Opportunistic Applications Research Articles

A Theoretically Informed Critical Review of Research Applying the Concept of Liminality to Understand Experiences with Cancer: Implications for a New Oncological Agenda in Health Psychology.

Liminality was described more than 20 years ago as a major category explaining how cancer is experienced. Since then, it has been widely used in the field of oncology research, particularly by those using qualitative methods to study patient experience. This body of work has great potential to illuminate the subjective dimensions of life and death with cancer. However, the review also reveals a tendency for sporadic and opportunistic applications of the concept of liminality. Rather than being developed in a systematic way, liminality theory is being recurrently 're-discovered' in relatively isolated studies, mostly within the realm of qualitative studies of 'patient experience'. This limits the capacity of this approach to influence oncological theory and practice. In providing a theoretically informed critical review of liminality literature in the field of oncology, this paper proposes ways of systematizing liminality research in line with a processual ontology. In so doing, it argues for a closer engagement with the source theory and data, and with more recent liminality theory, and it sketches the broad epistemological consequences and applications.

Accuracy of Opportunistic Bone Mineral Density Assessment on Staging Computed Tomography for Gynaecological Cancers.

Background and Objectives: Women with gynecological cancers constitute a high-risk cohort for loss of bone density. International guidance stipulates women undergoing cancer treatments associated with bone loss should have a quantitative assessment of bone density. Access to Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) is limited. This study aimed to assess the accuracy of opportunistic bone density measurement on staging computed tomography (CT) scans for gynaecological malignancies, in comparison to the gold standard DXA. Materials and Methods: Women with a staging CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis for a new diagnosis of gynecological cancer were recruited. DXA was performed within 6 weeks of treatment for gynaecological cancer. Lumbar bone density was measured by CT attenuation values, in Hounsfield units (HU), of the anterior trabecular region. Correlations between CT and DXA parameters were analysed. Receiver Operating Characteristic(ROC) curves for diagnosis of low bone density and osteoporosis were analysed. Results: Final cohort included 48 of 50 women recruited. There was good diagnostic accuracy for abnormal bone density and osteoporosis, with areas under the ROC curve at L1 of 0.77 (p = 0.002) and 0.80 (p = 0.020) respectively. CT-HU of 170–190 yielded sensitivities of 87–90%, positive predictive values of 75–84% and negative predictive values of 71–75% for the diagnosis of low bone mineral density. CT-HU of 90–110 yielded specificities of 85–93% for the diagnosis of osteoporosis. Moderate correlations were found between CT-HU and both DXA T-scores and diagnostic categories. Conclusions: This is the first study to assess the opportunistic application of CT in the assessment of bone health in women with gynaecological cancer, a cohort at high-risk of osteoporosis. The correlation between bone density assessment in CT-HU and DXA, and strong AUC values for the diagnosis of low bone density (0.77) and osteoporosis (0.80) support this pragmatic solution in resolving the care-gap in cancer treatment-induced bone loss, often associated with poor access to DXA.

Evolution and Impact of Wi-Fi Technology and Applications: A Historical Perspective

The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless local area networking (WLAN), commercially known as Wi-Fi, has become a necessity in our day-to-day life. Over a billion Wi-Fi access points connect close to hundred billion of IoT devices, smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, smart TVs, video cameras, monitors, printers, and other consumer devices to the Internet to enable millions of applications to reach everyone, everywhere. The evolution of Wi-Fi technology also resulted in the first commercial piloting of spread spectrum, high speed optical communications, OFDM, MIMO and mmWave pulse transmission technologies, which then became more broadly adopted by cellular phone and wireless sensor networking industries. The popularity and widespread Wi-Fi deployment in indoor areas further motivated innovation in opportunistic cyberspace applications that exploit the ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals. The RF signal radiated from Wi-Fi access points creates an “RF cloud” accessible to any Wi-Fi equipped device hosting or supporting these opportunistic applications. Wi-Fi positioning and location intelligence were the first popular opportunistic applications of Wi-Fi’s RF cloud. Today, researchers are investigating opportunistic applications of Wi-Fi signals for gesture and motion detection as well as authentication and security. This paper provides a holistic overview of the evolution of Wi-Fi technology and its applications as the authors experienced it in the last few decades.

