199 research outputs found
Wheelchair Modification
This document outlines the design process for a wheelchair modification. This wheelchair modification is the Senior Capstone Project for five undergraduate students studying Biomedical Engineering at The University of Akron, Team 14. The team was directed to compose a team name, which was chosen to be EnGenious Design Solutions (EDS). The project was provided by Dr. James Keszenheimer who is a professor at The University of Akron. This document focuses on the project results as well as business conclusions
Astro2020 White Paper: A Direct Measure of Cosmic Acceleration
Nearly a century after the discovery that we live in an expanding Universe,
and two decades after the discovery of accelerating cosmic expansion, there
remains no direct detection of this acceleration via redshift drift - a change
in the cosmological expansion velocity versus time. Because cosmological
redshift drift directly determines the Hubble parameter H(z), it is arguably
the cleanest possible measurement of the expansion history, and has the
potential to constrain dark energy models (e.g. Kim et al. 2015). The challenge
is that the signal is small - the best observational constraint presently has
an uncertainty several orders of magnitude larger than the expected signal
(Darling 2012). Nonetheless, direct detection of redshift drift is becoming
feasible, with upcoming facilities such as the ESO-ELT and SKA projecting
possible detection within two to three decades. This timescale is uncomfortably
long given the potential of this cosmological test. With dedicated experiments
it should be possible to rapidly accelerate progress and detect redshift drift
with only a five-year observational baseline. Such a facility would also be
ideal for precision radial velocity measurements of exoplanets, which could be
obtained as a byproduct of the ongoing calibration measurements for the
experiment.Comment: White paper submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. 6 page
Astro2020 Project White Paper: The Cosmic Accelerometer
We propose an experiment, the Cosmic Accelerometer, designed to yield
velocity precision of cm/s with measurement stability over years to
decades. The first-phase Cosmic Accelerometer, which is at the scale of the
Astro2020 Small programs, will be ideal for precision radial velocity
measurements of terrestrial exoplanets in the Habitable Zone of Sun-like stars.
At the same time, this experiment will serve as the technical pathfinder and
facility core for a second-phase larger facility at the Medium scale, which can
provide a significant detection of cosmological redshift drift on a 6-year
timescale. This larger facility will naturally provide further detection/study
of Earth twin planet systems as part of its external calibration process. This
experiment is fundamentally enabled by a novel low-cost telescope technology
called PolyOculus, which harnesses recent advances in commercial off the shelf
equipment (telescopes, CCD cameras, and control computers) combined with a
novel optical architecture to produce telescope collecting areas equivalent to
standard telescopes with large mirror diameters. Combining a PolyOculus array
with an actively-stabilized high-precision radial velocity spectrograph
provides a unique facility with novel calibration features to achieve the
performance requirements for the Cosmic Accelerometer
Effects of hyperlinks on navigation in virtual environments
Hyperlinks introduce discontinuities of movement to 3-D virtual environments (VEs). Nine independent attributes of hyperlinks are defined and their likely effects on navigation in VEs are discussed. Four experiments are described in which participants repeatedly navigated VEs that were either conventional (i.e. obeyed the laws of Euclidean space), or contained hyperlinks. Participants learned spatial knowledge slowly in both types of environment, echoing the findings of previous studies that used conventional VEs. The detrimental effects on participants' spatial knowledge of using hyperlinks for movement were reduced when a time-delay was introduced, but participants still developed less accurate knowledge than they did in the conventional VEs. Visual continuity had a greater influence on participants' rate of learning than continuity of movement, and participants were able to exploit hyperlinks that connected together disparate regions of a VE to reduce travel time
Defining normal IgG changes throughout pregnancy
Immunoglobulin G (IgG) is the major serum immunoglobulin, accounting for roughly 75% of all immunoglobulin. IgG is the only class of immunoglobulin that crosses the placenta and it serves as the main immunologic barrier between the fetus and external environments. There has not been a clear consensus on what the normal values of IgG are throughout pregnancy. The aim of this study is to measure serum immunoglobulin G in each trimester of the pregnant female to determine a normal IgG profile throughout all trimesters in normal pregnancy
Adherence to the updated guidelines for the prevention of perinatal Group B streptococcal disease
In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated the Guidelines for the Prevention of Perinatal Group B Streptococcal (GBS) Disease. Previous studies of adherence to GBS guidelines have focused on the treatment of carriers of GBS. Our objective was to determine whether there was any difference in adherence to the guidelines for screening and treatment of women who delivered at our institution between the beginning of 2011 and the end of 2011 as the revised guidelines were published in November 2010. Our secondary outcome was to determine whether any differences in adherence occurred between prenatal provider types (OB/Gyn, Certified Nurse Midwives, and Family Practice)
The International Gene Trap Consortium Website: a portal to all publicly available gene trap cell lines in mouse
Gene trapping is a method of generating murine embryonic stem (ES) cell lines containing insertional mutations in known and novel genes. A number of international groups have used this approach to create sizeable public cell line repositories available to the scientific community for the generation of mutant mouse strains. The major gene trapping groups worldwide have recently joined together to centralize access to all publicly available gene trap lines by developing a user-oriented Website for the International Gene Trap Consortium (IGTC). This collaboration provides an impressive public informatics resource comprising ∼45 000 well-characterized ES cell lines which currently represent ∼40% of known mouse genes, all freely available for the creation of knockout mice on a non-collaborative basis. To standardize annotation and provide high confidence data for gene trap lines, a rigorous identification and annotation pipeline has been developed combining genomic localization and transcript alignment of gene trap sequence tags to identify trapped loci. This information is stored in a new bioinformatics database accessible through the IGTC Website interface. The IGTC Website () allows users to browse and search the database for trapped genes, BLAST sequences against gene trap sequence tags, and view trapped genes within biological pathways. In addition, IGTC data have been integrated into major genome browsers and bioinformatics sites to provide users with outside portals for viewing this data. The development of the IGTC Website marks a major advance by providing the research community with the data and tools necessary to effectively use public gene trap resources for the large-scale characterization of mammalian gene function
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