Change Does Not Wait

The changes found in the growth patterns of trees, as they are impacted by their environment, can be seen as reflecting the journey that one progresses through over their own life. This thesis is the result of inner revelations that led the author to create a series of images that depict connections made between the movements found in trees that can be paralleled to the stresses in our own lives brought on by circumstance and experience. Correlations between human experience and nature are illuminated through the discussion of color usage, composition, historical art reference and development of personal artistic techniques

A Literature Review on the Risks and Potentials of Tracking and Monitoring eHealth Technologies in the Context of Occupational Health Management

Employee health is increasingly important, as is the use of eHealth technologies in the private and the organizational context. This paper examines which existing eHealth technologies that support monitoring and tracking of health are applied in occupational health management (OHM) and investigates the advantages and disadvantages of their application. To pursue this intention, we analyze the current state of research with a structured literature review and provide a comprehensive overview of relevant works. The results point out advantages and disadvantages that provide the groundwork to discuss success factors for tracking and monitoring eHealth technologies in OHM. The derived success factors aim at operational, technological, operational/technological aspects of eHealth tracking and monitoring usage. Thereby, favorable outcomes such as an increase in employee health can be achieved, and participation in OHM measures can be increased. However, it can also lead to adverse outcomes such as a reduced work-life balance

How one small step for occupational health management leads to many steps for employees – an experimental field study of incentive designs in a gamified mHealth app

Physical inactivity has become one of the leading health risk factors in today\u27s work environment, and in response, companies show increasing interest in digital health interventions to promote employees\u27 well-being. Tools such as mHealth apps use promising approaches to encourage people to be more physically active, for example, through gamification elements combined with financial incentives. However, there is a lack of research on how these technologies and incentives need to be designed to affect employees\u27 health behaviour positively. Based on prospect theory, this study examines the effect of gamified loss-oriented vs gain-oriented financial incentive systems with identical economic value to promote physical activity of employees. Our experiment\u27s results showed an overall positive effect in increasing employees\u27 physical activity (mean daily step count); more specifically, the advantage of a loss-oriented versus a gain-oriented incentive strategy compared to the control group

Designing antibiotic cycling strategies by determining and understanding local adaptive landscapes

The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria threatens our continued ability to treat infectious diseases. The need for sustainable strategies to cure bacterial infections has never been greater. So far, all attempts to restore susceptibility after resistance has arisen have been unsuccessful, including restrictions on prescribing [1] and antibiotic cycling [2,3]. Part of the problem may be that those efforts have implemented different classes of unrelated antibiotics, and relied on removal of resistance by random loss of resistance genes from bacterial populations (drift). Here, we show that alternating structurally similar antibiotics can restore susceptibility to antibiotics after resistance has evolved. We found that the resistance phenotypes conferred by variant alleles of the resistance gene encoding the TEM {\beta}-lactamase (blaTEM) varied greatly among 15 different {\beta}-lactam antibiotics. We captured those differences by characterizing complete adaptive landscapes for the resistance alleles blaTEM-50 and blaTEM-85, each of which differs from its ancestor blaTEM-1 by four mutations. We identified pathways through those landscapes where selection for increased resistance moved in a repeating cycle among a limited set of alleles as antibiotics were alternated. Our results showed that susceptibility to antibiotics can be sustainably renewed by cycling structurally similar antibiotics. We anticipate that these results may provide a conceptual framework for managing antibiotic resistance. This approach may also guide sustainable cycling of the drugs used to treat malaria and HIV

An ngVLA Wide Area AGN Survey

The next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) will have unprecedented sensitivities and mapping speeds at $1-8$ GHz. We discuss how the active galactic nuclei (AGN) community can benefit from a wide-area, medium depth ngVLA survey. We propose a 10 deg$^2$ survey in the Stripe 82 field using the 8 GHz band with an rms depth of $1\,\mu$Jy beam$^{-1}$. We will detect $\sim$130,000 galaxies, including radio-quiet AGN out to $z\sim7$. We can measure the luminosity and space density evolution of radio-quiet and radio-loud AGN. We can also measure AGN evolution through clustering of both populations using cross-correlation functions. A wide area ngVLA survey will benefit from existing multiwavelength AGN populations, particularly in the Stripe 82 field, as well as new information from next-generation optical and infrared survey instruments such as LSST and WFIRST.Comment: ngVLA Science Use Case to appear in the ngVLA Science Book (http://ngvla.nrao.edu/page/scibook

Using an Alternative Method to Estimate Overcount for Census 2021.

Objectives The project aimed to test an alternative method to estimate the number of duplicate responses  in the 2021 England and Wales Census. The method utilises information from all census records instead of relying on samples. It requires less clerical review  than the original inverse sampling method used for overcount estimation. Approach We used the Splink implementation of Fellegi-Sunter to match the 2021 Census to itself. The resulting linked dataset was filtered to retain only the top scoring record pair for each unique census record, giving a final dataset of around 71.5 million record pairs. These pairs were divided by score into 13 homogeneous buckets. Random samples of 1000 pairs per bucket were clerically reviewed to determine whether each pair was a true duplicate or not. The clerical results were used to assign an estimated probability of being a duplicate to each bucket and hence to every census record within the bucket. Results A dashboard was created which contained percentages of duplicates by region and ‘overcount group’ for the original and alternative methods. This enabled us to view the data side by side and create visualisations to aid analysis. The alternative method had higher average duplicate percentages in overcount groups for communal establishments and was also higher for 9 out of 10 regions in the armed forces overcount group. We found that both the original and alternative methods of overcount estimation followed the same pattern in terms of minimum and maximum duplicate percentages except for those in communal establishments where minimum and maximums were both higher than the original method. Additionally, the minimum was marginally higher for the student and armed forces overcount groups for the alternative method. Conclusion On initial comparison, estimated rates of duplication resulting from the different methods are comparable. We plan to conduct further analysis on the similarities and differences of the two methods, and research whether the new method could be applied to estimate the duplication rate in other large datasets including administrative data

