Telephone Extension Research Articles

Always connected, the Umea University campus and city network approach

This paper describes the current network approach at Umea University and how the strategy has changed over the years to meet new challenges. Today, we face two important scenarios that have to be managed within budget limitation and increased user demands. – the rapid growth of mobile devices put pressure on the University Wireless Network, and the Mobile Internet for the PTT´s to deliver accessibility. – the expectation of users, students and staff to be connected all the time and everywhere, on campus, in the city, in cafes and stores, on buses, in airplanes and on trains with enough network performance to use the application they want. Umea University has a large network, connected to Internet via the national university research network Sunet. The university has approx. 25,000 network outlets and 17,000 of them are active, the rest is a reserve for internal moving around. 100 Mbps is standard for a personal workplace but can be upgraded to higher speed for servers and users with high demands. The wireless network has 520 access-points, all scattered sparsely around the campus for maximum coverage. There are three Wlans accessible all over the campus: UmU Wlan – a closed network that can be accessed with your digital university identity, i.e. CAS or AD eduroam – the federated global university network Adm – the federated network from the local community The Umea city open network (SSID: City of Umea) is only available at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture. In 2010, the university and the local community agreed to federate their wireless networks to make Internet available in community premises for students and staff. For the university, the major benefit is that students can access the university network from local libraries, schools and other local facilities around the city. The university has an agreement with Telia, the major PTT, for both mobile telephones and mobile internet. The university has been moving on the road to Office Extension and offers staff to close their landline office telephones and move over to mobile telephony only. This approach builds on access to mobile telephony as the cell phone gradually takes over as the only office telephone extension for staffers. During 2013, the +20-year old university switchboard will be replaced by Lync 2013 which is a further extended approach to telecommunication. Office@365 and GoogleApps adds collaboration tools to the workplace and the concept Unified Communication is now being implemented and has currently 600+ users in the first installation phase.

Security rules and banned items in psychiatric acute admission wards in Athens, Greece

Mental health nurses play a key role in maintaining the safety of patients, themselves, and others during hospitalization. The aim of the research was to evaluate the safety measures that are taken by mental health nurses to identify the security policies that exist in acute mental health wards. The Ward Safety and Security Rules Survey was used as a method of data collection. Descriptive analysis and content analysis were carried out in order to identify nurses' practices. The total sample consisted of 172 mental health nurses and nurses' assistants who worked in 14 acute inpatient psychiatric wards in three psychiatric hospitals in the greater area of Athens, Greece. The results show a minimum number of security features existing in the wards. Only one of the 14 wards had an intercom system. In only nine wards, there was a panic alarm in the office, and in eight, an emergency response telephone extension. A wide range of practices were noted concerning banned items and patient searches upon admission and return from leave. The results indicate the significant lack of protocols and specific safety rules to guide nurses' actions across psychiatric acute admission wards in Athens.

Right Brain: My first tPA

It is the ultimate rite of passage for the 21st century junior neurology resident: administering IV tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) for an acute ischemic stroke for the first time. It was only a few months into residency, but the telephone number that glowed on my pager, accompanied by the repetitive shrill “beep,” had become an all-too-familiar experience. However, the dreaded “911” was affixed to the emergency department’s telephone extension, indicating a “stroke code,” and signifying that dinner would unceremoniously conclude—3 bites into my slice of cold pizza. I ran to the emergency department (ED) and was given a brief history by the ED physician, who said, “This lady is in her 70s, is demented and living in a nursing home, and comes in with slurred speech and altered mental status that started an hour ago.” I was concerned but skeptical, unsure if this was truly an acute ischemic stroke worthy of that 911 suffix. The IV lines were placed, the bloodwork was sent to the lab, and I helped push the …

Legal Protection for Conversational and Communication Privacy in Family, Marriage and Domestic Disputes: An Examination Federal and State Wiretap and Stored Communications Acts and the Common Law Privacy Intrusion Tort

