Designing collaborative strategic planning to engage your community and your library

The University of Pittsburgh University Library System (USA) completely revamped their strategic planning process in 5 years and here is how you can too

Reinvigorating strategic planning: An inclusive, collaborative process.

This article describes a redesigned inclusive planning process put into place at the University Library System (ULS) of the University of Pittsburgh, a state-related university in Pennsylvania. While we write from the perspective of a large, research library with a staff of 200, we believe that our experience with the principles and practices of participatory planning can apply in many library sizes and contexts

Re-Placing Research in the Literature Classroom

Putting research at the conceptual center of the literature classroom renews literature students’ place in the university. Students develop independent projects that make original contributions to scholarship, reinvigorate literary study, and make them competitive candidates for research fellowships. The leaders of this workshop will share their experience working on an experimental course that both redrew the relationship between the classroom and the library and offered students a new approach to research and literary study. They will discuss how the collaboration led to innovations in literary pedagogy and facilitated undergraduates’ use of contemporary digital research methods. Drawing on this experience, they will invite participants to imagine other models and offer approaches that are adaptable to various institutional and pedagogical circumstances

A Data Cube Extraction Pipeline for a Coronagraphic Integral Field Spectrograph

Project 1640 is a high contrast near-infrared instrument probing the vicinities of nearby stars through the unique combination of an integral field spectrograph with a Lyot coronagraph and a high-order adaptive optics system. The extraordinary data reduction demands, similar those which several new exoplanet imaging instruments will face in the near future, have been met by the novel software algorithms described herein. The Project 1640 Data Cube Extraction Pipeline (PCXP) automates the translation of 3.8*10^4 closely packed, coarsely sampled spectra to a data cube. We implement a robust empirical model of the spectrograph focal plane geometry to register the detector image at sub-pixel precision, and map the cube extraction. We demonstrate our ability to accurately retrieve source spectra based on an observation of Saturn's moon Titan.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figures; accepted for publication in PAS

The influence of the ligand chelate effect on iron-amine-catalysed Kumada cross-coupling

The performance of Fe-amine pre-catalysts in a representative Kumada reaction is inversely proportional to the lability of the chelate ligand.</p

A Catalyst for Connections: A Collaborative Strategic Planning Process

A revamped inclusive strategic planning process in the University Library System (ULS) has created two kinds of connections. It has created new connections in the library system and new partnerships with the university. In a yearly cycle, the Planning and Budget Committee (PBC) thinks about and creates strategic direction for the library system by gathering input from all library staff in a variety of ways. In the words of one PBC member: “What I love most about PBC is that everyone in the ULS has a voice. And there's a process that moves from highlighting lots of individual thoughts to discovering collective concerns.” These collective concerns strive to create strategic vision for partnerships outside of the library. A main benefit of the reinvigorated planning process has been the creation of connections between staff in a very large, distributed library environment. In the words of another PBC member, these connections are “fostering relationships across the organization that otherwise would have been a real challenge. PBC alumni take away friendships with people from across the ULS, and those friendships help us all build bridges for collaboration moving forward.” Two chairs of the PBC will present their findings of connectivity in this planning process and how you can apply it in your own settings

Impact of results-based financing on effective obstetric care coverage : evidence from a quasi-experimental study in Malawi

Background: Results-based financing (RBF) describes health system approaches addressing both service quality and use. Effective coverage is a metric measuring progress towards universal health coverage (UHC). Although considered a means towards achieving UHC in settings with weak health financing modalities, the impact of RBF on effective coverage has not been explicitly studied. Methods: Malawi introduced the Results-Based Financing For Maternal and Neonatal Health (RBF4MNH) Initiative in 2013 to improve quality of maternal and newborn health services at emergency obstetric care facilities. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined the impact of the RBF4MNH on both crude and effective coverage of pregnant women across four districts during the two years following implementation. Results: There was no effect on crude coverage. With a larger proportion of women in intervention areas receiving more effective care over time, the overall net increase in effective coverage was 7.1%-points (p = 0.07). The strongest impact on effective coverage (31.0%-point increase, p = 0.02) occurred only at lower cut-off level (60% of maximum score) of obstetric care effectiveness. Design-specific and wider health system factors likely limited the program's potential to produce stronger effects. Conclusion: The RBF4MNH improved effective coverage of pregnant women and seems to be a promising reform approach towards reaching UHC. Given the short study period, the full potential of the current RBF scheme has likely not yet been reached.Peer reviewe

Flaxseed-Derived Enterolactone Is Inversely Associated with Tumor Cell Proliferation in Men with Localized Prostate Cancer

Enterolactone and enterodiol, mammalian lignans derived from dietary sources such as flaxseed, sesame seeds, kale, broccoli, and apricots, may impede tumor proliferation by inhibiting activation of nuclear factor kappa B (NF?B) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). We examined the associations between urinary enterolactone and enterodiol with prostatic tumor expression of NF?B, VEGF, and Ki67 among 147 patients with prostate cancer who participated in a presurgical trial of flaxseed supplementation (30?g/day) for ?30 days. Urinary enterolignans and tissue biomarkers were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography and immunohistochemistry, respectively. After supplementation, we observed significant correlations between intakes of plant lignan and urinary concentrations of total enterolignans (?=0.677, P<.0001), enterolactone (?=0.676, P<.0001), and enterodiol (?=0.628, P<.0001). Importantly, we observed that total urinary enterolignans and enterolactone were significantly and inversely correlated with Ki67 in the tumor tissue (?=?0.217, P=.011, and ?=?0.230, P=.007, respectively), and a near-significant inverse association was observed for enterodiol (?=?0.159, P=.064). An inverse association was observed between enterolactone and VEGF (?=?0.143, P=.141), although this did not reach statistical significance. We did not observe an association between enterolignans and NF?B. In conclusion, flaxseed-derived enterolignans may hinder cancer cell proliferation via VEGF-associated pathways.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140111/1/jmf.2012.0159.pd

The Role of Parvalbumin-positive Interneurons in Auditory Steady-State Response Deficits in Schizophrenia

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Despite an increasing body of evidence demonstrating subcellular alterations in parvalbumin-positive (PV+) interneurons in schizophrenia, their functional consequences remain elusive. Since PV+ interneurons are involved in the generation of fast cortical rhythms, these changes have been hypothesized to contribute to well-established alterations of beta and gamma range oscillations in patients suffering from schizophrenia. However, the precise role of these alterations and the role of different subtypes of PV+ interneurons is still unclear. Here we used a computational model of auditory steady-state response (ASSR) deficits in schizophrenia. We investigated the differential effects of decelerated synaptic dynamics, caused by subcellular alterations at two subtypes of PV+ interneurons: basket cells and chandelier cells. Our simulations suggest that subcellular alterations at basket cell synapses rather than chandelier cell synapses are the main contributor to these deficits. Particularly, basket cells might serve as target for innovative therapeutic interventions aiming at reversing the oscillatory deficits.Peer reviewe