The Impact of Federal Level Special Education Policy Internships in Preparing Special Education Faculty: A Preliminary Investigation

In this manuscript, the authors examine the reaction of special education doctoral scholars and their response to a federal policy internship. Six doctoral scholar participants participated in a summer federal policy internship opportunity and partook in the study. Doctoral scholars responded to a survey about their knowledge of federal legislation and their perceptions of the federal policy internship. Data were collected and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Three themes emerged after completing their doctoral internship which include: importance of advocacy and its impact on policy, importance of evidence based practices and their role in policy making, and increased knowledge of national organizations and their impact on federal policy. Overall, the doctoral internship experience had a positive impact on the six special education doctoral interns in terms of knowledge and skills regarding policy and legislation

OpenCL Actors - Adding Data Parallelism to Actor-based Programming with CAF

The actor model of computation has been designed for a seamless support of concurrency and distribution. However, it remains unspecific about data parallel program flows, while available processing power of modern many core hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) or coprocessors increases the relevance of data parallelism for general-purpose computation. In this work, we introduce OpenCL-enabled actors to the C++ Actor Framework (CAF). This offers a high level interface for accessing any OpenCL device without leaving the actor paradigm. The new type of actor is integrated into the runtime environment of CAF and gives rise to transparent message passing in distributed systems on heterogeneous hardware. Following the actor logic in CAF, OpenCL kernels can be composed while encapsulated in C++ actors, hence operate in a multi-stage fashion on data resident at the GPU. Developers are thus enabled to build complex data parallel programs from primitives without leaving the actor paradigm, nor sacrificing performance. Our evaluations on commodity GPUs, an Nvidia TESLA, and an Intel PHI reveal the expected linear scaling behavior when offloading larger workloads. For sub-second duties, the efficiency of offloading was found to largely differ between devices. Moreover, our findings indicate a negligible overhead over programming with the native OpenCL API.Comment: 28 page

Thermoforming of planar polymer optical waveguides for integrated optics in smart packaging materials

The innovations in smart packaging will open up a wide range of opportunities in the future. This work describes the processing of additive manufactured and planar integrated polymer optical waveguides for use in smart packaging products. The previously published combination of flexographic and Aerosol Jet printing is complemented by thermoforming and thus creates three-dimensional integrated multimode waveguides with optical attenuation of 1.9 dB/cm ± 0.1 dB/cm @ 638 nm. These properties will be the basis to develop smart applications in packaging materials

Ablation and functionalization of flexographic printing forms using femtosecond lasers for additively manufactured polymer-optical waveguides

An efficient and low-cost approach to manufacture Opto-Mechatronic Interconnect Devices will be obligatory to handle the strongly increasing amount of data. The presented approach is based on a flexographic printing process. To adjust the transferred material the printing form is functionalized by means of laser-induced structures using an ultrashort-pulsed laser. The long-term goal is to adjust the printing result through microstructures in the printing form in order to create spatially resolved material transfer. In this work, first the ablation parameters are investigated at different repetition rates using a femtosecond laser. Further, a line structure is inserted in the material transferring areas of the printing form, which is consequently widened. Its influence on the printing result is presented. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Quality of primary health care in Poland from the perspective of the physicians providing it

Background: Primary care (PC) allows patients to address most of their health needs and is essential for high quality healthcare systems. The aim of the study was to analyze the insight of nine core dimensions of Polish PC system: “Economic conditions”, “Workforce”, “Accessibility”, “Comprehensiveness”, “Continuity”, “Coordination”, “Quality of care”, “Efficiency” and “Equity” and to identify the characteristics of the providing physicians that influence their perception of the quality of care.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted as part of an international QUALICOPC project. In Poland a nationally representative sample of 220 PC physicians was selected from the database of Polish National Health Fund by a stratified random sampling procedure. The research tool was a standardized 64-item questionnaire. Each of the respondents’ answers were assigned a numerical value ranging from−1 (extremely negative) to +1 (extremely positive). The quality indicators were calculated as an arithmetic mean of variables representing particular PC dimensions.Results: The mean scores for the majority of the dimensions had negative values. Accessibility of care was perceived as the best dimension, while the economic conditions were evaluated most negatively. Only a small part of variation in quality evaluation could be explained by physicians’ characteristics.Conclusions: The negative evaluation of primary care reflects the growing crisis in the health care system in Poland. There is an urgent need to apply complex recovery measures to improve the quality of primary care

Substrate-free miniaturized thin-film filters for single-element coarse wavelength division multiplexing fibers

We have created high-precision, miniaturized, substrate-free filters, based on ion beam sputtering on a sacrificial substrate. The sacrificial layer is cost efficient and environmentally friendly and can be dissolved using only water. We demonstrate an improved performance compared to filters on thin polymer layers from the same coating run. With these filters, a single-element coarse wavelength division multiplexing transmitting device for telecommunication applications can be realized by inserting the filter between fiber ends