In the article I examine the legality of the not uncommon practice of surreptitiously recording telephone conversations, videotaping activities and accessing e-mail or voicemail communications by parties in domestic disputes. First, I examine the important values that are implicated by such activities. These values include conversation, communication and physical privacy. Conversation (and communication) privacy are valued on both intrinsic and instrumentalist grounds. These values run into countervailing values in domestic conflict cases. These include parental autonomy in child rearing and the best interests of the child. I argue that the pervasiveness of electronic surveillance and the emerging tradition in our legal system to grant mature minors self-determination in respect to decisions traditionally left to parents need to count more in accommodating values in parental electronic surveillance cases. Section II examines the legality of electronic surveillance in domestic disputes under federal and state wiretap and stored communications acts and the common law privacy intrusion tort. Wiretap and stored communications acts are notorious for their lack of clarity. I endeavor in part of this section to lay foundations about the basic concepts and structure of these laws and identify areas where there is some clarity. Wiretap acts generally prohibit surreptitious electronic surveillance of conversations. However, electronic surveillance in domestic disputes may be legal if the surveillance is sanctioned under three exceptions. These are: (1) the marital conflict exception; (2) the telephone extension exception; and (3) the vicarious consent exception. I join other commentators in their criticism of the first two exceptions. The vicarious consent exception is of recent vintage and I argue that the exception ought to be junked for several reasons. These include inherent problems with the parental motive tests, the incomprehensibility of vicarious consent with the modern law of joint custody, and the non-identity of interests in parental electronic surveillance cases. I also suggest that the problems with the self-minimization role granted to parents under the vicarious consent exception is another reason to junk the defense. Access to e-mail and voicemail are regulated under federal and state stored communications acts. Unlike wiretap acts these statutes do not contain exclusionary rules and the fruits of violations of stored communications acts are still admissible in civil and criminal proceedings. Courts have construed stored communication acts to not apply to surreptitious access of e-mail and voicemail from computers in the home. In addition, silent video surveillance is not regulated under wiretap or stored communications acts. This development has elevated the role of the common law privacy intrusion tort in legal evaluation of access to e-mail in home computers and surreptitious video surveillance in the home. It is clear that surreptitious audio and video surveillance in domestic conflicts may constitute tortuous conduct even if the conduct does not violate wiretap or stored communications acts. I examine the extent to which parties may have reasonable expectations of privacy in conversations and communications within the meaning of the privacy intrusion tort. I conclude that it would be tortuous conduct for a spouse to access e-mail stored in a home computer if the e-mail is stored in a segregated account and the parties have maintained separate passwords. Much evidence that is obtained by illegal electronic surveillance maybe admissible in marriage and custody proceedings because violations of stored communications acts and the privacy intrusion tort do not provide a basis for excluding evidence in civil court proceedings. I suggest that protective orders based upon discovery rules and constitutional privacy rights may provide a way to protect privacy by excluding some communications or images from admissibility in judicial records.

Robust speech detection method for telephone speech recognition system

This paper describes speech endpoint detection methods for continuous speech recognition systems used over telephone networks. Speech input to these systems may be contaminated not only by various ambient noises but also by various irrelevant sounds generated by users such as coughs, tongue clicking, lip noises and certain out-of-task utterances. Under these adverse conditions, robust speech endpoint detection remains an unsolved problem. We found in fact, that speech endpoint detection errors occurred in over 10% of the inputs in field trials of a voice activated telephone extension system. These errors were caused by problems of (1) low SNR, (2) long pauses between phrases and (3) irrelevant sounds prior to task sentences. To solve the first two problems, we propose a real-time speech ending point detection algorithm based on the implicit approach, which finds a sentence end by comparing the likelihood of a complete sentence hypothesis and other hypotheses. For the third problem, we propose a speech beginning point detection algorithm which rejects irrelevant sounds by using likelihood ratio and duration conditions. The effectiveness of these methods was evaluated under various conditions. As a result, we found that the ending point detection algorithm was not affected by long pauses and that the beginning point detection algorithm successfully rejected irrelevant sounds by using phone HMMs that fit the task. Furthermore, a garbage model of irrelevant sounds was also evaluated and we found that the garbage modeling technique and the proposed method compensated each other in their respective weak points and that the best recognition accuracy was achieved by integrating these methods.

