Improving Students’ Oral Communication Skills Through an Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning Opportunity in a Sport Management Course

This study adopted several pedagogical foundations to determine if an interdisciplinary, problem-based learning (PBL) opportunity applied to teaching sport marketing would improve student’ individual and group oral communication skills. Faculty from two departments collaborated to create an assignment that was a hands-on class project designed around formative assessment, lecture intervention, and final PBL deliverable. The PBL and interdisciplinary design addressed the need for enhanced communication skills in the sport management industry. The study results indicate a successful development of the students’ data analysis and presentation skills. Findings confirm an interdisciplinary approach to PBL by implementing communication skill development across disciplines

AI-Informed Approaches to Keyword Generation, Text Summarization, and Document Clustering for Improved Resource Discovery

Academic and cultural institutions are grappling with problems of how to organize, label, and search disparate bodies of texts. As aggregators, preservers, and disseminators of substantial repositories of digital texts, research libraries are naturally situated at the heart of these problems. This chapter explores how unsupervised machine learning may be used to capture and simplify the complexity and nuances of text. Traditional approaches to improving discoverability and accessibility of text through metadata and controlled vocabularies have time-tested strengths. As the volume of digital data explodes, the obstacles and limitations of traditional approaches become more pronounced, and machine learning “show(s) the potential to create efficiencies that smooth the path to access, enhancing description and expanding forms of discovery along the way.”1 In light of the need for new approaches to metadata generation to facilitate discovery, the authors look at Doc2Vec and topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to explore their utility as assistive tools for authors, librarians, and readers. The authors apply the two approaches to a corpus of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) completed at Ohio universities and colleges

E2E Program

United States Department of Homeland Security University of Alaska Anchorag

Influence of grille spacing on the uplift behaviour of steel grillages for OHLs

The increasing development of renewable energy (e.g. on and offshore wind) has increased the demand on existing electricity transmission networks in the UK. However, the remoteness of the transmission network, particularly in Scotland, makes upgrade and renewal, both economically and environmentally challenging, with often highly restrictive access constraints. Steel grillages are an alternative non-concrete foundation that can be loaded immediately post-backfill and transported to remote locations using low-ground pressure vehicles or helicopters. This paper investigates the optimisation of steel grillages for overhead line foundations such that the uplift load-displacement response is comparable to solid foundations (i.e. a concrete pad). Initial 1g uplift tests have shown that the optimal grille-spacing-to-width ratio (/) for a comparable ultimate uplift capacity to a solid plate lies within 1 < / < 2

Approximation Algorithms for Quantum Max-dd-Cut

We initiate the algorithmic study of the Quantum Max-$d$-Cut problem, a quantum generalization of the well-known Max-$d$-Cut problem. The Quantum Max-$d$-Cut problem involves finding a quantum state that maximizes the expected energy associated with the projector onto the antisymmetric subspace of two, $d$-dimensional qudits over all local interactions. Equivalently, this problem is physically motivated by the $SU(d)$-Heisenberg model, a spin glass model that generalized the well-known Heisenberg model over qudits. We develop a polynomial-time randomized approximation algorithm that finds product-state solutions of mixed states with bounded purity that achieve non-trivial performance guarantees. Moreover, we prove the tightness of our analysis by presenting an algorithmic gap instance for Quantum Max-d-Cut problem with $d \geq 3$.Comment: 42 page

Growth rate, transmission mode and virulence in human pathogens.

The harm that pathogens cause to hosts during infection, termed virulence, varies across species from negligible to a high likelihood of rapid death. Classic theory for the evolution of virulence is based on a trade-off between pathogen growth, transmission and host survival, which predicts that higher within-host growth causes increased transmission and higher virulence. However, using data from 61 human pathogens, we found the opposite correlation to the expected positive correlation between pathogen growth rate and virulence. We found that (i) slower growing pathogens are significantly more virulent than faster growing pathogens, (ii) inhaled pathogens and pathogens that infect via skin wounds are significantly more virulent than pathogens that are ingested, but (iii) there is no correlation between symptoms of infection that aid transmission (such as diarrhoea and coughing) and virulence. Overall, our results emphasize how virulence can be influenced by mechanistic life-history details, especially transmission mode, that determine how parasites infect and exploit their hosts.This article is part of the themed issue 'Opening the black box: re-examining the ecology and evolution of parasite transmission'

