Part and Parcel: An Essential Component of Experience

In order to give voice to the understanding of my individuality, I create work as a memoir through visual symbolism. My hope is that as I revisit these parts of my life I am able to reflect on and release negative fragments. I choose to create work visually emphasizing the extremes of life using accumulation of imagery, vivid color, bold markings and textures. I balance the extremes by visually communicating the nuances of life through the use of delicate line quality, a soft color palette, and calm and repetitive subjects to indicate meditation and the passage of time. This body of work allows me to recognize myself as an artist. In turn, my creative process helps me to understand where I want to be as a person in order to maintain a sense of balance

Explaining Education to Engineers: Feedback Control Theory as a Metaphor

One of the barriers for engaging engineering faculty in the scholarship of learning and teaching is thechallenge of learning a new vocabulary. Becoming fluent in engineering education requires the acquisitionof new concepts and ideas that are often expressed in unfamiliar terms. Feedback control is a technical fieldcommon to a range of engineering disciplines that can be used as a model to help bridge the conceptual gapbetween traditional engineering and engineering education. Many of the key elements of engineering education can be represented by the elements of a feedback control system, with their behaviour in a learning environment paralleling their behaviour in a process control context. The feedback control model can be used to explain: the importance of timely feedback to students, the significance of assessment and evaluation in the learning process, the impact of learning styles upon learning outcomes, and the need for student-centered teaching approaches. While both fields have complexities that cannot be captured by simple models, the basic ideas can be explained simply. Feedback control metaphors make the basics accessible to a wider audience of engineering faculty

Slow Dynamics in Glasses

Minimalist theories of complex systems are broadly of two kinds: mean-field and axiomatic. So far all theories of complex properties absent from simple systems and intrinsic to glasses are axiomatic. Stretched Exponential Relaxation (SER) is the prototypical complex temporal property of glasses, discovered by Kohlrausch 150 years ago, and now observed almost universally in microscopically homogeneous, complex non-equilibrium materials, including luminescent electronic (Coulomb) glasses. Critical comparison of alternative axiomatic theories with both numerical simulations and experiments strongly favors dynamical trap models over static percolative or energy landscape models. PACS: 61.20.Lc; 67.40.F

Diagnosis of Pregnancy Disease in Sheep

Field practitioners are frequently confronted with the problem of diagnosis of disease of pregnant ewes that show weakness, depression, anorexia and a variety of central nervous disturbances as incoordination, circling, convulsions or coma. The frequent diagnosis of pregnancy disease in these cases may be misleading as to the prevalence of this condition. This syndrome may be confused with listeriosis, brain abscesses, enterotoxemia, hemorrhagic septicemia, plant and chemical poisons and rickettsial conjunctivitis

Special session: utopia university - building a roadmap for educating the next millennium's engineers

Ailing multibillionaire P. Oscar Utopia wishes to endow a university in honor of Rose B. Utopia, his beloved wife and long-practicing engineer. He will be at FIE to draw upon the expertise of our community to design the master plan for a university of the next millennium, unburdened by the assumptions of the present and the past. Conference attendees who subscribe to Utopia's vision are encouraged to participate in this workshop, challenge the assumptions inherent to the current practice, and brainstorm a plan for educating the engineer of 3030. During this session, we will identify and challenge assumptions that are inherent to the current practice of how we educate engineers. Participants will engage in a series of rapid planning sessions based on the “what if” scenario of being able to establish a new engineering schoolunfettered by standard constraints of money, facilities,or current educational practice

Work in Progress: Implementing a Tiger Team in a Capstone Design Course

This paper reports on the initial implementation of a two student “tiger team” in an engineering capstone design class. A tiger team is a small group of individuals that covers a range of expertise and is assigned when challenges arise that helps address the root issues causing the challenge. The term was coined in the 1960’s in the Cold War; tiger teams are used in industry, government, and military organizations. While tiger teams in these situations are usually formed around an issue then disbanded, in the capstone class the tiger team was formed for the duration of the two semester long class; details on formation and the larger context and organization of the class are discussed in the paper. The rationale for the tiger team was the observation over many years of a capstone class that as projects are functionally decomposed and subsystems assigned to individual students, a not insignificant fraction of students become “stuck” at some point in time – the concept of “stuckness” is further derived in the full paper. The result is that if delays accumulate on critical parts of the project, teams often struggle to get the project back on track and end up with a cascading series of missed deadlines. The rationale for the tiger team is to help teams identify when parts of the project are getting behind schedule and to have additional, short-term help available. In the initial implementation described here, the tiger team was two students—one from electrical and one from computer engineering—who volunteered for the position and were confirmed in that role by the other students in the class. Initial data shows that during the problem identification phase of the project the tiger team attended team meetings, helped evaluation project milestone reviews, worked to solve individual and team issues, and regularly met with the faculty. Early in the semester the two tiger team students described their role as unclear and worried their technical exposure would be limited. Later, as the teams developed technical representations, the tiger team provided independent feedback and addressed multiple technical challenges. Finally, as teams started to build technical prototypes the tiger team role again shifted to helping individuals with specific aspects of their project’ this role continued throughout the remainder of the year-long course. This in-depth case-study of the experience of implementing a tiger team draws on observations from students, faculty, the tiger team members, and an external ethnographer. This work may help other capstone instructors who may be considering similar interventions

