Perioperative Glycemic Management

Proposals and Goals: 1. We propose creating a standard easy to use and safe protocol for glycemic management for same day/elective surgical patients. 2. Following implementation in same day and elective surgical procedures, we propose expanding the protocol to be effective in urgent and emergent inpatient surgical procedures.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/patientsafetyposters/1068/thumbnail.jp

Standardized Consent Forms for Surgical Procedures: An Intervention to Improve the Resident-led Informed Consent Process

Objectives and Goals: To provide high quality, consistent consent forms for common surgical procedures and improve resident workflow by creating and implementing standardized printed consents for common surgical procedures. These consents will be used by residents consenting patients in the ED or inpatient setting. Consents shall include standardized procedure descriptions, risks and benefits of the procedure, and alternative treatment option descriptions, risks and benefitshttps://jdc.jefferson.edu/patientsafetyposters/1057/thumbnail.jp

Unitarity cutting rules for the nucleus excitation and topological cross sections in hard production off nuclei from nonlinear k_t-factorization

At the partonic level, a typical final state in small-x deep inelastic scattering off nuclei and hard proton-nucleus collisions can be characterized by the multiplicity of color-excited nucleons. Within reggeon field theory, each color-excited nucleon is associated with the unitarity cut of the pomeron exchanged between the projectile and nucleus. In this communication we derive the unitarity rules for the multiplicity of excited nucleons, alias cut pomerons, alias topological cross sections, for typical hard dijet production processes. We demonstrate how the coupled-channel non-Abelian intranuclear evolution of color dipoles, inherent to pQCD, gives rise to the reggeon field theory diagrams for final states in terms of the uncut, and two kinds of cut, pomerons. Upon the proper identification of the uncut and cut pomeron exchanges, the topological cross sections for dijet production follow in a straightforward way from the earlier derived nonlinear k_t - factorization quadratures for the inclusive dijet cross sections. The concept of a coherent (collective) nuclear glue proves extremely useful for the formulation of reggeon field theory vertices of multipomeron - cut and uncut - couplings to particles and between themselves. A departure of our unitarity cutting rules from the ones suggested by the pre-QCD Abramovsky-Kancheli-Gribov rules, stems from the coupled-channel features of intranuclear pQCD. We propose a multiplicity re-summation as a tool for the isolation of topological cross sections for single-jet production.Comment: 53 pages, 16 eps-figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

A Comprehensive Archival Search for Counterparts to Ultra-Compact High Velocity Clouds: Five Local Volume Dwarf Galaxies

We report five Local Volume dwarf galaxies (two of which are presented here for the first time) uncovered during a comprehensive archival search for optical counterparts to ultra-compact high velocity clouds (UCHVCs). The UCHVC population of HI clouds are thought to be candidate gas-rich, low mass halos at the edge of the Local Group and beyond, but no comprehensive search for stellar counterparts to these systems has been presented. Careful visual inspection of all publicly available optical and ultraviolet imaging at the position of the UCHVCs revealed six blue, diffuse counterparts with a morphology consistent with a faint dwarf galaxy beyond the Local Group. Optical spectroscopy of all six candidate dwarf counterparts show that five have an H$\alpha$-derived velocity consistent with the coincident HI cloud, confirming their association, the sixth diffuse counterpart is likely a background object. The size and luminosity of the UCHVC dwarfs is consistent with other known Local Volume dwarf irregular galaxies. The gas fraction ($M_{HI}/M_{star}$) of the five dwarfs are generally consistent with that of dwarf irregular galaxies in the Local Volume, although ALFALFA-Dw1 (associated with ALFALFA UCHVC HVC274.68+74.70$-$123) has a very high $M_{HI}/M_{star}$$\sim$40. Despite the heterogenous nature of our search, we demonstrate that the current dwarf companions to UCHVCs are at the edge of detectability due to their low surface brightness, and that deeper searches are likely to find more stellar systems. If more sensitive searches do not reveal further stellar counterparts to UCHVCs, then the dearth of such systems around the Local Group may be in conflict with $\Lambda$CDM simulations.Comment: 18 pages, 4 tables, 4 figures, ApJ Accepte

