LabView Interface for School-Network DAQ Card

A low-cost DAQ card has been developed for school-network cosmic ray detector projects, providing digitized data from photomultiplier tubes via a standard serial interface. To facilitate analysis of these data and to provide students with a starting point for custom readout systems, a model interface has been developed using the National Instruments LabVIEW(R) system. This user-friendly interface allows one to initialize the trigger coincidence conditions for data-taking runs and to monitor incoming or pre-recorded data sets with updating singles- and coincidence-rate plots and other user-selectable histograms.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures. Presented as Paper NS26-119 at IEEE-NSS 2003, Portland, OR, by R. J. Wilke

An Online Survey Framework Using the Life Events Calendar

We describe an online survey framework programmed as a Java applet with a MySQL back-end. Our framework is built specifically as a Event History Calendar for the study of tobacco users and their behavior over a six month period. We introduce the notion of a Life Events Calendar and the relevance of an intelligent survey system in this context. We describe our methods and our component application approach and expand on the opportunities for artificial intelligence research with the system

Exhibition Notes : Days of Reading : Beyond this State of Affairs

"[...] we structured an exhibition around language, a broad and inexhaustible topic, but focusing on artists who used language as medium - language that is found, translated, appropriated, colloquial, cut up, dislocated, and covered up, but ultimately imbricated into the fabric of each of their works. Language the artists have transformed into objects." -- page 9

Improving Creative Thinking through Narrative Practice

Military leaders must poise subordinate leaders to predict future states. By appreciating clues presented in environments, leaders must predict what will happen next. Such prediction requires acute creative thinking skills. Army leaders plan for future operations using military planning processes including the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). These processes entail a means of developing courses of action, testing those courses of action for viability, and publishing an order directing subordinate units to execute the selected course of action (Department of the Army, 2014; Department of the Army, 2012a). Also included is testing courses of action for viability also known as the wargaming step of MDMP. The focus of this study is to conduct a mixed methods study of the Creative Thinking Class C122 at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) and document the observed effects on student creative skills, to determine two different methodologies to teach creativity. The current C122 is a lecture and practical exercise method to teaching creativity. The proposed test in this mixed methods study to improve creativity among CGSC students through narrative perspective taking follows the Ohio State University Project Narrative (Fletcher, 2021c)

Immunobiomarkers in Small Cell Lung Cancer: Potential Early Cancer Signals

Abstract Purpose: We investigated the presence of autoantibodies as immunobiomarkers to a panel of tumor-associated antigens in a group of individuals with small cell lung cancer (SCLC), a disease group that has a poor overall cancer prognosis and therefore may benefit most from early diagnosis. Experimental Design: Sera from 243 patients with confirmed SCLC and normal controls matched for age, sex, and smoking history were analyzed for the presence of these early immunobiomarkers (i.e., autoantibodies to p53, CAGE, NY-ESO-1, GBU4-5, Annexin I, SOX2, and Hu-D) by ELISA. Results: Autoantibodies were seen to at least 1 of 6 antigens in 55% of all the SCLC patients' sera tested, with a specificity of 90% compared with controls. Using a higher assay cutoff to achieve a specificity of 99%, autoantibodies were still detectable in 42% of SCLC patients (receiver operator characteristic area under the curve = 0.76). There was no significant difference in sensitivity when analyzed by stage of the cancer or by patient age or gender. The frequency of autoantibodies to individual antigens varied, ranging from 4% for GBU4-5 to 35% for SOX2. Levels of Annexin I autoantibodies were not elevated in patients with SCLC. Antibodies were also detected in 4 separate patients whose sera were taken up to 3 months before tumor diagnosis. Conclusion: The presence of an autoantibody to one or more cancer-associated antigens may provide an important addition to the armamentarium available to the clinician to aid early detection of SCLC in high-risk individuals. Clin Cancer Res; 17(6); 1474–80. ©2011 AACR.</jats:p

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7