Barriers to reconstructive surgical care among surgical humanitarian aid recipients in Cartagena, Colombia

Medical Schoolhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148186/1/petersonj.pd

Sharing the Lord’s Supper: Finding Fellowship and Love in a Sacramental, Communal Meal

This thesis project identifies the biblical practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper weekly in conjunction with a communal meal. At this project’s Ministry Context, Garden City Bible Fellowship, there is a lack of fellowship and love. This project investigates whether the implementation of the Lord’s Supper and a communal meal on a weekly basis will build fellowship and love in a biblical way. After being approved by the leadership of this church, the topic will be introduced to the congregation via a sermon on the subject, culminating in a question and answer session for anyone who has questions before participating. Research will begin by participants voluntarily and anonymously completing an introductory survey, which will reveal their current views on the Lord’s Supper and the love feast. These participants will then voluntarily participate in the Lord’s Supper and the communal meal weekly for the next five weeks. Subsequently, those who have participated in three or more communal meals will complete the conclusory survey, which will be compared with the introductory survey to discover themes or slippages

Expansion of perturbation theory applied to shim rotation automation of the Advanced Test Reactor

textIn 2007, the Department of Energy (DOE) declared the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) a National Scientific User Facility (NSUF). This declaration expanded the focus of the ATR to include diversified classes of academic and industrial experiments. An essential part of the new suite of more accurate and flexible codes being deployed to support the NSUF is their ability to predict reactor behavior at startup, particularly the position of the outer shim control cylinders (OSCC). The current method used for calculating the OSCC positions during a cycle startup utilizes a heuristic trial and error approach that is impractical with the computationally intensive reactor physics tools, such as NEWT. It is therefore desirable that shim rotation prediction for startup be automated. Shim rotation prediction with perturbation theory was chosen to be investigated as one method for use with startup calculation automation. A modified form of first order perturbation theory, called phase space interpolated perturbation theory, was developed to more accurately model shim rotation prediction. Shim rotation prediction is just one application for this new modified form of perturbation theory. Phase space interpolated perturbation theory can be used on any application where the range of change to the system is known a priori, but the magnitude of change is not known. A cubic regression method was also developed to automate shim rotation prediction by using only forward solutions to the transport equation.Mechanical Engineerin

A Complete Characterization of Nash Solutions in Ordinal Games

The traditional field of cardinal game theory requires that the objective functions, which map the control variables of each player into a decision space on the real numbers, be well defined. Often in economics, business, and political science, these objective functions are difficult, if not impossible to formulate mathematically. The theory of ordinal games has been described, in part, to overcome this problem.Ordinal games define the decision space in terms of player preferences, rather than objective function values. This concept allows the techniques of cardinal game theory to be applied to ordinal games. Not surprisingly, an infinite number of cardinal games of a given size exist. However, only a finite number of corresponding ordinal games exist.This thesis seeks to explore and characterize this finite number of ordinal games. We first present a general formula for the number of two-player ordinal games of an arbitrary size. We then completely characterize each 2x2 and 3x3 ordinal game based on its relationship to the Nash solution. This categorization partitions the finite space of ordinal games into three sectors, those games with a single unique Nash solution, those games with multiple non-unique Nash solutions, and those games with no Nash solution. This characterization approach, however, is not scalable to games larger than 3x3 due to the exponentially increasing dimensionality of the search space. The results for both 2x2 and 3x3 ordinal games are then codified in an algorithm capable of characterizing ordinal games of arbitrary size. The output of this algorithm, implemented on a PC, is presented for games as large as 6x6. For larger games, a more powerful computer is needed. Finally, two applications of this characterization are presented to illustrate the usefulness of our approach