Reliability of the biceps brachii M-wave

BACKGROUND: The peak-to-peak (P-P) amplitude of the maximum M-wave and the area of the negative phase of the curve are important measures that serve as methodological controls in H-reflex studies, motor unit number estimation (MUNE) procedures, and normalization factors for voluntary electromyographic (EMG) activity. These methodologies assume, with little evidence, that M-wave variability is minimal. This study therefore examined the intraclass reliability of these measures for the biceps brachii. METHODS: Twenty-two healthy adults (4 males and 18 females) participated in 5 separate days of electrical stimulation of the musculocutaneous nerve supplying the biceps brachii muscle. A total of 10 stimulations were recorded on each of the 5 test sessions: a total of fifty trials were used for analysis. A two-factor repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) evaluated the stability of the group means across test sessions. The consistency of scores within individuals was determined by calculating the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). The variance ratio (VR) was then used to assess the reproducibility of the shape of the maximum M-wave within individual subjects. RESULTS: The P-P amplitude means ranged from 12.62 ± 4.33 mV to 13.45 ± 4.07 mV across test sessions. The group means were highly stable. ICC analysis also revealed that the scores were very consistent (ICC = 0.98). The group means for the area of the negative phase of the maximum M-wave were also stable (117 to 126 mV·ms). The ICC analysis also indicated a high degree of consistency (ICC = 0.96). The VR for the sample was 0.244 ± 0.169, which suggests that the biceps brachii maximum M-wave shape was in general very reproducible for each subject. CONCLUSION: The results support the use of P-P amplitude of the maximum M-wave as a methodological control in H-reflex studies, and as a normalization factor for voluntary EMG. The area of the negative phase of the maximum M-wave is both stable and consistent, and the shape of the entire waveform is highly reproducible and may be used for MUNE procedures

FINDING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: Copyright Review Management System Toolkit

Working over a span of nearly eight years, the University of Michigan Library received three grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to generously fund CRMS, a cooperative effort by partner research libraries to identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust. In CRMS- US (2008– 11), CRMS reviewed over 170,000 volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library that were published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 (“CRMS- US”). That first project team— which included reviewers from the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and Indiana University— identified nearly 87,000 volumes as being in the public domain, in addition to collecting renewal information and identifying rights holders of works in copyright. In CRMS- World (2011– 14), we built on that accomplishment by reviewing an additional 110,000 US volumes and expanded the scope of the review to include 170,000 English- language volumes published in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia between 1872 and 1944 (“CRMS- World”). This second grant continued through the end of 2014 and included initial development on an interface for works from Spain, a process for quality control, and an expanded suite of materials to allow an expert member of our project team to train and monitor reviewers online. The current CRMS grant (2014– 16) simultaneously made possible continued copyright review of CRMS- World volumes, the development of this toolkit, and planning related to the long- term sustainability of CRMS. We are hopeful that, whatever the near term brings for CRMS as an individual project, the valuable work of identifying public domain works will continue. We are grateful for the support and collaboration of all who have touched this project

Genetic characterization of Theileria equi infecting horses in North America: evidence for a limited source of U.S. introductions

Background: Theileria equi is a tick-borne apicomplexan hemoparasite that causes equine piroplasmosis. This parasite has a worldwide distribution but the United States was considered to be free of this disease until recently. Methods: We used samples from 37 horses to determine genetic relationships among North American T. equi using the 18S rRNA gene and microsatellites. We developed a DNA fingerprinting panel of 18 microsatellite markers using the first complete genome sequence of T. equi. Results: A maximum parsimony analysis of 18S rRNA sequences grouped the samples into two major clades. The first clade (n= 36) revealed a high degree of nucleotide similarity in U.S. T. equi, with just 0–2 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) among samples. The remaining sample fell into a second clade that was genetically divergent (48 SNPs) from the other U.S. samples. This sample was collected at the Texas border, but may have originated in Mexico. We genotyped T. equi from the U.S. using microsatellite markers and found a moderate amount of genetic diversity (2–8 alleles per locus). The field samples were mostly from a 2009 Texas outbreak (n= 22) although samples from five other states were also included in this study. Using Weir and Cockerham’s FST estimator (θ) we found strong population differentiation of the Texas and Georgia subpopulations (θ= 0.414), which was supported by a neighbor-joining tree created with predominant single haplotypes. Single-clone infections were found in 27 of the 37 samples (73%), allowing us to identify 15 unique genotypes. Conclusions: The placement of most T. equi into one monophyletic clade by 18S is suggestive of a limited source of introduction into the U.S. When applied to a broader cross section of worldwide samples, these molecular tools should improve source tracking of T. equi outbreaks and may help prevent the spread of this tick-borne parasite