X-rays for medical imaging: Radiation protection, governance and ethics over 125years.

Starting from Röntgen's discovery and the first radiograph of his wife's hand, the curtain was raised on a new technique with remarkable possibilities for contributing to human health. While growth in applications proceeded rapidly, it was accompanied by significant harms to those involved and by inappropriate opportunistic application. This paper places the attempts to deal with the harms and inappropriate activities side by side with the positive developments. It attempts a narrative on the development of medical radiation protection over the 125-year period and places it in the context of a commentary on governance and ethics. The substance of the narrative is based on the recommendations of ICRP as they developed and altered over time. The governance commentary is based on assessing the independence of ICRP and its attention to medical exposures. In terms of ethics, the recommendations at each stage are reviewed in the light of values that are deemed appropriate to both medical ethics and radiation protection. The paper, while celebrating Röntgen-125, also hopefully provides a perspective for discussion as ICRP's centenary in 2028 approaches. This is an important part of ensuring continued acceptance and confident use of X-Rays, and helps underwrite the possibility of further developments in the area.

Detecting Southern California’s White Sharks With Environmental DNA

To improve ability to detect white sharks without the need for tags, or visual census, we developed a species-specific environmental DNA (eDNA) assay that targets a 163 bp fragment of the white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) mitochondrial cytochrome B gene on a digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) platform. We used this marker to detect white shark DNA in 250 ml water samples taken from across two sites in Santa Barbara, California (USA) frequented by juvenile white sharks. We did not detect white shark DNA in samples from two neighboring sites where sharks are presumably absent, suggesting that eDNA can indicate nearby white sharks. This marker development, testing, and opportunistic application in a region with known distributions of white sharks indicates that environmental DNA could be developed further to monitor white sharks, thereby informing conservation planning and public safety. With the potential increase in white shark populations due to decades of protection, there is a need for fishery independent methods for assessing white shark distributions, and eDNA may provide be an ideal, non-intrusive tool for coastal assessments.

Foundations of translational ecology

Ecologists who specialize in translational ecology (TE) seek to link ecological knowledge to decision making by integrating ecological science with the full complement of social dimensions that underlie today's complex environmental issues. TE is motivated by a search for outcomes that directly serve the needs of natural resource managers and decision makers. This objective distinguishes it from both basic and applied ecological research and, as a practice, it deliberately extends research beyond theory or opportunistic applications. TE is uniquely positioned to address complex issues through interdisciplinary team approaches and integrated scientist–practitioner partnerships. The creativity and context‐specific knowledge of resource managers, practitioners, and decision makers inform and enrich the scientific process and help shape use‐driven, actionable science. Moreover, addressing research questions that arise from on‐the‐ground management issues – as opposed to the top‐down or expert‐oriented perspectives of traditional science – can foster the high levels of trust and commitment that are critical for long‐term, sustained engagement between partners.

Kill switches, remote deletion, and intelligent agents: Framing everyday household cybersecurity in the internet of things

Increasing utilizations of kill switches, remote deletion, and intelligent agents as a part of “Internet of Things” (IoT) architectures present emerging cybersecurity and privacy challenges. These issues are compounded in complexity by the frequent updates and other controls instituted by the growing assortment of purveyors of household IoT devices and systems. This paper proposes that aspects of user ownership, awareness, and voice be clarified and in some venues fostered in part to expose as quickly as possible potential technological and social dangers. It addresses rights of household participants to obtain knowledge and control over the intelligent IoT agents operating (and perhaps “quartering”) in their personal and intimate spheres, as well as to be free from inappropriately opportunistic applications associated with IoT systems.

Mobile-Edge Computing Come Home Connecting things in future smart homes using LTE device-to-device communications

Future 5G cellular networks are expected to play a major role in supporting the Internet of Things (IoT) due to their ubiquitous coverage, plug-and-play configuration, and embedded security. Besides connectivity, however, the IoT will need computation and storage in proximity of sensors and actuators to support timecritical and opportunistic applications. Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is currently under standardization as a novel paradigm expected to enrich future broadband communication networks [1], [2]. With MEC, traditional networks will be empowered by placing cloud-computing-like capabilities within the radio access network, in an MEC server located in close proximity to end users. Such distributed computing and storage infrastructure will enable the deployment of applications and services at the edge of the network, allowing operators to offer a virtualized environment to enterprise customers and industries to implement applications and services close to end users.

