Camera Shy and Unaccountable: The Constitutional, Statutory, and Democratic Ramifications of Police Seizing and Deleting Photos and Video Taken in Public

Article published in the Michigan State University School of Law Student Scholarship Collection

A Unique Collaborative Process for Developing a DRU

Indiana University (IU) has eight campuses around the state of Indiana, including two core campuses and six regional campuses, with a total student population of approximately 110,500. In early 2012, IU partnered with The Polis Center—an academic research center out of the core Indianapolis campus—to develop a comprehensive Disaster Resistant University Risk Assessment and Mitigation Plan to cover all eight campuses. The Polis Center has developed more than 100 county hazard mitigation plans and has significant expertise in FEMA’s Hazus-MH, a GIS-based disaster mitigation tool, as well as other geographic information systems. In this presentation, The Polis Center will discuss the processes of incorporating each campus’s unique data into databases that support Hazus-MH and other GIS hazard modeling applications. These resulting hazard scenarios estimate the physical, economic, and social impacts that contribute to the unique vulnerabilities of each campus

Giving Teeth to the Watchdog: Optimizing Open Records Appeals Processes to Facilitate the Media's Use of FOIA Laws

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Digital Atlas of American Religion

poster abstractOur poster presentation will introduce DAAR, the Digital Atlas of American Religion (http://www.religionatlas.org). DAAR is a web-based research platform with innovative data exploration and visualization tools to support research in the humanities. Time and location are essential components of humanities exploratory research; however, GIS technology, especially in its web form, does not support the easy exploration and visualization of the complex spatio-temporal data manipulated by humanists. DAAR presents researchers with an integrated solution stemming from several fields including GIS, visualization, and classification theory. Researchers using DAAR are provided with the following exploration/visualization techniques: maps, cartograms, tree maps, pie charts, and motion charts. Using these tools and methods, researchers can explore patterns, trends, and relationships in the data that otherwise are not apparent with traditional GIS or statistical software. DAAR allows researchers to understand the multiple dimensions and diversity of religion across geographies, or within geographies. Paired with historic census data, it allows them to explore relationships to give better context and meaning to the patterns and trends. Maps provide the spatial patterns and relationships, tree maps show relative strength and relationships, charts show trends, cartograms reveal relative numbers of adherence, and motion charts animate trends over time

A “CASE” Study on Developing Science Communication and Outreach Skills of University Graduate Student Researchers in Alaska

Well rounded scientific researchers are not only experts in their field, but can also communicate their work to a multitude of various audiences, including the general public and undergraduate university students. Training in these areas should ideally start during graduate school, but many programs are not preparing students to effectively communicate their work. Here, we present results from the NSF-funded CASE (Changing Alaska Science Education) program, which was funded by NSF under the auspices of the GK-12 program. CASE placed science graduate students (fellows) in K-12 classrooms to teach alongside of K-12 teachers with the goal of enhancing communication and teaching skills among graduate students. CASE trained fellows in inquiry-based and experiential techniques and emphasized the integration of art, writing, and traditional Alaska Native knowledge in the classroom. Such techniques are especially effective in engaging students from groups that are underrepresented in science.National Science Foundation's CASE (Changing Alaska Science Education) GK-12 Fellowship, UAF EPSCoR Graduate Student / Early Career Researcher Travel gran

Examination of near-wall hemodynamic parameters in the renal bridging stent of various stent graft configurations for repairing visceral branched aortic aneurysms

ObjectiveThis study examined the flow behavior of four stent graft configurations for endovascular repair of complex aneurysms of the descending aorta.MethodsComputational fluid dynamics models with transient boundary conditions and rigid wall simplifying assumptions were developed and used with four distinct geometries to compare various near-wall hemodynamic parameters.ResultsGraphic plots for time-averaged wall shear stress, oscillating shear index, and relative residence time were presented and compared among the four stent graft configurations of interest.ConclusionsAbrupt 90° and 180° changes in stent geometry (particularly in the side branches) cause a high momentum change and thus increased flow separation and mixing, which has significant implications in blood flow characteristics near the wall. By comparison, longer bridging stents provide more gradual changes in momentum, thus allowing blood flow to develop before reaching the target vessel.Clinical RelevanceRenal vessel patency is a well-known but rarely talked about challenge with complex aneurysm repair. Many factors need to be optimized to ensure branch vessel patency in aneurysms of the visceral segment, including bridging stent compliance transition, bridging stent material selection and design, and main body graft alignment. One topic that has not been discussed much is the flow characteristics entering the branch. Here we propose a technique to evaluate device configurations and their associated flows for their ability to maintain branch vessel patency

Information Needs and Requirements for Decision Support in Primary Care: An Analysis of Chronic Pain Care

Decision support system designs often do not align with the information environments in which clinicians work. These work environments may increase Clinicians’ cognitive workload and harm their decision making. The objective of this study was to identify information needs and decision support requirements for assessing, diagnosing, and treating chronic noncancer pain in primary care. We conducted a qualitative study involving 30 interviews with 10 primary care clinicians and a subsequent multidisciplinary systems design workshop. Our analysis identified four key decision requirements, eight clinical information needs, and four decision support design seeds. Our findings indicate that clinicians caring for chronic pain need decision support that aggregates many disparate information elements and helps them navigate and contextualize that information. By attending to the needs identified in this study, decision support designers may improve Clinicians’ efficiency, reduce mental workload, and positively affect patient care quality and outcomes

Time lags: insights from the U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network

Ecosystems across the United States are changing in complex ways that are difficult to predict. Coordinated long-term research and analysis are required to assess how these changes will affect a diverse array of ecosystem services. This paper is part of a series that is a product of a synthesis effort of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. This effort revealed that each LTER site had at least one compelling scientific case study about “what their site would look like” in 50 or 100 yr. As the site results were prepared, themes emerged, and the case studies were grouped into separate papers along five themes: state change, connectivity, resilience, time lags, and cascading effects and compiled into this special issue. This paper addresses the time lags theme with five examples from diverse biomes including tundra (Arctic), coastal upwelling (California Current Ecosystem), montane forests (Coweeta), and Everglades freshwater and coastal wetlands (Florida Coastal Everglades) LTER sites. Its objective is to demonstrate the importance of different types of time lags, in different kinds of ecosystems, as drivers of ecosystem structure and function and how these can effectively be addressed with long-term studies. The concept that slow, interactive, compounded changes can have dramatic effects on ecosystem structure, function, services, and future scenarios is apparent in many systems, but they are difficult to quantify and predict. The case studies presented here illustrate the expanding scope of thinking about time lags within the LTER network and beyond. Specifically, they examine what variables are best indicators of lagged changes in arctic tundra, how progressive ocean warming can have profound effects on zooplankton and phytoplankton in waters off the California coast, how a series of species changes over many decades can affect Eastern deciduous forests, and how infrequent, extreme cold spells and storms can have enduring effects on fish populations and wetland vegetation along the Southeast coast and the Gulf of Mexico. The case studies highlight the need for a diverse set of LTER (and other research networks) sites to sort out the multiple components of time lag effects in ecosystems