Pressbooks and Associated Technologies: Innovative Projects, Creating and Publishing Books by Libraries

This panel presentation shares innovative ways to engage patrons from a variety of library types and patrons including students, faculty, and teachers. In one case study, Winona State University has collaboratively published three books written by graduate students in Leadership Education. WSU used a variety of technologies, one of which is Pressbooks. Fortunately WSU has supported and has access to the subscription level Pressbooks through the statewide subscription available by Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project (MLPP) initiative. In addition to Pressbooks, Canva, Ingramspark, Adobe Creative Cloud, and bepress Digital Commons are all used in our process to create and publish print and ebooks written and edited by our graduate students. This process can be replicated in a variety of ways with alternative platforms

Be a Digital Survivor: Digitize, Share and Preserve

Are you feeling marooned on your own island? You are not alone. Is your tribe facing challenges, such as time, funding, preservation and storage? Looking to achieve the reward of providing access to and preserving your digital collections? Join these Minnesota digital survivors as they share their quest to digitize, preserve, and showcase their digital objects by using the open source Islandora digital asset management system, customized and supported by PALS. Together these tribes, along with the Islandora community, have formed alliances where they learn from, share with and collaborate to enrich their digital collections. Each tribe will share their journey, experiences, and advice on building digital repositories. Become a Digital Survivor and learn how you too can take the first steps toward building a bridge off your island

I’m a Librarian, Captain, Not a Developer! – Teaming Up with University IT for Creative Web Solutions

Winona State University, Krueger Library, Summer 2013. Time for a library website reboot. We wanted our online presence to be user-focused, simple, and elegant. Our dilemma? No developers on staff at our library. Our vision was galaxies ahead of our tools and knowledge. We turned to our university Web Communications and Web Development teams to boldly go where the library website had not gone before. At first, we educated each other. Librarians learned about the university’s web systems, and developers learned about library systems. Then we met weekly to share our ideas as a team, identifying and overcoming obstacles together along the way. And we made it so, as Krueger Library’s new library website rolled out in July 2014. In this discussion session, attendees will hear from all sides of the table as the project managers, developers, and librarians explain how we collaborated to produce a forward-thinking, sleek, responsive site. Join us as the panelists discuss the greatest stumbling blocks and biggest wins. The discussion will include use cases for local and common tools, such as MnPALS Discover and LibGuides. We will share timelines, site architecture, code snippets, and, perhaps most importantly, plans for future projects together

The Effect of Plastic Bags on Decomposition and Necrophagous Fly Composition

Forensic entomology uses insects to help estimate the post-mortem interval (PMI) based on blow fly colonization. The PMI provides an estimate of the time between death and discovery and is of extreme relevance due to its large role in forensic investigations. Nine fetal pigs were thawed from frozen 24 hours before the start of the experiment. Six fetal pigs were covered with plastic bags: three with thin plastic bags (average bag weight of 5.43 g) and three with thick plastic bags (average bag weight of 11.9 g). The remaining three pigs served as the control group. These pigs were placed outside, monitored for 6 days, and checked three times daily to look for the presence of blow fly eggs, adults, and maggots. Third instar maggots were collected for later observance. ANOVA tests were conducted to look for differences in the timing of blow fly oviposition between treatments. There was no significant difference found for any of the life stages in either trial. P-values ranged from 0.22 -1. The maggots were identified to species to look for differences in species composition between treatments. Lucilia coeruleiviridis was the dominant species found. Sarcophagidae flies were found only on bagged pigs. Sarcophagidae larvae have been found very rarely in this field site over the past decade, so this is an interesting finding. Scavenging of the pigs was a problem and future research should aim to reduce the effects of vertebrate scavenging

Why Homeless Individuals "Get Stuck": A Closer Look at Shelter Use and Intervention Points in Hennepin County.

