Uncovering strata: an investigation into the graphic innovations of geologist Henry T. De la Beche

An historical investigation into the types of illustrations in the Golden Age of Geology (1788-1840) revealed the nature and progression of graphic representation at the dawning of geology as a science. Exhaustive sampling of geology texts published in the period of focus proceeded until saturation was achieved. Qualitative analysis and evaluation of early illustrations were accomplished with Edward R. Tufte\u27s theory of graphic design. Hypothesis testing around a correlation coefficient revealed significance at the 99% confidence level for relationships between publication year and number of included graphics, and publication year and the graphic density of texts. Henry T. De la Beche emerged as an important geologist who made numerous innovative graphic contributions in the Golden Age of Geology. De la Beche promoted colliding theory graphics, or the accurate portrayal of the earth\u27s sections and scenes that would remain valuable for future generations of geologists. He was apparently the first geologist to utilize the small multiple format. De la Beche also designed and drew scientific caricatures that encapsulated the theoretical debates of the day, as well as the social, cultural, and historical influences on the emerging theories of geology. These scientific caricatures have emerged as instructional graphics with significant classroom potential for teaching the nature of science. De la Beche also drew the first portrayal of a scene from deep time, Duria antiquior, which became the first innovative classroom geology teaching graphic. Through his introduction and development of several important genres of visual explanation, De la Beche emerged as the Father of Visual Geology Education

Developing a Community Chaplaincy Ministry: Through a Need Satisfaction Care Model for a Native Language Church

Believers in Jesus Christ are mandated to go into the world, and caring for people is part of the seeking. God has provided models and processes of His care in the scriptures. A chaplain holds spiritual care functions outside the church\u27s four walls on the field. Unfortunately, many Asian Indian Americans in the booming immigrant population have not received care. Therefore, this action research thesis assumes need-based church training to build a culture-sensitive model of care to provide care. This research project explored the causes and impediments to care through participative sessions with the spiritual care provider volunteers of the church. Qualitative data was collected by observing participants. Using quality management improvement methods, the study participants examined their expectations of culture-based care and what they felt was lacking in them to provide care. The research results indicated increased awareness of the problem and the ability to uncover, identify, and select critical causes, such as the absence of listening presence, to build preventive solutions towards dispensing care as a systemic whole. Participants created the need satisfaction model by uncovering needs through probing and supporting uncovered needs with the benefits of the Word through listening and prayer. The church and participants are encouraged to continue to work on eliminating impediments to care and collaborate with other providers in the community. Following a continuous quality improvement initiative in community chaplaincy, they can adapt to a continuously changing and evolving culture of immigrant inter-faith life in an alien land

Assessing the use of multiple sources in student essays

Abstract The present study explored different approaches for automatically scoring student essays that were written on the basis of multiple texts. Specifically, these approaches were developed to classify whether or not important elements of the texts were present in the essays. The first was a simple pattern-matching approach called "multi-word" that allowed for flexible matching of words and phrases in the sentences. The second technique was latent semantic analysis (LSA), which was used to compare student sentences to original source sentences using its high-dimensional vectorbased representation. Finally, the third was a machinelearning technique, support vector machines, which learned a classification scheme from the corpus. The results of the study suggested that the LSA-based system was superior for detecting the presence of explicit content from the texts, but the multi-word pattern-matching approach was better for detecting inferences outside or across texts. These results suggest that the best approach for analyzing essays of this nature should draw upon multiple natural language processing approaches

Describing Healthcare Service Delivery in a Ryan White Funded HIV Clinic: A Bayesian Mixed Method Case Study

This dissertation describes health care delivery in a Ryan White Program (RWP) HIV clinic, with a focus on medical home care, using the Bayesian Case Study Method (BCSM). The RWP funds medical care for uninsured HIV patients and Pappas and colleagues (2014) suggested enhanced HIV care build upon medical home models of care rooted in the RWP. However, little research describes how RWP clinics operate as medical homes. This study developed the BCSM to describe medical home care at a RWP clinic. The BCSM combines a case study framework with Bayesian statistics for a novel approach to mixed method, descriptive studies. Roberts (2002) and Voils (2009) used mixed-method Bayesian approaches and this dissertation contributes to this work. For this study, clinic staff and patients participated in interviews and surveys. I used Bayes’ Theorem to combine interview data, by use of subjective priors, with survey data to produce Bayesian posterior means that indicate the extent to which medical home care was provided. Subjective priors facilitate the inclusion of valuable stakeholder belief in posteriors. Using the BCSM, posterior means succinctly describe qualitative and quantitative data, in a way other methods of mixing data do not, which is useful for decision makers. Posterior means indicated that coordinated, comprehensive, and ongoing care was provided at the clinic; however, accessible care means were lower reflecting an area in need of improvement. Interview data collected for subjective priors captured detailed service delivery descriptions. For example, interview data described how medical and support services were coordinated and highlighted the role of social determinants of health (SDH). Namely, coordinated and comprehensive services that addressed SDH, such as access to housing, food, and transportation, were necessary for patients to focus on their HIV and utilize healthcare. This case study addressed a gap in the literature regarding descriptions of how RWP clinics provide medical home care. For domains with high posterior means, the associated interview data can be used to plan HIV care in non-RWP settings. Future research should describe other RWP HIV medical homes so this information can be used to plan enhanced HIV care across the healthcare system

Impacts of Climate Change on Multiple Use Management of Bureau of Land Management Land in the Intermountain West, USA

