Reliability and Feasibility of the Four Square Step Test for Use in Children with Cerebral Palsy: A Pilot Study

Purpose: The ability to maintain standing balance with a moving base of support and while making rapid postural adjustments is important for independence in various functional activities. Clinical tests and measures have not addressed this ability in children with disability. This pilot study examined the feasibility and reliability of the Four Square Step Test (FSST) as a test of dynamic balance in children with cerebral palsy (CP). Method: Four children with CP (Gross Motor Function Classification Scale levels I-II) were tested on the FSST by 3 assessors on the first occasion (interrater reliability) and repeat-tested by 1 assessor after 2 weeks (test-retest reliability). Six children with typical development (TD) were tested on a separate occasion to explore any between-group difference in performance. Results: The FSST was easy to setup, required no specialized equipment, could be completed in 5 minutes, and might be carried out by clinicians with limited experience in pediatric therapy. It demonstrated excellent interrater reliability (ICC = 0.832) and test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.979) in children with CP. Compared with FSST times for children with TD (mean = 9.12 ± 2.67 seconds), times for children with CP (mean = 18.38 ± 9.02 seconds) were significantly slower (p = 0.019, Mann-Whitney U = -2.345). Conclusions and Recommendations: The pilot study provides initial evidence on the potential usefulness of the FSST as a test of dynamic standing balance in children with CP. This warrants further investigation of the clinimetric properties of the FSST using an adequate sample size

Career Building Among Asian American Immigrant Community College Students in Nebraska: A Phenomenological Study

Asian Americans are becoming the fastest growing minority group, and enrolling at community colleges at a faster rate compared to 4-year institutions. In Nebraska, they represent approximately a quarter of the community college student population, comprise 2.3% of the state’s population, and 7% of the state’s workforce. Despite their increasing numbers, very little is known about Asian Americans in the community college, including issues related to workforce transitions. Within a social cognitive career theory framework (SCCT), this qualitative study explored what career building means to Asian American immigrant community college students in Nebraska. Asian Americans in community colleges are typically invisible in discussions about underrepresented populations in higher education, especially in new settlement states like Nebraska. Scholars argue that this invisibility is primarily due to the model minority myth, which assumes that Asian Americans belong to a homogenous, successful, genetically superior group that does not need support (Ching & Agbayani, 2012; Museus & Park, 2015; Nadal, 2011; Suzuki, 2002). By uncovering salient factors affecting Asian American immigrants’ meaning of career building, findings of this study offer important implications for research and practice for this population. Twenty one foreign-born Asian/Asian American students participated in this study to describe their experiences about building careers at two community colleges in Nebraska. Findings revealed four overarching components representing the core of building a career: opportunity. Opportunity is realized through three essential processes of Leaning (seeking support), Leveraging (learning from immigrant experiences), and Leading (self-direction). Additionally, the interplay of person, context, and work knowledge variables were consistently highlighted in participants’ experiences, supporting literature that emphasizes the importance of context in career transitions of immigrant college students of color. Participants also experienced challenges due to their immigrant or financial status, rather than their race. Support from bilingual counselors and ethnic communities were critical in career building. Implications for research include the consideration of job-matching, context, and generational perspectives and racial self-identification in the development of career theory for Asian Americans. Advisor: Richard J. Torrac

Revisiting Goldwater-Nichols: Why Making the Joint Staff A General Staff will Improve Civilian Control of the Military and Refine the Constitutional Balance of War Powers

As the United States has progressively become more involved globally since World War II, the U.S. military is being stretched beyond the professional military competency straining civilian control of the military. To remedy this, it is again time to revisit our national security structure, and adopt a General Staff in place of the Joint Staff. Following World War II and the destruction of the German General Staff by the Nazi Party, the General Staff as an institution has been emotionally rejected in the United States without a careful historical and legal examination of how that institution operates under varying forms of government and without an understanding of how it would operate under the United States’ peculiar constitutional form of government. Exploring the historical and legal roots of the General Staff demonstrates that replacing the Joint Staff with a General Staff subordinated into the chain of command will act as a check on the ever-expanding influence of the military, while at the same time strengthening the military’s ability to decisively defend U.S. national interests. Further, a General Staff will clarify the constitutional separation of military powers in a way that mitigates the politicizing effects of the separation of powers doctrine restoring balance to the constitutional division of military powers

Status and perspectives of short baseline studies

The study of flavor changing neutrinos is a very active field of research. I will discuss the status of ongoing and near term experiments investigating neutrino properties at short distances from the source. In the next few years, the Double Chooz, RENO and Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiments will start looking for signatures of a non-zero value of the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ with much improved sensitivities. The MiniBooNE experiment is investigating the LSND anomaly by looking at both the $\nu_{\mu} \to \nu_{e}$ and $\bar{\nu}_{\mu} \to \bar{\nu}_{e}$ appearance channels. Recent results on cross section measurements will be discussed briefly.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2009), Rome, Italy, 1-5 July 200

Measurement of Muon Antineutrino Quasi-Elastic Scattering on a Hydrocarbon Target at E_{\nu} ~ 3.5 GeV

We have isolated muon anti-neutrino charged-current quasi-elastic interactions occurring in the segmented scintillator tracking region of the MINERvA detector running in the NuMI neutrino beam at Fermilab. We measure the flux-averaged differential cross-section, d{\sigma}/dQ^2, and compare to several theoretical models of quasi-elastic scattering. Good agreement is obtained with a model where the nucleon axial mass, M_A, is set to 0.99 GeV/c^2 but the nucleon vector form factors are modified to account for the observed enhancement, relative to the free nucleon case, of the cross-section for the exchange of transversely polarized photons in electron-nucleus scattering. Our data at higher Q^2 favor this interpretation over an alternative in which the axial mass is increased.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Added correlation between neutrino and anti-neutrino results in ancillary text files (CSV

Inclusive measurements with MINER nu A

MINER nu A is a neutrino scattering experiment in the NuMI beamline at Fermilab designed to measure neutrino cross-sections, final states and nuclear effects on a variety of targets in the few-GeV region. MINER nu A is currently running in the NuMI low energy configuration and will continue in medium energy. We present a preliminary neutrino energy spectra in three beam configurations and a preliminary comparison of iron and lead event rates

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Measurement of Partonic Nuclear Effects in Deep-Inelastic Neutrino Scattering using MINERvA

The MINERvA collaboration reports a novel study of neutrino-nucleus charged-current deep inelastic scattering (DIS) using the same neutrino beam incident on targets of polystyrene, graphite, iron, and lead. Results are presented as ratios of C, Fe, and Pb to CH. The ratios of total DIS cross sections as a function of neutrino energy and flux-integrated differential cross sections as a function of the Bjorken scaling variable x are presented in the neutrino-energy range of 5 - 50 GeV. Good agreement is found between the data and predicted ratios, based on charged-lepton nucleus scattering, at medium x and low neutrino energies. However, the data rate appears depleted in the vicinity of the nuclear shadowing region, x < 0.1. This apparent deficit, reflected in the DIS cross-section ratio at high neutrino energy , is consistent with previous MINERvA observations and with the predicted onset of nuclear shadowing with the the axial-vector current in neutrino scattering