Stiffening of deployable space booms: Automated Protein Crystal Growth Facility

Part of the curriculum for the seniors at Vanderbilt University in the Mechanical Engineering Program is to take a design class. The purpose of the class is to expose the students to the open ended problems which working engineers are involved with every day. In the past, the students have been asked to work in a variety of projects developed by the professor. This year Vanderbilt was admitted into the Advanced Design Program (ADP) sponsored by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Association (NASA). The grant sponsored undergraduate design and research into new and innovative areas in which NASA is involved. The grant sponsors the Teaching Assistant as well as provides monies for travel and other expenses. The design and research of the seniors of the 1992-1993 school year in association with NASA and USRA is documented

Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Engineering-a case study

This is a case study of the occupational therapy rehabilitation process of a teenage girl who presented in 1997 with a rare neurological condition diagnosed as rapid onset Dystonia Parkinsonism. She was helped to obtain some of the occupational performances of her choice by assistive technology devices tailored to her needs by the rehabilitation engineering department, and in this paper we wish to point out how collaboration between our departments can be of benefit to patients, and how essential microelectronic technology is in the occupational therapy environment

Grassland biodiversity restoration increases resistance of carbon fluxes to drought

Evidence suggests that the restoration of plant diversity in grasslands not only brings benefits for biodiversity conservation, but also the delivery of ecosystem services. While biodiversity-function experiments show that greater plant diversity increases resistance of plant productivity to climate extremes, it is not known whether real-world management options for grassland restoration likewise stabilize ecosystem responses to extreme climate events. We used a long-term (23 year) field experiment in northern England to test the hypothesis that management aimed at biodiversity restoration increases the resistance and recovery of ecosystem carbon (C) fluxes to short-term summer drought. This was tested by measuring plant, soil and microbial responses to a simulated drought in experimental grassland plots where fertilizer application and seed addition have been managed to enhance plant species diversity. The cessation of fertilizer application brought about small increases in plant species richness. Additionally, cessation of fertilizer application reduced overall plant productivity and promoted hemi-parasitic plants at the expense of grasses and forbs. Resistance of CO 2 fluxes to drought, measured as ecosystem respiration, was greater in non-fertilized plots, as lower plant biomass reduced water demand, likely aided by proportionally more hemi-parasitic plants further reducing plant biomass. Additionally, legumes increased under drought, thereby contributing to overall resistance of plant productivity. Recovery of soil microbial C and nitrogen was more rapid after rewetting than soil microbial community composition, irrespective of restoration treatment, suggesting high resilience of soil microbial communities to drought. Synthesis and applications. This study shows that while grassland diversity restoration management increases the resistance of carbon fluxes to drought, it also reduces agricultural yields, revealing a trade-off for land managers. Furthermore legumes, promoted through long-term restoration treatments, can help to maintain plant community productivity under drought by increasing their biomass. As such, grassland management strategies not only have consequences for ecosystem processes, but also the capacity to withstand extreme weather events

From Disciplinarian to Change Agent: How the Civil Rights Era Changed the Roles of Student Affairs Professionals

Little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs administrators during the civil rights era. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how the civil rights era influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to the roles played by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other administrators, and the community. A secondary analysis was conducted based on interviews with 18 student affairs professionals who served on a variety of college campuses during the civil rights era, primarily from the 1950s through the 1970s. Our findings suggest that these administrators took on roles such as educator, advocate, mediator, initiator, and change agent in order to effectively and efficiently resolve issues that arose on their campuses as a result of the civil rights era and the student protest movement. Colleges and universities have been the battleground for many important civil rights concerns, and many authors have chronicled student social movements of this era (Adelman, 1972; Altbach, 1973; Strauss & Howe, 1997). In both northern and southern colleges and universities, integration of African Americans into higher education was a slow and difficult process (Clark, 1993; Cohodas, 1997; Exum, 1985). Once on campus, African American students had to deal with segregation in all types of out-of-class domains including housing, cafeterias, social activities, organized student groups (including athletics, fraternities, and sororities), availability of scholarships, on-campus and off-campus jobs, and access to barber shops and beauty parlors. Student affairs administrators were in the middle of this battlefield and played a key role in representing student demands to the administration and sometimes advocating for change to occur (Clark, 1993; Laliberte, 2003; Tuttle, 1996). Simultaneously, the presidents of many college and university campuses expected the student affairs staff to represent the institutions’ views to the students and to mete out discipline to students who failed to follow the campus rules. These conflicting demands—the desire to support students and the desire to be seen as effective administrators—put many student affairs administrators in precarious positions (Nichols, 1990). Nevertheless, student affairs professionals in the civil rights era served as communication links between the administration and students and experienced enhanced status and advancement to higher administrative positions. In the process, their experiences exerted considerable influence on the student affairs profession itself. By examining the stories of student affairs administrators, we learn firsthand how the civil rights era affected the profession. This article provides a glimpse into civil rights struggles on campus as seen through their eyes. Unfortunately, little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs administrators during the civil rights era. One study by Crookston and Atkyns (1974) found that during the period of unrest in the 1960s, many senior student affairs officers left their positions. They also concluded that during this period student affairs administrators became known as crisis managers, and most colleges and universities elevated the chief student affairs officer from dean to vice president. In recent research that examined student affairs during the turbulent years of 1968-1972, Laliberte (2003) 1 confirmed the crisis manager and student advocate roles of student affairs administrators. For the purpose of this article, a secondary analysis of the data collected for the book Reflecting Back, Looking Forward: Civil Rights and Student Affairs (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2004) was conducted to examine how the civil rights era influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to the roles played by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other administrators, and the community. The book told the stories of individuals in first person narrative form; however, this article focuses specifically on how participation during the civil rights era affected the profession itself

