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In this paper, we present a case study on the development of interfaces for elderly and disabled users. The domain of the case study was situated in the home environment, where we focused on producing affordable technologies to enable users to interact with and to control home appliances. We have developed ambient user interfaces that are integrated in familiar home artefacts, such as televisions and digital picture frames. These interfaces are connected remotely to a home network and are adaptive to users' expected increasing physical and cognitive needs. To support the development of the project, we created a novel methodology that is grounded in the ethical issues associated with a project of this nature. Our success with it has led to us presenting it here as a practical approach to developing user interfaces for a range of interactive applications, especially where there may be diverse user populations. This paper describes our journey through this project, how the methodology has been used throughout and the development of our user interfaces and their evaluation. AbstractIn this paper, we present a case study on the development of interfaces for elderly and disabled users. The domain of the case study was situated in the home environment, where we focused on producing affordable technologies to enable users to interact with and to control home appliances. We have developed ambient user interfaces which are integrated in familiar home artefacts, such as televisions and digital picture frames. These interfaces are connected remotely to a home network and are adaptive to users' expected increasing physical and cognitive needs. To support the project's development, we created a novel methodology which is grounded in the ethical issues associated with a project of this nature. Our success with it has led to us presenting it here as a practical approach to developing user interfaces for a range of interactive applications, especially where there may be diverse user populations. This paper describes our journey through this project, how the methodology has been used throughout, the development of our user interfaces, and their evaluation.

Classical psychedelics represent a subgroup of serotonergic psychoactive substances characterized by their distinct subjective effects on the human psyche. Another unique attribute of this drug class is that such effects become less apparent after repeated exposure within a short time span. The classification of psychedelics as a subgroup within the serotonergic drug family and the tolerance to their effects are replicated by the murine head twitch response (HTR) behavioral paradigm. Here, we aimed to assess tolerance and cross-tolerance to HTR elicited by psychedelic and nonpsychedelic serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT 2A R) agonists in mice. We show that repeated (4 days) administration of the psychedelic 1-(2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenyl)-2-aminopropane (DOI) induced a progressive decrease in HTR behavior. Tolerance to DOI-induced HTR was also observed 24 h after a single administration of this psychedelic. Pretreatment with the 5-HT 2A R antagonist M100907 reduced not only the acute manifestation of DOI-induced HTR, but also the development of tolerance to HTR. Additionally, cross-tolerance became apparent between the psychedelics DOI and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), whereas repeated administration of the nonpsychedelic 5-HT 2A R agonist lisuride did not affect the ability of these two psychedelics to induce HTR. At the molecular level, DOI administration led to down-regulation of 5-HT 2A R density in mouse frontal cortex membrane preparations. However, development of tolerance to the effect of DOI on HTR remained unchanged in β-arrestin-2 knockout mice. Together, these data suggest that tolerance to HTR induced by psychedelics involves activation of the 5-HT 2A R, is not observable upon repeated administration of nonpsychedelic 5-HT 2A R agonists, and occurs via a signaling mechanism independent of β-arrestin-2.

This paper considers an optimisation problem encountered in the implementation of traffic policies on network routers, namely the ordering of rules in an access control list to minimise or reduce processing time and hence packet latency. The problem is formulated as an objective function with constraints and shown to be NP-complete by translation to a known problem. Exact and heuristic solution methods are introduced, discussed and compared and computational results given. The emphasis throughout is on practical implementation of the optimisation process, that is within the tight constraints of a production network router seeking to reduce latency, on-line, in real-time but without the overhead of significant extra computation. Keywords

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