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According to Michael Twidale, professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, bad usability can be an irritation for everyone but especially awful for the underprivileged. In Everyone Everywhere: A Distributed and Embedded Paradigm for Usability, which was recently published in the
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Twidale and coauthors David M. Nichols (University of Waikato, New Zealand) and Christopher P. Lueg (Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland) present a new paradigm to address the persistence of difficulties that people have in accessing and using information.
Twidale points to the COVID vaccination rollout as one recent example of bad usability. In many places, people have to book their vaccine appointments online, which can be difficult for the especially vulnerable elderly population.
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The authors are Helen M. Genova, PhD, of Kessler Foundation s Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Research, and Stefano Ziccardi, PhD, Marco Pitteri, PhD, and Massimiliano Calabrese, MD, of the University of Verona. Dr. Genova also has an academic appointment at Rutgers University.
Some recent MS research, including work led by Dr. Genova, has shown that social cognition deficits may affect people with MS who otherwise have no other cognitive impairments. Social cognition, which is required to understand and process the emotions of others, is an extremely important skill set for forming successful relationships with others, and deficits in this area can significantly affect a person s quality of life.
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IMAGE: ORNL s non-disruptive air leak detector captures air escaping from exterior walls and uses refractive imaging to calculate the leakage flow rate. view more
Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Buildings - The mirage effect
A team of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a method to detect and measure air leaking from a building s walls and roof that is quicker, cheaper and less disruptive to occupants.
Current air leak detection options, such as using a blower door and smoke or infrared thermography, are costly and invasive. ORNL s method is conducted from outside, using an imaging technique to visualize the flow of air leaks and calculate the volumetric flow of air based on the refraction effects imaged by cameras.
Professor of Chemistry, Lutz Ackermann from Göttingen University has received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC will fund his project Electrochemical Bond Functionalization (ElectroFun) for five years with an award of around 2.5 million euros.
Credit: Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT)
The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) has announced the development of an effective structural monitoring technique to monitor massive infrastructures, such as long-span bridge. The method provides accurate and precise responses over whole structural system densely by fusing advantages of multi-fidelity data.
Rapid advances in sensing and information technologies have led to condition-based monitoring in civil and mechanical structural systems. The structural monitoring system plays a key role in condition-based monitoring to evaluate structural safety from responses measured by sensors. In other words, following method allows to examine the health of an existing structures, such as a long-span bridge. The structural monitoring system can enable early detection for an unsafe condition and enable proactive maintenance. As a result, it greatly reduces the inspection burden as