Book Review: Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts

Editors: Daniel Krebs and Lorien Foote Reviewed by Dr. Michael E. Lynch, senior historian, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College Published on April 7, 2023. A book of useful and thought-provoking essays, Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military History explores 300 years of wars and the role POWs have played in them. Reviewer Dr. Michael Lynch walks readers through more than half of the groups featured in the book.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters_bookshelf/1001/thumbnail.jp

NYU and JetBlue: Partnerships that Work

In a knowledge economy, every organization must place a priority on developing talent: finding and keeping the right employees and helping them succeed in life and work is the fulcrum strategy for productivity at all levels. Implementing that strategy is an almost overwhelming proposition that requires enormous resources, particularly in a highly competitive environment. Higher education and employers can benefit from working with each other to maximize human capital, but it is a collaboration that requires flexibility and goodwill on everyone’s part. This article, while introducing some of the literature on partnerships between higher education and corporations, also provides some anecdotal tips on how to proceed; more than anything else, it is a testimonial based on the partnership between New York University (NYU) and JetBlue as to what can be, as opposed to what is

Ileocecal Adenocarcinoma and Ureteral Transitional Cell Carcinoma with Multiple Sebaceous Tumors and Keratoacanthomas in a Case of Muir-Torre Syndrome

Cutaneous neoplasms including sebaceous tumors, keratoacanthomas, and basal cell carcinomas with sebaceous differentiation can be markers of internal malignancy associated with the Muir-Torre Syndrome (MTS). We report a 56-year-old man with a diagnosis of hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC) and ureteral transitional cell carcinoma who subsequently developed two sebaceous gland neoplasms and several keratoacanthomas, leading to the diagnosis of MTS. Our case highlights the clinical advantages of immunohistochemistry (IHC) in identifying mutations in the mismatch repair (MMR) genes responsible for both HNPCC and MTS. The importance of continued clinical suspicion in the dermatological assessment of patients with sebaceous neoplasms is emphasized

Identification of body fat tissues in MRI data

In recent years non-invasive medical diagnostic techniques have been used widely in medical investigations. Among the various imaging modalities available, Magnetic Resonance Imaging is very attractive as it produces multi-slice images where the contrast between various types of body tissues such as muscle, ligaments and fat is well defined. The aim of this paper is to describe the implementation of an unsupervised image analysis algorithm able to identify the body fat tissues from a sequence of MR images encoded in DICOM format. The developed algorithm consists of three main steps. The first step pre-processes the MR images in order to reduce the level of noise. The second step extracts the image areas representing fat tissues by using an unsupervised clustering algorithm. Finally, image refinements are applied to reclassify the pixels adjacent to the initial fat estimate and to eliminate outliers. The experimental data indicates that the proposed implementation returns accurate results and furthermore is robust to noise and to greyscale in-homogeneity

A Distributed Source Control for Multimedia ATM Networks

The effects of multimedia data such as voice, audio, video, still-image, text, and graphics on high speed networks need to be identified for the purpose of developing efficient multimedia network designs and implementations. In this thesis, we identify a model for the most demanding multimedia type: motion video. Then, we define a network protocol for handling the bursty nature of the multimedia type. The protocol is placed at the source and is defined as an adaptive distributed source control (DSC) to adjust to the particulars of the given video call's virtual channel. The internal network protocol is also defined to work closely with the source nodes. In a computer simulation, the performance of adaptive DSC protocol in a multimedia ATM network is contrasted with non-adaptive DSC protocol performance. By adding video data types, a decrease in the network protocol performance is shown while lowering DSC setting improves performance. On the basis of these results, an overall adaptive DSC protocol strategy is shown to be the best approach in implementing the DSC protocol, especially when the statistics of the source are not known prior to transmission

A new reference genome assembly for the microcrustacean Daphnia pulex

Comparing genomes of closely related genotypes from populations with distinct demographic histories can help reveal the impact of effective population size on genome evolution. For this purpose, we present a high quality genome assembly of Daphnia pulex (PA42), and compare this with the first sequenced genome of this species (TCO), which was derived from an isolate from a population with >90% reduction in nucleotide diversity. PA42 has numerous similarities to TCO at the gene level, with an average amino acid sequence identity of 98.8 and >60% of orthologous proteins identical. Nonetheless, there is a highly elevated number of genes in the TCO genome annotation, with similar to 7000 excess genes appearing to be false positives. This view is supported by the high GC content, lack of introns, and short length of these suspicious gene annotations. Consistent with the view that reduced effective population size can facilitate the accumulation of slightly deleterious genomic features, we observe more proliferation of transposable elements (TEs) and a higher frequency of gained introns in the TCO genome

Silicate Emission in the TW Hydrae Association

The TW Hydrae Association is the nearest young stellar association. Among its members are HD 98800, HR 4796A, and TW Hydrae itself, the nearest known classical T Tauri star. We have observed these three stars spectroscopically between 3 and 13 microns. In TW Hya the spectrum shows a silicate emission feature that is similar to many other young stars with protostellar disks. The 11.2 micron feature indicative of significant amounts of crystalline olivine is not as strong as in some young stars and solar system comets. In HR 4796A, the thermal emission in the silicate feature is very weak, suggesting little in the way of (small silicate) grains near the star. The silicate band of HD 98800 (observed by us but also reported by Sylvester and Skinner (1996)) is intermediate in strength between TW Hya and HR 4796.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures, LaTeX2e and AAS LaTeX macros v5.0. Accepted for publication in A

Automatic seed initialization for the expectation-maximization algorithm and its application in 3D medical imaging

Statistical partitioning of images into meaningful areas is the goal of all region-based segmentation algorithms. The clustering or creation of these meaningful partitions can be achieved in number of ways but in most cases it is achieved through the minimization or maximization of some function of the image intensity properties. Commonly these optimization schemes are locally convergent, therefore initialization of the parameters of the function plays a very important role in the final solution. In this paper we perform an automatically initialized expectation-maximization algorithm to partition the data in medical MRI images. We present analysis and illustrate results against manual initialization and apply the algorithm to some common medical image processing task