Regional Aggregation and Discovery of Digital Collections: The Mountain West Digital Library

book chapterThe Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is a digital collaborative of over 180 partners from five states in the U.S. West, sharing free access to over 775 digital collections with over 950,000 resources. Partners of the MWDL work together on providing regional discovery via an online portal at mwdl.org and facilitating, on behalf of the region, the on-ramp to national discovery via the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) portal at dp .la. MWDL was organized around these common goals: • Establish a distributed digitization and hosting infrastructure to support memory institutions in sharing their digital collections • Increase public access to digital collections materials through aggregation and discovery via open search portals • Promote interoperability of metadata via common standards and enhancements • Share expertise and training This chapter describes how these goals have been met for MWDL partners, through a coordinated network of distributed repositories supporting collections and a central harvesting system for searching. Key to the success of regional discovery has been the establishment of common standards and practices, along with the development of useful data enhancement practices, also described below. How MWDL has adapted over its years of growth and adoption of changing technologies, and particularly how it has served the emergence of the new national digital library, are also discussed. Finally, future directions for collaborative discovery are suggested, with notes about the challenges ahead

Durvalumab: an investigational anti-PD-L1 monoclonal antibody for the treatment of urothelial carcinoma.

Our expanding knowledge of immunotherapy for solid tumors has led to an explosion of clinical trials aimed at urothelial carcinoma. The primary strategy is centered on unleashing the immune system by releasing the inhibitory signals propagated by programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its ligand programmed cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1). Many antibody constructs have been developed to block these interactions and are used in clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration has already approved a number of checkpoint inhibitors such as anti-cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA4) monoclonal antibodies including ipilimumab; anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibodies including nivolumab and pembrolizumab; anti-PD-L1 antibodies including atezolizumab, avelumab, and durvalumab. One of the latest inhibitors is durvalumab, which is a high-affinity human immunoglobulin G1 kappa monoclonal antibody and blocks the interaction of PD-L1 with PD-1 and CD80. Currently, there are a number of ongoing trials in advanced urothelial carcinoma both using durvalumab monotherapy and in combination with other targeted therapies. In addition, durvalumab is being investigated in the non-muscle-invasive urothelial carcinoma, which is centered around intravenous formulations. These exciting developments have added a significant number of therapies in a previously limited treatment landscape

From Digital Library to Open Datasets

This article discusses the burgeoning “collections as data” movement within the fields of digital libraries and digital humanities. Faculty at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library are developing a collections as data strategy by leveraging existing Digital Library and Digital Matters programs. By selecting various digital collections, small- and large-scale approaches to developing open datasets are explored. Five case studies chronicling this strategy are reviewed, along with testing the datasets using various digital humanities methods, such as text mining, topic modeling, and GIS (geographic information system)

Biodiversity, Baking and Boiling, Endangered Species Act Turning Down the Heat

Today the Earth faces an extinction event on a scale second only to Earth\u27s largest mass extinction, the Permian-Triassic event, which occurred 250 million years ago. Upwards of 70 percent of the Earth\u27s species could be at risk of extinction with a 3.5°C (6.3°F) rise in temperature, which could occur by the end of this century. The driver is global warming, caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As such, a rational climate policy is needed immediately to prevent the complete collapse of biodiversity. Yet, the United States—the world\u27s largest cumulative contributor to emissions—is in a state of paralysis when it comes to implementing climate solutions. This paralysis arises from a complex of cultural, political, and economic origins. It is perhaps understandable that persons, be they individual humans or corporations, would not respond readily. Humans\u27 ability to fundamentally alter our environs has far outstripped our limited ability to calculate cost/benefit in the abstract and over the long term. On the other hand, there is no excuse for inaction on the part of government. One of the primary purposes of government is social order. Implicit in the organization of society is that at a collective, governmental level we are better at calculating abstract long-term cost/benefit. The government must therefore take definitive steps in the face of the climate crisis. This article begins by providing a brief overview of biodiversity, the threats global warming poses to it, and the economic and social costs that the loss of biodiversity will exact on human society. We then review four key examples of ways in which the Endangered Species Act operates, or should operate, to address global warming and greenhouse gas emissions and confer substantial benefits on species threatened by the climate crisis: the listing process, the section 7 consultation process required of federal agencies, the designation of critical habitat, and the preparation and implementation of recovery plans

Rollercoasters and Caterpillars

A rollercoaster is a sequence of real numbers for which every maximal contiguous subsequence - increasing or decreasing - has length at least three. By translating this sequence to a set of points in the plane, a rollercoaster can be defined as an x-monotone polygonal path for which every maximal sub-path, with positive- or negative-slope edges, has at least three vertices. Given a sequence of distinct real numbers, the rollercoaster problem asks for a maximum-length (not necessarily contiguous) subsequence that is a rollercoaster. It was conjectured that every sequence of n distinct real numbers contains a rollercoaster of length at least ceil[n/2] for n>7, while the best known lower bound is Omega(n/log n). In this paper we prove this conjecture. Our proof is constructive and implies a linear-time algorithm for computing a rollercoaster of this length. Extending the O(n log n)-time algorithm for computing a longest increasing subsequence, we show how to compute a maximum-length rollercoaster within the same time bound. A maximum-length rollercoaster in a permutation of {1,...,n} can be computed in O(n log log n) time. The search for rollercoasters was motivated by orthogeodesic point-set embedding of caterpillars. A caterpillar is a tree such that deleting the leaves gives a path, called the spine. A top-view caterpillar is one of maximum degree 4 such that the two leaves adjacent to each vertex lie on opposite sides of the spine. As an application of our result on rollercoasters, we are able to find a planar drawing of every n-vertex top-view caterpillar on every set of 25/3(n+4) points in the plane, such that each edge is an orthogonal path with one bend. This improves the previous best known upper bound on the number of required points, which is O(n log n). We also show that such a drawing can be obtained in linear time, when the points are given in sorted order

A Case Study of the Benefits of the Science Learning Partnerships in Early Years and Primary Education in England

This paper charts the recent history of the STEM Learning UK contracts with local Science Learning Partnerships (SLPs) and identifies what leadership has been made available to support the Early Years and Primary school sector. A case study approach is taken using ‘Super SLP’ hubs in England. Curriculum Hubs exist in core subject areas such as maths, English, science and computing. They have recently been expanded to include Behaviour Hubs. This forms the current DfE strategy of Teaching School Hubs (TSHs), i.e., to offer system support and a full career-length support for all stages of teacher-career and leadership development. This paper charts the changes to the Early Years (EY) and Primary teacher support networks, in science particularly, and examines what they provide and how this can be improved, and discusses, through session evaluation and feedback, what teachers have appreciated the most.</jats:p