Modeling opportunistic communication with churn

In opportunistic networking, characterizing contact patterns between mobile users is essential for assessing feasibility and performance of opportunistic applications. There has been significant efforts in deriving this characterization, based on observations and trace analyses; however, most of the previously established results were obtained by studying contact opportunities at large spatial and temporal scales. Moreover, the user population is considered to be constant: no user can join or leave the system. Yet, there are many examples of scenarios which do not fully adhere to the previous assumption and cannot be accurately described at large scales. Urban environments, such as smaller city districts, are characterized by highly dynamic user populations. We believe that scenarios with varying population require further investigation. In this paper, we present a novel modeling approach to study operation of opportunistic applications in scenarios where the population size is subjected to frequent changes, that is, it exhibits churn. We examine two location-based content sharing schemes: a purely opportunistic case and an infrastructure-supported content sharing scheme, for which we provide stochastic models based on stochastic differential equations (SDEs). We validate our models in five scenarios: a city area, subway station, conference, campus, and a scenario with a synthetic mobility model and we show that the models provide good representations of the investigated scenarios.

Zones : beyond the logic of exception?

Over the past five decades the proliferation of economic zones has been crucial to the emergence of Asian economic power. With historical precedents in ancient free ports, pirate enclaves, and colonial concessions, zones have become crucial spaces of labor and production. They are sites in which globalized forms of capital and logistics interact with populations and administrative bodies to augment the conditions for profit-making and accumulation. How are we to understand the political and legal constitution of zones? In an important sense they are spaces of exception since states create them by sectioning off locations in which foreign investors enjoy exemptions to law and other forms of normative regulation. These exceptions, however, are often established by normative means and are almost always partial. Exceptional forms of rule in zones tend to exist alongside domestic civil laws, opportunistic applications of international law, and diverse norms and standards promulgated by corporate actors. Zones can at once be spaces of exception and spaces saturated by competing norms and calculations. They are strategic sites in which to test the applicability of Agamben's work on sovereignty, exception and governmentality to the contemporary Asian context. Mindful of the plurality of zones across Asia, the paper highlights mutations in these forms of power to explore how zones disarticulate jurisdiction from territory, produce new kinds of laboring subjects, and prompt processes of spatial and social reorganization.

AppAdapt: Opportunistic Application Adaptation in Presence of Hardware Variation

In this work, we propose a method to reduce the impact of process variations by adapting the application's algorithm at the software layer. We introduce the concept of hardware signatures as the measured post manufacturing hardware characteristics that can be used to drive software adaptation across different die. Using H.264 encoding as an example, we demonstrate significant yield improvements (as much as 30% points at 0% hardware overdesign), a reduction in overdesign (by as much as 8% points at 80% yield) as well as application quality improvements (about 2.0 dB increase in average peak-signal-to-noise ratio at 70% yield). Further, we investigate implications of limited information exchange (i.e., signature quantization) on yield and quality. We conclude that hardware-signature-based application adaptation is an easy and inexpensive (to implement), better informed (by actual application requirements) and effective way to manage yield-cost-quality tradeoffs in application-implementation design flows.

Brain–Computer Interface Technologies in the Coming Decades

As the proliferation of technology dramatically infiltrates all aspects of modern life, in many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies. Fortunately, these technological advancements have also driven an explosion of neuroscience research over the past several decades, presenting engineers with a remarkable opportunity to design and develop flexible and adaptive brain-based neurotechnologies that integrate with and capitalize on human capabilities and limitations to improve human-system interactions. Major forerunners of this conception are brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which to this point have been largely focused on improving the quality of life for particular clinical populations and include, for example, applications for advanced communications with paralyzed or locked in patients as well as the direct control of prostheses and wheelchairs. Near-term applications are envisioned that are primarily task oriented and are targeted to avoid the most difficult obstacles to development. In the farther term, a holistic approach to BCIs will enable a broad range of task-oriented and opportunistic applications by leveraging pervasive technologies and advanced analytical approaches to sense and merge critical brain, behavioral, task, and environmental information. Communications and other applications that are envisioned to be broadly impacted by BCIs are highlighted; however, these represent just a small sample of the potential of these technologies.

