Development and implementation of the University of Northern Iowa\u27s “Students First” capital campaign: A case study

A case study was conducted of The University of Northern Iowa\u27s Students First 100 million-dollar comprehensive capital campaign. This study examined the predominant forces, activities, and participants associated with employing the capital campaign strategy at a public comprehensive university. When, how, and in what sequence did these major forces, activities, and participants converge to develop and implement the capital campaign? The study also describes major challenges incurred during the campaign cycle. The initial interview questionnaire was adapted from a study by Leonard Moisan (1986) of the University of Virginia\u27s capital campaign. Seventeen people were interviewed including the President, development staff, and the external consultant. Analysis of the data revealed that four major categories emerged as most related: Leadership, Organization, Planning, and Implementation. Major forces affecting the campaign process were strategic planning, needs assessment, case statement, the feasibility study, setting of campaign priorities, and organizational capacity building. Development staff, aided by the consultant, were primarily responsible for the organization, planning, and implementation of the capital campaign. Presidential leadership was found to be an essential component for conducting a successful capital campaign. The President was the key figure in both providing leadership to attract affluent supporters to the campaign and in assisting the University community in overcoming psychological impediments in regards to the University\u27s ability to launch a comprehensive campaign. The President was also instrumental in utilizing the catalytic nature of the capital campaign strategy to raise private funding, enhance the University\u27s image, change the institution\u27s organizational culture, and achieve his vision of UNI as being best of its class

Using Pilot Systems to Execute Many Task Workloads on Supercomputers

High performance computing systems have historically been designed to support applications comprised of mostly monolithic, single-job workloads. Pilot systems decouple workload specification, resource selection, and task execution via job placeholders and late-binding. Pilot systems help to satisfy the resource requirements of workloads comprised of multiple tasks. RADICAL-Pilot (RP) is a modular and extensible Python-based pilot system. In this paper we describe RP's design, architecture and implementation, and characterize its performance. RP is capable of spawning more than 100 tasks/second and supports the steady-state execution of up to 16K concurrent tasks. RP can be used stand-alone, as well as integrated with other application-level tools as a runtime system

Investigation of a generalized Obukhov Model for Turbulence

We introduce a generalization of Obukhov's model [A.M. Obukhov, Adv. Geophys. 6, 113 (1959)] for the description of the joint position-velocity statistics of a single fluid particle in fully developed turbulence. In the presented model the velocity is assumed to undergo a continuous time random walk. This takes into account long time correlations. As a consequence the evolution equation for the joint position-velocity probability distribution is a Fokker-Planck equation with a fractional time derivative. We determine the solution of this equation in the form of an integral transform and derive a relation for arbitrary single time moments. Analytical solutions for the joint probability distribution and its moments are given.Comment: 10 page

MPI Sessions: Evaluation of an Implementation in Open MPI

The recently proposed MPI Sessions extensions to the MPI standard present a new paradigm for applications to use with MPI. MPI Sessions has the potential to address several limitations of MPI’s current specification: MPI cannot be initialized within an MPI process from different application components without a priori knowledge or coordination; MPI cannot be initialized more than once; and, MPI cannot be reinitialized after MPI finalization. MPI Sessions also offers the possibility for more flexible ways for individual components of an application to express the capabilities they require from MPI at a finer granularity than is presently possible.At this time, MPI Sessions has reached sufficient maturity for implementation and evaluation, which are the focuses of this paper. This paper presents a prototype implementation of MPI Sessions, discusses certain of its performance characteristics, and describes its successful use in a large-scale production MPI application. Overall, MPI Sessions is shown to be implementable, integrable with key infrastructure, and effective, but with certain overheads involving the initialization of MPI as well as communicator construction. Small impacts on message-passing latency and throughput are noted. Open MPI was used as the implementation vehicle, but results here are also relevant to other middleware stacks

Avalanches, Scaling and Coherent Noise

We present a simple model of a dynamical system driven by externally-imposed coherent noise. Although the system never becomes critical in the sense of possessing spatial correlations of arbitrarily long range, it does organize into a stationary state characterized by avalanches with a power-law size distribution. We explain the behavior of the model within a time-averaged approximation, and discuss its potential connection to the dynamics of earthquakes, the Gutenberg-Richter law, and to recent experiments on avalanches in rice piles.Comment: 17 pages, 4 Postscript figures, written in LaTeX using RevTeX and epsfig.st

