Improving Pedagogy Through The Use Of Dynamic Excel Presentations In Financial Management Courses

This paper discusses and illustrates the use of dynamic Excel presentations to improve learning in Financial Management courses.  Through the use of such presentations, multiple and varied examples of important principles in Financial Management, which would ordinarily take an excessive amount of time to cover, can be considered within the time span of a single class.  Two applications of these techniques are presented in this paper: (1) Time Value of Money -- Classic Retirement Annuity analysis and (2) Capital Structure Decisions -- EBIT-EPS Analysis.  By using these Excel techniques to cover multiple examples under different initial conditions and assumptions, the authors contend that students gain a broader understanding of these financial problems and their solutions, than would otherwise be possible

First Data On Aquaculture of the Tripletail, \u3ci\u3eLobotes surinamensis\u3c/i\u3e, a Promising Candidate Species For U.S. Marine Aquaculture

The Tripletail, Lobotes surinamensis, is a warm-water pelagic fish that is increasingly targeted by U.S. anglers. The superior quality of Tripletail flesh coupled with the lack of domestic commercial fisheries stimulated interests to develop aquaculture of this species. In this work, photo-thermal conditioning of captive-held broodstocks promoted maturation in females, but spontaneous spawning was not observed. GnRHa slow-release implants induced ovulation in late vitellogenic females but fertility remained below 10% when GnRHa was administered alone. However, spawns with high fertility (up to 85%) were obtained when a dopamine antagonist was administered in conjunction with GnRHa implants indicating dopamine inhibition impaired final gamete maturation, in particular sperm production in males, in aquaculture conditions. Tripletail larvae successfully initiated exogenous feeding on enriched rotifers followed by Artemia nauplii and were weaned to prepared feeds at 25 days post hatch, yet with low survival through the late phases of larval culture. Pilot grow-out trials at low density in recirculating systems revealed impressive growth rates averaging over 170 g/month through a market size above 1 kg. While protocols for hatchery culture and grow-out still need to be optimized, current data suggest that Tripletail could become a successful species for U.S. marine aquaculture

The pitfalls of electronic health orders: Development of an enhanced institutional protocol after a preventable patient death

BACKGROUND: Continuous bladder irrigation (CBI) is a long-standing treatment used in the setting of gross hematuria and other acute bladder issues. Its use has traditionally been reserved for patients under direct urologic care, but with the constraints of modern large-hospital healthcare, many patients have CBI administered by providers unfamiliar with its use and potential complications. FINDINGS: There were 136 CBI orders placed in 2013 by non-urologic providers. The biggest hazard found in our analysis was the requirement for entering a rate of irrigation administration. Nurses with no experience with CBI viewed this order as an indication to administer via an infusion pump, which can easily exceed the mechanical integrity of the bladder and increase the risk of bladder perforation. Our panel also found that due to lack of experience by nurses and non-urologic providers, that signs and symptoms of CBI dysfunction were not common knowledge. Also we found that non-urologic providers were unfamiliar with administration and dosing of medications for CBI patients to help with the intrinsic discomfort with CBI administration. CONCLUSIONS: In our revised order set we found that removing the requirement for an infusion rate, along with placing warnings in the CPOE, helped staff better understand this possible complication. We created a best practice alert in our CPOE to strongly recommend the urology service be consulted. Communication text boxes were added to the order set to help staff be aware of the signs and symptoms of CBI dysfunction, along with a guide for trouble shooting

Organizations and Citizens Building Back Better? Climate Resilience, Social Justice & COVID-19 Recovery in Preston, UK

