Ironclad Revolution: The History, Discovery and Recovery of the USS Monitor

On the afternoon of March 8, 1862, the Confederate ironclad ram Virginia, built upon the burned-out hulk of the steam screw frigate Merrimack, crawled slowly into Hampton Roads to challenge the Union blockade of the Confederate coastline. Before nightfall, the Virginia had wreaked havoc upon the Union blockading fleet: the USS Cumberland lay at the bottom of the Roads, her flags still defiantly flying while the surrendered USS Congress blazed ominously in the harbor until exploding spectacularly in the early morning hours of March 9.;The USS Monitor---a vessel of a radical new design and completely untried in battle---arrived too late to make a difference on the 8th, but met the Virginia on the morning of the 9th in a contest that signaled the first time ironclad had met ironclad in combat. While their four-and-a-half-hour battle ended in a draw, it changed much of the future course of naval warfare. Within days of the engagement, navies around the world were declaring an end to wooden construction and moving forward with their own ironclad building programs--many of which predated both the Monitor and the Virginia. Furthermore, the Monitor\u27s rotating gun turret design freed vessels from the strictures of broadside tactics by allowing the guns, rather than the entire vessel, to be turned, and ushered in a new element of battleship design.;Neither the Virginia nor the Monitor lived out that year, however. The Virginia was destroyed in May of 1862 by her own crew to keep her from enemy hands, while the Monitor succumbed to a nor\u27easter on New Year\u27s Eve off the coast of Cape Hatteras.;Discovered in 1973, the Monitor was designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1975 under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since 1987, The Mariners\u27 Museum in Newport News, VA has served as the principal repository for artifacts recovered from the wrecksite and is currently conserving over 210 tons of the Union ironclad in the Batten Conservation Complex.;This dissertation serves as the text for the catalogue of the award-winning exhibition, Ironclad Revolution, which opened at The Mariners\u27 Museum in 2007. The author serves as curator of the USS Monitor Center. Drawing from artwork, archival material and the recovered artifacts themselves, this work seeks to tell the full story of the Monitor: her history, discovery, recovery, and conservation

Rapid return to normal activities at a residential summer camp during COVID-19 Pandemic

Aim: Infection prevention and control (IPC) within residential settings is a central focus of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Youth residential summer camps are an excellent model for such environments and have thus far had mixed results. The aim of this report is to describe the successful implementation of a seven-week overnight summer camp with rapid return to normal activities from June to August 2020 Subjects and Methods: This retrospective study includes 427 individuals who traveled from 24 US States. All staff and campers were tested by serial nasopharyngeal PCR tests in the context of strict infection prevention and control (IPC) measures including cohorts and masking. The entire camp population was isolated from non-camp personnel with special measures for food, supply, and mail delivery. Results: During the two-week staff session, one staff member tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, was isolated, and sent safely off premises. All other campers and staff had three negative PCR tests: 1-8 days before arrival, upon arrival, and 5-6 days after arrival. After these three negative tests, 6 days into camp, most IPCs, including masking, were successfully lifted and a normal camp experience was possible. Conclusions: These findings indicate that serial PCR-based testing and strict adherence to IPC measures among cohorts can allow for successful assumption of near normal group activities in a residential setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. This result at an overnight summer camp has broad implications for similar residential communities such as boarding schools, other youth education and development programs, as well as nursing homes and military installations

Reality Check: On Bentham's Preclusion of Reality's Effect on the Value of Experience

This paper seeks to disprove Bentham’s claim that the value of experience equals the pleasure derived from it. A few intuitive examples demonstrate the added value of reality, which is independent of perception, to critique Bentham’s utilitarianism.Bonevac, DanielPhilosoph

Research Experiences Instrument Scoring Guide

This document is a scoring guide to assist higher-education administrators, faculty, and researchers who wish to use the Research Experiences Instrument (REI). There are five aspects, or factors, that the REI is intended to measure relative to engineering Ph.D. students’ opportunities to practice being a professional in their research experiences, and an overall REI score. Detailed scoring instructions are provided. The REI was developed to assess how the research experiences of engineering Ph.D. students are preparing them for practice. Utilizing a rigorous instrument development process, the REI was shown to be a tool that can reliably and validly be used to assess engineering Ph.D. students\u27 professional practice preparation

Mycotoxin biosensor based on optical planar waveguide

The research aim of this work is to develop a simple and highly sensitive optical biosensor for detection of mycotoxins. This sensor is built on a planar waveguide operating on the polarization interferometry principle, i.e., detecting a phase shift between p- and s-components of polarized light developed during the binding of analyte molecules. The operation of the proposed sensor is similar to that of a Mach⁻Zehnder interferometer, while its design is much simpler and it does not require splitting the waveguide into two arms. The refractive index sensitivity of the polarization interferometer sensor was in the range of 5200 radians per refractive index unit (RIU). Several tests were conducted to detect ochratoxin A (OTA) at different concentrations in direct immunoassay with specific antibodies immobilized in the sensing window. The lowest concentration of OTA of 0.01 ng/mL caused a phase shift of nearly one period. The results obtained prove high sensitivity of the sensors, which are capable of detecting even lower concentrations of mycotoxins at the ppt (part-per-trillion) level