Evaluation of the angiotensin II receptor blocker azilsartan medoxomil in African-American patients with hypertension

The efficacy and safety of azilsartan medoxomil (AZL-M) were evaluated in African-American patients with hypertension in a 6-week, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, for which the primary end point was change from baseline in 24-hour mean systolic blood pressure (BP). There were 413 patients, with a mean age of 52years, 57% women, and baseline 24-hour BP of 146/91mmHg. Treatment differences in 24-hour systolic BP between AZL-M 40mg and placebo (-5.0mmHg; 95% confidence interval, -8.0 to -2.0) and AZL-M 80mg and placebo (-7.8mmHg; 95% confidence interval, -10.7 to -4.9) were significant (P.001 vs placebo for both comparisons). Changes in the clinic BPs were similar to the ambulatory BP results. Incidence rates of adverse events were comparable among the treatment groups, including those of a serious nature. In African-American patients with hypertension, AZL-M significantly reduced ambulatory and clinic BPs in a dose-dependent manner and was well tolerated

The relationship between patient volume and mortality in NSW major trauma service hospitals

Introduction: Conventional wisdom is that Major Trauma Services (MTS) treating larger volumes of severe trauma patients will have better outcomes than lower volume centres, but recent studies from Europe have questioned this relationship. We aimed to determine if there is a relationship between patient volume and outcome in New South Wales (NSW) MTS hospitals. Materials and Methods: Retrospective observational study using data from the NSW State Trauma Registry from 2010 to 2019 inclusive. Adult patients with Injury Severity Score &gt;15 transported directly to a NSW MTS were included. Outcome measures were mortality at hospital discharge, and intensive care unit and hospital length of stay. Generalised estimating equation models were created to determine the adjusted relationship between patient volume and the main outcome measures. Results: The mean annual patient volume of the MTS ranged from 127.4 to 282.0 patients whilst the observed mortality rates p.a. ranged from 10.4 % to 17.19 %. Multivariate analysis, using low volume MTS as the reference, did not demonstrate a significant difference in mortality between high and low volume MTS (adjusted OR: 1.14 95 % CI: 0.98–1.25, P = 0.087). There was however a significant correlation between volume and length of hospital stay (adjusted β; 0.024, 95 % CI, 0.182 – 1.089, P = 0.006). Conclusions: There was no mortality difference between high and low volume MTS demonstrated. Length of hospital stay significantly increased with increasing volume however.</p

Inclined gravity currents filling basins: The influence of Reynolds number on entrainment into gravity currents

In many important natural and industrial systems, gravity currents of dense fluid feed basins. Examples include lakes fed by dense rivers and auditoria supplied with cooled air by ventilation systems. As we will show, the entrainment into such buoyancy driven currents can be influenced by viscous forces. Little work, however, has examined this viscous influence and how entrainment varies with the Reynolds number, Re. Using the idea of an entrainment coefficient, E, we derive a mathematical expression for the rise of the front at the top of the dense fluid ponding in a basin, where the horizontal cross-sectional area of the basin varies linearly with depth. We compare this expression to experiments on gravity currents with source Reynolds numbers, Res , covering the broad range 100 < Res < 1500. The form of the observed frontal rises was well approximated by our theory. By fitting the observed frontal rises to the theoretical form with E as the free parameter, we find a linear trend for E(Res ) over the range 350 < Res < 1100, which is in the transition to turbulent flow. In the experiments, the entrainment coefficient, E, varied from 4 × 10−5 to 7 × 10−2. These observations show that viscous damping can be a dominant influence on gravity current entrainment in the laboratory and in geophysical flows in this transitional regime

Multisite gynecologic endometrioid adenocarcinomas: Can mutation profiling be used to distinguish synchronous primary cancers from metastases?

It is well recognized that some patients with endometrioid gynecological cancers have tumors arising in multiple sites (ovary, endometrium, and endometriosis) at the time of diagnosis. Molecular analysis has helped discern whether these multisite cancers represent synchronous primary tumors or alternatively metastatic disease. We present a complex case of a patient with endometrioid carcinomas arising in multiple sites. We discuss the use of mutation profiling to discern clonality and highlight how this information may inform the clinical management of such cases