The increasing number of space debris has created an orbital debris environment that poses increasing impact risks to existing space systems and human space flight. For the safety of in-orbit spacecrafts, we should optimally schedule surveillance tasks of the existing facilities to allocate collection resources in a manner that most significantly improves the ability to predict and detect event...

3D laser scanning technology has become an exciting and beneficial alternative in the collection of as-built data for plant and facilities applications, where accurate three-dimensional detail of complex facilities is critical for efficient design and construction projects. This paper introduces terrestrial 3D laser scanner as an instrument for two experiments which may be applicable to the fie...

Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) offer enterprise-class computing, storage and coordination facilities to any organization or individual in the world with a valid credit card. This paper details our experience working with these commodity grid computing services between November 2006 and May 2007, including an analysis of the o...

The objective of this exploratory study was to understand the perspective of professionals working at assisted living facilities about the healthcare practices performed in the mental health service. Data collection was performed using an observation form, field journal, and a semi-structured interview script, which was conducted with 10 professionals working at the facilities. It was found tha...

A local municipality has decided to build a sewage pit to receive residential sewage waste arriving by tank trucks. Daily accumulated waste are to be pumped to a nearby waste water treatment facility to be re-consumed for agricultural and construction projects. A discrete-event simulation model using Arena Software was constructed to assist in defining the capacity of the system in cubic meters...

Currently, macromolecular crystallography projects often require the use of highly automated facilities for crystallization and X-ray data collection. However, crystal harvesting and processing largely depend on manual operations. Here, a series of new methods are presented based on the use of a low X-ray-background film as a crystallization support and a photoablation laser that enable the aut...

PDB-Metrics (http://sms.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br/SMS/pdb_metrics/index.html) is a component of the Diamond STING suite of programs for the analysis of protein sequence, structure and function. It summarizes the characteristics of the collection of protein structure descriptions deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and provides a Web interface to search and browse the PDB, using a variety of al...

Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) offer enterprise-class computing, storage and coordination facilities to any organization or individual in the world with a valid credit card. This paper details our experience working with these commodity grid computing services between November 2006 and May 2007, including an analysis of the o...

Planning effective and well targeted actions to manage and improve the local and national healthcare services requires institutions to understand and analyse the real needs of the population based on reliable and timely statistical analysis on citizens’ health state. This is particularly important in developing countries in which healthcare facilities lack ICT infrastructures and network connec...

Clinicians and hospital administrators rely on healthcare information systems (HIS) for decisionmaking. Typically, HIS need to aggregate data from a network of geographically dispersed healthcare facilities and specialized departments of medical practice. However interoperability issues in the data arise from the diversity of infrastructure, specialized practices, underlying systems, procedures...