Physiological strain of firefighters exposed to a live firefighting exercise

Department Head: Richard Gay Israel.2009 Spring.Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-80).The physiological demands of occupations such as live urban or wildland firefighting are an important determinant of occupational safety, and can inform decisions about employee recruitment, screening, and training. To this end, the present study describes the physiological strain which attends live burn exercises in an urban firefighter academy. Fourteen firefighters from the Northern Colorado Fire Consortium Fire Academy participated in this investigation. The firefighter cadets’ clinical characteristics were as follows (mean ± SD): age 28.8 ± 5.7 years; height 1.8 ± 0.1 m; mass 83.8 ± 12.9 kg; body mass index (BMI) 26.3 ± 3.0; maximal aerobic capacity 45.0 ± 4.4 ml/kg/min, 3.77 ± 0.6 L/min. Participants were studied during two live burn sessions separated by four days. The mean (± SD) duration of fire exposures was 9.6 ± 1.5 and 9.32 ± 2.6 minutes for day one and two, respectively. The pre-burn heart rates were 92.7 ± 18.0 bpm and 96.4 ± 13.8 bpm in days one and two, respectively. The mean pre-burn blood pressures were 117/68 ± 18.7/9.1 and 122/76 ± 11.0/8.9, respectively. The mean pre-burn blood lactate was 3.3 ± 1.9 mmol/L on day one and 2.7 ± 1.0 mmol/L on day two

PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTORS AFFECTING THE BACTERICIDAL ACTIVITY OF THE WESTERN FENCE LIZARD (SCELOPORUS OCCIDENTALIS) FOR THE LYME DISEASE SPIROCHETE, BORRELIA BURGDORFERI

The Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) is a major host of juvenile stages of the Western Black-legged Tick (Ixodes pacificus), which is the vector for the Lyme disease causative spirochete bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi in the western United States. Because S. occidentalis is reservoir incompetent and capable of eliminating spirochetes from infected ticks, it has been implicated as a major factor in the ecology of Lyme disease in the West. Although complement proteins in lizard blood have been established as the borreliacidal factor, no studies have examined intraspecific variability in host lizard borreliacidal capacity. In Chapter 1 of this thesis, we introduce the complexity of the Borrelia burgdorferi transmission cycle and it’s implications for transmission risk. In Chapter 2 we tested the hypothesis that host lizard physiological condition impacts their borreliacidal capacity. Blood plasma of lizards in varying physiological conditions was challenged against cultured B. burgdorferi, and the complement-mediated inactivation of spirochetes was quantified. Adult lizards had higher bactericidal activity than first-year juveniles, suggesting that complement-mediated inactivation develops with maturity and/or exposure to spirochete antigens. Also, bactericidal activity was positively associated with lizard tick load and body condition. Adult lizard sex did not significantly affect spirochete mortality. Lizards from an inland site with little exposure to ticks had higher bactericidal activity than lizards from a coastal population that is heavily parasitized by ticks

Status of northern mountain caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Yukon, Canada

Caribou (Rangifer tarandus) are an important ecological, cultural and economic resource in Yukon, Canada. Three caribou ecotypes occur within Yukon: Grant’s (R. t. granti), northern mountain (R. t. caribou), and boreal (R. t. caribou). Northern mountain caribou are classified as a species of special concern under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, and a national management plan for northern mountain caribou was recently completed. Twenty-six northern mountain caribou herds occur at least partially within Yukon, representing approximately 30,000 – 35,000 animals. Active monitoring of Yukon’s northern mountain caribou began in earnest in the early 1980s. To date, over 200 fall composition surveys have been carried out, over 1000 animals have been fitted with radio-collars, and nearly 40 formal population estimates have been completed. Disease and contaminant monitoring of these caribou has indicated relatively low disease prevalence and contaminant loading. Northern mountain caribou are harvested in Yukon, with an average of 230 caribou harvested per year by licensed hunters (1995 – 2012) and an unknown number by First Nation hunters. Future challenges related to caribou management and conservation in Yukon include increasing levels of industrial development primarily through mineral exploration and development, ensuring harvest of these herds is conducted sustainably given the absence of total harvest information, inter-jurisdictional management of shared herds, existing uncertainty surrounding herd distribution and delineation, and dealing with vehicle-related mortality of caribou for certain herds. Overall, the population status (i.e., trend) of eight herds is known, with two increasing, two decreasing, and four stable

