The Em-Powter-ing of America: Using Info-mercials to Teach Persuasion and Popular Discourse in the Basic Communication Course

This article describes how a critique of Susan Powter\u27s Stop the Insanity! info-mercial provides educators with an effective, class-tested, and fun assignment to be included in the persuasion section of a basic communication course. This assignment provides students with an excellent example of a message from popular discourse that follows Monroe\u27s Motivated Sequence. It also facilitates discussion of several key issues related to persuasion in general. Additionally, because this activity uses a popular discourse text, students enhance their critical thinking skills and become more critical consumers of messages they receive through popular discourse

Postmodern Messiah: A Critical Ethnography of Elvis Presley as a Site of Performance.

In this study I used a critical ethnographic approach to investigate Elvis as a site of performance where cultural identity, authority and representation are contextualized within the cultural practices of fans, people who love Elvis, and funs, people who do not love Elvis, but still elect to use Elvis as the basis for their cultural performances. I argued that fans and funs use performance as the agency of postmodern identity construction. I explored three performance events in which both fans and funs participated. Additionally, I examined the relationship of power and play between and within fan and fun culture. I positioned fan and fun activities as cultural performances that enact political ideologies supported by members of fan and fun cultures. I focused on fans and funs as performers who enacted material, verbal, and processual texts. I detailed these performances in three case studies. In the first case study, written as a narrative, I discussed the performance of the Candlelight Vigil. I described the Vigil as a ritual and discussed how fans/funs use the performance to enact power relations within and between each culture. I also considered how performance of the Vigil aids postmodern identity construction for fans and funs. In the next case study, written as a screenplay, I critiqued the performance of the Graceland Mansion tour. I discussed how fans and funs are special types of tourists who use the tour context to further their own cultural identities and agendas. Finally, in the last case study I explored the critical implications of shopping for souvenirs as performance. I wrote the first part of the study as a brochure to highlight the rhetoric of objects featured at Graceland Plaza. The second part of the chapter I wrote as a scrapbook of snapshots to implicate my own autobiographical experience of shopping at Graceland Crossings in the same context as popular and academic discourse about souvenirs and shopping. I attempted to draw the connection between myself and fan/fun performances of shopping at both venues to determine if shopping was an empowering or disempowering performance of postmodern identity

An experimental right atrium platform to assess recirculation in hemodialysis catheters

Hemodialysis (HD) is a treatment supporting decreased kidney function, via a catheter inserted into the heart’s Right Atrium (RA). Recirculation is a source of inefficiency for treatment, where blood is dialysed again due to poor catheter design. Lab-testing is still relatively unexplored, hence, a mechanical testing system was designed with the intention of providing a consistent and repeatable environment for testing HD catheters. System geometry was composed using a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model of a heart, with the RA scaled to appropriate dimensions, and a PolyDiMethylSiloxane (PDMS) model produced through 3D printing and negative wax casting. Pulsatile blood flow was mimicked by peristaltic pumps driving a blood analogue (BA). Recirculation was induced by adding dyed BA to the system via the catheter and measured using a colourimeter. The developed platform was initially evaluated using two catheters, demonstrating capability to accurately replicate atrial hemodynamic conditions. Two step-tipped catheters, A and B, were tested at 350 ml/min, producing recirculation values of 13.11% and 18.58%, respectively. The results exhibit the ability of the system developed to evaluate HD catheter performance, with potential to explore a wider range of tip geometries relevant to clinical preference. Furthermore, this advancement towards an anatomically accurate lab-based test system could be paired with computational methods to progress the evaluation of such medical devices and enhance their development

Faster Predict-and-Optimize with Davis-Yin Splitting

In many applications, a combinatorial problem must be repeatedly solved with similar, but distinct parameters. Yet, the parameters $w$ are not directly observed; only contextual data $d$ that correlates with $w$ is available. It is tempting to use a neural network to predict $w$ given $d$, but training such a model requires reconciling the discrete nature of combinatorial optimization with the gradient-based frameworks used to train neural networks. When the problem in question is an Integer Linear Program (ILP), one approach to overcoming this issue is to consider a continuous relaxation of the combinatorial problem. While existing methods utilizing this approach have shown to be highly effective on small problems (10-100 variables), they do not scale well to large problems. In this work, we draw on ideas from modern convex optimization to design a network and training scheme which scales effortlessly to problems with thousands of variables

Spontaneous Iliopsoas Hematoma following Microvascular Free Tissue Transfer.

