Restoring the Heart: A Community Vision for the Neighborhood of Aldenville

The goal of the Master of Regional Planning Studio is to develop a student’s techniques for collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing spatial and non-spatial data and then presenting that collective data in a manner (i.e., report, video, presentation, and charettes) that is understandable to academics, professionals, and the public. Planning Studio allows students to integrate knowledge from coursework and research, and apply such knowledge to resolving representative planning problems. At UMASS Amherst, these problems are found in neighborhood, rural, urban, and/or regional settings. For the Fall 2017 Planning Studio, Chicopee tasked the Masters of Regional Planning Studio to prepare a vision plan that focuses on improving Chicopee’s public engagement and land-use in Aldenville. The vision plan will contain a multi-question survey that will query Chicopee residents on their opinions of Chicopee, overall, and/or the neighborhood of Aldenville. In addition, the vision plan will also include two proposed land-use studies (zoning, land-use, pedestrian access, design, street improvements) for the neighborhood of Aldenville. This project has 6 goals: § Goal 1: Develop an outreach/engagement process that includes community survey materials (in hard-copy and digital formats) for distribution to Aldenville residents and stakeholders. The Planning Studio shall develop these materials understanding the City’s intended re-use of materials in a City-wide comprehensive visioning process. § Goal 2: Experiment with non-traditional modes of community engagement to maximize variety and volume of community response and data collection. § Goal 3: Analyze data collected from the outreach/engagement process to best inform the neighborhood visioning process and final Aldenville Vision Plan. § Goal 4: Develop a comprehensive understanding and graphic representation of major neighborhood destinations within Aldenville from which a more connected neighborhood concept can be developed. § Goal 5: Document, analyze, and discuss neighborhood opportunities and challenges (informed by the Community Outreach/Public Engagement Process) to advance visions for improving connectivity within the neighborhood and broadening the potential for Aldenville to function as a destination for all City residents as well as visitors from outside the City. § Goal 6: Document and prioritize destinations within Aldenville and propose urban design interventions to improve these destinations while using these destinations as anchors in a larger neighborhood network

Fragmentation of a Circular Disc by Impact on a Frictionless Plate

The break-up of a two-dimensional circular disc by normal and oblique impact on a hard frictionless plate is investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. The disc is composed of numerous unbreakable randomly shaped convex polygons connected together by simple elastic beams that break when bent or stretched beyond a certain limit. It is found that for both normal and oblique impacts the crack patterns are the same and depend solely on the normal component of the impact velocity. Analysing the pattern of breakage, amount of damage, fragment masses and velocities, we show the existence of a critical velocity which separates two regimes of the impact process: below the critical point only a damage cone is formed at the impact site (damage), cleaving of the particle occurs at the critical point, while above the critical velocity the disc breaks into several pieces (fragmentation). In the limit of very high impact velocities the disc suffers complete disintegration (shattering) into many small fragments. In agreement with experimental results, fragment masses are found to follow the Gates-Gaudin-Schuhmann distribution (power law) with an exponent independent of the velocity and angle of impact. The velocity distribution of fragments exhibit an interesting anomalous scaling behavior when changing the impact velocity and the size of the disc.Comment: submitted to J. Phys: Condensed Matter special issue on Granular Medi

Securing Information Technology in Healthcare

Information technology (IT) has great potential to improve healthcare quality while also improving efficiency, and thus has been a major focus of recent healthcare reform efforts. However, developing, deploying and using IT that is both secure and genuinely effective in the complex clinical, organizational and economic environment of healthcare is a significant challenge. Further, it is imperative that we better understand the privacy concerns of patients and providers, as well as the ability of current technologies, policies, and laws to adequately protect privacy. The Securing Information Technology in Healthcare (SITH) workshops were created to provide a forum to discuss security and privacy for experts from a broad range of perspectives, from officers at large healthcare companies, startups and nonprofits, to physicians, researchers and policy makers

Targeting Glycosylation Pathways and the Cell Cycle: Sugar-Dependent Activity of Butyrate-Carbohydrate Cancer Prodrugs