Improving data delivery in opportunistic networks using probabilistic forwarding

As the number of opportunistic networking applications increases, the need for an effective routing scheme is becoming increasingly urgent. We propose the HEC-PF scheme for effective data forwarding in opportunistic networks. The scheme modifies the aggressive forwarding phase of our previous H-EC scheme by implementing a new probabilistic forwarding feature, which decides whether to forward a message to a newly encountered node based on the delivery probability. The performance in terms of delivery latency and completion ratio is evaluated by simulations. The results show that the HEC-PF scheme outperforms the EC and H-EC schemes, and the performance gain is even more substantial when network connectivity is extremely poor. We also show that its completion ratio improves as the maximum forwarding distance or the hop distance considered when calculating the delivery probability increases. The effectiveness of the HEC-PF scheme makes it an ideal solution for effective data delivery in opportunistic networks.

Emulating Opportunistic Networks with KauNet Triggers

In opportunistic networks, the availability of an end-to-end path is no longer required. Instead opportunistic networks may take advantage of temporary connectivity opportunities. Opportunistic networks present a demanding environment for network emulation as the traditional emulation setup, where application/transport endpoints only send and receive packets from the network following a black box approach, is no longer applicable. Opportunistic networking protocols and applications additionally need to react to the dynamics of the underlying network beyond what is conveyed through the exchange of packets. In order to support IP-level emulation evaluations of applications and protocols that react to lower layer events, we have proposed the use of emulation triggers. Emulation triggers can emulate arbitrary cross-layer feedback and can be synchronized with other emulation effects. After introducing the design and implementation of triggers in the KauNet emulator, we describe the integration of triggers with the DTN2 reference implementation and illustrate how the functionality can be used to emulate a classical DTN data-mule scenario.

A Comparison of Reported Earnings Under Chinese GAAP vs. IAS: Evidence from the Shanghai Stock Exchange

This paper reports the results of an empirical examination of the difference between earnings based on Chinese GAAP and those based on International Accounting Standards (IAS). Specifically, the study determines how current Chinese accounting standards are different from the IAS, whether these differences are systematically biased toward under- or overstated earnings, and which items from the financial statements contributed most to these differences. The findings suggest that reported accounting earnings based on current Chinese GAAP are significantly different from those based on IAS. On average, the reported earnings determined under the Chinese GAAP are 20–30 percent higher than earnings reported under IAS. After restatement, 15 percent of the B-share companies changed from a reported profit to a reported loss. The findings suggest that the differences between the two sets of earnings are caused by differences in accounting standards and financial rules, opportunistic applications of Chinese GAAP, and unusual market-wide events. An analysis of recently promulgated accounting standards indicates that the difference between the two sets of accounting earnings is likely to be significantly reduced from those reported for 1998 as a result.

System Concept and Simulation Model for a ProposedClass of Delay-Tolerant Variably-Priced NetworkServices

We describe a system concept for the revenue-producing disposition of surplus capacity at off-peak times in real trunking networks. The idea is to approximate a competitive market for distribution of the networks' time-varying excess capacity with a pricing strategy controlled by the network. The scheme is intended to allow network operators to stimulate background traffic loads to gain new revenues from otherwise idle time on existing installed resources. The concept is suitable for low priority delay-tolerant or opportunistic applications such as remote backups, software distribution, dispatching batched faxes, disseminating newsgroup updates, updating web page caches or routing tables. Background service subscribers are notified of price reductions at off-peak times to elicit additional traffic for the network. Traffic aggregators act on behalf of subscribing organizations or groups of users. The background service is completely subordinate to the conventional tariff-priced on-demand calling services and the variable background pricing merges with the foreground under suitable total load. This paper focuses on the network problem of price setting to continually maximize the price-volume product in a time-varying price-sensitive traffic environment such as this concept implies. A price-stimulated offered traffic environment is simulated in which time of day, price, and hidden demand latency and demand curve characteristics all affect the offered traffic. An analytically optimum strategy is available for the particular traffic model used and the performance of a fuzzy logic price controller is tested against the revenue-optimal strategy. Depending on econometric assumptions for latent traffic demand and price-volume curves, increases in revenue from 4%-20% are obtained in simulation of a 30-trunk group having a typical daily load pattern.