High-reliability release mechanism

Release mechanism employing simple clevis fitting in combination with two pin-pullers achieves high reliability degree through active mechanical redundancy. Mechanism releases solar arrays. It is simple and inexpensive and performs effectively. It adapts to other release-system applications with variety of pin-puller devices

What’s missing? Mentee training seminars for students of interpreter training programs

The purpose of this professional project was to identify what current practicum students of Interpreter Training Programs know and understand about the Mentorship process. This study aimed to collect information regarding their current knowledge of the terms Mentorship, Mentor, and Mentee, and what their experiences with mentorship were like. The larger and overarching question that led to this research study was, Would a training session on Mentorship be beneficial for our students prior to beginning a mentored relationship? An online survey was sent to two ITPs and had a total of 21 participants. The findings show that students receive little to no training about the mentorship process, and the majority of participants do believe that prior training would have been helpful. The findings also show that mentorship is viewed as a relationship between the mentor (experienced interpreter) and the mentee (less experienced interpreter, student). Embedded in the data are a variety of factors that promote and hinder the success of the mentorship. This research was then used to develop a training seminar designed specifically for interpreting students about to enter their practicum or internship courses. Mentorship is a way to bridge the gap between student and professional status, and ease the transition into the interpreting field (RID, 2007). The goal of this training is that with a full understanding of what and how the relationship between mentor and mentee is developed and fostered, both the student and the professional interpreter are able to engage in the mentorship process effectively

Effects of microcosm scaling and food resources on growth and survival of larval Culex pipiens

BACKGROUND: We used a simple experimental design to test for the effects of microcosm scaling on the growth and survival of the mosquito, Culex pipiens. Microcosm and mesocosm studies are commonly used in ecology, and there is often an assumption that scaling doesn't affect experimental outcomes. The assumption is implicit in the design; choice of mesocosms may be arbitrary or based on convenience or cost. We tested the hypothesis that scale would influence larvae due to depth and surface area effects. Larvae were predicted to perform poorly in microcosms that were both deep and had small openings, due to buildup of waste products, less exchange with the environment, and increased competition. To determine if the choice of scale affected responses to other factors, we independently varied leaf litter quantity, whose effects on mosquitoes are well known. RESULTS: We found adverse effects of both a lower wall surface area and lower horizontal surface area, but microcosm scale interacted with resources such that C. pipiens is affected by habitat size only when food resources are scarce. At low resource levels mosquitoes were fewer, but larger, in microcosms with smaller horizontal surface area and greater depth than in microcosms with greater horizontal surface area and shallower depth. Microcosms with more vertical surface area/volume often produced larger mosquitoes; more food may have been available since mosquitoes browse on walls and other substrates for food. CONCLUSIONS: The interaction between habitat size and food abundance is consequential to aquatic animals, and choice of scale in experiments may affect results. Varying surface area and depth causes the scale effect, with small horizontal surface area and large depth decreasing matter exchange with the surrounding environment. In addition, fewer resources leads to less leaf surface area, and the effects of varying surface area will be greater under conditions of limiting resources. This leads to smaller size, which limits fecundity and survival. Choice of container size, either by ovipositing females or researchers, interacts with a major aspect of the ecology of animals; obtaining resources in a resource-limited environment

MISR stereoscopic image matchers: techniques and results

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument, launched in December 1999 on the NASA EOS Terra satellite, produces images in the red band at 275-m resolution, over a swath width of 360 km, for the nine camera angles 70.5/spl deg/, 60/spl deg/, 45.6/spl deg/, and 26.1/spl deg/ forward, nadir, and 26.1/spl deg/, 45.6/spl deg/, 60/spl deg/, and 70.5/spl deg/ aft. A set of accurate and fast algorithms was developed for automated stereo matching of cloud features to obtain cloud-top height and motion over the nominal six-year lifetime of the mission. Accuracy and speed requirements necessitated the use of a combination of area-based and feature-based stereo-matchers with only pixel-level acuity. Feature-based techniques are used for cloud motion retrieval with the off-nadir MISR camera views, and the motion is then used to provide a correction to the disparities used to measure cloud-top heights which are derived from the innermost three cameras. Intercomparison with a previously developed "superstereo" matcher shows that the results are very comparable in accuracy with much greater coverage and at ten times the speed. Intercomparison of feature-based and area-based techniques shows that the feature-based techniques are comparable in accuracy at a factor of eight times the speed. An assessment of the accuracy of the area-based matcher for cloud-free scenes demonstrates the accuracy and completeness of the stereo-matcher. This trade-off has resulted in the loss of a reliable quality metric to predict accuracy and a slightly high blunder rate. Examples are shown of the application of the MISR stereo-matchers on several difficult scenes which demonstrate the efficacy of the matching approach

