The Self-Taught Marketers Guide to Creating an Annual Report

Objective To produce an easy-to-read, visually appealing, 1-4 page annual report for the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Health Sciences and Human Services Library (HSHSL). The report should be a mix of interesting statistics, highlights, stories, quotes, and photographs to promote the HSHSL’s annual accomplishments to the campus. Methods We gather all of the stories and statistics we think will be eligible material for the annual report, pulling content and ideas from: newsletters, workshops, blog posts, events, exhibits, and meetings with division and department heads. An annual report committee and visual designer decide upon the top stories and statistics, focusing upon high-impact events, meaningful statistics, and attractive design, images, and photographs to craft the report. We keep in mind that the report is meant to be read by non-librarians, and that the language and messages need to be understandable to our larger campus community.Results This will be our 5th year producing an annual report for the HSHSL. The process has become more streamlined and less time-consuming as we have become familiar with where to source content, design principles, and how to manage space limitations. This has decreased the amount of time it takes to produce the report and the number of iterations we go through before achieving our final product. Additionally, other libraries have been inspired by our designs and created their own colorful Annual Reports based on our layouts and ideas. Conclusions In our next report we plan to include a survey link to try to elicit feedback from our readers. We would like to know if the report was useful to them and if there is other information they would be interested to see in future reports

Mealtime Behaviour and Parent-Child Interaction: A Comparison of Children with Cystic Fibrosis, Children with Feeding Problems, and Nonclinic Controls

Examined the role of family interaction factors in dietary compliance problems reported by parents of children with cystic fibrosis (CF). The family mealtime interactions of children with CF, children with feeding problems and nonclinic controls were observed, and parents monitored children's eating behavior at home. Parents of children with CF reported more concern about feeding problems and recorded more disruptive mealtime behavior than parents of nonclinic children. Observational data showed children with CF to display overall rates of disruptive mealtime behavior not significantly different from either comparison group. Mothers of children with CF were observed to engage in higher rates of aversive interaction with their child than did mothers of nonclinic controls. Fathers of children with CF reported lower marital satisfaction than fathers of controls. Both mothers and fathers of children with CF reported lower parenting self-efficacy than non-CF families. Clinical implications are discussed

The Sun's position in the sky

We express the position of the Sun in the sky as a function of time and the observer's geographic coordinates. Our method is based on applying rotation matrices to vectors describing points on the celestial sphere. We also derive direct expressions, as functions of date of the year and geographic latitude, for the duration of daylight, the maximum and minimum altitudes of the Sun, and the cardinal directions to sunrise and sunset. We discuss how to account for the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, the precessions of the equinoxes and the perihelion, the size of the solar disk, and atmospheric refraction. We illustrate these results by computing the dates of "Manhattanhenge" (when sunset aligns with the east-west streets on the main traffic grid for Manhattan, in New York City), by plotting the altitude of the Sun over representative cities as a function of time, and by showing plots ("analemmas") for the position of the Sun in the sky at a given hour of the day.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figures. v3: Replaced to match published version and to re-package Mathematica notebook as an ancillary fil

Efficient Model Learning for Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

We present a framework for learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables the robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. The learning takes place completely automatically, without any human intervention. First, we describe the clustering of demonstrated action sequences into different human types using an unsupervised learning algorithm. These demonstrated sequences are also used by the robot to learn a reward function that is representative for each type, through the employment of an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm. The learned model is then used as part of a Mixed Observability Markov Decision Process formulation, wherein the human type is a partially observable variable. With this framework, we can infer, either offline or online, the human type of a new user that was not included in the training set, and can compute a policy for the robot that will be aligned to the preference of this new user and will be robust to deviations of the human actions from prior demonstrations. Finally we validate the approach using data collected in human subject experiments, and conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations in which a person performs a collaborative task with a small industrial robot

“some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us”: David Mitchell, Russell Hoban, and metafiction after the millennium

This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatextual methods indicate a nostalgia for by-gone radical aesthetics rather than reaching for new modes of its own. The article not only proposes several new backdrops against which Mitchell’s novel can be read but also conducts the first in-depth appraisal of Mitchell’s formal linguistic replication of Riddley Walker