

A new tRNA, THG73, has been designed and evaluated as a vehicle for incorporating unnatural amino acids site-specifically into proteins expressed in vivo using the stop codon suppression technique. The construct is a modification of tRNAGln(CUA) from Tetrahymena thermophila, which naturally recognizes the stop codon UAG. Using electrophysiological studies of mutations at several sites of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, it is established that THG73 represents a major improvement over previous nonsense suppressors both in terms of efficiency and fidelity of unnatural amino acid incorporation. Compared with a previous tRNA used for in vivo suppression, THG73 is as much as 100-fold less likely to be acylated by endogenous synthetases of the Xenopus oocyte. This effectively eliminates a major concern of the in vivo suppression methodology, the undesirable incorporation of natural amino acids at the suppression site. In addition, THG73 is 4-10-fold more efficient at incorporating unnatural amino acids in the oocyte system. Taken together, these two advances should greatly expand the range of applicability of the in vivo nonsense suppression methodology