Foot pedal operated fluid type exercising device

A foot pedal operated exercising device is reported that contains a dynamometer formed of a pair of cylinders each containing a piston. The pistons are linked to each other. The upper portions of the two cylinders are joined together by a common opening to provide a common fluid reservoir and each piston is provided with a one way check valve to maintain an adequate supply of working fluid. Fluid from the driven cylinder is transmitted to the other cylinder through separate constant force spring biased valves each valve takes the predominant portion of the pressure drop thereby providing a constant force hydraulic dynamometer. A device is provided to determine the amount of movement of piston travel

Examining How Parents Respond to Their Infant: The Difference Between Full-term and Preterm Infants

Preterm infants born with a low birthweight are at risk for developmental delays both physically and cognitively. Research suggests that preterm infants struggle to meet developmental milestones in the same way that their full-term counterparts do, especially when it comes to their language development. This study examined the quantitative (i.e., number of words infants heard, amount of child vocalizations) and qualitative (i.e., contingent responding between infants and caregivers, proportion of infant-directed speech) in three cohorts of infants 1) infants born preterm (8-9-months chronological age; 6-months corrected age; n=6), 2) gestational age-matched full-term infants (~ 6 months chronological age), and 3) chronological age-matched full-term infants (~ 8-9 months chronological age) using the Language ENvironmental Analysis (LENA) system. Further quality measures included the types of vocalizations the infants made and the latency of response time between caregivers and infants during their interactions. Descriptive analyses of the LENA’s quantitative measures revealed that preterm infants do not vocalize nearly the same amount as their full-term counterparts. Further analyses of the quality of their interactions revealed that, in spite of preterm infants vocalizing less, parents responded to their infants quicker than their full-term peers’ parents did and interacted just as often. In sum, there is quite a bit of individual differences in infants’ language environments, and preterm infants seem to be behind in their vocal interactions than their full-term counterparts

School Culture and Leadership: Teacher Perceptions of Title I and Non-Title I Schools

This study was conducted to see if teachers perceive a significant difference in school culture and leadership in Title I and non-Title I schools. Specifically, this researcher considered the possibility that teachers working in Title I schools have lower perceptions of their school’s culture and leadership than teachers working in non-Title I schools. A quantitative study was used to find the perceived differences between school culture and leadership in Title I and non-Title I schools. A quasi-experimental design was selected because preexisting data were collected on teachers in an upper East Tennessee region. The data were collected from the TELL Tennessee survey conducted in 2011 by the Tennessee Department of Education. The TDOE contracted with the New Teacher Center (NTC) to conduct the state’s survey. The NTC is a national organization that has administered surveys in several states and is dedicated to developing and supporting a quality teaching force. The TDOE compiled 8 constructs or focus indicator areas for the survey, and 5 of the 8 indicators were used to determine school culture and leadership. School culture indicators were compiled from the focus questions of facilities and resources and community support. Leadership indicators were compiled from focus questions of student conduct, school leadership, and instructional practices and support. The population included teachers who taught in public schools, Pre Kindergarten through 12th grade during the 2010 through 2011 school year. This study showed no significant difference in regard to teacher perceptions of leadership in Title I and non-Title I schools in an upper East Tennessee region. However the study did find a significant difference in regard to teacher perceptions of school culture in Title I and non-Title I schools in the area of facilities and resources. An examination of the group means indicates that Title I schools (M = .845, SD = .120) had a significantly more positive perception of facilities and resources than teachers in non-Title I schools (M = .786, SD = .149)

Linden Documentary Project

IMPACT. 1: Students interviewed the Ohio EPA, Columbus Health Department, and the Kirwan Institute on Race and Ethnicity. They learned of the high rates of prostate cancer, asthma and other illnesses in their neighborhood connected to environmental racism. -- 2. Additionally, with Ohio State cartography students, Linden students created digital maps to offer Linden residents and visitors a resource for historical landmarks, health and human services, and sites of activism.PRIMARY CONTACT: Melissa R. CrumMelissa addressed community empowerment by working with underserved youth. She partnered with the Greater Linden Development Corporation and the Linden‐ McKinley STEM Academy. Under Melissa's direction, 8th grade students conducted video interviews of local residents, businesses, and community agencies to learn about their community's history and environmental racism in their neighborhood