SummaryShort-chain fatty acid (SCFA)-carbohydrate hybrid molecules that target both histone deacetylation and glycosylation pathways to achieve sugar-dependent activity against cancer cells are described in this article. Specifically, n-butyrate esters of N-acetyl-d-mannosamine (But4ManNAc, 1) induced apoptosis, whereas corresponding N-acetyl-d-glucosamine (But4GlcNAc, 2), d-mannose (But5Man, 3), or glycerol (tributryin, 4) derivatives only provided transient cell cycle arrest. Western blots, reporter gene assays, and cell cycle analysis established that n-butyrate, when delivered to cells via any carbohydrate scaffold, functioned as a histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi), upregulated p21WAF1/Cip1 expression, and inhibited proliferation. However, only 1, a compound that primed sialic acid biosynthesis and modulated the expression of a different set of genes compared to 3, ultimately killed the cells. These results demonstrate that the biological activity of butyrate can be tuned by sugars to improve its anticancer properties

Detection of Potential Transit Signals in Sixteen Quarters of Kepler Mission Data

We present the results of a search for potential transit signals in four years of photometry data acquired by the Kepler Mission. The targets of the search include 111,800 stars which were observed for the entire interval and 85,522 stars which were observed for a subset of the interval. We found that 9,743 targets contained at least one signal consistent with the signature of a transiting or eclipsing object, where the criteria for detection are periodicity of the detected transits, adequate signal-to-noise ratio, and acceptance by a number of tests which reject false positive detections. When targets that had produced a signal were searched repeatedly, an additional 6,542 signals were detected on 3,223 target stars, for a total of 16,285 potential detections. Comparison of the set of detected signals with a set of known and vetted transit events in the Kepler field of view shows that the recovery rate for these signals is 96.9%. The ensemble properties of the detected signals are reviewed.Comment: Accepted by ApJ Supplemen

Protocol for the development of guidance for stakeholder engagement in health and healthcare guideline development and implementation

Stakeholder engagement has become widely accepted as a necessary component of guideline development and implementation. While frameworks for developing guidelines express the need for those potentially affected by guideline recommendations to be involved in their development, there is a lack of consensus on how this should be done in practice. Further, there is a lack of guidance on how to equitably and meaningfully engage multiple stakeholders. We aim to develop guidance for the meaningful and equitable engagement of multiple stakeholders in guideline development and implementation. METHODS: This will be a multi-stage project. The first stage is to conduct a series of four systematic reviews. These will (1) describe existing guidance and methods for stakeholder engagement in guideline development and implementation, (2) characterize barriers and facilitators to stakeholder engagement in guideline development and implementation, (3) explore the impact of stakeholder engagement on guideline development and implementation, and (4) identify issues related to conflicts of interest when engaging multiple stakeholders in guideline development and implementation. DISCUSSION: We will collaborate with our multiple and diverse stakeholders to develop guidance for multi-stakeholder engagement in guideline development and implementation. We will use the results of the systematic reviews to develop a candidate list of draft guidance recommendations and will seek broad feedback on the draft guidance via an online survey of guideline developers and external stakeholders. An invited group of representatives from all stakeholder groups will discuss the results of the survey at a consensus meeting which will inform the development of the final guidance papers. Our overall goal is to improve the development of guidelines through meaningful and equitable multi-stakeholder engagement, and subsequently to improve health outcomes and reduce inequities in health

Intravital FRAP imaging using an E-cadherin-GFP mouse reveals disease- and drug-dependent dynamic regulation of cell-cell junctions in live tissue

E-cadherin-mediated cell-cell junctions play a prominent role in maintaining the epithelial architecture. The disruption or deregulation of these adhesions in cancer can lead to the collapse of tumor epithelia that precedes invasion and subsequent metastasis. Here we generated an E-cadherin-GFP mouse that enables intravital photobleaching and quantification of E-cadherin mobility in live tissue without affecting normal biology. We demonstrate the broad applications of this mouse by examining E-cadherin regulation in multiple tissues, including mammary, brain, liver, and kidney tissue, while specifically monitoring E-cadherin mobility during disease progression in the pancreas. We assess E-cadherin stability in native pancreatic tissue upon genetic manipulation involving Kras and p53 or in response to anti-invasive drug treatment and gain insights into the dynamic remodeling of E-cadherin during in situ cancer progression. FRAP in the E-cadherin-GFP mouse, therefore, promises to be a valuable tool to fundamentally expand our understanding of E-cadherin-mediated events in native microenvironments