Forging strategic partnerships with industry: The Industrial Fellows Program

Science, technology, and industrial policy are at an important nexus due to long developing trends in the national and international economy and recent events in national security affairs. The research and development assets built by the American taxpayer in response to the Cold War face a quest for relevance in the new era. National competitiveness in international markets has emerged as an important new priority. To better understand the perspective of US industry the management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has initiated an Industrial Fellows Program which has placed six individuals at US corporations. Their goal is to create strategic partnerships through increased understanding of technical needs of industry and the technical capabilities of the Laboratory

The association between retinal vascular geometry changes and diabetic retinopathy and their role in prediction of progression: an exploratory study

Background: The study describes the relationship of retinal vascular geometry (RVG) to severity of diabetic retinopathy (DR), and its predictive role for subsequent development of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). Methods. The research project comprises of two stages. Firstly, a comparative study of diabetic patients with different grades of DR. (No DR: Minimal non-proliferative DR: Severe non-proliferative DR: PDR) (10:10: 12: 19). Analysed RVG features including vascular widths and branching angles were compared between patient cohorts. A preliminary statistical model for determination of the retinopathy grade of patients, using these features, is presented. Secondly, in a longitudinal predictive study, RVG features were analysed for diabetic patients with progressive DR over 7 years. RVG at baseline was examined to determine risk for subsequent PDR development. Results: In the comparative study, increased DR severity was associated with gradual vascular dilatation (p = 0.000), and widening of the bifurcating angle (p = 0.000) with increase in smaller-child-vessel branching angle (p = 0.027). Type 2 diabetes and increased diabetes duration were associated with increased vascular width (p = <0.05 In the predictive study, at baseline, reduced small-child vascular width (OR = 0.73 (95 CI 0.58-0.92)), was predictive of future progression to PDR. Conclusions: The study findings suggest that RVG alterations can act as novel markers indicative of progression of DR severity and establishment of PDR. RVG may also have a potential predictive role in determining the risk of future retinopathy progression. © 2014 Habib et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

ASS1 Overexpression:A Hallmark of Sonic Hedgehog Hepatocellular Adenomas; Recommendations for Clinical Practice

Until recently, 10% of hepatocellular adenomas (HCAs) remained unclassified (UHCA). Among the UHCAs, the sonic hedgehog HCA (shHCA) was defined by focal deletions that fuse the promoter of Inhibin beta E chain with GLI1. Prostaglandin D2 synthase was proposed as immunomarker. In parallel, our previous work using proteomic analysis showed that most UHCAs constitute a homogeneous subtype associated with overexpression of argininosuccinate synthase (ASS1). To clarify the use of ASS1 in the HCA classification and avoid misinterpretations of the immunohistochemical staining, the aims of this work were to study (1) the link between shHCA and ASS1 overexpression and (2) the clinical relevance of ASS1 overexpression for diagnosis. Molecular, proteomic, and immunohistochemical analyses were performed in UHCA cases of the Bordeaux series. The clinico-pathological features, including ASS1 immunohistochemical labeling, were analyzed on a large international series of 67 cases. ASS1 overexpression and the shHCA subgroup were superimposed in 15 cases studied by molecular analysis, establishing ASS1 overexpression as a hallmark of shHCA. Moreover, the ASS1 immunomarker was better than prostaglandin D2 synthase and only found positive in 7 of 22 shHCAs. Of the 67 UHCA cases, 58 (85.3%) overexpressed ASS1, four cases were ASS1 negative, and in five cases ASS1 was noncontributory. Proteomic analysis performed in the case of doubtful interpretation of ASS1 overexpression, especially on biopsies, can be a support to interpret such cases. ASS1 overexpression is a specific hallmark of shHCA known to be at high risk of bleeding. Therefore, ASS1 is an additional tool for HCA classification and clinical diagnosis

Texto de José Núñez Castain. Elecciones municipales de 1991

Texto de José Núñez Castain de 1989, utilizado por el PA para las elecciones municipales de 199