Improving Community Health through an Innovative Collaboration between Academics and Practitioners through the Worcester Academic Health Department

Session Description The newly established Academic Health Collaborative at the Worcester Division of Public Health links local universities with the Division of Public Health in a collaborative partnership that bridges health/public health academia and practice to improve community health. It allows the DPH to leverage academic and community resources and expertise to help it achieve its goal to become the “Healthiest City in New England by 2020”. This innovative collaboration allows the DPH and local partners to train a future generation of students that can work and communicate across disciplines and settings. In addition, it provides structured practicum and internship experience for area college and university students that serves not only the needs of public health but enhances the learning experience for the student. So far, these experiences have been tailored to address priorities identified by the WDPH to support the Division’s Strategic Plan and CHIP are addressed and implemented

A rotating white dwarf shows different compositions on its opposite faces

White dwarfs, the extremely dense remnants left behind by most stars after their death, are characterised by a mass comparable to that of the Sun compressed into the size of an Earth-like planet. In the resulting strong gravity, heavy elements sink toward the centre and the upper layer of the atmosphere contains only the lightest element present, usually hydrogen or helium. Several mechanisms compete with gravitational settling to change a white dwarf's surface composition as it cools, and the fraction of white dwarfs with helium atmospheres is known to increase by a factor ~2.5 below a temperature of about 30,000 K; therefore, some white dwarfs that appear to have hydrogen-dominated atmospheres above 30,000 K are bound to transition to be helium-dominated as they cool below it. Here we report observations of ZTF J203349.8+322901.1, a transitioning white dwarf with two faces: one side of its atmosphere is dominated by hydrogen and the other one by helium. This peculiar nature is likely caused by the presence of a small magnetic field, which creates an inhomogeneity in temperature, pressure or mixing strength over the surface. ZTF J203349.8+322901.1 might be the most extreme member of a class of magnetic, transitioning white dwarfs -- together with GD 323, a white dwarf that shows similar but much more subtle variations. This new class could help shed light on the physical mechanisms behind white dwarf spectral evolution.Comment: 45 pages, 11 figure

PaLM 2 Technical Report

We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report

2020 roadmap on solid-state batteries

Li-ion batteries have revolutionized the portable electronics industry and empowered the electric vehicle (EV) revolution. Unfortunately, traditional Li-ion chemistry is approaching its physicochemical limit. The demand for higher density (longer range), high power (fast charging), and safer EVs has recently created a resurgence of interest in solid state batteries (SSB). Historically, research has focused on improving the ionic conductivity of solid electrolytes, yet ceramic solids now deliver sufficient ionic conductivity. The barriers lie within the interfaces between the electrolyte and the two electrodes, in the mechanical properties throughout the device, and in processing scalability. In 2017 the Faraday Institution, the UK's independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, launched the SOLBAT (solid-state lithium metal anode battery) project, aimed at understanding the fundamental science underpinning the problems of SSBs, and recognising that the paucity of such understanding is the major barrier to progress. The purpose of this Roadmap is to present an overview of the fundamental challenges impeding the development of SSBs, the advances in science and technology necessary to understand the underlying science, and the multidisciplinary approach being taken by SOLBAT researchers in facing these challenges. It is our hope that this Roadmap will guide academia, industry, and funding agencies towards the further development of these batteries in the future

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

We Are Owners Without Pay: Ideological Disconnect Between North and South Over Fairtrade Standards

Mentor: Derek Pardue From the Washington University Undergraduate Research Digest: WUURD, Volume 3, Issue 1, Fall 2007. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Henry Biggs, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Joy Zalis Kiefer, Undergraduate Research Coordinator, Co-editor, and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Kristin Sobotka, Editor

Various Methodologies and the Efficacies thereof for the Release of Kentucky Bluegrass and Rye N-Linked Glycans from their Peptide Backbone

Carbohydrates are the first point of contact in the allergic response pathway, and are thought to heavily regulate the interaction between IgE and mast cells. Several of the groups currently identified to have a role in this process contain N-linked glycans. In this study, various methods for separating N-linked glycans from their peptide backbone were developed to determine which technique released the greatest amount of glycans with the least amount of noise in the resultant mass spectrum. While various mass spectra were obtained, this project focused less on detailing the specifics of the obtained data, but instead sought to determine which method(s) brought about accurate mass spectra (based on previously obtained data) with a high signal-to-noise ratio. Mass spectral data indicates that without proper "pre-separation" techniques, large amounts of high-mass plant material would interfere with analyzing the smaller-mass glycans. Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC), filtration at the micrometer level, salting out, chemical separations, and mechanical separation via glass beads (all of which can be classified as a "plant material separation") were performed to break down larger pollen protein fragments to smaller units. This was followed by moving on to the "proven method," which worked to separate glycans from their peptide backbone. The "plant material separation" methods are those methods which were tested in order to determine the best way to move forward into the "proven method" of release through permethylation of the glycans. Results indicate that mechanical separation with glass beads followed by the proven method yielded results with a significantly higher amount of released glycans, and less noise in a mass spectrum

Extracting identity : universal social policy in post-neoliberal Bolivia

textExaminations of social policy often focus on their economic and social outcomes without much concern for their political dimensions. Since Evo Morales assumed the presidency of Bolivia in 2006, the Andean country has emerged as a powerful example of how social policy can be leveraged for political purposes beyond clientelism. The government's famous nationalization of natural gas resources along with a hefty hydrocarbon tax funded two major social programs: the Bono Juancito Pinto, an education conditional cash transfer, and Renta Dignidad, a universal old-age pension. Evidence from surveys, key informant interviews, reports, and official documents demonstrated that Bolivia's universal social policy was motivated by more than the goal of efficiently addressing the country's chronic social inequality. The Morales administration's implementation of these programs was a conscious decision to leverage windfall resource rents to build greater national solidarity and advance the MAS' political project to refound the country. Through a universalist approach to social policy, the MAS government has consolidated political hegemony, strengthened national solidarity, and secured the support of the armed forces. This political strategy, however, rests on shaky ground. The rentier model the government depends on to fund universal social policy fuels social conflicts that could destabilize the MAS' recently won hegemony and its attempts at nation building. Bolivia's experience with universal cash transfers lays the foundation for future study of social policy and nation building in the developing world; it is also important to examine how funding sources impact the efficacy of these programs. Considering cash transfers' exploding popularity and dissemination across the world in the last decade, this thesis calls for the more nuanced study of these programs in their political dimensions.Latin American Studie

Defining Success for the Refugee Client

The U.S. government provides funding for refugee resettlement on a programmatic basis, compelling social service organizations to provide services in the same way. This approach places limitations on which of the client’s true needs can be met and hinders the client’s integration into society. Ascentria Care Alliance recognizes this problem and wants to find a better way to serve their clients. Consequently, Ascentria asked us to create a tool to track a refugee client’s level of success in integration. We discovered four indicators of success for refugee clients, which directly influenced the tool that we developed for Ascentria. We recommend that Ascentria utilize this tool to collect information and statistics regarding refugee needs and improve Ascentria’s ability to serve its clients