Summary. There is a compelling case, based on research in statistics education, for first courses in statistical inference to be underpinned by a staged development path. Preferably over a number of years, students should begin working with precursor forms of statistical inference, much earlier than they now do. A side benefit is giving younger students more straightforward and more satisfying ways of answering interesting real world questions. We discuss the issues that are involved in formulating precursor versions of inference and then present some specific and highly visual proposals. These build on novel ways of experiencing sampling variation and have intuitive connections to the standard formal methods of making inferences in first university courses in statistics. Our proposal uses visual comparisons to enable the inferential step to be made without taking the eyes off relevant graphs of the data.This allows the time and conceptual distances between questions, data and conclusions to be minimized, so that the most critical linkages can be made. Our approach was devised for use in high schools but is also relevant to adult education and some introductory tertiary courses.
Patients who present during pregnancy with acute abdominal symptoms often present a significant diagnostic challenge. Although ultrasound is often the first mode of abdominal imaging, in complex cases further imaging is often necessary. MRI of the small bowel has been made possible with the development of rapid scanning techniques. This has increased the attractiveness of a modality whose benefits include multiplanar imaging, excellent soft tissue contrast and the avoidance of ionizing radiation. With these capabilities MRI has been shown to be a useful adjunct when imaging the small bowel in pregnancy. Although MRI has been employed to investigate small bowel obstruction in the obstetric setting, to date there have been no reports of MR identifying small bowel obstruction secondary to extrinsic compression from a gravid uterus. During pregnancy, small bowel obstruction is most commonly attributed to adhesions. However, there are also antenatal occurrences of small bowel obstruction secondary to uterine compression. We present the MRI findings of an unusual case of small bowel obstruction occurring secondary to compression from a 32-week gravid uterus, in a patient with an end ileostomy. Furthermore, while clinical history and examination are fundamental to diagnosis of intestinal obstruction, the following case highlights the value of MRI in pregnancy as a confirmatory test.
This paper describes the design and implementation of an architecture for interactively viewing static light fields with very low latency. The system was deliberately over engineered to specifications much tighter than expected necessary to eliminate perceptible latency. This allowed us to relax the specifications to the point at which human users began to detect latency artifacts. We found empirically that when interacting with a light field, human users began to notice latency artifacts when the total system latency is approximately 15 ms. Although the architecture may not be used in practice, this result should prove fundamental for designers of future interactive graphics systems.
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