Algorithms for FFT Beamforming Radio Interferometers

Radio interferometers consisting of identical antennas arranged on a regular lattice permit fast Fourier transform beamforming, which reduces the correlation cost from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ in the number of antennas to $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. We develop a formalism for describing this process and apply this formalism to derive a number of algorithms with a range of observational applications. These include algorithms for forming arbitrarily pointed tied-array beams from the regularly spaced Fourier-transform formed beams, sculpting the beams to suppress sidelobes while only losing percent-level sensitivity, and optimally estimating the position of a detected source from its observed brightness in the set of beams. We also discuss the effect that correlations in the visibility-space noise, due to cross-talk and sky contributions, have on the optimality of Fourier transform beamforming, showing that it does not strictly preserve the sky information of the $n^2$ correlation, even for an idealized array. Our results have applications to a number of upcoming interferometers, in particular the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment--Fast Radio Burst (CHIME/FRB) project.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, accepted to Ap

Quality of Care in Community Health Centers and Factors Associated With Performance

Federally funded community health centers are a key source of comprehensive primary care for medically underserved communities, serving more than 20 million patients in 2011. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded the health center program significantly to help meet the increased demand for health care that is expected as millions of the uninsured gain health coverage, beginning in 2014. Especially given health centers’ growing role, evidence of the quality of care they provide is of keen interest. Most research shows high performance by health centers relative to various standards, but some gaps have also been found, and suitable benchmarks for assessing the quality of care provided by health centers, which serve a uniquely disadvantaged population, have been lacking. Recently, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured (KCMU) partnered with the George Washington University to analyze health center performance relative to Medicaid managed care organizations (MCO), which also serve a low-income population, on important measures of quality of care – diabetes control, blood pressure control, and receipt of a Pap test in the past three years. The study also aimed to identify factors that differ significantly between high-performing and lower-performing health centers. Using data reported in the federal 2010 Uniform Data System (UDS) by health centers and the 2008 Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) for Medicaid MCOs, we defined health centers as “high-performing” if their rates exceeded the 75th percentile of Medicaid MCO HEDIS scores on all three of our quality measures. We defined health centers as “lower-performing” if their rates were below the mean Medicaid MCO HEDIS score on all three measures

Health Center Trends: Recent Experience in Medicaid Expansion and Non-Expansion States.

In thousands of medically underserved communities across the U.S., community health centers enroll lowincome people in health coverage and provide care to millions of patients. Against the backdrop of significant health center expansion over several years and a full year of expanded health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this brief examines change between 2013 and 2014 in the volume and health coverage profile of health center patients, and health center enrollment activities and service capacity, comparing states that implemented the ACA Medicaid expansion in 2014 and states that did not expand Medicaid in 2014. The study is based on 2014 data from the federal Uniform Data System and a 2014 national survey of health centers

Community Health Centers in an Era of Health Reform: An Overview and Key Challenges to Health Center Growth

Today, over 1,100 federally funded community health centers play a vital role in ensuring access to health care for a predominantly low-income population in medically underserved communities. Health centers’ ability to provide comprehensive primary care and improve access to high-quality care while holding down health care cost growth has been well-documented. As health reform spurs coverage expansion and efforts to improve quality, the nation’s reliance on health centers is likely to grow. In the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Congress invested $11 billion over five years to expand the health center program, to broaden access to care in lower-income communities as coverage expands. As policymakers and others gear up for ACA implementation, understanding the role of health centers and the characteristics of the people they serve is increasingly important. This brief provides a current snapshot of health centers and discusses recent developments that can be expected to have a significant impact on health center growth in the coming years

Community Health Centers: A 2013 Profile and Prospects as ACA Implementation Proceeds

In 2013, more than 1,200 federally funded community health centers provided access to care for low-income populations living in medically underserved communities throughout the country. The Affordable Care Act made expansion of health centers a key part of its strategy for ensuring that these communities would realize the benefits of increased health insurance coverage for their residents. As health insurance coverage expands under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the demand for primary care increases, the role of health centers is likely to increase. A key question going forward is whether health centers’ expanded capacity, developed over the past five years, will be sustained going forward