Aloha Undergraduates: Development and Application of Local & Indigenous Topics into an Undergraduate Public Health Curriculum

As public health education expands to include undergraduate students, it is important to include discussion of local public health topics and issues to provide a sense of place to the educational experience. Inclusion of Native Hawaiian and indigenous issues and perspectives is also an established priority of the University of Hawai‘i system. To address both needs, a required course was created during development of a new Bachelor of Arts (BA) public health program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa to specifically focus on discussion of local and indigenous public health topics of interest. Public Health Issues in Hawai‘i is an introductory course included early in the recommended undergraduate curriculum and emphasizes the application of public health skills and principles to local issues (e.g., state-level legislative awareness and local sustainability topics). The Public Health Issues in Hawai‘i course further challenges students to recognize public health practice in their daily activities, and encourages them to become actively engaged in local community issues early in their public health educational careers. Among multiple advantages, improved awareness of local health challenges and early connections to community members and organizations have been instrumental in actively engaging local students in their education, and has also proved beneficial for students participating in required undergraduate applied learning capstone experiences and entry-level public health careers following graduation. Here we present insights into course development, articulation with broader program curricula, and successes and challenges in the past 4 years of implementation and instruction

Search of the Orion spur for continuous gravitational waves using a loosely coherent algorithm on data from LIGO interferometers

We report results of a wideband search for periodic gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars within the Orion spur towards both the inner and outer regions of our Galaxy. As gravitational waves interact very weakly with matter, the search is unimpeded by dust and concentrations of stars. One search disk (A) is 6.87° in diameter and centered on 20h10m54.71s+33°33′25.29′′, and the other (B) is 7.45° in diameter and centered on 8h35m20.61s-46°49′25.151′′. We explored the frequency range of 50-1500 Hz and frequency derivative from 0 to -5×10-9 Hz/s. A multistage, loosely coherent search program allowed probing more deeply than before in these two regions, while increasing coherence length with every stage. Rigorous follow-up parameters have winnowed the initial coincidence set to only 70 candidates, to be examined manually. None of those 70 candidates proved to be consistent with an isolated gravitational-wave emitter, and 95% confidence level upper limits were placed on continuous-wave strain amplitudes. Near 169 Hz we achieve our lowest 95% C.L. upper limit on the worst-case linearly polarized strain amplitude h0 of 6.3×10-25, while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 3.4×10-24 for all polarizations and sky locations. © 2016 American Physical Society

Practical guidelines for rigor and reproducibility in preclinical and clinical studies on cardioprotection

The potential for ischemic preconditioning to reduce infarct size was first recognized more than 30 years ago. Despite extension of the concept to ischemic postconditioning and remote ischemic conditioning and literally thousands of experimental studies in various species and models which identified a multitude of signaling steps, so far there is only a single and very recent study, which has unequivocally translated cardioprotection to improved clinical outcome as the primary endpoint in patients. Many potential reasons for this disappointing lack of clinical translation of cardioprotection have been proposed, including lack of rigor and reproducibility in preclinical studies, and poor design and conduct of clinical trials. There is, however, universal agreement that robust preclinical data are a mandatory prerequisite to initiate a meaningful clinical trial. In this context, it is disconcerting that the CAESAR consortium (Consortium for preclinicAl assESsment of cARdioprotective therapies) in a highly standardized multi-center approach of preclinical studies identified only ischemic preconditioning, but not nitrite or sildenafil, when given as adjunct to reperfusion, to reduce infarct size. However, ischemic preconditioning—due to its very nature—can only be used in elective interventions, and not in acute myocardial infarction. Therefore, better strategies to identify robust and reproducible strategies of cardioprotection, which can subsequently be tested in clinical trials must be developed. We refer to the recent guidelines for experimental models of myocardial ischemia and infarction, and aim to provide now practical guidelines to ensure rigor and reproducibility in preclinical and clinical studies on cardioprotection. In line with the above guideline, we define rigor as standardized state-of-the-art design, conduct and reporting of a study, which is then a prerequisite for reproducibility, i.e. replication of results by another laboratory when performing exactly the same experiment

