Rachel Carson

It is rare for the intrinsic power of distilled prose to span across generations, shaping politics, policy, and perception. Blending conservation ethics, meticulous research and political knowledge into an easily readable prose, Rachel Louise Carson left a legacy through the written word. Criticized for being a single woman in a male-centric field, she established her individuality, her free spirit, and her amazing dedication to her ethics. Carson’s contribution to science lies within her meticulous attention to scientific detail and her ability to communicate complex scientific theories to the general public. Carson portrayed peremptory evidence of the devastating effects of synthetic chemicals and nuclear testing, while simultaneously communicating the role of ecology and environmental change to the general public. Carson challenged agricultural scientists, chemical companies, and the government for their misuse of chemical agents, and their misguided notions of trying to dominate nature. Technology and scientific testing was severely limited and yet Carson was able to draw sound scientific proof of the devastating lasting effects of the human-made chemicals she dubbed “elixirs of death.” Rachel Carson left a legacy through her chosen medium, the written word; inspiring generations of scientific writers to distill complex scientific processes into creative prose to inspire the general public to consider their own role within the environment

A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice by David Alan Sklansky

What is violence? What may appear in its face to be a simple question does not have a simple answer, especially when we are searching for it within our legal systems. The answer is not clear, and yet it has wide-reaching and potentially life-changing implications. Professor and former Assistant United States Attorney David Alan Sklansky does not seek to answer this question, but rather suggests that there is no definition of violence “that will allow the category of violence to do the work that we have asked it to do.”3 In A Pattern of Violence, Sklansky instead turns to the answers of others—of politicians, judges, and US legislators, now and throughout the country’s history. Violence is often defined in order to serve a particular purpose; it is not neutral. A Pattern of Violence reveals how the US legal system’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory views of violence inform the legal treatment of violent crime

A Study of Actor and Action Semantic Retention in Video Supervoxel Segmentation

Existing methods in the semantic computer vision community seem unable to deal with the explosion and richness of modern, open-source and social video content. Although sophisticated methods such as object detection or bag-of-words models have been well studied, they typically operate on low level features and ultimately suffer from either scalability issues or a lack of semantic meaning. On the other hand, video supervoxel segmentation has recently been established and applied to large scale data processing, which potentially serves as an intermediate representation to high level video semantic extraction. The supervoxels are rich decompositions of the video content: they capture object shape and motion well. However, it is not yet known if the supervoxel segmentation retains the semantics of the underlying video content. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of how well the actor and action semantics are retained in video supervoxel segmentation. Our study has human observers watching supervoxel segmentation videos and trying to discriminate both actor (human or animal) and action (one of eight everyday actions). We gather and analyze a large set of 640 human perceptions over 96 videos in 3 different supervoxel scales. Furthermore, we conduct machine recognition experiments on a feature defined on supervoxel segmentation, called supervoxel shape context, which is inspired by the higher order processes in human perception. Our ultimate findings suggest that a significant amount of semantics have been well retained in the video supervoxel segmentation and can be used for further video analysis.Comment: This article is in review at the International Journal of Semantic Computin

Postcard: Pioneer Sod House Western Kansas

This black and white photographic postcard features a sod house. A wooden second story and shingles were added to the existing structure. The sod has deteriorated on the corners and the front of the second story is missing siding. A tree has grown so close to the building that it is leaning away from the structure. Written text is at the bottom of the card. Handwriting is on the back of the card.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/tj_postcards/2195/thumbnail.jp

Extending holographic LEED to ordered small unit cell superstructures

Following on the success of the recent application of holographic LEED to the determination of the 3D atomic geometry of Si adatoms on a SiC(111) p(3x3) surface, which enabled that structure to be solved, we show in this paper that a similar technique allows the direct recovery of the local geometry of adsorbates forming superstructures as small as p(2x2), even in the presence of a local substrate reconstruction.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures postscript included, revtex, Phys. Rev. B in pres

