Sediment and Hydrologic Budgets for the Lake of the Woods Watershed, Champaign County, Illinois

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Uniting Student Musicians and Patients: A Quality Improvement Project

Background: The benefits of exposing hospitalized patients to live music have been well established, both from a quality improvement perspective and as a means of therapy. Hospitals across the country are increasingly seeking to incorporate music into models of patient-centered care. Music offers many benefits to the performer as well, and is well suited for promoting empathic communication, stress relief and a sense of well-being. Medical students in the pre-clinical years who might otherwise experience little patient interaction are able to uniquely engage with patients through musical performance. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the quality improvement impact of a program that facilitated musical performances given by student volunteers to hospitalized patients. Methods: Student musicians were recruited via email from the UMass Medical School and the Graduate School of Nursing, with an initial pool of 47 students expressing interest in performing. Over a period of several months, 21 performances were held on the Oncology floor and in the Bone Marrow Transplant unit. Qualitative data was collected via an online survey from the student volunteers and from the nursing staff. Informal feedback was obtained from patients. Results: The qualitative data collected was almost uniformly positive. Student musicians generally reported positive experiences, and felt that their efforts were appreciated by patients and by the nursing staff. Staff also enjoyed the performances, with most feeling that their workplace environment was positively impacted. Indeed, the major complaint from nursing staff was that the performances were not frequent enough. Although data was not collected from patients, informal questioning indicated that almost all patients enjoyed the experience. Conclusions: Taken as a whole, student musical volunteering in the hospital setting appears to be of great benefit as both a quality improvement tool and as a means of engaging students with patients. Patients appreciate the personal attention and a break from the monotony of hospitalization, while hospital staff reports a more pleasant working environment. Students are able to connect directly with patients in a non-medical role, which can be deeper and more meaningful than a brief encounter during work rounds. Additionally, pre-clinical students are exposed to the hospital setting and to patients

Bayesian calibration of the nitrous oxide emission module of an agro-ecosystem model

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the main biogenic greenhouse gas contributing to the global warming potential (GWP) of agro-ecosystems. Evaluating the impact of agriculture on climate therefore requires a capacity to predict N2O emissions in relation to environmental conditions and crop management. Biophysical models simulating the dynamics of carbon and nitrogen in agro-ecosystems have a unique potential to explore these relationships, but are fraught with high uncertainties in their parameters due to their variations over time and space. Here, we used a Bayesian approach to calibrate the parameters of the N2O submodel of the agro-ecosystem model CERES-EGC. The submodel simulates N2O emissions from the nitrification and denitrification processes, which are modelled as the product of a potential rate with three dimensionless factors related to soil water content, nitrogen content and temperature. These equations involve a total set of 15 parameters, four of which are site-specific and should be measured on site, while the other 11 are considered global, i.e. invariant over time and space. We first gathered prior information on the model parameters based on the literature review, and assigned them uniform probability distributions. A Bayesian method based on the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm was subsequently developed to update the parameter distributions against a database of seven different field-sites in France. Three parallel Markov chains were run to ensure a convergence of the algorithm. This site-specific calibration significantly reduced the spread in parameter distribution, and the uncertainty in the N2O simulations. The model’s root mean square error (RMSE) was also abated by 73% across the field sites compared to the prior parameterization. The Bayesian calibration was subsequently applied simultaneously to all data sets, to obtain better global estimates for the parameters initially deemed universal. This made it possible to reduce the RMSE by 33% on average, compared to the uncalibrated model. These global parameter values may be used to obtain more realistic estimates of N2O emissions from arable soils at regional or continental scales

The intended and enacted curriculum in a new developmental mathematics course: a study of community college students' participation and attitudes

