The Challenges and Limitations of Conducting Research Among the Old Order Amish

The Old Order or horse and buggy Amish have been a part of American society for more than two centuries. Today, some 95,000 Amish persons reside in over twenty states, a Canadian province, and two countries in Latin America. Although variations exist in the social values and behavioral practices within different Amish communities (or church districts), they have basically resisted the acculturation process that would reinforce and promote a standard of living and lifestyle embraced by most of the non-Amish in the U.S

Raising automotive fuel efficiency

The Obama administration recently moved up the schedule for achieving the fuel efficiency standards set forth by Congress in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. The deadline for meeting these standards is now vehicle model year 2016 instead of 2020.Fuel ; Energy industries

Metal etching composition

The present invention is directed to a chemical etching composition for etching metals or metallic alloys. The composition includes a solution of hydrochloric acid, phosphoric acid, ethylene glycol, and an oxidizing agent. The etching composition is particularly useful for etching metal surfaces in preparation for subsequent fluorescent penetrant inspection

A New Vision of Education: On the Nature of Poetic Knowledge and Form

One of the dangers of life is to go about something in the same way for so long that when there is a problem it is hard to conceive of a different way

Encouraging Student Wellness: An Expanded Role for Counselor Educators

Graduate school can present as a time of both self-fulfillment and stress for students; students who lack psychosocial resources and must fulfill other life roles (e.g. employee, spouse, caregiver) during graduate school can experience significant stress levels that can interfere with their academic and personal life. However, students can make healthy choices about how to live, and over time, these choices can develop into a wellness lifestyle. The Wellness Cube Model (WCM) serves as an academic intervention with the purposes to: (a) infuse wellness content and experiences into a counseling program, (b) expose students to wellness, and (c) help both struggling and non-struggling students make positive choices that benefit their professional and personal lives

The Ethics Of Character: The Teacher As Moral Agent

What is needed is an overhaul of the educational system with a new model that is both reflective and integrated

Numerical Investigation of Cryopreserved Zebrafish Sperm Cell Activation in Microchannels

This aim of this research project is to probe the activation process of zebrafish spermatozoa. Zebrafish are a model species for biological engineering applications, and the cryopreservation of their reproductive cells allows for inexpensive cataloging and maintenance of valuable biological material. Evaluation of cryopreservation protocols for aquatic sperm cells is typically accomplished by motility analysis after subjecting cells to a cryopreservation treatment. In zebrafish sperm cells, motility is initiated when cells come into contact with a hypo-osmotic environment. Subsequent activation analysis is currently done manually and brings with it an inherent difficulty and error. This process is slow and not ideal for high-throughput sample processing and analysis. As such, there is a critical need for an influx of enabling technologies to improve the throughput and optimization of these procedures. Microfluidics offers an intriguing solution to this problem. These devices, the size of a single 1-inch by 3-inch glass slide, offer automated, high-throughput, highly reproducible results. Additionally they utilize small sample volumes, which is important in minimizing valuable sample loss. Cells can be input into a micromixer which can rapidly dilute the extracellular environment, and then sent to an analysis chamber that acn determine the efficacy of a cryopreservation treatment. Despite its popularity in other fields, computational modeling of sperm cell activation has been nearly non-existent in literature. In this work, we model both the macroscopic aspects of particulate flow in a microchannel, and the microscopic mass transport across the cellular membrane. By tracking cells as they move throughout a simulated microdevice, we can find a history for each particle and predict cell outcomes. We are the first to introduce this combinatory model to the problem of cryoprotectant loading, where numerical modeling has well-established presence, and to the problem of zebrafish sperm cell activation. I envision the combination of microfluidics, with their controllable and reproducible flow patterns, and computational methods capturing both macro- and micro-transport, as two examples of the very enabling technologies that cryopreservation needs. While we apply these methods primarily to sperm cell analysis, the framework can be widely applied to a variety of cells and tissues

The concept of the object relation in the writings of Gotthard Booth, M.D.: An example of an emerging paradigm in medicine

The writings of Gotthard Booth, M.D., especially his concept of object relation, demonstrate a change in medical thought away from a mechanistic to a holistic conception of man. His concept of the object relation and the diagnostic rationale that he developed from it reveal changes in medical conceptualization that are consistent with those changes in conceptualization across a variety of disciplines that have been identified as part of an emerging paradigm