This policy brief is adapted from Heading Home Hennepin: An Analysis of Shelter Use and Intervention Points, a report prepared for Professor Maria Hanratty's spring 2010 capstone workshop at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The brief summarizes a study that assessed how well homelessness programs funded by Hennepin County, in partnership with other agencies and organizations, are meeting the needs of the long-term homeless population. The study draws on newly available data on public and private shelter use to determine the nature and extent of long-term homelessness in Hennepin County. Includes recommendations for policy makers.The Hennepin-University Partnership at CURA helped connect Hanratty and her students to Lisa Thornquist, research and project evaluation coordinator at Hennepin County's Office to End Homelessness, to conduct this research

“I’m a Librarian, Captain, Not a Developer!” – Teaming Up with University IT for Creative Web Solutions

Winona State University, Krueger Library, Summer 2013. Time for a library website reboot. We wanted our online presence to be user-focused, simple, and elegant. Our dilemma? No developers on staff at our library. Our vision was galaxies ahead of our tools and knowledge. We turned to our university Web Communications and Web Development teams to boldly go where the library website had not gone before. At first, we educated each other. Librarians learned about the university’s web systems, and developers learned about library systems. Then we met weekly to share our ideas as a team, identifying and overcoming obstacles together along the way. And we made it so, as Krueger Library’s new library website rolled out in July 2014. In this discussion session, attendees will hear from all sides of the table as the project managers, developers, and librarians explain how we collaborated to produce a forward-thinking, sleek, responsive site. Join us as the panelists discuss the greatest stumbling blocks and biggest wins. The discussion will include use cases for local and common tools, such as MnPALS Discover and LibGuides. We will share timelines, site architecture, code snippets, and, perhaps most importantly, plans for future projects together

VCL@FER– baza slika za procjenu kvalitete slike

Original scientific paper In this paper we present new image quality database VCL@FER (http://www.vcl.fer.hr/quality/) which consists of four degradation types, 6 levels of each degradation and 23 different images (552 degraded images). It can be used in objective image quality evaluation, as well as to develop and test new image quality measures. Results for six commonly used full reference objective quality measures are compared using newly developed image database, as well as 6 other image databases.VCL@FER baza slika nova je baza slika (http://www.vcl.fer.hr/quality/) koja se sastoji od 4 vrste izobličenja, 6 razina svakog izobličenja i 23 različite slike (ukupno 552 izobličene slike). Baza slika može se koristiti za usporedbu različitih objektivnih mjera kvalitete slike, kao i za razvoj novih objektivnih mjera. Uporabom nove baze te još šest dostupnih baza slika provedena je usporedba šest relevantnih objektivnih mjere kvalitete slike

Adolescent Substance Use and Occupational Therapy Interventions: A Rapid Systematic Review

Indiana University Purdue University IndianapolisThis rapid systematic review analyzes the evidence for substance use reduction through therapeutic interventions and activities in adolescents between the ages of 13-25, along with the potential for implementation in the field of occupational therapy. Adolescents with substance use disorders (SUDs) often have specific challenges regarding their family interactions, cultural beliefs, school engagement, and community support. It can be difficult for adolescents with SUDs to successfully navigate their ever changing lives, as they may also present with comorbid psychiatric conditions. It is noted that throughout this review, many interventions were the first of their kind and focused on targeting adolescents within the contexts of their environment. Many studies utilized specific techniques aimed at improving adolescents’ intrinsic beliefs regarding their substance use. Overall, low to moderate evidence was found for the effectiveness of various interventions to reduce adolescent substance use. More exhaustive research is needed to evaluate the usefulness of these interventions, as many were done in very specific settings with very individualized populations. Moreover, occupational therapists should be cautious before implementation into practice, as none of the studies evaluated explicitly examined the role of occupational therapy. More investigation is required to determine how these interventions can be applied to the field of occupational therapy.Occupational Therap

Maximum likelihood analysis of systematic errors in interferometric observations of the cosmic microwave background

We investigate the impact of instrumental systematic errors in interferometric measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra. We simulate interferometric CMB observations to generate mock visibilities and estimate power spectra using the statistically optimal maximum likelihood technique. We define a quadratic error measure to determine allowable levels of systematic error that do not induce power spectrum errors beyond a given tolerance. As an example, in this study we focus on differential pointing errors. The effects of other systematics can be simulated by this pipeline in a straightforward manner. We find that, in order to accurately recover the underlying B-modes for r=0.01 at 28<l<384, Gaussian-distributed pointing errors must be controlled to 0.7^\circ rms for an interferometer with an antenna configuration similar to QUBIC, in agreement with analytical estimates. Only the statistical uncertainty for 28<l<88 would be changed at ~10% level. With the same instrumental configuration, we find the pointing errors would slightly bias the 2-\sigma upper limit of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r by ~10%. We also show that the impact of pointing errors on the TB and EB measurements is negligibly small.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS. Includes improvements in clarity of presentation and Fig.4 added, in response to refere