First low frequency all-sky search for continuous gravitational wave signals

In this paper we present the results of the first low frequency all-sky search of continuous gravitational wave signals conducted on Virgo VSR2 and VSR4 data. The search covered the full sky, a frequency range between 20 and 128 Hz with a range of spin-down between −1.0×10−10 and +1.5×10−11  Hz/s, and was based on a hierarchical approach. The starting point was a set of short fast Fourier transforms, of length 8192 s, built from the calibrated strain data. Aggressive data cleaning, in both the time and frequency domains, has been done in order to remove, as much as possible, the effect of disturbances of instrumental origin. On each data set a number of candidates has been selected, using the FrequencyHough transform in an incoherent step. Only coincident candidates among VSR2 and VSR4 have been examined in order to strongly reduce the false alarm probability, and the most significant candidates have been selected. The criteria we have used for candidate selection and for the coincidence step greatly reduce the harmful effect of large instrumental artifacts. Selected candidates have been subject to a follow-up by constructing a new set of longer fast Fourier transforms followed by a further incoherent analysis, still based on the FrequencyHough transform. No evidence for continuous gravitational wave signals was found, and therefore we have set a population-based joint VSR2-VSR4 90% confidence level upper limit on the dimensionless gravitational wave strain in the frequency range between 20 and 128 Hz. This is the first all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves conducted, on data of ground-based interferometric detectors, at frequencies below 50 Hz. We set upper limits in the range between about 10−24 and 2×10−23 at most frequencies. Our upper limits on signal strain show an improvement of up to a factor of ∼2 with respect to the results of previous all-sky searches at frequencies below 80 H

Search of the Orion spur for continuous gravitational waves using a loosely coherent algorithm on data from LIGO interferometers

We report results of a wideband search for periodic gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars within the Orion spur towards both the inner and outer regions of our Galaxy. As gravitational waves interact very weakly with matter, the search is unimpeded by dust and concentrations of stars. One search disk (A) is 6.87° in diameter and centered on 20[superscript h]10[superscript m]54.71[superscript s] + 33°33[superscript ′]25.29[superscript ′′], and the other (B) is 7.45° in diameter and centered on 8[superscript h]35[superscript m]20.61[superscript s] - 46°49[superscript ′]25.151[superscript ′′]. We explored the frequency range of 50–1500 Hz and frequency derivative from 0 to -5 × 10[superscript -9]  Hz/s. A multistage, loosely coherent search program allowed probing more deeply than before in these two regions, while increasing coherence length with every stage. Rigorous follow-up parameters have winnowed the initial coincidence set to only 70 candidates, to be examined manually. None of those 70 candidates proved to be consistent with an isolated gravitational-wave emitter, and 95% confidence level upper limits were placed on continuous-wave strain amplitudes. Near 169 Hz we achieve our lowest 95% C.L. upper limit on the worst-case linearly polarized strain amplitude h[subscript 0] of 6.3 × 10[superscript -25], while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 3.4 × 10[superscript -24] for all polarizations and sky locations.National Science Foundation (U.S.)United States. National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationCarnegie TrustDavid & Lucile Packard FoundationAlfred P. Sloan Foundatio

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10–500 s in a frequency band of 40–1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10[superscript -5] and 9.4×10[superscript -4]  Mpc[superscript -3] yr[superscript -1] at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves.Carnegie TrustDavid & Lucile Packard FoundationAlfred P. Sloan FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.

Search of the Orion spur for continuous gravitational waves using a loosely coherent algorithm on data from LIGO interferometers

