There was a request recently to categorise aspects of postgraduate medical education as either "academic" or "vocational." This raises a question about the meaning of words and about the logic behind such a distinction. In common parlance "academic" means impracticable and irrelevant to the real business of living. A "vocation" was once a calling to the higher rungs of a profession but now "voc...

Use of groundwater from private wells in households has increased considerably, owing to a better cost/benefit ratio than that of water provided by local utilities for a fee. However, this water is usually untreated, which makes it a vehicle for diseases. Thus, monitoring this water is necessary to ensure its integrity and quality. We aimed to evaluate the physical, chemical, and microbiologica...

In this paper, we propose a model-based scattering removal method for stereo vision for robot manipulation in indoor scattering media where the commonly used ranging sensors are unable to work. Stereo vision is an inherently ill-posed and challenging problem. It is even more difficult in the case of images of dense fog or dense steam scenes illuminated by active light sources. Images taken in s...