Spontaneous hematoma within the iliopsoas muscle (SIH) is a rare complication most commonly seen in coagulopathic patients. Often, patients undergoing microvascular free tissue transfer are anticoagulated for anastomotic patency. Here we describe two cases of postoperative SIH following contralateral anterolateral thigh (ALT) free tissue transfer for reconstruction of oncologic head and neck defects. Both patients described hip pain after mobilization and had a corresponding acute blood loss anemia. Diagnosis of SIH was confirmed by CT and both patients were managed conservatively. Given that anticoagulation is a common practice following head and neck free tissue transfer, surgeons should be aware of this potential complication

Dating Clinopyroxene Phenocrysts in Submarine Basalts Using ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar Geochronology

Dating submarine basalts using ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar geochronology is often hindered by a lack of potassium‐bearing phenocrystic phases and severe alteration in the groundmass. Clinopyroxene is a common phenocrystic phase in seafloor basalts and is highly resistive to low‐temperature alteration. Here we show that clinopyroxene phenocrysts separated from marine basalts are a viable phase for ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar incremental heating age determinations. We provide results from a pilot study comprising 16 age experiments from nine clinopyroxene separates, five of which from samples with dated coeval phases. The clinopyroxene ages range from 11.5 to 112 Ma with relatively high uncertainties (ranging from 0.8% to 7.1%; median of 1.9%) compared to more traditional phases. The clinopyroxene age plateaus form at low to moderate temperature steps and are characterized by relatively elevated K/Ca of 0.002–0.4, suggesting that other K‐bearing phases hosted within the clinopyroxene are likely degassing to yield the ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar age information. There are three possible origins for the K and corresponding ^(40)Ar* including films of trapped melt/nanomineral inclusions along grain defects, secondary melt inclusion bands, or variations in degassing behaviors between lower and higher crystalline Ca pyroxene phases. Regardless of the source of the K, the age determinations are successful with 75% of the experiments producing long plateaus (>60% ^(39)Ar released) with mean square of the weighted deviations ranging from 0.6 to 1.5 and probability of fit values >0.05. We conclude that clinopyroxene dating by the ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar method has the potential to provide a wealth of information for previously undated, altered seafloor lithologies and continental equivalents

Electrostatic Solar Sail: A Propellantless Propulsion Concept for an Interstellar Probe Mission

The propulsion of an electrostatic solar sail (E Sail) is obtained by extracting momentum from the solar wind through electrostatic repulsion of the positively charged solar wind ions (see Figure 1). The positively charged solar wind protons are deflected by the electric field created around the tethers.This electric field grows in diameter as the spacecraft moves away from the Sun, therefore the E Sail effective area grows. The growth of the E-Sail effective area allows the propulsive force to decrease as 1/r up to distances of 20 AU as it moves away from the Sun, unlike solar sail propulsion whose thrust decreases as 1/r 2 but only to distances of 5AU. This propulsive force is created without using propellant and, therefore, E-sail avoids both the mass and complexity of chemical rockets (that require large amounts of propellant, propellant storage tanks, plumbing, valves, and insulation)

Community Seismic Network

The article describes the design of the Community Seismic Network, which is a dense open seismic network based on low cost sensors. The inputs are from sensors hosted by volunteers from the community by direct connection to their personal computers, or through sensors built into mobile devices. The server is cloud-based for robustness and to dynamically handle the load of impulsive earthquake events. The main product of the network is a map of peak acceleration, delivered within seconds of the ground shaking. The lateral variations in the level of shaking will be valuable to first responders, and the waveform information from a dense network will allow detailed mapping of the rupture process. Sensors in buildings may be useful for monitoring the state-of-health of the structure after major shaking