Implementing Change at 68th District Court: A Participant Observation Case Study

Implementation is an ignored area of research in Public Administration. Most Public Administrators are involved in implementing policy developed by the Legislature, the Governor, the Congress, the Mayor, the Board of Managers or the Board of Directors of a non-profit agency or an institution. As "implementers", they operate within organizations which possess certain characteristics and develop according to various principles. Perhaps the most difficult task administrators face is that of implementing change in organizations. The topic of this research, then, is to examine classical principles of organizations/organizational change which apply to the 68th District Court, City of Flint. The objective will be to develop a list of what the 68th District Court needs both short and long-term and a plan of action for meeting those needs.Master of Public AdministrationPublic AdministrationUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143449/1/HughesJ.pd

Fracture and Back Stress Along the Byrd Glacier Flowband on the Ross Ice Shelf

East Antarctic ice discharged by Byrd Glacier continues as a flowband to the calving front of the Ross Ice Shelf. Flow across the grounding line changes from compressive to extensive as it leaves the fjord through the Transantarctic Mountains occupied by Byrd Glacier. Magnitudes of the longitudinal compressive stress that suppress opening of transverse tensile cracks are calculated for the flowband. As compressive back stresses diminish, initial depths and subsequent growth of these cracks, and their spacing, are calculated using theories of elastic and ductile fracture mechanics. Cracks are initially about one millimeter wide, with approximately 30 in depths and 20 in spacings for a back stress of 83 kPa at a distance of 50 kin beyond the fjord, where floating ice is 600 in thick. When these crevasses penetrate the whole ice thickness, they release tabular icebergs 20 kin to 100 kin wide, spaced parallel to the calving front of the Ross Ice Shel

Basal Melting Along the Floating Part of Byrd Glacier

A mass balance calculation was made for the floating part of Byrd Glacier, using 1978-79 ice elevation and velocity data, over the 45 km of Byrd Glacier from its grounding line to where it leaves its fjord and merges with the Ross Ice Shelf. Smoothed basal melting rates were relatively uniform over this distance and averaged 12 +/- 2 m yr(-1)

Nonparametric and Semiparametric Analysis of Current Status Data Subject to Outcome Misclassification

In this article, we present nonparametric and semiparametric methods to analyze current status data subject to outcome misclassification. Our methods use nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation (NPMLE) to estimate the distribution function of the failure time when sensitivity and specificity may vary among subgroups. A nonparametric test is proposed for the two sample hypothesis testing. In regression analysis, we apply the Cox proportional hazard model and likelihood ratio based confidence intervals for the regression coefficients are proposed. Our methods are motivated and demonstrated by data collected from an infectious disease study in Seattle, WA

Relating Crevassing to Non-Linear Strain in the Floating Part of Jakobshavn Isbrae, West Greenland

Jakobshavn Isbrae is a major ice stream that drains the west-central Greenland ice sheet and becomes afloat in Jakobshavn Isfiord (69degreesN, 49degreesW), where it has maintained the world\u27s fastest-known sustained velocity and calving rate (7 km a(-1)) for at least four decades. The floating portion is approximately 12 km long and 6 km wide. Surface elevations and motion vectors were determined photogrammetrically for about 500 crevasses on the floating ice, and adjacent grounded ice, using aerial photographs obtained 2 weeks apart in July 1985. Surface strain rates were computed from a mesh of 399 quadrilateral elements having velocity measurements at each corner. It is shown that heavy crevassing of floating ice invalidates the assumptions of linear strain theory that (i) surface strain in the floating ice is homogeneous in both space and time, (ii) the squares and products of strain components are nil, and (iii) first- and second-order rotation components are small compared to strain components. Therefore, strain rates and rotation rates were also computed using non-linear strain theory. The percentage difference between computed linear and non-linear second invariants of strain rate per element were greatest (mostly in the range 40-70%) where crevassing is greatest. Isopleths of strain rate parallel and transverse to flow and elevation isopleths relate crevassing to known and inferred pinning points