The impacts of COVID-19 on cities across the United Kingdom were significant and diverse, whilst ongoing climate-related, sustainability and social challenges were highlighted and sometimes amplified. Lessons from organizational and citizen experiences and their responses have the potential to improve local sustainability and resilience to global events, hence they must be examined. We report findings from a project conducted in Preston (UK) exploring how COVID-19 recovery might accelerate organization- and citizen-led action for the wellbeing of people, places and planet. The project used a settings approach to public health and combined qualitative research with conceptual development; the former involved online interviews and group dialogues with members of several local anchor institutions, whilst the latter examined synergy between community wealth building, Doughnut Economics and place-based climate action. We explore two themes 19 anchor institutions’ strategic priorities and plans; ‘building back better’ and its future sustainability implications. These revealed four cross-cutting aspects – wellbeing; tackling societal inequalities; collaborative working; and COVID-19 as a catalyst for transformative change. Informed by ‘Doughnut-Shaped Community Wealth Building’, organizations are encouraged to: embed commitment to equitable and inclusive climate action; consolidate the co-operative approach developed during the pandemic at strategic, operational and grassroots levels; take a nuanced approach to future work policies and practices; and work across anchor institutions to advocate collectively for supportive national-level policy to build a sustainable, wellbeing economy

The LONI QC System: A Semi-Automated, Web-Based and Freely-Available Environment for the Comprehensive Quality Control of Neuroimaging Data.

Quantifying, controlling, and monitoring image quality is an essential prerequisite for ensuring the validity and reproducibility of many types of neuroimaging data analyses. Implementation of quality control (QC) procedures is the key to ensuring that neuroimaging data are of high-quality and their validity in the subsequent analyses. We introduce the QC system of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI): a web-based system featuring a workflow for the assessment of various modality and contrast brain imaging data. The design allows users to anonymously upload imaging data to the LONI-QC system. It then computes an exhaustive set of QC metrics which aids users to perform a standardized QC by generating a range of scalar and vector statistics. These procedures are performed in parallel using a large compute cluster. Finally, the system offers an automated QC procedure for structural MRI, which can flag each QC metric as being 'good' or 'bad.' Validation using various sets of data acquired from a single scanner and from multiple sites demonstrated the reproducibility of our QC metrics, and the sensitivity and specificity of the proposed Auto QC to 'bad' quality images in comparison to visual inspection. To the best of our knowledge, LONI-QC is the first online QC system that uniquely supports the variety of functionality where we compute numerous QC metrics and perform visual/automated image QC of multi-contrast and multi-modal brain imaging data. The LONI-QC system has been used to assess the quality of large neuroimaging datasets acquired as part of various multi-site studies such as the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) Study and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). LONI-QC's functionality is freely available to users worldwide and its adoption by imaging researchers is likely to contribute substantially to upholding high standards of brain image data quality and to implementing these standards across the neuroimaging community

Climate Resilience, Social Justice and COVID-19 Recovery in Preston

This document reports on the ‘Climate Resilience, Social Justice & COVID-19 Recovery in Preston’ project. Funded by the Place-Based Climate Action Network (PCAN) with additional support from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)’s Institute of Citizenship, Society & Change and Centre for Sustainable Transitions, this comprised a rapid literature review (supported by a webinar and workshop) and a qualitative research project. The project sought to explore how recovery from COVID-19 could create innovative opportunities for climate action and social justice, translating into practice the rhetoric of ‘build back better’ and serving as a springboard to accelerate action for a future that respects and prioritises the wellbeing of people, places and the planet

Topological Data Analysis for Discovery in Preclinical Spinal Cord Injury and Traumatic Brain Injury

Data-driven discovery in complex neurological disorders has potential to extract meaningful syndromic knowledge from large, heterogeneous data sets to enhance potential for precision medicine. Here we describe the application of topological data analysis (TDA) for data-driven discovery in preclinical traumatic brain injury (TBI) and spinal cord injury (SCI) data sets mined from the Visualized Syndromic Information and Outcomes for Neurotrauma-SCI (VISION-SCI) repository. Through direct visualization of inter-related histopathological, functional and health outcomes, TDA detected novel patterns across the syndromic network, uncovering interactions between SCI and co-occurring TBI, as well as detrimental drug effects in unpublished multicentre preclinical drug trial data in SCI. TDA also revealed that perioperative hypertension predicted long-term recovery better than any tested drug after thoracic SCI in rats. TDA-based data-driven discovery has great potential application for decision-support for basic research and clinical problems such as outcome assessment, neurocritical care, treatment planning and rapid, precision-diagnosis