Perceptual and ventilatory responses to hypercapnia in athletes and sedentary individuals

Purpose: Hypercapnic chemosensitivity traditionally captures the ventilatory response to elevated pressures of carbon dioxide in the blood. However, hypercapnia also contributes to subjective breathing perceptions, and previously we demonstrated a closer matching of perception to changes in ventilation in athletes compared to controls. Here we investigated any potential underlying hypercapnic chemosensitivity differences between groups, and explored whether these measures relate to ventilatory and perceptual responses during exercise as well as trait levels of affect. Methods: A hypercapnic challenge, incremental maximal exercise test and affective questionnaires were completed by 20 endurance athletes and 20 age-/sex-matched sedentary controls. The hypercapnic challenge involved elevating end-tidal PCO2 by 0.8% (6.1 mmHg) and 1.5% (11.2 mmHg) for 3 min each (randomised), with constant end-tidal oxygen. Ventilatory and perceptual responses to hypercapnia were compared between groups, and within each group the relationships between hypercapnic chemosensitivity (slope analyses) and exercising ventilation and perceptions were calculated using Spearman’s non-parametric correlations. Results: While absolute ventilation differences during hypercapnia and exercise were observed, no group differences were found across hypercapnic chemosensitivity (slope) measures. Correlation analyses revealed the anxiety hypercapnic response was related to maximal exercise anxiety, but only in sedentary individuals. Conclusion: Ventilatory and perceptual hypercapnic chemosensitivity do not differ between athletes and sedentary individuals. However, ventilatory and anxiety hypercapnic chemosensitivities were related to ventilatory and anxiety responses during exercise in untrained individuals only. Athletes may employ additional strategies during exercise to reduce the influence of chemosensitivity on ventilatory and perceptual responses

A Systematic Way of Ordering Hyaluronic Acid for Knee Injections in the Primary Care Setting

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common forms of arthritis affecting a significant population worldwide potentially leading to long term disability. Osteoarthritic joints contain synovial fluid that has become less concentrated and viscous over time which often leads to less absorption and protection. Synovial fluid also contains Hyaluronic Acid (HA), although the mechanism is unclear this seems to inhibit inflammation, decrease cartilage degradation, and promote cartilage development. It has been proposed that HA injections help preserve OA joints and act as an acceptable alternative treatment option to corticosteroid injections, NSAIDs, or opioids. Project Purpose: Hyaluronic Acid (HA) Injections have been identified as a valuable treatment option to help patients with mild to moderate osteoarthritis (OA); however, the ability to order and perform these injections at our family medicine clinic faces constraints due to cost/storage and staff and resident training requirements. Due to the limited amount of injections performed annually, ordering the medication in bulk is not a viable option due to risk of waste and unavailable storage space. Formulating a standardized protocol for performing the HA injections and providing additional training to staff and residents was required. Patient acceptance of this treatment is also a challenge, seeing that less invasive options such as NSAIDs or opioid medications are sometimes preferred to control pain. After systems were in place to order the medication, it was hypothesized that self-reported pain and symptoms would improve after receiving HA injections. Methods: A pre-ordering system was implemented to obtain injections at a lower cost, avoid issues with storage, and prevent waste. Patient selection was determined through both physical examinations and surveys. Candidates who qualify must also receive insurance approval before the medication orders can be submitted. The timing of the treatment must be coordinated between the staff and patient, concurrent with when the medication orders are submitted. Staff and resident experience levels with HA injections were assessed throughout the study using surveys. To address knowledge gaps in applying and using HA injections, a lecture on treatment options for OA highlighting HA injection as well as a wet lab were provided to residents. The lecture and other training information has been uploaded to online filing service for future reference. Furthermore, codes for the medication and procedure were posted on the whiteboard in our resident office for convenience and easy-access. After patients were identified, the KOOS questionnaire was administered prior to and after receiving HA injection as a measure to assess effectiveness of HA injections. Results and Conclusions: Five patients received HA injections. Four of these patients completed both pre and post injection KOOS questionnaire. The mean KOOS questionnaire score prior to injection was 79.25 with a standard deviation of 17.69 compared to a mean after injection of 42.00 with a standard deviation of 19.43. The p value was 0.0697. Future goals will be to expand the number of patients in the study and continue to follow KOOS questionnaire to evaluate the effectiveness of HA injections. Associated with this goal will be to continue to educate residents on the indications and benefits of HA injections.https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/merf2019qi/1005/thumbnail.jp

Applying Natural Language Processing Tools to a Student Academic Writing Corpus: How Large are Disciplinary Differences Across Science and Engineering Fields?

• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professional disciplinary writing (e.g., Ewer & Latorre, 1969; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Tse, 2007) for decades. Recently, research has taken important steps towards understanding disciplinary variation in student writing. Much of this research is corpus-based and focuses on lexico-grammatical features in student writing as captured in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The present study extends this work by analyzing lexical and cohesion differences among disciplines in MICUSP. Critically, we analyze not only linguistic differences in macro-disciplines (science and engineering), but also in micro-disciplines within these macro-disciplines (biology, physics, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering). • Literature Review: Hardy and Römer (2013) used a multidimensional analysis to investigate linguistic differences across four macro-disciplines represented in MICUSP. Durrant (2014, in press) analyzed vocabulary in texts produced by student writers in the BAWE corpus by discipline and level (year) and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles. Ward (2007) examined lexical differences within micro-disciplines of a single discipline. • Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows: 1. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between science and engineering student writing? 2. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between micro-disciplines within science and engineering student writing? • Research Methodology: To address the research questions, student-produced science and engineering texts from MICUSP were analyzed with regard to lexical sophistication and textual features of cohesion. Specifically, 22 indices of lexical sophistication calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES; Kyle & Crossley, 2015) and 38 cohesion indices calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO; Crossley, Kyle, & McNamara, 2016) were used. These features were then compared both across science and engineering texts (addressing Research Question 1) and across micro-disciplines within science and engineering (biology and physics, industrial and mechanical engineering) using discriminate function analyses (DFA). • Results: The DFAs revealed significant linguistic differences, not only between student writing in the two macro-disciplines but also between the micro-disciplines. Differences in classification accuracy based on students’ years of study hovered at about 10%. An analysis of accuracies of classification by paper type found they were similar for larger and smaller sample sizes, providing some indication that paper type was not a confounding variable in classification accuracy. • Discussion: The findings provide strong support that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences exist in student writing in these MICUSP samples and that these differences are likely not related to student level or paper type. These findings have important implications for understanding disciplinary differences. First, they confirm previous research that found the vocabulary used by different macro-disciplines to be “strikingly diverse” (Durrant, 2015), but they also show a remarkable diversity of cohesion features. The findings suggest that the common understanding of the STEM disciplines as “close” bears reconsideration in linguistic terms. Second, the lexical and cohesion differences between micro-disciplines are large enough and consistent enough to suggest that each micro-discipline can be thought of as containing a unique linguistic profile of features. Third, the differences discerned in the NLP analysis are evident at least as early as the final year of undergraduate study, suggesting that students at this level already have a solid understanding of the conventions of the disciplines of which they are aspiring to be members. Moreover, the differences are relatively homogeneous across levels, which confirms findings by Durrant (2015) but, importantly, extends these findings to include cohesion markers. • Conclusions: The findings from this study provide evidence that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences at the linguistic level exist in student writing, not only in lexical use but also in text cohesion. A number of pedagogical applications of writing analytics are proposed based on the reported findings from TAALES and TAACO. Further studies using different corpora (e.g., BAWE) or purpose assembled corpora are suggested to address limitations in the size and range of text types found within MICUSP. This study also points the way toward studies of disciplinary differences using NLP approaches that capture data which goes beyond the lexical and cohesive features of text, including the use of part-of-speech tags, syntactic parsing, indices related to syntactic complexity and similarity, rhetorical features, or more advanced cohesion metrics (latent semantic analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, Word2Vec approaches)

Automatic Water Pump Controller

In countries including Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, a city water authority supplies the clean water and pumps it into large ground-level storage tanks. A resident’s water pump then pumps the water to a water tank on top of his/her house. When the water level in the ground-level storage tank becomes too low, the pump siphons air and shuts down, requiring a resident to manually prime the water pump to get it running again. Residents struggle to monitor the water level of the tanks effectively and keep the pump running properly. To remedy the issue, the Automatic Water Pump Controller (AWPC) system monitors the water levels and controls the pump as necessary to prevent breakdown and maximize water storage without overfilling the rooftop tank and wasting water

3R- Reach, Recruit, Reform: Working with the Grand Rapids Community to Meet the Volunteer Needs of the Heartside Gleaning Initiative

