Society of Women Engineers: Central Illinois Award

A healthy nation is a wealthy nation. The well-being of the citizens of the United States lies in the hands of, frankly, themselves. The activists who promote progress and prosperity. The engineers who create that which have never been. And lastly, the medical professionals that allocate years of their life to study, treat, and improve the physical well-being of their populations. Yet as America progresses with time, our healthcare system is failing the very people it was meant to serve: the public. More than 82 million people in this country have inadequate or no health insurance. As this number rises with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, this means that nearly one-third of Americans will live each day without the security of knowing that, if and when they need it, medical care is available to them and their loved ones. In order to double down on this problem, taking a look at the expensive costs of healthcare begins our process of problem-solving: identifying the problem. According to Insider Intelligence, 30% of healthcare costs are associated with administrative tasks. Though, there may be a way to tackle this 30%: the evolving field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/sl_dsw/1000/thumbnail.jp

Self Organising Network Techniques to Maximise Traffic Offload onto a 3G/WCDMA Small Cell Network using MDT UE Measurement Reports

This paper presents a number of Self-Organising Network (SON) based methods using a 3GPP Minimisation of Drive Testing (MDT) approach or similar and the analysis of these geo-located UE measurements to maximise traffic offload onto lamppost mounted 3G/WCDMA microcells. Simulations have been performed for a real 3G/WCDMA microcell deployment in a busy area of central London and the results suggest that for the network studied a traffic increase on the microcell layer of up to 175% is achievable through the novel SON methods presented

Shall We Continue Laptop Services?

Laptop ownership levels have changed over time for students at Southern Polytechnic State University. The authors used surveys to determine appropriate numbers of laptops to make available for circulation

Are systematic reviews up-to-date at the time of publication?

BACKGROUND: Systematic reviews provide a synthesis of evidence for practitioners, for clinical practice guideline developers, and for those designing and justifying primary research. Having an up-to-date and comprehensive review is therefore important. Our main objective was to determine the recency of systematic reviews at the time of their publication, as measured by the time from last search date to publication. We also wanted to study the time from search date to acceptance, and from acceptance to publication, and measure the proportion of systematic reviews with recorded information on search dates and information sources in the abstract and full text of the review. METHODS: A descriptive analysis of published systematic reviews indexed in Medline in 2009, 2010 and 2011 by three reviewers, independently extracting data. RESULTS: Of the 300 systematic reviews included, 271 (90%) provided the date of search in the full-text article, but only 141 (47%) stated this in the abstract. The median (standard error; minimum to maximum) survival time from last search to acceptance was 5.1 (0.58; 0 to 43.8) months (95% confidence interval = 3.9 to 6.2) and from last search to first publication time was 8.0 (0.35; 0 to 46.7) months (95% confidence interval = 7.3 to 8.7), respectively. Of the 300 reviews, 295 (98%) stated which databases had been searched, but only 181 (60%) stated the databases in the abstract. Most researchers searched three (35%) or four (21%) databases. The top-three most used databases were MEDLINE (79%), Cochrane library (76%), and EMBASE (64%). CONCLUSIONS: Being able to identify comprehensive, up-to-date reviews is important to clinicians, guideline groups, and those designing clinical trials. This study demonstrates that some reviews have a considerable delay between search and publication, but only 47% of systematic review abstracts stated the last search date and 60% stated the databases that had been searched. Improvements in the quality of abstracts of systematic reviews and ways to shorten the review and revision processes to make review publication more rapid are needed

Measuring friction at an interface using ultrasonic response

Friction between sliding surfaces is a fundamental phenomenon prevalent in many aspects of engineering. There are many sliding contact tribometers that measure friction force in a laboratory environment. However, the transfer of laboratory data to real machine elements is unreliable. Results depend on the specimen configuration, surface condition and environment. In this work, a method has been developed that uses the nonlinear response of a high-power ultrasonic wave to deduce friction coefficient in situ at an interface. When the high-power shear wave strikes a frictional interface, relative slip can occur. It imposes a nonlinear response and causes generation of higher-order odd frequency components in received ultrasonic signals. The amplitude of the harmonics depends on contact stress and local friction coefficient. This nonlinear ultrasonic response has been investigated both numerically and experimentally. A simple one-dimensional model has been used to predict nonlinearity generation. This model has been compared with experiments conducted on aluminium rough surfaces pressed together under increasing loads. Two strategies have been used to estimate the friction coefficient by correlating experimental and numerical third-order nonlinearity. It has proved possible to determine the friction coefficient in situ at the interface; values in the range of 0.22 to 0.61 were measured for different surface configurations

Self-consistent Ornstein-Zernike approximation for three-dimensional spins

An Ornstein-Zernike approximation for the two-body correlation function embodying thermodynamic consistency is applied to a system of classical Heisenberg spins on a three-dimensional lattice. The consistency condition determined in a previous work is supplemented by introducing a simplified expression for the mean-square fluctuations of the spin on each lattice site. The thermodynamics and the correlations obtained by this closure are then compared with approximants based on extrapolation of series expansions and with Monte Carlo simulations. The comparison reveals that many properties of the model, including the critical temperature, are very well reproduced by this simple version of the theory, but that it shows substantial quantitative error in the critical region, both above the critical temperature and with respect to its rendering of the spontaneous magnetization curve. A less simple but conceptually more satisfactory version of the SCOZA is then developed, but not solved, in which the effects of transverse correlations on the longitudinal susceptibility is included, yielding a more complete and accurate description of the spin-wave properties of the model.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figure

Silk-fibronectin protein alloy fibres support cell adhesion and viability as a high strength, matrix fibre analogue

Silk is a natural polymer with broad utility in biomedical applications because it exhibits general biocompatibility and high tensile material properties. While mechanical integrity is important for most biomaterial applications, proper function and integration also requires biomaterial incorporation into complex surrounding tissues for many physiologically relevant processes such as wound healing. In this study, we spin silk fibroin into a protein alloy fibre with whole fibronectin using wet spinning approaches in order to synergize their respective strength and cell interaction capabilities. Results demonstrate that silk fibroin alone is a poor adhesive surface for fibroblasts, endothelial cells, and vascular smooth muscle cells in the absence of serum. However, significantly improved cell attachment is observed to silk-fibronectin alloy fibres without serum present while not compromising the fibres' mechanical integrity. Additionally, cell viability is improved up to six fold on alloy fibres when serum is present while migration and spreading generally increase as well. These findings demonstrate the utility of composite protein alloys as inexpensive and effective means to create durable, biologically active biomaterials.T32 EB006359 - NIBIB NIH HH

India Global Immersion 2018

Undergraduate Clinical/ Cultural Immersion in New Delhi, India 2018https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148305/1/LiLeeNguyen.pd

Cascading training down into the classroom: The need for parallel planning

Cascade models of in-service training are widely considered to be a cost effective means of introducing educational change to large numbers of teachers. Data from 511 teachers completing a cascade training programme that introduced current ideas about and procedures for teaching English to young learners, suggests that provision of training alone is no guarantee that cascade training aims will actually be applied in classrooms. The paper considers implications for cascade projects, suggesting that planning needs to be a parallel process if an adequate return on outlay, in the sense of teachers applying skills introduced in training in their classrooms, is to be achieved