Collaborative Nutrition Assessment Planning: A Program for Nursing

The Joint Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organization's 1995 Agenda for Change reflects a shift in the way the performance of healthcare organizations is being assessed. The approach has shifted from evaluating each discipline or department individually to focusing on functions such as patient assessment, care planning and education. “Interdisciplinary” has become the hallmark of the Commission's review.Our goal in this regard was to develop a tool by which nurses could identify, upon completion of their inpatient admission assessment, which patients should be referred to the dietitian. A lesson plan was developed with the guidance of the nursing education task force. The plan defined important nutrition indicators and avenues of communication available for the nurse to make a referral to the dietitian. It also acknowledged ways in which the nurse already provides nutritional care. The in-service was submitted and approved for .5 continuing education units for Registered Nurses and Licensed Practical Nurses. The dietitians set out with flip chart in hand to in-service all three shifts of nurses on their respective patient units. A handout was provided to all nursing staff that were unable to attend. Information was also provided about the Registered Dietitian's education and experience. Upon completion of all in-services, an updated nursing assessment form was distributed to all nursing units which included an area to check if a referral to the dietitian was made. Along side this, a telephone extension which is connected to an answering machine was provided for referrals made after 6 pm and before 7 am.Although difficult to quantify, benefits are definitely evident. As a result of the in-services, 20 nurse-initiated consults are received per week from the second and third shift only. These include patients with poor skin integrity, with a history of poor intake as reported to the nurse or patients in need of diet instruction. We receive this information within 24 hours of admission. It is our hope that this will help eliminate the need for last minute diet instructions. Additional benefits have been seen in improved communication with nursing staff. Some patient units, dietitians have been invited to participate in annual nursing “skills day” training sessions. Additionally, the in-service is being included as part of the hospital's Core Orientation which is provided to nurses upon employment.

A Voice-Controlled, Repertory-Dialer System

This paper describes a speaker-trained, voice-controlled, repertory-dialer system that includes a real-time speech analyzer, an isolated-word recognizer, a voice-response system, and a simulated dialer. The system is implemented on a minicomputer with a high-speed array processor performing the real-time operations. The vocabulary consists of seven command words, ten digits, and any number of names up to a specified maximum. To train the system, the user speaks each vocabulary word twice to provide reference templates for the system. After training, the system can dial the telephone number corresponding to any name in the repertory, or it can dial a 4-digit telephone extension spoken as a string of isolated digits. The system operates in two modes. In the first (cued by a double beep), the user can modify the repertory either by adding or deleting names or by changing a phone number, or the user can enter the second mode using a specified command word. In the second mode (cued by a single beep), the user can speak any name in the repertory or can give a 4-digit telephone extension. The system was tested by six talkers (three male and three female, three of whom were naive and three experienced users) over a three-week period. A total of 4620 words were spoken, and during the course of the text there were no recognition errors. A request for a repeat of a spoken word occurred about 2 percent of the time.

Dial-The-Computer Program A Preliminary Analysis

To the Editor:— In Los Angeles, when you are about to jump off the roof of a tall building, you can first get on the dial-a-psychiatrist line, provided there is a telephone extension on the roof, and ask, What do I do next? In Bloomington we have also Dial-a-Home, Dial-a-Movie, Dial-a-Prayer, Dial-a-Stock, Dial-a-Unity Blessing, and Dial-a-Unity Thought, the last two being separate units. How much simpler it would be to have a single Dial-the-Computer service which handled all problems! We also have a Dial-a-Saint number which is the same as the Dial-a-Movie number. This is confusing, making me fearful of the result, not of getting a wrong number, but of getting a right one. A computer should be able to take care of these problems. Please do not think this a jest. In 15 cities of the United States the Dial-a-Dietitian program is in full swing ( J Amer Diet Assoc