Line Profiles from Discrete Kinematic Data

We develop a method to extract the shape information of line profiles from discrete kinematic data. The Gauss-Hermite expansion, which is widely used to describe the line of sight velocity distributions extracted from absorption spectra of elliptical galaxies, is not readily applicable to samples of discrete stellar velocity measurements, accompanied by individual measurement errors and probabilities of membership. We introduce two parameter families of probability distributions describing symmetric and asymmetric distortions of the line profiles from Gaussianity. These are used as the basis of a maximum likelihood estimator to quantify the shape of the line profiles. Tests show that the method outperforms a Gauss-Hermite expansion for discrete data, with a lower limit for the relative gain of approx 2 for sample sizes N approx 800. To ensure that our methods can give reliable descriptions of the shape, we develop an efficient test to assess the statistical quality of the obtained fit. As an application, we turn our attention to the discrete velocity datasets of the dwarf spheroidals of the Milky Way. In Sculptor, Carina and Sextans the symmetric deviations are consistent with velocity distributions more peaked than Gaussian. In Fornax, instead, there is an evolution in the symmetric deviations of the line profile from a peakier to more flat-topped distribution on moving outwards. These results suggest a radially biased orbital structure for the outer parts of Sculptor, Carina and Sextans. On the other hand, tangential anisotropy is favoured in Fornax. This is all consistent with a picture in which Fornax may have had a different evolutionary history to Sculptor, Carina and Sextans.Comment: MNRAS, accepted for publication, minor change

Segue 2: A Prototype of the Population of Satellites of Satellites

We announce the discovery of a new Milky Way satellite Segue 2 found in the data of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE). We followed this up with deeper imaging and spectroscopy on the Multiple Mirror Telescope. From this, we derive a luminosity of M_v = -2.5, a half-light radius of 34 pc and a systemic velocity of -40$ km/s. Our MMT data also provides evidence for a stream around Segue 2 at a similar heliocentric velocity, and the SEGUE data show that it is also present in neighboring fields. We resolve the velocity dispersion of Segue 2 as 3.4 km/s and the possible stream as about 7 km/s. This object shows points of comparison with other recent discoveries, Segue 1, Boo II and Coma. We speculate that all four objects may be representatives of a population of satellites of satellites -- survivors of accretion events that destroyed their larger but less dense parents. They are likely to have formed at redshifts z > 10 and are good candidates for fossils of the reionization epoch.Comment: MNRAS, Submitte

A Keck/DEIMOS spectroscopic survey of faint Galactic satellites: searching for the least massive dwarf galaxies

[abridged] We present the results of a spectroscopic survey of the recently discovered faint Milky Way satellites Boo, UMaI, UMaII and Wil1. Using the DEIMOS spectrograph on Keck, we have obtained samples that contain from 15 to 85 probable members of these satellites for which we derive radial velocities precise to a few km/s down to i~21-22. About half of these stars are observed with a high enough S/N to estimate their metallicity to within \pm0.2 dex. From this dataset, we show that UMaII is the only object that does not show a clear radial velocity peak. However, the measured systemic radial velocity (v_r=115\pm5 km/s) is in good agreement with recent simulations in which this object is the progenitor of the recently discovered Orphan Stream. The three other satellites show velocity dispersions that make them highly dark-matter dominated systems. In particular the Willman 1 object is not a globular cluster given its metallicity scatter over -2.0<[Fe/H]<-1.0 and is therefore almost certainly a dwarf galaxy or dwarf galaxy remnant. We measure a radial velocity dispersion of only 4.3_{-1.3}^{+2.3} km/s around a systemic velocity of -12.3\pm2.3 km/s which implies a mass-to-light ratio of ~700 and a total mass of ~5x10^5 Msun for this satellite, making it the least massive satellite galaxy known to date. Such a low mass could mean that the 10^7 Msun limit that had until now never been crossed for Milky Way and Andromeda satellite galaxies may only be an observational limit and that fainter, less massive systems exist within the Local Group. However, more modeling and an extended search for potential extra-tidal stars are required to rule out the possibility that these systems have not been significantly heated by tidal interaction.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS accepte

NGC 2419 -- Another Remnant of Accretion by the Milky Way

We isolate a sample of 43 upper RGB stars in the extreme outer halo Galactic globular cluster NGC 2419 from two Keck/DEIMOS slitmasks. The probability that there is more than one contaminating halo field star in this sample is extremely low. Analysis of moderate resolution spectra of these cluster members, as well as of our Keck/HIRES high resolution spectra of a subsample of them, demonstrates that there is a small but real spread in Ca abundance of ~ 0.2 dex within this massive metal-poor globular cluster. This provides additional support to earlier suggestions that NGC 2419 is the remnant of a dwarf galaxy accreted long ago by the Milky Way.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journa