Although natural resource managers are concerned about climate change, many are unable to adequately incorporate climate change science into their adaptation strategies or management plans, and are not always aware of or do not employ the most current scientific knowledge. One of the most prominent natural resource management agencies in the United States is the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is tasked with managing over 248 million acres (\u3e1 million km2) of public lands for multiple, often conflicting, uses. Climate change will affect the sustainability of many of these land uses and could further increase conflicts between them. As such, the purpose of our study was to determine the extent to which climate change will affect public land uses, and whether the BLM is managing for such predicted effects. To do so, we first conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature that discussed potential impacts of climate change on the multiple land uses the BLM manages in the Intermountain West, USA, and then expanded these results with a synthesis of projected vegetation changes. Finally, we conducted a content analysis of BLM Resource Management Plans in order to determine how climate change is explicitly addressed by BLM managers, and whether such plans reflect changes predicted by the scientific literature. We found that active resource use generally threatens intrinsic values such as conservation and ecosystem services on BLM land, and climate change is expected to exacerbate these threats in numerous ways. Additionally, our synthesis of vegetation modeling suggests substantial changes in vegetation due to climate change. However, BLM plans rarely referred to climate change explicitly and did not reflect the results of the literature review or vegetation model synthesis. Our results suggest there is a disconnect between management of BLM lands and the best available science on climate change. We recommend that the BLM actively integrates such research into on-the-ground management plans and activities, and that researchers studying the effects of climate change make a more robust effort to understand the practices and policies of public land management in order to effectively communicate the management significance of their findings

A comprehensive review of industrial symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis, which allows entities and companies that traditionally be separated, to cooperate among them in the sharing of resources, contributes to the increase of sustainability with environmental, economic and social benefits. Examples of industrial symbiosis have grown over the years with increasing geographic dispersion. Thus, through a comprehensive review of previous studies, this work aims to trace the trend of industrial symbiosis research and to map the existing case studies around the world, with a critical analysis of its impact. The analysis of the 584 selected publications allowed tracing the evolution of these according to their content and the type of article, as well as its distribution by journals. Based on the literature review, the main lines for research in industrial symbiosis are assessed, as well as an updated study of the published case studies is provided with emphasis on the location, type of industry and employed methodologies. Several challenges are then identified for future research. The results reveal the number of articles on industrial symbiosis has greatly increased since 2007 and China is the country with the largest number of publications and cases of industrial symbiosis, followed by the United States. The methods for quantifying impacts and analysing industrial symbiosis networks were the most widely used. The analysis of the published case studies allowed an overview of the industrial symbiosis in the world and showed that the potential for application is enormous, both in developed countries and in countries with developing economies, and although the most present economic activities in the synergies are associated with the manufacturing sector, the possibilities of industrial symbiosis are not restricted to these activities nor to the number of entities involved. The symbioses between industry and the surrounding community also have great potential for development with numerous advantages for both parties.publishe

The Role of Social Workers in Addressing Patients' Unmet Social Needs in the Primary Care Setting

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Unmet social needs pose significant risk to both patients and healthcare organizations by increasing morbidity, mortality, utilization, and costs. Health care delivery organizations are increasingly employing social workers to address social needs, given the growing number of policies mandating them to identify and address their patients’ social needs. However, social workers largely document their activities using unstructured or semi-structured textual descriptions, which may not provide information that is useful for modeling, decision-making, and evaluation. Therefore, without the ability to convert these social work documentations into usable information, the utility of these textual descriptions may be limited. While manual reviews are costly, time-consuming, and require technical skills, text mining algorithms such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) offer cheap and scalable solutions to extracting meaningful information from large text data. Moreover, the ability to extract information on social needs and social work interventions from free-text data within electronic health records (EHR) offers the opportunity to comprehensively evaluate the outcomes specific social work interventions. However, the use of text mining tools to convert these text data into usable information has not been well explored. Furthermore, only few studies sought to comprehensively investigate the outcomes of specific social work interventions in a safety-net population. To investigate the role of social workers in addressing patients’ social needs, this dissertation: 1) utilizes NLP, to extract and categorize the social needs that lead to referral to social workers, and market basket analysis (MBA), to investigate the co-occurrence of these social needs; 2) applies NLP, ML, and deep learning techniques to extract and categorize the interventions instituted by social workers to address patients’ social needs; and 3) measures the effects of receiving a specific social work intervention type on healthcare utilization outcomes

Digital History and Hermeneutics

For doing history in the digital age, we need to investigate the “digital kitchen” as the place where the “raw” is transformed into the “cooked”. The novel field of digital hermeneutics provides a critical and reflexive frame for digital humanities research by acquiring digital literacy and skills. The Doctoral Training Unit "Digital History and Hermeneutics" is applying this new digital practice by reflecting on digital tools and methods

African/Black psychology: a qualitative investigation of distinguished Black psychologists

Over the past 40 years, researchers have made numerous attempts to document and expand upon the literature surrounding the development of African/Black psychology. Yet little is known about the contextual factors that might have influenced individual decisions to become involved in the movement. This study examined the early life experience of 13 Black psychologists whose autobiographies were published in Robert Williams (2008) book, History of the Association of Black Psychologists: Profiles of Outstanding Black Psychologists. Data for this study were analyzed utilizing a qualitative research approach. Themes that arose from the analysis included: (a) direct exposure/awareness of oppressive social, political, and environmental practices; (b) supportive role of family in providing a sense of direction, structure, and safety; (c) early childhood education emphasis; and (d) collective work and responsibility. Findings from this study expand on communal ways of coping with aversive life experiences such as racism