Barely in Time: The Successful Struggle to Create the Transportation Command

With the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, a concentrated effort was begun to consolidate the functions of the U.S. military services wherever possible. One area that seemed appropriate for merger was the several units that were providing ocean transportation for the services

Primary care physician practices in the diagnosis, treatment and management of men with chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome.

To describe practice patterns of primary care physicians (PCPs) for the diagnosis, treatment and management of chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS), we surveyed 556 PCPs in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (RR=52%). Only 62% reported ever seeing a patient like the one described in the vignette. In all, 16% were 'not at all' familiar with CP/CPPS, and 48% were 'not at all' familiar with the National Institutes of Health classification scheme. PCPs reported practice patterns regarding CP/CPPS, which are not supported by evidence. Although studies suggest that CP/CPPS is common, many PCPs reported little or no familiarity, important knowledge deficits and limited experience in managing men with this syndrome

Improving Performance of Iterative Methods by Lossy Checkponting

Iterative methods are commonly used approaches to solve large, sparse linear systems, which are fundamental operations for many modern scientific simulations. When the large-scale iterative methods are running with a large number of ranks in parallel, they have to checkpoint the dynamic variables periodically in case of unavoidable fail-stop errors, requiring fast I/O systems and large storage space. To this end, significantly reducing the checkpointing overhead is critical to improving the overall performance of iterative methods. Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a novel lossy checkpointing scheme that can significantly improve the checkpointing performance of iterative methods by leveraging lossy compressors. (2) We formulate a lossy checkpointing performance model and derive theoretically an upper bound for the extra number of iterations caused by the distortion of data in lossy checkpoints, in order to guarantee the performance improvement under the lossy checkpointing scheme. (3) We analyze the impact of lossy checkpointing (i.e., extra number of iterations caused by lossy checkpointing files) for multiple types of iterative methods. (4)We evaluate the lossy checkpointing scheme with optimal checkpointing intervals on a high-performance computing environment with 2,048 cores, using a well-known scientific computation package PETSc and a state-of-the-art checkpoint/restart toolkit. Experiments show that our optimized lossy checkpointing scheme can significantly reduce the fault tolerance overhead for iterative methods by 23%~70% compared with traditional checkpointing and 20%~58% compared with lossless-compressed checkpointing, in the presence of system failures.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, HPDC'1

'Mindless markers of the nation': The routine flagging of nationhood across the visual environment

The visual environment has increasingly been used as a lens with which to understand wider processes of social and economic change with studies employing in-depth qualitative approaches to focus on, for example, gentrification or trans-national networks. This exploratory paper offers an alternative perspective by using a novel method, quantitative photo mapping, to examine the extent to which a particular socio-cultural marker, the nation, is ‘flagged’ across three contrasting sites in Britain. As a multi-national state with an increasingly diverse population, Britain offers a particularly fruitful case study, drawing in debates around devolution, European integration and Commonwealth migration. In contributing to wider debates around banal nationalism, the paper notes the extent to which nations are increasingly articulated through commerce, consumption and market exchange and the overall significance of everyday markers (signs, objects, infrastructure) in naturalising a national view of the world

Everyday cosmopolitanism in representations of Europe among young Romanians in Britain

The paper presents an analysis of everyday cosmopolitanism in constructions of Europe among young Romanian nationals living in Britain. Adopting a social representations approach, cosmopolitanism is understood as a cultural symbolic resource that is part of everyday knowledge. Through a discursively-oriented analysis of focus group data, we explore the ways in which notions of cosmopolitanism intersect with images of Europeanness in the accounts of participants. We show that, for our participants, representations of Europe are anchored in an Orientalist schema of West-vs.-East, whereby the West is seen as epitomising European values of modernity and progress, while the East is seen as backward and traditional. Our findings further show that representations of cosmopolitanism reinforce this East/West dichotomy, within a discourse of ‘Occidental cosmopolitanism’. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the diverse and complex ideological foundations of these constructions of European cosmopolitanism and their implications

The METCRAX II Field Experiment: A Study of Downslope Windstorm-Type Flows in Arizona\u2019s Meteor Crater

The second Meteor Crater Experiment (METCRAX II) was conducted in October 2013 at Arizona\u2019s Meteor Crater. The experiment was designed to investigate nighttime downslope windstorm 12type flows that form regularly above the inner southwest sidewall of the 1.2-km diameter crater as a southwesterly mesoscale katabatic flow cascades over the crater rim. The objective of METCRAX II is to determine the causes of these strong, intermittent, and turbulent inflows that bring warm-air intrusions into the southwest part of the crater. This article provides an overview of the scientific goals of the experiment; summarizes the measurements, the crater topography, and the synoptic meteorology of the study period; and presents initial analysis results

Guidelines for Community‐Based Partners for Reviewing Research Grant Applications: Lessons from the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) Community Engagement Research Core (CERC)

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102046/1/cts12126.pd

Racial Differences in Abnormal Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Measures: Results From the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study

Background: Several ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) measures have been associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk independent of clinic blood pressure (BP). African Americans have higher clinic BP compared with Whites but few data are available on racial differences in ABPM measures. Methods: We compared ABPM measures between African American (n = 178) and White (n = 103) participants at the Year 5 Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study visit. BP was measured during a study visit and the second and third measurements were averaged. ABPM was conducted over the following 24 hours. Results: Mean ± SD age of participants was 29.8±3.8 years and 30.8±3.5 years for African Americans and Whites, respectively. Mean daytime systolic BP (SBP) was 3.90 (SD 1.18) mm Hg higher among African Americans compared with Whites (P < 0.001) after age–gender adjustment and 1.71 (SD 1.03) mm Hg higher after multivariable adjustment including mean clinic SBP (P = 0.10). After multivariable adjustment including mean clinic SBP, nighttime SBP was 4.83 (SD 1.11) mm Hg higher among African Americans compared with Whites (P < 0.001). After multivariable adjustment, the African Americans were more likely than Whites to have nocturnal hypertension (prevalence ratio: 2.44, 95% CI: 0.99–6.05) and nondipping (prevalence ratio: 2.50, 95% CI: 1.39–4.48). The prevalence of masked hypertension among African Americans and Whites was 4.4% and 2.1%, respectively, (P = 0.49) and white coat hypertension was 3.3% and 3.9%, respectively (P = 0.99). Twenty-four hour BP variability on ABPM was higher among African Americans compared with Whites. Conclusions: These data suggest racial differences in several ABPM measures exist

Scholar-activists in an expanding European food sovereignty movement

This article analyzes the roles, relations, and positions of scholar-activists in the European food sovereignty movement. In doing so, we document, make visible and question the political dimensions of researchers' participation in the movement. We argue that scholar-activists are part of the movement, but are distinct from the affected constituencies, put in place to ensure adequate representation of key movement actors. This is because scholar-activists lack a collective identity, have no processes to formulate collective demands, and no mechanisms for inter-researcher and researchers-movement communication. We reflect on whether and how scholar-activists could organize, and discuss possible pathways for a more cohesive and stronger researcher engagement in the movement.</p