Development of the cat-owner relationship scale (CORS)

Characteristics of the human-animal bond can be influenced by both owner-related and pet-related factors, which likely differ between species. Three studies adapted the Monash Dog-Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS) to permit assessment of human-cat interactions as perceived by the cat's owner. In Study 1293 female cat owners completed a modified version of the MDORS, where 'dog' was replaced with 'cat' for all items. Responses were compared with a matched sample of female dog owners. A partial least squares discriminant analysis revealed systematic differences between cat and dog owners in the Dog (Cat)-Owner Interaction subscale (MDORS subscale 1), but not for Perceived Emotional Closeness or Perceived Costs (Subscales 2 and 3). Study 2 involved analysis of free-text descriptions of cat-owner interactions provided by 61 female cat owners. Text mining identified key words which were used to create additional questions for a new Cat-Owner Interaction subscale. In Study 3, the resulting cat-owner relationship scale (CORS) was tested in a group of 570 cat owners. The main psychometric properties of the scale, including internal consistency and factor structure, were evaluated. We propose that this scale can be used to accurately assess owner perceptions of their relationship with their cat. A modified scale, combining items from the CORS and MDORS (a C/DORS), is also provided for when researchers would find it desirable to compare human-cat and human-dog interactions. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Universality of rain event size distributions

We compare rain event size distributions derived from measurements in climatically different regions, which we find to be well approximated by power laws of similar exponents over broad ranges. Differences can be seen in the large-scale cutoffs of the distributions. Event duration distributions suggest that the scale-free aspects are related to the absence of characteristic scales in the meteorological mesoscale

Factors affecting paramedicine students' learning about evidence-based practice: a phenomenographic study

Background: Evidence-based practice is an important component of pre-service professional learning in medicine and allied health degrees, including new programmes in paramedicine. Despite substantial interest in this area, there is still a lack of clear understanding of how the skills and understandings needed to develop the capacity to apply evidence-based practice can best be learned. Evidence-based practice is often described as consisting of five steps: ask, acquire, appraise, apply and assess. This study focuses on paramedicine students’ learning about the first three steps in a final year unit which explicitly aims to develop their skills in relation to these. Methods: We conducted a qualitative study of learning journals recorded by 101 of 121 students in a final year unit of a paramedicine degree (20 students either withheld consent for their journals to be used in the research or did not complete their journal entries). We used phenomenographic approaches to the data analysis in order to identify both variation in students’ learning and the factors affecting this variation. Results: We observed variation in students’ understanding of the purpose of literature analysis, the nature of medical research and its relationship to practice. In all three, we identify two main factors contributing to the variation in student learning outcomes: epistemological stance, and opportunities for metacognitive learning generated through peer interactions and self-reflection. We also found that as students begin to grapple with the complexity of medical research, this sometimes produced negative attitudes towards its value; such unintended outcomes need to be recognised and addressed. Conclusions: We suggest key factors that should be considered in developing coursework intended to enhance students’ understandings about the processes and application of evidence-based practice. Providing collaborative learning opportunities that address the architecture of variation we observed may be useful in overcoming epistemological and metacognitive barriers experienced by students

Article A new subspecies of Batagur affinis (Cantor, 1847), one of the world's most critically endangered chelonians (Testudines: Geoemydidae)

Abstract Estuarine Batagur are among the most critically endangered chelonian species. We assess the taxonomic status of the recently discovered Cambodian relic population of Batagur by phylogenetic analyses of three mitochondrial (2096 bp) and three nuclear DNA fragments (1909 bp) using sequences from all other Batagur species and selected allied geoemydids. Furthermore, we calculated haplotype networks of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene for Cambodian terrapins, B. affinis, B. baska, and B. kachuga and compare external morphology of estuarine Batagur populations. Genetically, Cambodian Batagur are closely related with, but distinct from B. affinis from Sumatra and the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. Morphologically, Cambodian Batagur resemble the distinctive B. affinis populations from the eastern Malay Peninsula that were not available for genetic study. We suggest that the Batagur populations from the eastern Malay Peninsula and Cambodia represent a new subspecies of B. affinis that once was distributed in estuaries surrounding the Gulf of Thailand (Batagur affinis edwardmolli subsp. nov.). Its patchy extant distribution is most probably the result of large-scale habitat alteration and century-long overexploitation. In addition, our phylogenetic analyses suggest repeated switches between riverine and estuarine habitats during the evolution of the extant Batagur species