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Objectives This article presents a comparative study of two Health Level Seven International (HL7) standards for clinical knowledge representation, the Arden Syntax and the Clinical Quality Language (CQL), regarding their expressiveness and utility to represent knowledge for clinical decision support (CDS) systems. Methods We compiled a concatenated set of features from both languages and made descriptive comparisons of 27 categories covering areas of language characteristics, data, control statements, and operators. Results Both Arden and CQL have similar constructs that can be used for representing CDS knowledge but also have unique constructs that could support distinct use cases. They have constructs that fully or partially address several of the categories used in the comparison, except for data models and terminologies in Arden and event triggering and iteration statements in CQL. Conclusion These standards can facilitate the sharing, management, and reuse of computable knowledge, and permit knowledge to be represented with their languages and converted to a machine-friendly executable code that can be shared and reused by other systems. Having support for standard data models and terminologies will continue to be a differential for adoption of a language. The HL7 working groups responsible for developing these standards can direct future development to enhance the functions of the standard and address the gaps identified in this study.

Here we present an inexpensive proposal to experimentally study Faraday's law of induction. The experiment uses low-cost materials, a computer with a sound card and a smartphone, both running free software. A value proportional to the induced electromotive force is measured with the computer's sound card and the data related to the magnetic field time dynamics is recorded using the smartphone's magnetometer. The analysis of the data is made with an electronic spreadsheet. Our proposal is quite suitable to be carried out with secondary school students or even with introductory undergraduate students and allows one to quantitatively study the linear relation between the induced electromotive force and the magnetic flux time rate.

In this work we present an inexpensive experiment proposal to study the kinematics of uniform circular motion in a secondary school. We used a PC sound card to connect a homemade simple sensor to a computer and used the free sound analysis software Audacity to record experimental data. We obtained quite good results even in comparison with the commercial PASCO PS-2103A motion sensor. We show that our experimental set up is suitable to perform experiments in secondary schools and allows the teacher to prove the relationship between angular velocity, the scalar one and the radius of the motion.

Abstract. This paper describes a novel architecture for anti-terrorism planning and resource allocation systems. The architecture uses web services and agents to provide a re-usable and extensible architecture for these types of systems. A dynamic web-based client and custom middle ware provide for the integration of otherwise de-coupled software components. The architecture has evolved from a longitudinal field study of U.S. Marine Corps anti-terrorism planners through recent empirical work in a more controlled setting. We describe this evolution, the architecture and its rationale, and provide some lessons learned for others engaged in development of anti-terrorism systems.