Genetic Resistance to Fowl Cholera Is Linked to the Major Histocompatibility Complex

Chickens of the Iowa State S1 line have been selected for ability to regress Rous sarcoma virus-induced (RSV) tumors, humoral immune response to GAT (Ir-GAT), and erythrocyte antigen B. Sublines homozygous at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), as well as F1 heterozygotes and F2 segregants, were tested for resistance to fowl cholera by challenge with Pasteurella multocida strain X73. Control of the response at high doses was associated in a preliminary study with Ir-GAT and response to RSV tumors. Genetic control of resistance to low doses of P. multocida was demonstrated via sublines and F2 segregants to be linked with genes of the B-Gregion. Thus, genetic control of resistance to fowl cholera in chickens after exposure to Pasteurella multocida was shown to be linked to the major histocompatibility B complex, in this first demonstration of MHC-linked resistance to bacterial disease challenge

Cost effectiveness of telecare management for pain and depression in patients with cancer: results from a randomized trial

OBJECTIVE: Pain and depression are prevalent and treatable symptoms among patients with cancer, yet they are often undetected and undertreated. The Indiana Cancer Pain and Depression (INCPAD) trial demonstrated that telecare management can improve pain and depression outcomes. This article investigates the incremental cost effectiveness of the INCPAD intervention. METHODS: The INCPAD trial was conducted in 16 community-based urban and rural oncology practices in Indiana. Of the 405 participants, 202 were randomized to the intervention group and 203 to the usual-care group. Intervention costs were determined, and effectiveness outcomes were depression-free days and quality-adjusted life years. RESULTS: The intervention group was associated with a yearly increase of 60.3 depression-free days (S.E. = 15.4; P < 0.01) and an increase of between 0.033 and 0.066 quality-adjusted life years compared to the usual care group. Total cost of the intervention per patient was US$1189, which included physician, nurse care manager and automated monitoring set-up and maintenance costs. Incremental cost per depression-free day was US$19.72, which yields a range of US$18,018 to US$36,035 per quality-adjusted life year when converted to that metric. When measured directly, the incremental cost per quality-adjusted life year ranged from US$10,826 based on the modified EQ-5D to US$73,286.92 based on the SF-12. CONCLUSION: Centralized telecare management, coupled with automated symptom monitoring, appears to be a cost effective intervention for managing pain and depression in cancer patients

Integrating Function‐Directed Treatments into Palliative Care

The growing acceptance of palliative care has created opportunities to increase the use of rehabilitation services among populations with advanced disease, particularly those with cancer. Broader delivery has been impeded by the lack of a shared definition for palliative rehabilitation and a mismatch between patient needs and established rehabilitation service delivery models. We propose the definition that, in the advanced cancer population, palliative rehabilitation is function‐directed care delivered in partnership with other clinical disciplines and aligned with the values of patients who have serious and often incurable illnesses in contexts marked by intense and dynamic symptoms, psychological stress, and medical morbidity to realize potentially time‐limited goals. Although palliative rehabilitation is most often delivered by inpatient physical medicine and rehabilitation consultation/liaison services and by physical therapists in skilled nursing facilities, outcomes in these settings have received little scrutiny. In contrast, outpatient cancer rehabilitation programs have gained robust evidentiary support attesting to their benefits across diverse settings. Advancing palliative rehabilitation will require attention to historical barriers to the uptake of cancer rehabilitation services, which include the following: patient and referring physicians’ expectation that effective cancer treatment will reverse disablement; breakdown of linear models of disablement due to presence of concurrent symptoms and psychological distress; tension between reflexive palliation and impairment‐directed treatment; palliative clinicians’ limited familiarity with manual interventions and rehabilitation services; and challenges in identifying receptive patients with the capacity to benefit from rehabilitation services. The effort to address these admittedly complex issues is warranted, as consideration of function in efforts to control symptoms and mood is vital to optimize patients’ autonomy and quality of life. In addition, manual rehabilitation modalities are effective and drug sparing in the alleviation of adverse symptoms but are markedly underused. Realizing the potential synergism of integrating rehabilitation services in palliative care will require intensification of interdisciplinary dialogue.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146938/1/pmr2s335.pd