Reaching a Goal

Craig Ostbo \u2715 seems to have it all – a successful business, close family, community ties – and he\u27s even the drummer in the band Petty Fever. But there is one goal that has eluded him until now – completing his college degree. That will change in May when he receives a bachelor’s degree in international business through the Division of Continuing Education

Reaching Out to Youth

You might say that Gabriel Del Rayo ’08 is straddling two different worlds. Whether he’s encouraging players on the soccer field or dispensing advice, counsel and sometimes punishment through the juvenile justice system, Del Rayo is serving local youth

Reaching In, Reaching Out: A Tale of Administrative Experimentation and the Process of Administrative Inclusion

Universities often have a variety of academic programs and initiatives dedicated to the goal of helping students achieve effective communication skills, but these programs and initiatives can change quickly during different moments of institutional and administrative shifts. Our writing center at a mid-size, fouryear institution serves as a primary support program for enhancing students’ literacy in writing and critical thinking, so when our administrators and faculty engage in conversations concerning retention, general education reform, and writing in the disciplines, the writing center becomes a central component in supporting students through these curricular changes. To that end, the administrative goals involved in writing center work may change or evolve frequently and quickly as the university community seeks to enhance the educational experience of our students. The question becomes how do writing centers “survive” in the ever-changing tides of university administration and curriculum reform? And how do these changes present opportunities for tutors to acquire leadership skills transferable to contexts outside of the writing centerUniversity Writing Cente

Submovements During Reaching Movements after Stroke

Neurological deficits after cerebrovascular accidents very frequently disrupt the kinematics of voluntary movements with the consequent impact in daily life activities. Robotic methodologies enable the quantitative characterization of specific control deficits needed to understand the basis of functional impairments and to design effective rehabilitation therapies. In a group of right handed chronic stroke survivors (SS) with right side hemiparesis, intact proprioception, and differing levels of motor impairment, we used a robotic manipulandum to study right arm function during discrete point-to-point reaching movements and reciprocal out-and-back movements to visual targets. We compared these movements with those of neurologically intact individuals (NI). We analyzed the presence of secondary submovements in the initial (i.e. outward) trajectory portion of the two tasks and found that the SS with severe impairment (F

Consensus reaching in committees

In this paper, we apply a consensus model to decision-making in committees that have to choose one or more alternatives from a set of alternatives. The model does not use a voting rule nor a set of winning coalitions. Every decision maker evaluates each alternative with respect to given criteria. The criteria may be of unequal importance to a decision maker. Decision makers may be advised by a chairman to adjust their preferences, i.e., to change their evaluation of some alternative(s) or/and the importance of the criteria, in order to obtain a better consensus. The consensus result should satisfy constraints concerning the consensus degree and the ma jority degree. A simple example is presented.constraints satisfaction; consensus; committees

Sensitivity to Hand Path Curvature during Reaching

People optimize reaching to make straight and smooth movements. We performed experiments characterizing human sensitivity to hand path deviations from a straight reach. Vision of the arm was blocked. Subjects either moved the hand along paths of constrained curvature, or a robot moved the relaxed limb along similar trajectories (active and passive conditions, respectively). Subjects responded after each trial whether or not they thought the movement curved convex right. In a series of three experiments, we tested the effects of modifying visual feedback of hand position to suppress curvature, isotonic muscle activation, and a distracter task on subjects ability to detect curvature during reaching. We found that both active reaching and artificial minimization of visual hand path deviations significantly decreased proprioceptive curvature sensitivity. Specifically, isotonic contraction of muscles antagonistic to the movement decreased sensitivity to curvature while agonistic contraction had no effect. The distracter task did not significantly affect proprioceptive sensitivity, though it did interfere with the detrimental effect of minimizing visual error feedback. These findings demonstrate that: 1) antagonist muscle activation decreases efficacy of proprioceptive feedback during hand path curvature estimation, and 2) vision\u27s dominance over proprioception can be manipulated by altering the attentional demands of the task

Robust visual servoing in 3d reaching tasks

This paper describes a novel approach to the problem of reaching an object in space under visual guidance. The approach is characterized by a great robustness to calibration errors, such that virtually no calibration is required. Servoing is based on binocular vision: a continuous measure of the end-effector motion field, derived from real-time computation of the binocular optical flow over the stereo images, is compared with the actual position of the target and the relative error in the end-effector trajectory is continuously corrected. The paper outlines the general framework of the approach, shows how visual measures are obtained and discusses the synthesis of the controller along with its stability analysis. Real-time experiments are presented to show the applicability of the approach in real 3-D applications

Reaching Higher Ground

Examines outreach programs at postsecondary institutions that provide greater accessibility to college information for Latino parents. Includes information about the mission, operation, development, marketing, recruitment, and evaluation processes