The purpose of this project is to address the volunteer needs of the Heartside Gleaning Initiative, a nonprofit organization founded by Grand Valley State University professor Lisa Sisson. The mission of the Heartside Gleaning Initiative is to “empower the Heartside community to become healthier through nutrition education and improving accessibility of healthy foods” (Heartside, 2014). Members of the Heartside Gleaning Initiative are currently working to give people living in the Heartside community of Grand Rapids access to fresh produce. Volunteers glean the produce from local farmers at the Fulton Street Farmers Market and then deliver it to shelters in the Heartside neighborhood. This work is also a part of a larger goal to fight the national issue of food insecurity, which affects millions of people living in the United States. For this project, our group chose to focus on volunteer recruitment. Volunteers are the backbone of the Heartside Gleaning Initiative and a necessary component for the work being done. We have begun to work with several Grand Rapids schools and local churches in the Heartside neighborhood to generate awareness about the initiative and to try and fill this need for volunteers. The organization specifically needs a core group of four to five volunteers who can consistently work with the initiative. Though we have generated interest among community members to volunteer for a weekend, we struggled to establish this core group of leaders. This proved to be our biggest challenge with the project, and finding a group of leaders will continue to be a task for the initiative in the future, though we have several suggestions that may help their efforts. The final goal for this project was to provide the Heartside Gleaning Initiative with recruitment materials. We recreated a pamphlet for the organization to give to potential volunteers. It includes information about the goals and the mission of the organization and contact information. It can be used to generate awareness and knowledge about the Heartside Gleaning Initiative. We also provided the organization with a list of the local churches and schools with interested members. We hope the initiative will be able to use these materials to continue to recruit a stable group of volunteers

Center for Population Dynamics Quarterly Brief July 2016: Population Loss and Development Trends in Cleveland

When a place loses population, it’s assumed that’s because people leave. But it’s not that simple. What’s lost in translation is today’s households have fewer people living in them than they did years prior. For instance, 40% of mothers aged 40 to 44 had four or more children in 1976. Today, it’s 14%. Overall, the average American household contracted from 3.14 people in 1970 to 2.54 today. This can explain the apparent paradox of population loss in “shrinking” communities while the number of occupied households grows. Such was the case in Cuyahoga County. There were 1.72 million residents in the county in 1970. By 2010 the population fell by 440,713, to just over 1.28 million. How much of that loss was due to change in family composition? If the average household size remained at 1970 levels (3.10 people per house), the population of Cuyahoga County would be 1,692,323 in 2010 given its current household totals—412,201 more than the actual number. Taken together, 93.5% of Cuyahoga County’s population loss since 1970 can be explained by change in household composition, not necessarily entire households leaving. Does this mean outmigration is not a factor locally? No. This is particularly so for the City of Cleveland. Cleveland’s population approached its peak in 1950 with 914,808 residents. In 2010 the population was 396,830—a decline of 517,978 . While the average household size dropped considerably from 1950 (3.44) to 2010 (2.37), the change in household composition accounted for only 34.6% of the city’s population losses since 1950. The remainder was likely due to the decline in the actual number of households, which dropped by nearly 100,000. That is, people left, and not many people arrived, and this was manifested in the erosion of occupied residencies and net outmigration

Using temporary dye marks to estimate ungulate population abundance in southwest Yukon, Canada

We describe the protocols of two mark-resight abundance surveys, using temporary dye-marks, for the Aishihik woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) and wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) populations (herds) in the southwest Yukon Territory, Canada. We also provide recommendations based on experiences from these surveys for biologists and managers considering this approach. The Aishihik woodland caribou herd was the focus of intensive management in the 1990s aimed at recovering the herd. Following recovery activities, a target size of 2000 animals was determined and the Champagne-Aishihik Traditional Territory Community-Based Wildlife Management Plan recommended an estimate of the herd’s size be completed before the year 2013. We used an aerial mark-resight approach to estimate the herd’s size in March 2009. Caribou (n = 59) were marked from a helicopter with temporary dye, delivered via a CO2-powered rifle. Two independent resighting sessions were subsequently carried out via helicopter. The herd was estimated at 2044 animals (90% CI: 1768 – 2420) with an overall resighting rate of 0.47. The mean annual growth rate (λ) of the herd from 1997 – 2009 was 1.05 (SE = 0.01). The Aishihik wood bison herd was estimated at 1151 (90% CI: 998 – 1355). Our study suggests that ungulates temporarily marked with dye can be successfully used to obtain statistically sound population estimates