Organized Crime Against Civilization : The Congressional Investigation of Liberated Concentration Camps in 1945

This study examines the congressional mission to liberated concentration camps in April and May 1945. General Dwight D. Eisenhower requested a congressional mission and a group of newspaper editors and publishers to view firsthand the horrors of the concentration camp Buchenwald, so that the American public might be made more aware of German atrocities in concentration camps and to dispel the belief that the atrocity reports were wartime propaganda. The congressmen and newspapermen were horrified by what they saw at the German concentration camps, and many reported back to the American public about the atrocities and conditions in the concentration camps through articles, interviews, speeches, and rallies. Upon their return to the United States, the congressmen published a report on the conditions within the camps, and many of them spoke in Congress and to the public about the need to re-educate the Germans, try guilty Germans, and rebuild Germany. The congressmen and editors and publishers brought legitimacy to the reports of American war correspondents concerning German atrocities, and their efforts contributed to constructing a political climate that allowed for and legitimized the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S. Army denazification efforts, and the rebuilding of Germany through the Marshall Plan. To examine this mission, newspaper articles from April and May 1945 were collected from thirteen American newspapers, as well as the Times of London. Research was also conducted in the personal collections of two of the congressmen who toured Europe at that time, as well as at the National Archives in College Park, MD. This study goes beyond the existing research by examining the congressional mission to Buchenwald, Dora, and Dachau, which, though it has been briefly mentioned in existing Holocaust literature, has never been fully examined

Representing moisture fluxes and phase changes in glacier debris cover using a reservoir approach

Due to the complexity of treating moisture in supraglacial debris, surface energy balance models to date have neglected moisture infiltration and phase changes in the debris layer. The latent heat flux (QL) is also often excluded due to the uncertainty in determining the surface vapour pressure. To quantify the importance of moisture on the surface energy and climatic mass balance (CMB) of debris-covered glaciers, we developed a simple reservoir parameterization for the debris ice and water content, as well as an estimation of the latent heat flux. The parameterization was incorporated into a CMB model adapted for debris-covered glaciers. We present the results of two point simulations, using both our new “moist” and the conventional “dry” approaches, on the Miage Glacier, Italy, during summer 2008 and fall 2011. The former year coincides with available in situ glaciological and meteorological measurements, including the first eddy-covariance measurements of the turbulent fluxes over supraglacial debris, while the latter contains two refreeze events that permit evaluation of the influence of phase changes. The simulations demonstrate a clear influence of moisture on the glacier energy and mass-balance dynamics. When water and ice are considered, heat transmission to the underlying glacier ice is lower, as the effective thermal diffusivity of the saturated debris layers is reduced by increases in both the density and the specific heat capacity of the layers. In combination with surface heat extraction by QL, subdebris ice melt is reduced by 3.1% in 2008 and by 7.0% in 2011 when moisture effects are included. However, the influence of the parameterization on the total accumulated mass balance varies seasonally. In summer 2008, mass loss due to surface vapour fluxes more than compensates for the reduction in ice melt, such that the total ablation increases by 4.0 %. Conversely, in fall 2011, the modulation of basal debris temperature by debris ice results in a decrease in total ablation of 2.1 %. Although the parameterization is a simplified representation of the moist physics of glacier debris, it is a novel attempt at including moisture in a numerical model of debris-covered glaciers and one that opens up additional avenues for future research

Resonant oscillations in the Hawai`ian archipelago and tropical instability vortices and their fronts, frontal instabilities, and cross-frontal differences

Ph.D

Discrepancies in Written Versus Calculated Durations in Opioid Prescriptions: Pre-Post Study.

BACKGROUND: The United States is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. Long-term use of opioid medications is associated with an increased risk of dependence. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes specific recommendations regarding opioid prescribing, including that prescription quantities should not exceed the intended duration of treatment. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine if opioid prescription quantities written at our institution exceed intended duration of treatment and whether enhancements to our electronic health record system improved any discrepancies. METHODS: We examined the opioid prescriptions written at our institution for a 22-month period. We examined the duration of treatment documented in the prescription itself and calculated a duration based on the quantity of tablets and doses per day. We determined whether requiring documentation of the prescription duration affected these outcomes. RESULTS: We reviewed 72,314 opioid prescriptions, of which 16.96% had a calculated duration that was greater than what wasdocumented in the prescription. Making the duration a required field significantly reduced this discrepancy (17.95% vs 16.21%,P CONCLUSIONS: Health information technology vendors should develop tools that, by default, accurately represent prescription durations and/or modify doses and quantities dispensed based on provider-entered durations. This would potentially reduce unintended prolonged opioid use and reduce the potential for long-term dependence

Time-based vertex reconstruction in the Compact Muon Solenoid

The Phase-II upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider will introduce a variety of new measurement devices to the CMS, including the High-Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL). The increase in luminosity from these upgrades will also have the undesired side effect of vastly increasing pileup to a level at which the current machine learning vertex reconstruction (vertexing) algorithms cease to be effective. This will necessitate the development of further vertexing algorithms. Using high precision timing measurements from simulated events in the HGCAL, we design a vertex reconstruction algorithm that requires only the spatiotemporal arrival coordinates to reconstruct the interaction vertex of a collision with sub-millimeter resolution. We also analyse how particle energy and simulated time smearing affect this resolution and we apply this algorithm to more realistic H->γγ sets. To do this, we implement a set of filters to remove poorly-reconstructed events and introduce a new algorithm capable of reconstructing interaction vertices given the pointing data and arrival data of a single cluster. Progress on this work was ultimately hindered by extensive errors in the clustering algorithms used the generation of the datasets; should these errors be resolved, further work would include integration with tracker information and the application of these algorithms to high-pileup scenarios and QCD jets

Thermogravimetric analysis of biomass-lignite blends for co-combustion

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Improving Syntactic Relationships Between Language and Objects

This paper presents the integration of natural language processing and computer vision to improve the syntax of the language generated when describing objects in images. The goal was to not only understand the objects in an image, but the interactions and activities occurring between the objects. We implemented a multi-modal neural network combining convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures to create a model that can maximize the likelihood of word combinations given a training image. The outcome was an image captioning model that leveraged transfer learning techniques for architecture components. Our novelty was to quantify the effectiveness of transfer learning schemes for encoders and decoders to qualify which were the best for improving syntactic relationships. Our work found the combination of ResNet feature extraction and fine-tuned BERT word embeddings to be the best performing architecture across two datasets - a valuable discovery for those continuing this work considering the cost of compute for these complex models

Milking time during periods of heat stress: part of the solution or part of the problem?

Dairy Research, 2014 is known as Dairy Day, 2014Milking time may be a stressful event for lactating dairy cows during summer. Increases in body temperatures because of crowding in the milk parlor holding pen may contribute to increased heat stress. The objective of this extension project was to evaluate the effectiveness of heat stress abatement in milking facilities from two Kansas commercial dairies. Vaginal temperatures at milking were lower than vaginal temperatures before milking in one of the dairies. The lower vaginal temperatures at milking, however, were not observed in the other dairy at all milkings, likely because of differences in efficacy of heat abatement strategies. Milking facilities may be one of the factors to aggravate or alleviate heat stress in lactating dairy cows during summer. Key words