Model-based hypervolumes for complex ecological data

Developing a holistic understanding of the ecosystem impacts of global change requires methods that can quantify the interactions among multiple response variables. One approach is to generate high dimensional spaces, or hypervolumes, to answer ecological questions in a multivariate context. A range of statistical methods has been applied to construct hypervolumes but have not yet been applied in the context of ecological datasets with spatial or temporal structure, for example where the data are nested or demonstrate temporal autocorrelation. We outline an approach to account for data structure in quantifying hypervolumes based on the multivariate normal distribution by including random effects. Using simulated data we show that failing to account for structure in data can lead to biased estimates of hypervolume properties in certain contexts. We then illustrate the utility of these ‘model‐based hypervolumes’ in providing new insights into a case study of afforestation effects on ecosystem properties where the data has a nested structure. We demonstrate that the model‐based generalisation allows hypervolumes to be applied to a wide range of ecological datasets and questions

Can digital image classification be used as a standardised method for surveying peatland vegetation cover?

The ability to carry out systematic, accurate and repeatable vegetation surveys is an essential part of long-term scientific studies into ecosystem biodiversity and functioning. However, current widely used traditional survey techniques such as destructive harvests, pin frame quadrats and visual cover estimates can be very time consuming and are prone to subjective variations. We investigated the use of digital image techniques as an alternative way of recording vegetation cover to plant functional type level on a peatland ecosystem. Using an established plant manipulation experimental site at Moor House NNR (an Environmental Change Network site), we compared visual cover estimates of peatland vegetation with cover estimates using digital image classification methods, from 0.5 m × 0.5 m field plots. Our results show that digital image classification of photographs taken with a standard digital camera can be used successfully to estimate dwarf-shrub and graminoid vegetation cover at a comparable level to field visual cover estimates, although the methods were less effective for lower plants such as mosses and lichens. Our study illustrates the novel application of digital image techniques to provide a new way of measuring and monitoring peatland vegetation to the plant functional group level, which is less vulnerable to surveyor bias than are visual field surveys. Furthermore, as such digital techniques are highly repeatable, we suggest that they have potential for use in long-term monitoring studies, at both plot and landscape scales

DNA methylation and body mass index:investigating identified methylation sites at HIF3A in a causal framework

Multiple differentially methylated sites and regions associated with adiposity have now been identified in large-scale cross-sectional studies. We tested for replication of associations between previously identified CpG sites at HIF3A and adiposity in ∼1,000 mother-offspring pairs from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Availability of methylation and adiposity measures at multiple time points, as well as genetic data, allowed us to assess the temporal associations between adiposity and methylation and to make inferences regarding causality and directionality. Overall, our results were discordant with those expected if HIF3A methylation has a causal effect on BMI and provided more evidence for causality in the reverse direction (i.e., an effect of BMI on HIF3A methylation). These results are based on robust evidence from longitudinal analyses and were also partially supported by Mendelian randomization analysis, although this latter analysis was underpowered to detect a causal effect of BMI on HIF3A methylation. Our results also highlight an apparent long-lasting intergenerational influence of maternal BMI on offspring methylation at this locus, which may confound associations between own adiposity and HIF3A methylation. Further work is required to replicate and uncover the mechanisms underlying the direct and intergenerational effect of adiposity on DNA methylation.Rebecca C. Richmond, Gemma C. Sharp, Mary E. Ward, Abigail Fraser, Oliver Lyttleton, Wendy L. McArdle, Susan M. Ring, Tom R. Gaunt, Debbie A. Lawlor, George Davey Smith, and Caroline L. Relto

Deconstructing interventions: approaches to studying behavior change techniques across obesity interventions

Deconstructing interventions into the specific techniques that are used to change behavior represents a new frontier in behavioral intervention research. This paper considers opportunities and challenges in employing the Behavior Change Techniques Taxonomy (BCTTv1) developed by Michie and colleagues, to code the behavior change techniques (BCTs) across multiple interventions addressing obesity and capture dose received at the technique level. Numerous advantages were recognized for using a shared framework for intervention description. Coding interventions at levels of the social ecological framework beyond the individual level, separate coding for behavior change initiation vs. maintenance, fidelity of BCT delivery, accounting for BCTs mode of delivery, and tailoring BCTs, present both challenges and opportunities. Deconstructing interventions and identifying the dose required to positively impact health-related outcomes could enable important gains in intervention science