Fee-for-Placement in Level II Fieldwork: Prevalence and Context

Occupational therapy (OT) education has utilized fieldwork experiences to develop professional identity and clinical competency of entry-level OT practitioners since 1923. Level II OT fieldwork is viewed as a necessary and valuable experience by students, clinicians, and academicians. Despite the significant role fieldwork has in the formation of the future workforce, some educational programs report a shortage of OT fieldwork placement sites and the emergence of fee-for-placement fieldwork sites. The purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence and context of fee-for-placement for Level II OT fieldwork in the United States. Investigators surveyed master’s and doctoral level OT programs to examine their experience with requests for fee-for-placement fieldwork sites. The response rate was 32% (58 of 128 programs). Approximately two-thirds (67%, n=38) of respondents reported a decrease in number of Level II placement reservations. Eighty-two percent of programs reported encountering sites who requested fee-for-placement and almost half (43%, n=25) anticipated this trend to increase in the future. The majority of programs (89%, n=52) indicated they avoid placing students at fieldwork sites who charge for placement. The observed trend in fee-for-placement fieldwork may affect OT education by yielding significant implications related to finances, selection and placement processes, and compliance with professional values and ethics for programs and students. The concerns raised by the respondents may warrant a profession-wide consensus and direction toward addressing fieldwork shortages and fee-for-placements

Using a continuum model to predict closure time of gaps in intestinal epithelial cell layers

A two-dimensional continuum model of collective cell migration is used to predict the closure of gaps in intestinal epithelial cell layers. The model assumes that cell migration is governed by lamellipodia formation, cell-cell adhesion, and cell-substrate adhesion. Model predictions of the gap edge position and complete gap closure time are compared with experimental measures from cell layer scratch assays (also called scratch wound assays). The goal of the study is to combine experimental observations with mathematical descriptions of cell motion to identify effects of gap shape and area on closure time and to propose a method that uses a simple measure (e.g., area) to predict overall gap closure time early in the closure process. Gap closure time is shown to increase linearly with increasing gap area; however, gaps of equal areas but different aspect ratios differ greatly in healing time. Previous methods that calculate overall healing time according to the absolute or percent change in gap area assume that the gap area changes at a constant rate and typically underestimate gap closure time. In this study, data from scratch assays suggest that the rate of change of area is proportional to the first power or square root power of area

Ordering and dimensional crossovers in metallic glasses and liquids

The atomic-level structures of liquids and glasses are amorphous, lacking long-range order. We characterize the atomic structures by integrating radial distribution functions (RDF) from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for several metallic liquids and glasses: Cu46Zr54, Ni80Al20, Ni33.3Zr66.7, and Pd82Si18. Resulting cumulative coordination numbers (CN) show that metallic liquids have a dimension of d = 2.55 +/- 0.06 from the center atom to the first coordination shell and metallic glasses have d = 2.71 +/- 0.04, both less than 3. Between the first and second coordination shells, both phases crossover to a dimension of d = 3, as for a crystal. Observations from discrete atom center-of-mass position counting are corroborated by continuously counting Cu glass- and liquid-phase atoms on an artificial grid, which accounts for the occupied atomic volume. Results from Cu grid analysis show short-range d = 2.65 for Cu liquid and d = 2.76 for Cu glass. Cu grid structures crossover to d = 3 at {\xi}~8 {\AA} (~3 atomic diameters). We study the evolution of local structural dimensions during quenching and discuss its correlation with the glass transition phenomenon.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures in main tex

Test-Time Personalization with Meta Prompt for Gaze Estimation

Despite the recent remarkable achievement in gaze estimation, efficient and accurate personalization of gaze estimation without labels is a practical problem but rarely touched on in the literature. To achieve efficient personalization, we take inspiration from the recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by updating a negligible number of parameters, "prompts", at the test time. Specifically, the prompt is additionally attached without perturbing original network and can contain less than 1% of a ResNet-18's parameters. Our experiments show high efficiency of the prompt tuning approach. The proposed one can be 10 times faster in terms of adaptation speed than the methods compared. However, it is non-trivial to update the prompt for personalized gaze estimation without labels. At the test time, it is essential to ensure that the minimizing of particular unsupervised loss leads to the goals of minimizing gaze estimation error. To address this difficulty, we propose to meta-learn the prompt to ensure that its updates align with the goal. Our experiments show that the meta-learned prompt can be effectively adapted even with a simple symmetry loss. In addition, we experiment on four cross-dataset validations to show the remarkable advantages of the proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/hmarkamcan/TPGaze.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202

HIV+ Youth in the Twin Cities may be Engaged in Case Management but not Retained in Medical Care

Faculty Advisor: Jonathan RavdinThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

Imbalances in Mobilization and Activation of Pro-Inflammatory and Vascular Reparative Bone Marrow-Derived Cells in Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy is a sight-threatening complication of diabetes, affecting 65% of patients after 10 years of the disease. Diabetic metabolic insult leads to chronic low-grade inflammation, retinal endothelial cell loss and inadequate vascular repair. This is partly due to bone marrow (BM) pathology leading to increased activity of BM-derived pro-inflammatory monocytes and impaired function of BM-derived reparative circulating angiogenic cells (CACs). We propose that diabetes has a significant long-term effect on the nature and proportion of BM-derived cells that circulate in the blood, localize to the retina and home back to their BM niche. Using a streptozotocin mouse model of diabetic retinopathy with GFP BM-transplantation, we have demonstrated that BM-derived circulating pro-inflammatory monocytes are increased in diabetes while reparative CACs are trapped in the BM and spleen, with impaired release into circulation. Diabetes also alters activation of splenocytes and BM-derived dendritic cells in response to LPS stimulation. A majority of the BM-derived GFP cells that migrate to the retina express microglial markers, while others express endothelial, pericyte and Müller cell markers. Diabetes significantly increases infiltration of BM-derived microglia in an activated state, while reducing infiltration of BM-derived endothelial progenitor cells in the retina. Further, control CACs injected into the vitreous are very efficient at migrating back to their BM niche, whereas diabetic CACs have lost this ability, indicating that the in vivo homing efficiency of diabetic CACs is dramatically decreased. Moreover, diabetes causes a significant reduction in expression of specific integrins regulating CAC migration. Collectively, these findings indicate that BM pathology in diabetes could play a role in both increased pro-inflammatory state and inadequate vascular repair contributing to diabetic retinopathy