We report results of a wideband search for periodic gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars within the Orion spur towards both the inner and outer regions of our Galaxy. As gravitational waves interact very weakly with matter, the search is unimpeded by dust and concentrations of stars. One search disk (A) is 6.87° in diameter and centered on 20[superscript h]10[superscript m]54.71[superscript s] + 33°33[superscript ′]25.29[superscript ′′], and the other (B) is 7.45° in diameter and centered on 8[superscript h]35[superscript m]20.61[superscript s] - 46°49[superscript ′]25.151[superscript ′′]. We explored the frequency range of 50–1500 Hz and frequency derivative from 0 to -5 × 10[superscript -9]  Hz/s. A multistage, loosely coherent search program allowed probing more deeply than before in these two regions, while increasing coherence length with every stage. Rigorous follow-up parameters have winnowed the initial coincidence set to only 70 candidates, to be examined manually. None of those 70 candidates proved to be consistent with an isolated gravitational-wave emitter, and 95% confidence level upper limits were placed on continuous-wave strain amplitudes. Near 169 Hz we achieve our lowest 95% C.L. upper limit on the worst-case linearly polarized strain amplitude h[subscript 0] of 6.3 × 10[superscript -25], while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 3.4 × 10[superscript -24] for all polarizations and sky locations.National Science Foundation (U.S.)United States. National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationCarnegie TrustDavid & Lucile Packard FoundationAlfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Properties of the Binary Black Hole Merger GW150914

On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a gravitational-wave transient (GW150914); we characterize the properties of the source and its parameters. The data around the time of the event were analyzed coherently across the LIGO network using a suite of accurate waveform models that describe gravitational waves from a compact binary system in general relativity. GW150914 was produced by a nearly equal mass binary black hole of masses 36+5−4M⊙ and 29+4−4M⊙; for each parameter we report the median value and the range of the 90% credible interval. The dimensionless spin magnitude of the more massive black hole is bound to be <0.7 (at 90% probability). The luminosity distance to the source is 410+160−180  Mpc, corresponding to a redshift 0.09+0.03−0.04 assuming standard cosmology. The source location is constrained to an annulus section of 610  deg2, primarily in the southern hemisphere. The binary merges into a black hole of mass 62+4−4M⊙ and spin 0.67+0.05−0.07. This black hole is significantly more massive than any other inferred from electromagnetic observations in the stellar-mass regime

Examining factors associated with heavy episodic drinking among college undergraduates

Heavy episodic drinking among college students is a serious health concern. The purpose of this study was to identify factors associated with heavy episodic drinking behaviors amongst a predominately Asian undergraduate college student population in the United States. A survey measuring alcohol use behaviors was completed by a random sample of 18-24 year old undergraduates during April, 2011. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to determine factors associated with students’ heavy episodic drinking behavior. Independent factors associated with heavy episodic drinking included living on campus, ethnicity, perceived drinking behavior among peers, and a belief that alcohol is a central part of one’s social life. Heavy episodic drinking was also associated with poor academic performance. Campus-wide educational strategies to reduce heavy episodic drinking among college undergraduates should incorporate accurate information regarding alcohol use norms to correct students’ perceived over estimation of their peers alcohol consumption rates and the under estimation of students protective alcohol use behaviors. These efforts should focus in on-campus residence halls where a higher occurrence of heavy episodic drinking is often found

Developing an Undergraduate Public Health Introductory Core Course Series

The number of undergraduate public health education programs is increasing, but few publications provide examples of introductory public health courses that provide foundational knowledge and meet 2016 Council on Education in Public Health (CEPH) accreditation standards. This article presents the development and testing of a three-course, introductory series in public health at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM). Development was informed by best pedagogical practices in education, web review of existing programs, literature review, key informant interviews, and accreditation standards. Student mastery of required concepts, domains, and competencies is assessed through testing and class assignments. Data from course evaluations, students' exit questionnaires at graduation, and faculty feedback were used to continuously evolve and adapt the curriculum. The three-course series—including Introduction to Public Health, Public Health Issues in Hawai‘i, and Introduction to Global Health—was designed to provide incoming undergraduate public health students with a foundation in local, national, and global public health concepts and domains, while improving their skills in public health communication and information literacy. Data from class assignments, examinations, and later coursework suggest students are mastering the course materials and gaining required competencies. Data from course evaluation and exit questionnaires suggest that the students appreciate the series' approach and the challenge to apply course concepts locally and globally in subsequent courses. This foundational public health series provides a model for an introductory course series that can be implemented with existing resources by most programs, meets the new CEPH requirements, is well-received by students, and prepares students well for upper-division public health courses