Evaluating Services for Bhutanese Elders at the Champlain Senior Center

Introduction: •Bhutanese refugees have been living in Vermont since 2008. They constitute a vulnerable population due to lack of language skills, increased health care requirements and lack of access to transportation. The Champlain Senior Center (CSC) provides services and a community space for Bhutanese refugee elders (older than 55 years). We aimed to determine the necessity for the CSC in the elders’ wellbeing and to demonstrate that services are crucial to ensure this New American elderly population’s needs are being met.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1209/thumbnail.jp

Everyday Life History of the Soviet Laborer, 1920s-1930s

This thesis provides a comprehensive view of the daily lives of the Soviet Proletariat in the 1920s and 1930s. Both negative and positive outcomes of the policies implemented during this period are discussed regarding the growth and experiences of the working class. The discipline of everyday life history is explored and applied to this socioeconomic group. Work, education, home life, family structure, gender roles, and standard of living are the main subsets of daily life examined in this thesis. The research presented here concludes that the Soviet Communist Party considered itself an urban vanguard creating a proletarian serving state and would maintain this narrative regardless of its contradictory policies. Due to difficult living conditions, the proletariat was an incredibly resourceful and enduring population that valued its culture and traditions

Analysing and modelling train driver performance

Arguments for the importance of contextual factors in understanding human performance have been made extremely persuasive in the context of the process control industries. This paper puts these arguments into the context of the train driving task, drawing on an extensive analysis of driver performance with the Automatic Warning System (AWS). The paper summarises a number of constructs from applied psychological research which are thought to be important in understanding train driver performance. A “Situational Model” is offered as a framework for investigating driver performance. The model emphasises the importance of understanding the state of driver cognition at a specific time (“Now”) in a specific situation and a specific context

Can longitudinal generalized estimating equation models distinguish network influence and homophily? An agent-based modeling approach to measurement characteristics

Abstract Background Connected individuals (or nodes) in a network are more likely to be similar than two randomly selected nodes due to homophily and/or network influence. Distinguishing between these two influences is an important goal in network analysis, and generalized estimating equation (GEE) analyses of longitudinal dyadic network data are an attractive approach. It is not known to what extent such regressions can accurately extract underlying data generating processes. Therefore our primary objective is to determine to what extent, and under what conditions, does the GEE-approach recreate the actual dynamics in an agent-based model. Methods We generated simulated cohorts with pre-specified network characteristics and attachments in both static and dynamic networks, and we varied the presence of homophily and network influence. We then used statistical regression and examined the GEE model performance in each cohort to determine whether the model was able to detect the presence of homophily and network influence. Results In cohorts with both static and dynamic networks, we find that the GEE models have excellent sensitivity and reasonable specificity for determining the presence or absence of network influence, but little ability to distinguish whether or not homophily is present. Conclusions The GEE models are a valuable tool to examine for the presence of network influence in longitudinal data, but are quite limited with respect to homophily.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134740/1/12874_2016_Article_274.pd

How Many Topics? Stability Analysis for Topic Models

Topic modeling refers to the task of discovering the underlying thematic structure in a text corpus, where the output is commonly presented as a report of the top terms appearing in each topic. Despite the diversity of topic modeling algorithms that have been proposed, a common challenge in successfully applying these techniques is the selection of an appropriate number of topics for a given corpus. Choosing too few topics will produce results that are overly broad, while choosing too many will result in the "over-clustering" of a corpus into many small, highly-similar topics. In this paper, we propose a term-centric stability analysis strategy to address this issue, the idea being that a model with an appropriate number of topics will be more robust to perturbations in the data. Using a topic modeling approach based on matrix factorization, evaluations performed on a range of corpora show that this strategy can successfully guide the model selection process.Comment: Improve readability of plots. Add minor clarification

Is it important to position foot in subtalar joint neutral position during non–weight-bearing molding for foot orthoses?

2011-2012 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Comment on “The complex effects of ocean acidification on the prominent N2-fixing cyanobacterium Trichodesmium”

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science 357 (2017): eaao0067, doi:10.1126/science.aao0067.Hong et al. (Reports, 5 May 2017, p. 527) suggested that previous studies of the biogeochemically significant marine cyanobacterium Trichodesmium showing increased growth and nitrogen fixation at projected future high CO2 levels suffered from ammonia or copper toxicity. They reported that these rates instead decrease at high CO2 when contamination is alleviated. We present and discuss results of multiple published studies refuting this toxicity hypothesis