In-line filter included into the syringe infusion pump assembly reduces flow irregularities

Purpose: To evaluate whether an in-line filter inserted in the syringe pump infusion line assembly influences start-up times and flow irregularities during vertical pump displacement at low infusion rates. Methods: Fluid delivery after syringe pump start-up and after vertical displacement of the syringe pump by −50cm was determined gravimetrically at flow rates of 0.5, 1.0 and 2.0mlh−1. Measurements were repeated for each flow rate four times with two different syringe pumps with and without an in-line filter incorporated. Data are shown as median and range. Results: Start-up times were reduced by an in-line filter at 0.5mlh−1 flow rate from 355.5s (0-660) to 115s (0-320), whereas the effect was attenuated at higher flow rates. Pooling of fluid into the infusion system after lowering the infusion syringe pump was halved in all flow rates tested. Amount of infusion bolus after elevating the syringe pump by 50cm was not affected by an in-line filter. Conclusion: In the evaluated model in-line filters help to reduce flow irregularities and delay in drug delivery of syringe pumps at low flow rates and represent an option to optimize continuous administration of highly concentrated short-acting drugs at very small infusion rate

The use of youth justice services by young people with neurodevelopmental disorders in Glasgow, Scotland: a qualitative exploration of the perspectives of services providers

Abstract or summary per chapter

Rapid pressure compensation by automated cuff pressure controllers worsens sealing in tracheal tubes

Background Cyclic redistribution of air within the cuff during respiratory pressure changes creates a self-sealing mechanism which allows tracheal sealing, despite tracheal airway pressure being above baseline cuff inflation pressure. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of continuous automated cuff pressure regulation on tracheal sealing during cyclic respiratory pressure changes. Methods In vitro tracheal sealing was studied in four different high volume-low pressure (HVLP) tracheal tube cuffs size internal diameter 8.0 and 5.0 mm in combination with a conventional pressure manometer and two different automated pressure controllers (VBM Cuff Controller; Cuff Pressure Control Tracoe™). Experiments were performed at 10, 15, 20, and 25 cm H2O cuff pressure during intermittent positive pressure ventilation with peak inspiratory pressures of 20 and 25 cm H2O. Air leakage was assessed spirometrically. Experiments were performed four times with each tube brand and size with two exemplars of each of the three cuff pressure controllers. Results Owing to immediate cuff pressure correction, tracheal sealing at cuff pressure below inspiratory pressure was reduced in most of the tracheal tube cuffs, except in those with reduced sealing characteristics when using the Pressure Control Tracoe™ compared with the conventional pressure manometer and the VBM Cuff Controller. Tracheal sealing with the Pressure Control Tracoe™ comparable with the other two devices was only achieved at cuff pressures of 20 and 25 cm H2O. Conclusions Automated cuff pressure controllers with rapid pressure correction interfere with the self-sealing mechanism of high sealing HVLP tube cuffs and reduce their improved sealing characteristic

A Region-Based Deep Learning Algorithm for Detecting and Tracking Objects in Manufacturing Plants

In today\u27s competitive production era, the ability to identify and track important objects in a near real-time manner is greatly desired among manufacturers who are moving towards the streamline production. Manually keeping track of every object in a complex manufacturing plant is infeasible; therefore, an automatic system of that functionality is greatly in need. This study was motivated to develop a Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask RCNN) model to semantically segment objects and important zones in manufacturing plants. The Mask RCNN was trained through transfer learning that used a neural network (NN) pre-trained with the MS-COCO dataset as the starting point and further fine-tuned that NN using a limited number of annotated images. Then the Mask RCNN model was modified to have consistent detection results from videos, which was realized through the use of a two-staged detection threshold and the analysis of the temporal coherence information of detected objects. The function of object tracking was added to the system for identifying the misplacement of objects. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system were demonstrated by analyzing a sample of video footages