Going Beyond Promoting: Preparing Students to Creatively Solve Future Problems

While we cannot know what problems the future will bring, we can be almost certain that solving them will require creativity. In this article we describe how our course, a first-year undergraduate mathematics course, supports creative problem solving. Creative problem solving cannot be learned through a single experience, so we provide our students with a blend of experiences. We discuss how the course structure enables creative problem solving through class instruction, during class activities, during out of class assessments, and during in class assessments. We believe this course structure increases student comfort with solving open-ended and ill-defined problems similar to what they will encounter in the real world

Genetic diversity of \u3ci\u3eDanthonia spicata\u3c/i\u3e (L.) Beauv. based on genomic simple sequence repeat markers

Danthonia spicata (L.) Beauv., commonly known as poverty oatgrass, is a perennial bunch-type grass native to North America. D. spicata is often found in low input turfgrass areas on the East Coast of the United States and has potential for development as a new native low input turfgrass species. Roche 454 sequenced randomly sheared genomic DNA reads of D. spicata were mined for SSR markers using the MIcroSAtellite identification tool. A total of 66,553 singlet sequences (approximately 37.5 Mbp) were examined, and 3454 SSR markers were identified. Trinucleotide motifs with greater than six repeats and possessing unique PCR priming sites within the genome, as determined by Primer-BLAST, were evaluated visually for heterozygosity and mutation consistent with stepwise evolution using CLC Genomics software. Sixty-three candidate markers were selected for testing from the trinucleotide SSR marker sites meeting these in silico criteria. Ten primer pairs that amplified polymorphic loci in preliminary experiments were used to screen 91 individual plants composed of at least 3–5 plants from each of 23 different locations. The primer pairs amplified 54 alleles ranging in size from 71 to 246 bp. Minimum and maximum numbers of alleles per locus were two and 12, respectively, with an average of 5.4. A dendrogram generated by unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean cluster analysis using the Jaccard’s similarity coefficient was in agreement with the grouping obtained by Structure v2.3. The analyses were dominated by clonal groupings and lack evidence for gene flow with some alleles present in a single plant from a single location. Fourteen multilocus genotype groups were observed providing strong evidence for asexual reproduction in the studied D. spicata populations

Feasibility Study of the Health Empowerment Intervention to Evaluate the Effect on Self-Management, Functional Health, and Well-Being in Older Adults with Heart Failure

abstract: ABSTRACT The population of older adults in the United States is growing disproportionately, with corresponding medical, social and economic implications. The number of Americans 65 years and older constitutes 13.7% of the U.S. population, and is expected to grow to 21% by 2040. As the adults age, they are at risk for developing chronic illness and disability. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5.7 million Americans have heart failure, and almost 80% of these are 65 years and older. The prevalence of heart failure will increase with the increase in aging population, thus increasing the costs associated with heart failure from 34.7 billion dollars in 2010 to 77.7 billion dollars by 2020. Of all cardiovascular hospitalizations, 28.9% are due to heart failure, and almost 60,000 deaths are accounted for heart failure. Marked disparities in heart failure persist within and between population subgroups. Living with heart failure is challenging for older adults, because being a chronic condition, the responsibility of day to day management of heart failure principally rests with patient. Approaches to improve self-management are targeted at adherence, compliance, and physiologic variables, little attention has been paid to personal and social contextual resources of older adults, crucial for decision making, and purposeful participation in goal attainment, representing a critical area for intervention. Several strategies based on empowerment perspective are focused on outcomes; paying less attention to the process. To address these gaps between research and practice, this feasibility study was guided by a tested theory, the Theory of Health Empowerment, to optimize self-management, functional health and well-being in older adults with heart failure. The study sample included older adults with heart failure attending senior centers. Specific aims of this feasibility study were to: (a) examine the feasibility of the Health Empowerment Intervention in older adults with heart failure, (b) evaluate the effect of the health empowerment intervention on self-management, functional health, and well-being among older adults with heart failure. The Health Empowerment Intervention was delivered focusing on strategies to identify and building upon self-capacity, and supportive social network, informed decision making and goal setting, and purposefully participating in the attainment of personal health goals for well-being. Study was feasible and significantly increased personal growth, and purposeful participation in the attainment of personal health goals.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Nursing and Healthcare Innovation 201

Scaffold Translation: Barriers Between Concept and Clinic

Translation of scaffold-based bone tissue engineering (BTE) therapies to clinical use remains, bluntly, a failure. This dearth of translated tissue engineering therapies (including scaffolds) remains despite 25 years of research, research funding totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, over 12,000 papers on BTE and over 2000 papers on BTE scaffolds alone in the past 10 years (PubMed search). Enabling scaffold translation requires first an understanding of the challenges, and second, addressing the complete range of these challenges. There are the obvious technical challenges of designing, manufacturing, and functionalizing scaffolds to fill the Form, Fixation, Function, and Formation needs of bone defect repair. However, these technical solutions should be targeted to specific clinical indications (e.g., mandibular defects, spine fusion, long bone defects, etc.). Further, technical solutions should also address business challenges, including the need to obtain regulatory approval, meet specific market needs, and obtain private investment to develop products, again for specific clinical indications. Finally, these business and technical challenges present a much different model than the typical research paradigm, presenting the field with philosophical challenges in terms of publishing and funding priorities that should be addressed as well. In this article, we review in detail the technical, business, and philosophical barriers of translating scaffolds from Concept to Clinic. We argue that envisioning and engineering scaffolds as modular systems with a sliding scale of complexity offers the best path to addressing these translational challenges.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90495/1/ten-2Eteb-2E2011-2E0251.pd

