Evaluation of Parental Stress and Appointment Satisfaction in a Feeding Disorders Clinic

More than one-quarter of the pediatric population in the United States struggles with feeding or swallowing challenges, many of which become chronic, lifelong disorders. Diagnosis and treatment of feeding and disorders can be challenging due to the interplay of behavioral and medical factors that create food refusal by the child. Treatment of feeding disorders is difficult, as it requires comprehensive involvement of parents and caregivers, which can be demanding and stressful. Parental stress may include anxiety, fear, and frustration with the child(ren) with feeding or swallowing disorders and can negatively affect health outcomes for children. Specialty clinics designed to address treatment needs for children diagnosed with a feeding disorder can provide tools necessary to improve the child’s health outcomes (e.g., feeding plans implemented by parents/caregivers). This study examined the perspectives of 81 parents/caregivers within the feeding clinic at a large children’s hospital in the Pacific Northwest. Parents/caregivers reported on their clinic experience and how their needs were met, with specific attention to stress and motivation for implementation of treatment plans outside of clinic appointments. Overall, participants were largely satisfied with the clinic operations, typically scored within higher levels of activation (knowledge, skills, and confidence in managing their child’s healthcare). Most endorsed “child resistance to eating” as a main barrier to successful mealtime interactions. Recommendations for future research included a focus on implementation of stress reduction/management techniques, incorporation of outcome measures for the clinic, and incorporation of health literacy measures within the clinic

Investigation of single crystal ferrite thin films

Materials suitable for use in magnetic bubble domain memories were developed for aerospace applications. Practical techniques for the preparation of such materials in forms required for fabrication of computer memory devices were considered. The materials studied were epitaxial films of various compositions of the gallium-substituted yttrium gadolinium iron garnet system. The major emphasis was to determine their bubble properties and the conditions necessary for growing uncracked, high quality films

Corporate Social Responsibility: Small Businesses and Small Towns

This paper is a review of previous scholarship on the social responsibility of small businesses in small towns with the addition of findings from recent research on the subject conducted by the authors. We focused on the responsibility of businesses to work for community betterment which includes a wide variety of charitable and social causes. The extant literature and new research lead to several general conclusions. First most small business owners believe they have an obligation to work for community and societal betterment, but it is proportional to their size compared to other businesses in the same location. While the values of top management have a significant impact on the social performance of businesses of all sizes, in small businesses, social performance is more directly and personally shaped by the owners than is the case in large businesses. Small business owners are more socially and economically embedded within the community in which they operate than are managers of big businesses. Moreover, in small towns, they are more visible than similarly sized businesses in metropolitan locations. For this reason, size of town is a key intermediary variable between size of business and level of social performance. Partially as a result of their greater embeddedness and visibility, small business owners in small towns are likely to conform to the local patterns of civic engagement. For many of the same reasons, small business owners’ social performance is affected by the expectations and prevailing patterns of social performance displayed by members of the business networks to which they belong. Past research supports the argument that doing good is good for business in large and small firms alike although the relationship is less well documented for small businesses. We expand the research to consider the rewards and penalties of business social responsibility for the business owner personally. This is an important outcome of business social performance for all sizes of business, but for small businesses where owner discretion may be the only factor determining the community involvement of the business, it is critical. We end by advocating for more research attention directed toward small business social performance, the impact of town size on business social performance, and the personal costs and benefits of business social performance for the owners themselves

A Globally Optimal Energy-Efficient Power Control Framework and its Efficient Implementation in Wireless Interference Networks

This work develops a novel power control framework for energy-efficient power control in wireless networks. The proposed method is a new branch-and-bound procedure based on problem-specific bounds for energy-efficiency maximization that allow for faster convergence. This enables to find the global solution for all of the most common energy-efficient power control problems with a complexity that, although still exponential in the number of variables, is much lower than other available global optimization frameworks. Moreover, the reduced complexity of the proposed framework allows its practical implementation through the use of deep neural networks. Specifically, thanks to its reduced complexity, the proposed method can be used to train an artificial neural network to predict the optimal resource allocation. This is in contrast with other power control methods based on deep learning, which train the neural network based on suboptimal power allocations due to the large complexity that generating large training sets of optimal power allocations would have with available global optimization methods. As a benchmark, we also develop a novel first-order optimal power allocation algorithm. Numerical results show that a neural network can be trained to predict the optimal power allocation policy.Comment: submitte

Predicting Space Weather Effects on Close Approach Events

The NASA Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team sends ephemeris data to the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) for conjunction assessment screening against the JSpOC high accuracy catalog and then assesses risk posed to protected assets from predicted close approaches. Since most spacecraft supported by the CARA team are located in LEO orbits, atmospheric drag is the primary source of state estimate uncertainty. Drag magnitude and uncertainty is directly governed by atmospheric density and thus space weather. At present the actual effect of space weather on atmospheric density cannot be accurately predicted because most atmospheric density models are empirical in nature, which do not perform well in prediction. The Jacchia-Bowman-HASDM 2009 (JBH09) atmospheric density model used at the JSpOC employs a solar storm active compensation feature that predicts storm sizes and arrival times and thus the resulting neutral density alterations. With this feature, estimation errors can occur in either direction (i.e., over- or under-estimation of density and thus drag). Although the exact effect of a solar storm on atmospheric drag cannot be determined, one can explore the effects of JBH09 model error on conjuncting objects' trajectories to determine if a conjunction is likely to become riskier, less risky, or pass unaffected. The CARA team has constructed a Space Weather Trade-Space tool that systematically alters the drag situation for the conjuncting objects and recalculates the probability of collision for each case to determine the range of possible effects on the collision risk. In addition to a review of the theory and the particulars of the tool, the different types of observed output will be explained, along with statistics of their frequency

Graphical evidence for the solar coronal structure during the Maunder minimum: Comparative study of the total eclipse drawings in 1706 and 1715

We discuss the significant implications of three eye-witness drawings of the total solar eclipse on 1706 May 12 in comparison with two on 1715 May 3, for our understanding of space climate change. These events took place just after what has been termed the "deep Maunder Minimum"but fall within the "extended Maunder Minimum"being in an interval when the sunspot numbers start to recover. Maria Clara Eimmert's image in 1706 is particularly important because she was both a highly accomplished astronomical observer and an excellent artist: It was thought lost and was only re-discovered in 2012. Being the earliest coronal drawings of observational value yet identified, these drawings corroborate verbal accounts a corona without significant streamers, seen at totality of this and another eclipse event in 1652 during the Maunder Minimum. The graphical evidence implies that the coronal solar magnetic field was not lost but significantly weakened and the lack of coronal structure means there was little discernable open flux (either polar or at lower latitudes) even during the recovery phase of the Maunder Minimum. These observations provide evidence for a different state of oscillation of the solar dynamo, and hence behaviour of the Sun, in comparison with that during normal solar cycle minima (when a streamer belt between two polar coronal holes is visible) or near normal sunspot maxima (when coronal structure is caused by coronal holes at all latitudes) even to observers without a telescope