The Right to a Safe and Healthy Birth

The right to a safe and healthy birth is included in the declaration of human rights- the intrinsic allowances that humans are obligated to be protected by on a global scale. These rights, however, for some pregnant women have been submersed by lack of transportation, education and skilled birth attendants. Financial constraints and difficulty in obtaining adequate healthcare are also issues of concern. A review of literature pertaining to three different countries, the United States, China and India will be examined in light of safe and healthy birthing techniques for women worldwide. These countries were chosen due to their diverse injustice issues as it pertains to birthing rights. Education and advocacy efforts in relation to reproductive rights on a global scale will be discussed. Review of the literature not only reveals grave injustices for women and children but it also illuminates ways in which individuals can get involved to help promote the right to a safe and healthy birth. Several movements will be highlighted in order to provide the audience with practical advocacy, education, and relief effort implementations

Marrying Social Media Approaches and Space Flight Control: Eight Years at SpaceOps

Three previous SpaceOps papers [1-3] - published in 2010, 2012 (honored by the Conference as a "Best Paper"), and 2014 - have discussed paths to using social media concepts and techniques to enhance space flight controller effectiveness by a) reducing clutter of nonverbal communications (e.g., visual flow with minimal headers and shared content instead of multiple copies), b) moving some voice communication to non-verbal transmission (virtually eliminating "say again" requests because non-verbal comm can be re-read), thus making remaining voice comm easier to focus on, and c) reducing short-term and long-term flight stress on flight control personnel. This paper shows how Marshall Space Flight Center's (MSFC) ISS Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) is realizing the above goals via the Communications Dashboard (CommDash) software suite deployed in 2017 (including enhancements to the Console Log Tool (CoLT) discussed in earlier papers). Two larger-scope benefits spawned by CommDash evolution are also chronicled: a) emergence of an Agile Software Development (ASD) process adapted to the not-always-nimble environment of government projects, and b) the sprouting of a Human Factors Engineering (HF or HFE) community of practice within MSFC's Payload and Mission Operations Division (PMOD)

Revealing a signaling role of phytosphingosine-1-phosphate in yeast

Perturbing metabolic systems of bioactive sphingolipids with genetic approachMultiple types of “omics” data collected from the systemSystems approach for integrating multiple “omics” informationPredicting signal transduction information flow: lipid; TF activation; gene expressio

Waveforms and Sonic Boom Perception and Response (WSPR): Low-Boom Community Response Program Pilot Test Design, Execution, and Analysis

The Waveforms and Sonic boom Perception and Response (WSPR) Program was designed to test and demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of techniques to gather data relating human subjective response to multiple low-amplitude sonic booms. It was in essence a practice session for future wider scale testing on naive communities, using a purpose built low-boom demonstrator aircraft. The low-boom community response pilot experiment was conducted in California in November 2011. The WSPR team acquired sufficient data to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the various physical and psychological data gathering techniques and analysis methods

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far