Withholding ACEIs and ARBs 24 h before coronary angiography does not appear to influence the incidence of CIN in stable patients with CKD stages 3-4.

No abstract

Visible Past proposes a cross platform, scalable environment (Exploratorium) for collaborative social, geographic, and historical education and research. The Exploratorium will be deployed in a variety of settings, from Web to fully immersive virtual reality environments. Educational activities can be formal (classroom teaching) or informal (conducted in a museum or self–directed online learning setting). The specific goals of the Exploratorium concept are two–fold: 1) to create a set of tools for collecting, organizing, or disseminating knowledge in a collaborative manner at various scales and in various formats; and, 2) to extend and refine a theoretical framework and methodological tools for prototyping and testing future research and learning applications and architectures that benefit from 3D and location aware applications. The heart of the Visible Past Exploratorium concept, the Exploratorium, is an information space built on top of a georeferenced wiki database that can be accessed through a variety of avenues: full immersion 3D environments, Web interfaces, or Geographic Exploration Systems (GES), such as Google Earth or NASA’s World Wind.

This chapter discusses the emergence of social media, especially wiki environments, as collaborative knowledge tools that function within a given set of individualistic and community-oriented cultural and functional constraints. The chapter provides the reader with an understanding of wiki social functions and technical capabilities and of the main value and cultural promises associated with them. It also examines the social and knowledge challenges they create and their likely impact on knowledge production in an individual and community setting. One main conclusion of the chapter is that wiki technologies need to be understood not as an overcoming of the tension between individualism and community, but as a product of their conflict, which they epitomize.

No abstract

This paper examines the potential cognitive impact of location aware information systems compared to that of search engines using a dual coding and conjoint retention theoretical framework. Supported by virtual reality or mobile devices, location aware systems deliver information that is relevant for a specific location. Research questions and hypotheses formulated under the assumption that location aware systems are better prepared to contextualize and make information memorable are explored using a planned comparison repeated measures 3 (2 treatment; 1 control) x 3 (pre-test, post-test, one week post-test) design. The results indicate that information acquisition in location-aware systems is just as powerful as that facilitated by search engines and that information recall (after 1 week) of facts is superior when using location-aware systems. The findings reinforce and extend dual coding theory suggesting that spatial and three-dimensional indexing can be one of the channels used in indexing and recalling information. The results also indicate that location-aware applications are a promising technology for distributing information in general and for learning in particular.

No abstract

No abstract