Incivility Among Radiography Educators in the United States

Purpose: Medical imaging education must nurture a civil environment for both students and educators. Because faculty incivility can potentially compromise learning and interfere with workplace productivity, this study examined the perceptions of incivility among radiography educators in the United States. Methods: A survey research method was designed to examine the severity and frequency of incivility among educators teaching in radiography programs accredited by the Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology (JCERT). Using a scale of 1 to 4, the participants in this study considered their perceptions of faculty incivility among radiography educators within their respective departments. Results: Civility has been demonstrated as a perceived problem in this survey. A total of 240/1,333 educators completed the survey, resulting in a response rate of 18%. Only 40.4% (97/240) of the participants in this study perceived that the severity of incivility was not a problem. The majority of the participant perceived civility to be an issue with 23.8% (57/240) reporting a minor problem; 39/240 (16.3%) said it was a moderate problem; and 47/240 (19.6%) believed faculty incivility is a major problem among radiography educators in the United States. Interestingly, severe uncivil faculty behaviors did not occur as often as behaviors classified as less severe. A very weak negative correlation was found between perceived severity of faculty incivility and age of radiography educators, indicating age increased as the perceived severity of faculty incivility slightly decreased and vice versa. Conclusions: Faculty incivility is perceived to be occurring among radiography educators in the United States. This study provides a foundation for future research to address various aspects of incivility among imaging sciences and radiation therapy educators in the United States

The Saga of the Masked Bobwhite: Lessons Learned and Unlearned

No bird has generated so much interest and controversy as has the masked bobwhite (Colinus virginianus ridgwayi). From its discovery in 1884 to the present, this gallinaceous game bird has captured the attention of hunter-naturalists, ornithologists, collectors, game breeders, conservationists and bureaucrats. Believed threatened with extinction throughout its 130 year history, the masked bobwhite prompted several collecting expeditions, a survey technique study, a plethora of propagation attempts, and the purchase of an 117,464 acre refuge by the federal government, and expenditures totaling millions of dollars. Yet, despite propagated stock existing in a captive facility on Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, the status of the masked bobwhite is now more perilous than ever, and this subtropical race of America’s most popular game bird may now be functionally extinct. How this all came about is a lesson that needed to be learned by wildlife managers seeking to increase and secure wild populations of native game birds

Quantum mutual information of an entangled state propagating through a fast-light medium

Although it is widely accepted that classical information cannot travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, the behavior of quantum correlations and quantum information propagating through actively-pumped fast-light media has not been studied in detail. To investigate this behavior, we send one half of an entangled state of light through a gain-assisted fast-light medium and detect the remaining quantum correlations. We show that the quantum correlations can be advanced by a small fraction of the correlation time while the entanglement is preserved even in the presence of noise added by phase-insensitive gain. Additionally, although we observe an advance of the peak of the quantum mutual information between the modes, we find that the degradation of the mutual information due to the added noise appears to prevent an advancement of the leading edge. In contrast, we show that both the leading and trailing edges of the mutual information in a slow-light system can be significantly delayed

An Analysis of Masked Bobwhite Collection Locales and Habitat Characteristics

We evaluated the collecting locales of 251 masked bobwhite (Colinus virginianus ridgwayi) specimens in museum collections. Eighteen were from 4 sites in Arizona—all collected by Herbert Brown. The vast majority (93%) of specimens were from the Mexican State of Sonora. We visited and photographed each of the Arizona collection locations and most of the sites in Sonora. Collector descriptions indicate the bird’s principal habitat affiliations were with tall grass-weed (1⁄4 forb) pastures, savannas, and farm fields. All historic localities visited were either in grass-forb habitats along drainages or in present or former savannas adjacent to woody cover and/or agricultural fields between 240 and 1,060 m elevation. These sites were remarkably similar to other bobwhite habitats in subtropic-tropic South Texas and Oaxaca, Mexico. Masked bobwhite habitat was a diverse tropic-subtropic grassland within or adjacent to dense woody cover (thornscrub) and/or farmland. These habitats experienced alterations and loss of the tall grass-weed component due to livestock husbandry. Some former habitat sites appear to have recovered, however, and restoration of the subspecies might be possible if suitable stock exists. Unfortunately, this bird may now be functionally extinct

GliTr: Glimpse Transformers with Spatiotemporal Consistency for Online Action Prediction