Evidence for a Frozen Bed, Byrd Glacier, Antarctica

Ice thickness, computed within the fjord region of Byrd Glacier on the assumptions that Byrd Glacier is in mass-balance equilibrium and that ice velocity is entirely due to basal sliding, are on average 400 m less than measured ice thicknesses along a radio-echo profile. We consider four explanations for these differences: (1) active glacier ice is separated from a zone of stagnant ice near the base of the glacier by a shear zone at depth; (2) basal melting rates are some 8 m/yr; (3) internal shear occurs with no basal sliding in much of the region above the grounding zone; or (4) internal creep and basal sliding contribute to the flow velocity in varying proportions above the grounding zone. Large gradients of surface strain rate seem to invalidate the first explanation. Computed values of basal shear stress (140 to 200 kPa) provide insufficient frictional heat to melt the ice demanded by the second explanation. Both the third and fourth explanations were examined by making simplifying assumptions that prevented a truly quantitative evaluation of their merit. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the qualitative conclusion that internal shear contributes strongly to surface velocities measured on Byrd Glacier, as is postulated in both these explanations

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation in Traumatic Injury: An Overview of Utility and Indications

Severe respiratory failure may develop in the trauma patient as a consequence of direct lung injury, in response to trauma‐associated systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), as a result of infection, or at times as an unintended consequence of the life‐saving management of the acute traumatic injury. Approximately 0.5% of all adult trauma patients develop some form of pulmonary dysfunction along the acute lung injury (ALI) – acute respiratory distress (ARDS) spectrum, with the incidence of severe respiratory failure reaching 10–20% in multisystem trauma victims. Of concern, mortality in patients with acute respiratory failure who go on to develop severe pulmonary dysfunction can be as high as 37–50% with the use of conventional therapeutic modalities. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) has been proposed as a rescue strategy when less invasive primary or adjunctive attempts fail. Numerous case reports and single‐center studies demonstrate potential benefits of early implementation of veno‐venous (VV)‐ECMO for the treatment of severe respiratory failure associated with trauma or sequelae of trauma. In this clinical context, VV‐ECMO can be employed to correct for both ventilatory and oxygenation failure while allowing the treating physician to provide much needed rest to the patient\u27s lungs and permit healing to take place. The use of ECMO (mainly veno‐venous, with limited use of veno‐arterial circuits for cardiac indications) has been described in patients with severe chest injuries, traumatic pneumonectomy, bronchopleural fistulas, and various forms of respiratory failure refractory to conventional therapies

Robust Inference for the Stepped Wedge Design

Based on a permutation argument, we derive a closed form expression for an estimate of the treatment effect, along with its standard error, in a stepped wedge design. We show that these estimates are robust to misspecification of both the mean and covariance structure of the underlying data-generating mechanism, thereby providing a robust approach to inference for the treatment effect in stepped wedge designs. We use simulations to evaluate the type I error and power of the proposed estimate and to compare the performance of the proposed estimate to the optimal estimate when the correct model specification is known. The limitations, possible extensions, and open problems regarding the method are discussed

Scaling in Plasticity-Induced Cell-Boundary Microstructure: Fragmentation and Rotational Diffusion

We develop a simple computational model for cell boundary evolution in plastic deformation. We study the cell boundary size distribution and cell boundary misorientation distribution that experimentally have been found to have scaling forms that are largely material independent. The cell division acts as a source term in the misorientation distribution which significantly alters the scaling form, giving it a linear slope at small misorientation angles as observed in the experiments. We compare the results of our simulation to two closely related exactly solvable models which exhibit scaling behavior at late times: (i) fragmentation theory and (ii) a random walk in rotation space with a source term. We find that the scaling exponents in our simulation agree with those of the theories, and that the scaling collapses obey the same equations, but that the shape of the scaling functions depend upon the methods used to measure sizes and to weight averages and histograms