Sphagnum Taxa and Their Distribution in Iowa

Sphagnum was known previously from eight counties in Iowa based on documented specimens. Undocumented collections were also reported from Buchanan, Cedar, and Johnson Counties. We have added four new species (S. compactum, S. fimbriatum, S. squarrosum, and S. warnstorfii) and three new varieties (S. subsecundum var. subsecundum, S. recurvum var. amblyphyllum, and S. recurvum var. recurvum) to the state flora, and four new stations in three counties (Black Hawk, Iowa, and Marion) where sphagnum was previously unknown. Sphagnum is presently represented in Iowa by documented collections of 13 taxa from 13 stations in 9 counties, mostly in the eastern third of the state

MENTOR: Human Perception-Guided Pretraining for Iris Presentation Detection

Incorporating human salience into the training of CNNs has boosted performance in difficult tasks such as biometric presentation attack detection. However, collecting human annotations is a laborious task, not to mention the questions of how and where (in the model architecture) to efficiently incorporate this information into model's training once annotations are obtained. In this paper, we introduce MENTOR (huMan pErceptioN-guided preTraining fOr iris pResentation attack detection), which addresses both of these issues through two unique rounds of training. First, we train an autoencoder to learn human saliency maps given an input iris image (both real and fake examples). Once this representation is learned, we utilize the trained autoencoder in two different ways: (a) as a pre-trained backbone for an iris presentation attack detector, and (b) as a human-inspired annotator of salient features on unknown data. We show that MENTOR's benefits are threefold: (a) significant boost in iris PAD performance when using the human perception-trained encoder's weights compared to general-purpose weights (e.g. ImageNet-sourced, or random), (b) capability of generating infinite number of human-like saliency maps for unseen iris PAD samples to be used in any human saliency-guided training paradigm, and (c) increase in efficiency of iris PAD model training. Sources codes and weights are offered along with the paper.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Teaching AI to Teach: Leveraging Limited Human Salience Data Into Unlimited Saliency-Based Training

Machine learning models have shown increased accuracy in classification tasks when the training process incorporates human perceptual information. However, a challenge in training human-guided models is the cost associated with collecting image annotations for human salience. Collecting annotation data for all images in a large training set can be prohibitively expensive. In this work, we utilize ''teacher'' models (trained on a small amount of human-annotated data) to annotate additional data by means of teacher models' saliency maps. Then, ''student'' models are trained using the larger amount of annotated training data. This approach makes it possible to supplement a limited number of human-supplied annotations with an arbitrarily large number of model-generated image annotations. We compare the accuracy achieved by our teacher-student training paradigm with (1) training using all available human salience annotations, and (2) using all available training data without human salience annotations. We use synthetic face detection and fake iris detection as example challenging problems, and report results across four model architectures (DenseNet, ResNet, Xception, and Inception), and two saliency estimation methods (CAM and RISE). Results show that our teacher-student training paradigm results in models that significantly exceed the performance of both baselines, demonstrating that our approach can usefully leverage a small amount of human annotations to generate salience maps for an arbitrary amount of additional training data.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

A Total-System View of Environmental Management

Man, vastly increasing in number and continuing to exploit his natural resources, has altered the quality of his environment until it is in danger of becoming unfit for human life. The reversal of this trend must begin with the formulation of a management system that encompasses the total cycle of man\u27s environmental manipulation — from the extraction of raw materials and the production of goods to the eventual disposal of those goods. This paper describes how environmental quality can be managed on a large scale and outlines the methods for implementing this management through the total-system approach