n 1999, after a 3-year transit through space, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft will place a scientific payload consisting of five instruments into a low-altitude orbit (≈35 km) about the asteroid 433 Eros for 1 year. One instrument, the NEAR Laser Rangefinder (NLR), will use infrared laser pulses to provide astrophysicists with precision altimetry data, measurements that wer...

The effects of aging on eye movements are well studied in the laboratory. Increased saccade latencies or decreased smooth-pursuit gain are well established findings. The question remains whether these findings are influenced by the rather untypical environment of a laboratory; that is, whether or not they transfer to the real world. We measured 34 healthy participants between the age of 25 and ...

Change-of-shift report is the time when responsibility and accountability for the care of a patient is transferred from one nurse to another. The communication that ensues during this process is linked to both patient safety and continuity of care giving. While many nurses already recognize the value of bringing report to the patient’s bedside and have practiced in this manner, this remains rel...

Numerous models have been developed for estimating the time required to evacuate from a variety of places under various conditions. For high-traffic places, such as commercial and industrial buildings, it is vital to be able to accurately calculate the evacuation time required in order to ensure the safety of the occupants. To this end, various models of pedestrian dynamics have been proposed, ...

Introduction In the Altmetrics Manifesto published on the Web in October 2010, the concept of “Altmetrics” is introduced as follows: In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a ...

In this paper a mobility model of people in urban areas for mobile wireless network simulation is presented. Unlike most mobility models found in the literature, this model attempts to provide realistic mobility of people in an urban setting. To this end, the model is based on data collected through a number of surveys. The result is a 3-layer hierarchical model where the highest layer is an ac...

It is a busy day in the emergency room with the monitors beeping, the alarms blaring intermittently, the phones ringing, and the overhead paging system crackling at intervals with important messages. The nurses are running back and forth between the rooms, weaving around the patients on the hallway beds. The doctors are talking in groups while referring to the large overhead displays showing th...

INTRODUCTION Smoke-free policies can effectively protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure in multiunit housing. We surveyed all affordable multiunit housing properties in North Carolina to determine the statewide prevalence of smoke-free policies and to identify predictors of smoke-free policies. METHODS Representatives of affordable housing properties in North Carolina complet...

ii Acknowledgements I first would like to thank Prof. Gérard Medioni for being an absolutely wonderful thesis supervisor through the entire process. He started me out with great ideas and problems, provided good feedback and suggestions during the research, and made sure that the final output is of high quality. As well as teaching me computer vision, he showed me that good research can be fun....

It has been suggested that aerobic training should be considered in stroke rehabilitation programs to counteract detrimental health effects and decrease cardiovascular risk caused by inactivity. Robot-assisted treadmill exercise (using a Lokomat device) has the potential to increase the duration of walking therapy relative to conventional overground therapy. We investigated whether exercise int...