Confluency

Confluency The power of conflict leads to resolution, personal healing, and revelatory insights. As a kid, I was taught to voice my opinion in an educated, effective, and efficient way. However, when my ideas were different from those of my peers or society, and many disagreed, I was rejected, ignored, or muted. As I grew up, I noticed that thinking out of the box was a positive feature, especially when debating ideas with friends, family, and colleagues. Respecting our differences and disagreements is a crucial part of a healthy society. Conflict has a negative connotation; however, having a thoughtful and productive argument is vital to creating deep connections. Today, I recognize and feel empowered when facing my problems head-on and how I learn significant insights about myself by doing so. I painted Congruency, thinking of a phrase my mother often told me: There are many ways of saying the same thing, meaning that one can always choose to speak with kindness mainly because nothing can take the words back once said. Instead, whatever was said in the heat of the argument will come back to you in circles

Above Water

After a trial and error period, I understood that balance is not about absolute control but of continuous inspiration. ABOVE WATER represents my balancing act during my first year in medical school while going through the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been hard not to lose pieces of myself in these tumultuous times, especially when there is so much to learn and so little time. I turned to my loved ones to bring me light and joy. To be those shades of color that I had lost. I painted ABOVE WATER as a reminder of how I got here and why I get to stay here. As my first year ends, I feel I am not swimming against the current but enjoying the colorful sea

SMoT+NCS: Algorithm for Detecting Non-Continuous Stops

Several algorithms have been proposed in the last years for discovering stops in trajectories of moving objects. Some methods consider as stops the subtrajectories that i) have speed lower than the average trajectory speed, ii) present significant direction changes, iii) have gaps, or iv) intersect a given spatial region. In these approaches a time constraint should be met for the subtrajectory to be considered as a stop, and this constraint is absolute (it is met or not). Indeed, these approaches consider stops as a continuous subtrajectory. In this paper, we show that for several application domains the stops do not need to be continuous, and the time constraint should be relaxed. In summary, we present the definitions of non-continuous stops and present an algorithm to discover a new kind of stops. We evaluate the proposed algorithm with a running example and real trajectory data, comparing it to the most similar approach in the literature, the SMoT algorithm

Component Separation: A Case Report of Hybrid and Synthetic Absorbable Mesh Use for Complex Large Ventral Hernia Reparation.

Ventral abdominal hernias are a common abdominal wall defect in the United States. We present a 50-year-old Caucasian male with a large (\u3e18 cm) abdominal wall defect. An extensive complex abdominal wall reconstruction with advanced bilateral fascial flaps/component separation and repair of the abdominal wall defect was planned to restore the appropriate abdominal wall anatomic contour. The use of double mesh in large abdominal wall defects is still a relatively new documented technique. Only two case series detail the same technique used on this patient, with no articles on using a hybrid mesh with a synthetic absorbable mesh. This case uses an underlay and onlay mesh technique, with a hybrid mesh, Tela Biologics (Malvern, PA, USA), under the muscle, in this case, intraperitoneal bridging the gap. The anterior rectus sheath was reinforced with intercepted 0-Ethibond sutures (Ethicon/J&J, Bridgewater, NJ, USA) and then reinforced with a synthetic absorbable mesh (PhasixTM, Becton Dickinson, Franklin Lakes, NJ). The outcome with this patient shows more research should be conducted on considering long-term results with the types of mesh and the question of whether there are additional benefits when using two different types of mesh and their placement in the sandwich technique