Automatic summarization of voicemail messages using lexical and prosodic features

This article presents trainable methods for extracting principal content words from voicemail messages. The short text summaries generated are suitable for mobile messaging applications. The system uses a set of classifiers to identify the summary words with each word described by a vector of lexical and prosodic features. We use an ROC-based algorithm, Parcel, to select input features (and classifiers). We have performed a series of objective and subjective evaluations using unseen data from two different speech recognition systems as well as human transcriptions of voicemail speech

Partial information community detection in a multilayer network

Identifying communities in a dark network is a potentially difficult task. The nature of dark networks, and their characteristic of con-cealing connections within the network, makes community detection an enterprise based on operations and decisions with only partial information. We take this concept of operation with only partial information, and extend it to our work by identifying communities within a dark network using only a single layer from the full multilayer network. Additionally, the concept of identification of terrorist networks within civilian populations is one of ever-increasing importance in our world today. We create a large multilayer synthetic network, and embed a known terrorist network in the larger synthetic network. We construct our synthetic network in a manner to ensure that our terrorist network is not unique, in order to make discovery of the terrorist network difficult. In this portion of our work we are concerned with identifying the entire terrorist network, not just a community within the terrorist network. We use known discovery algorithms to discover the terrorist network, and compare the results to modified algorithms introduced in this thesis and their ability to discover the terrorist network as quickly as possible.http://archive.org/details/partialinformati1094549410Captain, United States ArmyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Three is The Answer: Combining Relationships to Analyze Multilayered Terrorist Networks

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3110025.3110154In this paper we introduce a methodology to create multilayered terrorist networks, taking into account that the main challenges of the data behind the networks are incompleteness, fuzzy boundaries, and dynamic behavior. To account for these dark networks' characteristics, we use knowledge sharing communities in determining the methodology to create 3-layered networks from each of our datasets. We analyze the resulting layers of three terrorist datasets and present explanations of why three layers should be used for these models. We also use the information of just one layer, to identify the Bali 2005 attack community.Asymmetric Warfare GroupWest point Network Science Cente

Genetic diversity of \u3ci\u3eDanthonia spicata\u3c/i\u3e (L.) Beauv. based on genomic simple sequence repeat markers

Danthonia spicata (L.) Beauv., commonly known as poverty oatgrass, is a perennial bunch-type grass native to North America. D. spicata is often found in low input turfgrass areas on the East Coast of the United States and has potential for development as a new native low input turfgrass species. Roche 454 sequenced randomly sheared genomic DNA reads of D. spicata were mined for SSR markers using the MIcroSAtellite identification tool. A total of 66,553 singlet sequences (approximately 37.5 Mbp) were examined, and 3454 SSR markers were identified. Trinucleotide motifs with greater than six repeats and possessing unique PCR priming sites within the genome, as determined by Primer-BLAST, were evaluated visually for heterozygosity and mutation consistent with stepwise evolution using CLC Genomics software. Sixty-three candidate markers were selected for testing from the trinucleotide SSR marker sites meeting these in silico criteria. Ten primer pairs that amplified polymorphic loci in preliminary experiments were used to screen 91 individual plants composed of at least 3–5 plants from each of 23 different locations. The primer pairs amplified 54 alleles ranging in size from 71 to 246 bp. Minimum and maximum numbers of alleles per locus were two and 12, respectively, with an average of 5.4. A dendrogram generated by unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean cluster analysis using the Jaccard’s similarity coefficient was in agreement with the grouping obtained by Structure v2.3. The analyses were dominated by clonal groupings and lack evidence for gene flow with some alleles present in a single plant from a single location. Fourteen multilocus genotype groups were observed providing strong evidence for asexual reproduction in the studied D. spicata populations

Evaluation of population structure within diploid Agrostis germplasm based on miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements

The bentgrasses (Agrostis spp.) are valuable species to the turfgrass industry. The bentgrasses have complex genomes resulting from interspecifi c hybridization and polyploidization events. The New England Velvet Bentgrass collection along with diploid germplasm present in the National Plant Germplasm System represent the largest collections of publicly available diploid Agrostis germplasm within the United States. In the present study, 1225 miniature inverted-repeat transposable element (MITE)-display genetic markers were used to assess the amount of genetic diversity within a collection of 181 diploid Agrostis selections. Structure v. 2.3.3 was used to determine population structure and suggests that five subpopulations best explain the genetic variation present within this germplasm. An analysis of molecular variance and principal coordinate analysis also supports the subgroupings defined by the Structure analysis. Nine selections were found to be genetically similar to Agrostis stolonifera L. and may be related to one of its diploid progenitors. Our improved understanding of the genetic diversity among these diploid selections, resulting from this study, will help Agrostis breeders transfer important traits from these unimproved selections for cultivar improvement. © Crop Science Society of America