Many online action prediction models observe complete frames to locate and attend to informative subregions in the frames called glimpses and recognize an ongoing action based on global and local information. However, in applications with constrained resources, an agent may not be able to observe the complete frame, yet must still locate useful glimpses to predict an incomplete action based on local information only. In this paper, we develop Glimpse Transformers (GliTr), which observe only narrow glimpses at all times, thus predicting an ongoing action and the following most informative glimpse location based on the partial spatiotemporal information collected so far. In the absence of a ground truth for the optimal glimpse locations for action recognition, we train GliTr using a novel spatiotemporal consistency objective: We require GliTr to attend to the glimpses with features similar to the corresponding complete frames (i.e. spatial consistency) and the resultant class logits at time $t$ equivalent to the ones predicted using whole frames up to $t$ (i.e. temporal consistency). Inclusion of our proposed consistency objective yields ~10% higher accuracy on the Something-Something-v2 (SSv2) dataset than the baseline cross-entropy objective. Overall, despite observing only ~33% of the total area per frame, GliTr achieves 53.02% and 93.91% accuracy on the SSv2 and Jester datasets, respectively.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202

Ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, and climate change

This symposium was organized to study the unusual convergence of a number of observations, both short and long term that defy an integrated explanation. Of particular importance are surface temperature observations and observations of upper atmospheric temperatures, which have declined significantly in parts of the stratosphere. There has also been a dramatic decline in ozone concentration over Antarctica that was not predicted. Significant changes in precipitation that seem to be latitude dependent have occurred. There has been a threefold increase in methane in the last 100 years; this is a problem because a source does not appear to exist for methane of the right isotopic composition to explain the increase. These and other meteorological global climate changes are examined in detail

Evidence of Titan's Climate History from Evaporite Distribution

Water-ice-poor, 5-$\mu$m-bright material on Saturn's moon Titan has previously been geomorphologically identified as evaporitic. Here we present a global distribution of the occurrences of the 5-$\mu$m-bright spectral unit, identified with Cassini's Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) and examined with RADAR when possible. We explore the possibility that each of these occurrences are evaporite deposits. The 5-$\mu$m-bright material covers 1\% of Titan's surface and is not limited to the poles (the only regions with extensive, long-lived surface liquid). We find the greatest areal concentration to be in the equatorial basins Tui Regio and Hotei Regio. Our interpretations, based on the correlation between 5-$\mu$m-bright material and lakebeds, imply that there was enough liquid present at some time to create the observed 5-$\mu$m-bright material. We address the climate implications surrounding a lack of evaporitic material at the south polar basins: if the south pole basins were filled at some point in the past, then where is the evaporite

Comparison of AlloDerm and AlloMax tissue incorporation in rats.

BackgroundHuman acellular dermal matrices (HADMs) are used in a variety of settings. AlloMax is a new HADM currently being used for breast reconstruction and hernia repair. We compared the in vivo tissue integration of AlloMax to AlloDerm, a well-studied HADM, in rats.MethodsWe implanted AlloDerm and AlloMax patches into subcutaneous pockets on the backs of 32 male Sprague-Dawley rats. The animals were killed after either 4 or 8 weeks, and the patches were recovered and stained for histopathologic analyses. Microscopic end points included patch thickness, vascularization, tissue in-growth, fibroblast proliferation, and inflammation.ResultsAll animals completed the study without complications or infection. There were no significant differences in graft thicknesses at 4 and 8 weeks. Microscopically, at 4 weeks, AlloDerm sections had significantly more microvessels than AlloMax (P = 0.02). This disparity increased by 8 weeks (P < 0.01). Similarly, we found greater tissue in-growth and fibroblast proliferation in AlloDerm than AlloMax sections at 4 (P < 0.01) and at 8 (P < 0.01) weeks. Inflammatory infiltrates consisted of lymphocytes, histiocytes, eosinophils, and plasma cells. Deep graft infiltration by predominately lymphocytic inflammatory cells was significantly higher in AlloDerm than AlloMax grafts at 4 (P = 0.01) and 8 (P = 0.02) weeks. Graft necrosis was uncommon, but marginal fibrosis was similar in both.ConclusionsAlloDerm grafts had greater neovascularization, tissue infiltration, fibroblast proliferation, and inflammatory reaction than AlloMax grafts when placed subcutaneously in rats. AlloDerm may be better incorporated than AlloMax when placed in vivo