Serving approximately 80% of the one million college students taking pre-college-level mathematics classes, community colleges perform an important function in providing access to advanced coursework and degrees. Low success rates in these classes has led mathematics educators to consider alternative forms of curriculum and instruction for these often required, but non-credit bearing pre-college, or developmental, classes. One emerging reform has pushed for the inclusion of more real-world problem solving and group work in these classes, mirroring reform efforts in K-12 mathematics education (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989, 2000). Success rates of students in early implementations of this developmental mathematics reform show promising results. However, these studies provided little information about the actual enactment of the curriculum or how developmental students, who have dramatically different demographics and mathematical histories than the K-12 population, experience these classes. Sitting at the intersection of research on K-12 mathematics education reform and research on developmental mathematics in the community college context, this dissertation sets out to examine how a problem-centered, group-intensive form of instruction plays out with developmental mathematics students at a single community college. Classroom observation data, classroom audio, and both instructor and student interviews were collected in a focus classroom. In addition, survey responses from students in seven Mathematical Literacy classrooms are used to examine the impact of the implementation on students. More specifically, this mixed-methods study: (a) describes what Mathematical Literacy looks like at the classroom level, examining the students’ and instructor’s patterns of engagement with the curriculum over time using an innovative, visual representation of the classroom, (b) examines students’ persistence and affective outcomes using statistical methods, including hierarchical linear modeling, and (c) examines students’ perceptions of the class and how these differ among students and compare with the instructor’s intentions, using open coding and the mixed-method analysis technique of matrices. Results show that students in the focus classroom had ample opportunity to work within their groups while the instructor operated in a facilitator role. Contrary to many of the reform models implemented at the K-12 level, whole-class discussion was minimal. Instead, students spent the vast majority of class time working collaboratively in their assigned groups, engaging in a comparatively small amount of off-task talk. Those who persisted in the class experienced some positive changes in their attitudes towards mathematics, but benefits were unevenly distributed among this diverse group of students. Differences in the perceptions of the students with positive, neutral, or negative experiences in the class were at least partially rooted in the challenges of having very mathematically diverse students required to work together in groups. although the developmental students’ focused goals and desire for efficiency were strengths in the classroom, they also led to tensions between some of the more and less advanced students within groups. This study illuminates critical challenges of productively implementing instruction centered around problem solving and group work in developmental mathematics courses. To improve implementation, instructors may need to (a) help students better understand each other’s needs and motivations, (b) support students as they mediate large differences in mathematical backgrounds, and (c) leverage students’ backgrounds and goals when grouping students. More research is needed to uncover productive ways to address these implementation challenges, as well as the academic benefits that can be obtained when doing so

The IIASA Energy-Multi Criteria Analysis Tool (ENE-MCA)

Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), building on work carried out within the framework of the Global Energy Assessment (GEA), have developed an interactive web-based scenario analysis tool that permits the concurrent assessment of synergies and trade-offs between multiple energy objectives at the global scale. This software, known as the IIASA Energy-Multi Criteria Analysis Policy Tool (ENE-MCA), is designed to assist national policy makers in their strategic policy planning processes. The tool extends work undertaken for the GEA and, as such, is built on the extensive set of global energy and environmental scenarios that have been generated as part of the GEA process. This document serves as an introduction to the ENE-MCA tool and as a brief manual for the typical user

Quantum Dynamics in a Time-dependent Hard-Wall Spherical Trap

Exact solution of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation is given for a particle inside a hard sphere whose wall is moving with a constant velocity. Numerical computations are presented for both contracting and expanding spheres. The propagator is constructed and compared with the propagator of a particle in an infinite square well with one wall in uniform motion.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, Accepted by Europhys. Let

Trinucleotide cassettes increase diversity of T7 phage-displayed peptide library

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Amino acid sequence diversity is introduced into a phage-displayed peptide library by randomizing library oligonucleotide DNA. We recently evaluated the diversity of peptide libraries displayed on T7 lytic phage and M13 filamentous phage and showed that T7 phage can display a more diverse amino acid sequence repertoire due to differing processes of viral morphogenesis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this study, we evaluated and compared the diversity of a 12-mer T7 phage-displayed peptide library randomized using codon-corrected trinucleotide cassettes with a T7 and an M13 12-mer phage-displayed peptide library constructed using the degenerate codon randomization method.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We herein demonstrate that the combination of trinucleotide cassette amino acid codon randomization and T7 phage display construction methods resulted in a significant enhancement to the functional diversity of a 12-mer peptide library. This novel library exhibited superior amino acid uniformity and order-of-magnitude increases in amino acid sequence diversity as compared to degenerate codon randomized peptide libraries. Comparative analyses of the biophysical characteristics of the 12-mer peptide libraries revealed the trinucleotide cassette-randomized library to be a unique resource.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The combination of T7 phage display and trinucleotide cassette randomization resulted in a novel resource for the potential isolation of binding peptides for new and previously studied molecular targets.</p