Getting Started in Your Neighborhood: Piloting Community Health Teams through a Multi-Payer Approach

The Care Transformation Collaborative of Rhode Island (CTC), a patient-centered medical home initiative managed by UMass Medical School, explains how primary care practices can build a medical neighborhood by creating a community health team to provide behavioral health and social support services to patients with high-cost, complex care needs. CTC used a multi-payer approach to pilot and evaluate two community health teams in two diverse areas of Rhode Island

Finding Top UI/UX Design Talent on Adobe Behance

AbstractThe Behance social network allows professionals of diverse artistic disciplines to exhibit their work and connect amongst each other. We investigate the network properties of the UX/UI designer subgraph. Considering the subgraph is motivated by the idea that professionals in the same discipline are more likely to give a realistic assessment of a colleague's work. We therefore developed a metric to assess the influence and importance of a specific member of the community based on structural properties of the subgraph and additional measures of prestige. For that purpose, we identified appreciations as a useful measure to include in a weighted PageRank algorithm, as it adds a notion of perceived quality of the work in the artist's portfolio to the ranking, which is not contained in the structural information of the graph. With this weighted PageRank, we identified locations that have a high density of influential UX/UI designers

Microdialysis fluxes of inorganic nitrogen differ from extractable nitrogen by minimising disturbance of mineral-associated sources

Measuring soil nitrogen (N) provides important information for ecosystem productivity and improving N use efficiency in agricultural systems. Conventional means of sampling N using soil extractions disturb soil structure and function, and likely distort accurate quantification. In situ microdialysis is a novel sampling method that generates differing N profiles compared to soil extractions. Here we test the hypothesis that differences observed between sampling methods are due to the minimal disturbance and sampling of a mobile N fraction when using microdialysis, with discernible patterns expected across soils with distinct clay and organic matter contents. In a short-term laboratory microcosm experiment with 21 sugarcane cropping soils, we compared salt (potassium chloride; KCl) or aqueous (H2O) extractants and microdialysis. KCl-extractable ammonium (NH4+) was highly correlated with the content of clay, total N and carbon, indicative of bound N being solubilised. In contrast, NH4 (+) contributed significantly less to microdialysis fluxes and was not correlated with the measured soil properties, which we attribute to minimal disturbance of bound N center dot H2O extracts sampled proportionally more NH4 (+) than microdialysis but were significantly correlated with fluxes. This suggests that while microdialysis and H2O extraction sample from a dissolved N pool, H2O extracts sample from an additional pool of loosely-bound NH4+. Nitrate (NO3) measures were correlated between methods, but shared no relationship with the measured soil properties, indicating that NO3 sampling is less affected by the disturbance introduced by extractions. We conclude that sampling inorganic N is biased by the degree to which soil sampling methods disturb adsorbed N sources with implications for interpreting soil N measurements

New Aspects of Phloem-Mediated Long-Distance Lipid Signaling in Plants

Plants are sessile and cannot move to appropriate hiding places or feeding grounds to escape adverse conditions. As a consequence, they evolved mechanisms to detect changes in their environment, communicate these to different organs, and adjust development accordingly. These adaptations include two long-distance transport systems which are essential in plants: the xylem and the phloem. The phloem serves as a major trafficking pathway for assimilates, viruses, RNA, plant hormones, metabolites, and proteins with functions ranging from synthesis to metabolism to signaling. The study of signaling compounds within the phloem is essential for our understanding of plant communication of environmental cues. Determining the nature of signals and the mechanisms by which they are communicated through the phloem will lead to a more complete understanding of plant development and plant responses to stress. In our analysis of Arabidopsis phloem exudates, we had identified several lipid-binding proteins as well as fatty acids and lipids. The latter are not typically expected in the aqueous environment of sieve elements. Hence, lipid transport in the phloem has been given little attention until now. Long-distance transport of hydrophobic compounds in an aqueous system is not without precedence in biological systems: a variety of lipids is found in human blood and is often bound to proteins. Some lipid–protein complexes are transported to other tissues for storage, use, modification, or degradation; others serve as messengers and modulate transcription factor activity. By simple analogy it raises the possibility that lipids and the respective lipid-binding proteins in the phloem serve similar functions in plants and play an important role in stress and developmental signaling. Here, we introduce the lipid-binding proteins and the lipids we found in the phloem and discuss the possibility that they may play an important role in developmental and stress signaling

Effect of Gender and Defensive Opponent on the Biomechanics of Sidestep Cutting

Purpose: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries often occur in women during cutting maneuvers to evade a defensive player. Gender differences in knee kinematics have been observed, but it is not known to what extent these are linked to abnormal neuromuscular control elsewhere in the kinetic chain. Responses to defense players, which may be gender-dependent, have not been included in previous studies. This study determined the effects of gender and defense player on entire lower extremity biomechanics during sidestepping. Methods: Eight male and eight female subjects performed sidestep cuts with and without a static defensive opponent while 3D motion and ground reaction force data were recorded. Peak values of eight selected motion and force variables were, as well as their between-trial variabilities, submitted to a two-way (defense × gender) ANOVA. A Bonferroni-corrected alpha level of 0.003 denoted statistical significance. Results: Females had less hip and knee flexion, hip and knee internal rotation, and hip abduction. Females had higher knee valgus and foot pronation angles, and increased variability in knee valgus and internal rotation. Increased medial ground reaction forces and flexion and abduction in the hip and knee occurred with the defensive player for both genders. Conclusions: A simulated defense player causes increased lower limb movements and forces, and should be a useful addition to laboratory protocols for sidestepping. Gender differences in the joint kinematics suggest that increased knee valgus may contribute to ACL injury risk in women, and that the hip and ankle may play an important role in controlling knee valgus during sidestepping. Consideration of the entire lower extremity contributes to an understanding of injury mechanisms and may lead to better training programs for injury prevention

Technical Report: TeraGrid eXtreme Digital Campus Cyberinfrastructure and Campus Bridging Requirements Elicitation Meeting

In an effort to systematically investigate requirements for TeraGrid XD, the XROADS collaboration held during 2009 a series of requirements elicitation meetings (REM) with small groups of stakeholders. This report summarizes the conduct of and results from a requirements elicitation meeting on the topics of campus bridging and campus cyberinfrastructure. The meeting’s goal was to develop a clearer and more functional definition of what the next phase of the TeraGrid should do to be a resource broadly useful to and used by university and college campuses throughout the US.This report depends very much on the prior involvement of several XROADS partners in the TeraGrid, which has been funded in part by the NSF via the following grant awards: 0504086, 0503697, and 0742145 to the University of Chicago; 0451237 and 0504075 to Indiana University; and 0122272, 0332113, 0451566, 0503944, 0910847 to the University of California San Diego

Approaching Bulk from the Nanoscale: Extrapolation of Binding Energy from Rock-Salt Cuts of Alkaline Earth Metal Oxides

A systematic DFT study is performed on (MgO)n, (CaO)n, (SrO)n, and (BaO)n clusters with 6 < n < 50, and which display a cuboid 2×2×2 atomic motif seen in the bulk, rock-salt, configuration. The stability and energy progression of these clusters are used to predict the energies of infinitely long nanorods, or nanowires, slabs, and the bulk global minimum energy