An Interactive Telehealth Program to Improve Attitudes Toward Treating Diabetes

Background Currently 60% of the United States population is overweight or obese. Recent data has shown that 7% of the US population has Diabetes Mellitus Type 2 and New Mexico is above the average at 9%. Many studies have shown that good glycemic control with lifestyle changes or Metformin therapy can prevent or delay microvascular and some macrovascular complications of Diabetes. These findings have not been translated into routine care especially in New Mexico in large part due to NMs largely, rural, poor and medically underserved population. The Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) is a project developed at the University of New Mexico Health Science Center (UNMHSC) that connects UNMHSC expects with providers in rural New Mexico using a tele-health network. Although the ECHO project was first developed to treat Hepatitis C,its design allows it to be replicated for other complex and chronic diseases such as Diabetes Mellitus Type 2. We sought to evaluate the project as a teaching tool for medical students participating in rural education programs. We hypothesize that medical students participating in the diabetes ECHO project will demonstrate improved knowledge and a positive attitude towards the treatment and care for patients with diabetes. Methods A total number of 14 first through fourth year medical students were assigned to either an intervention group or control group. The intervention group completed four to eight weeks of the Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) telehealth program on diabetes knowledge and attitude towards treatment while in a healthcare rotation in a rural New Mexico community. The control group completed four to eight weeks of a rural New Mexico rotation but did not participate in weekly tele-health clinics. Surveys rating the participants knowledge and attitude towards diabetes were given before and after the four to eight week clinics. Results There was at least one question with a significant change between the pre and post survey group that participated in the ECHO telehealth clinics in each survey. Two out of the thirty-three questions for the Diabetes Attitude Survey, one out of the seven for the Diabetes Knowledge Survey and, one out of the twelve questions for the Attitudes Diabetes Care Survey showed a significant change. There were no significant differences between the post survey intervention group compared to the post survey control group that did not participated in the ECHO telehealth clinics. Conclusions Although not statistically significant, the ECHO telehealth program showed improving attitudes and knowledge in treatment and understanding of type 2 diabetes mellitus.\u2

Predicting spatial distributions of sediments in fluvial environments using kriging and flowline based distances.

The process of predicting reasonable spatial distributions of surficial sediments in fluvial environments using interpolation techniques can be quite challenging. The process of sediment transport creates anisotropy in the spatial distributions that follow the direction of flow. Standard geostatistical software only allow for the incorporation of one anisotropy direction for the entire problem domain. This is problematic for fluvial environments because an average direction usually misrepresents the local changes in anisotropy throughout the river. A distance transformation technique based on flowlines was applied in an attempt to improve the way geostatistical algorithms deal with anisotropy. The standard geostatistical method of ordinary kriging was modified so that distances measured along, and perpendicular to, flowlines are substituted for the Cartesian coordinate system distances typically used. Five simple test cases were generated using the CH3D hydrodynamic model with sediment transport to examine how the method performs in idealized environments. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .W56. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0269. Advisers: Stanley Reitsma; Phil Graniero. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare

This book fills a gap in the historiographical and theoretical fields of race, gender, and war. In brief, Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare (RGMWW) offers an introduction into how cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war and how they in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Focusing on the modern West, this project begins by introducing the contours of race and gender theories as they have evolved and how they are employed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. The project then mixes chronological narrative with analysis and historiography as it takes the reader through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the Global War of Terror. The purpose throughout is not merely to create a list of so-called "great moments" in race and gender, but to create a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and male-exclusive military experience. The final chapter considers the current challenges that Western societies, particularly the United States, face in imposing social diversity and tolerance on statist military structures in a climates of sometimes vitriolic public debate. RGMWW represents our effort to blend race, gender, and military war, to problematize these intersections, and then provide some answers to those problems

MAPping Metadata at a Public University

This session explores the purpose of metadata application profiles (MAP), and how a team of practitioners at a public university developed a single MAP representing metadata elements and values from multiple repositories. Download is a pdf file. PowerPoint (.pptx) slides attached below

An objective function exploiting suboptimal solutions in metabolic networks

Background: Flux Balance Analysis is a theoretically elegant, computationally efficient, genome-scale approach to predicting biochemical reaction fluxes. Yet FBA models exhibit persistent mathematical degeneracy that generally limits their predictive power. Results: We propose a novel objective function for cellular metabolism that accounts for and exploits degeneracy in the metabolic network to improve flux predictions. In our model, regulation drives metabolism toward a region of flux space that allows nearly optimal growth. Metabolic mutants deviate minimally from this region, a function represented mathematically as a convex cone. Near-optimal flux configurations within this region are considered equally plausible and not subject to further optimizing regulation. Consistent with relaxed regulation near optimality, we find that the size of the near-optimal region predicts flux variability under experimental perturbation. Conclusion: Accounting for suboptimal solutions can improve the predictive power of metabolic FBA models. Because fluctuations of enzyme and metabolite levels are inevitable, tolerance for suboptimality may support a functionally robust metabolic network

Abstraction, Imagery, and Control in Cognitive Architecture.

This dissertation presents a theory describing the components of a cognitive architecture supporting intelligent behavior in spatial tasks. In this theory, an abstract symbolic representation serves as the basis for decisions. As a means to support abstract decision-making, imagery processes are also present. Here, a concrete (highly detailed) representation of the state of the problem is maintained in parallel with the abstract representation. Perceptual and action systems are decomposed into parts that operate between the environment and the concrete representation, and parts that operate between the concrete and abstract representations. Control processes can issue actions as a continuous function of information in the concrete representation, and actions can be simulated (imagined) in terms of it. The agent can then derive useful abstract information by applying perceptual processes to the resulting concrete state. This theory addresses two challenges in architecture design that arise due to the diversity and complexity of spatial tasks that an intelligent agent must address. The perceptual abstraction problem results from the difficulty of creating a single perception system able to induce appropriate abstract representations in each of the many tasks an agent might encounter, and the irreducibility problem arises because some tasks are resistant to being abstracted at all. Imagery works to mitigate the perceptual abstraction problem by allowing a given perception system to work in more tasks, as perception can be dynamically combined with imagery. Continuous control, and the simulation thereof via imagery, works to mitigate the irreducibility problem. The use of imagery to address these challenges differs from other approaches in AI, where imagery is considered as an alternative to abstract representation, rather than as a means to it. A detailed implementation of the theory is described, which is an extension of the Soar cognitive architecture. Agents instantiated in this architecture are demonstrated, including agents that use reinforcement learning and imagery to play arcade games, and an agent that performs sampling-based motion planning for a car-like vehicle. The performance of these agents is discussed in the context of the underlying architectural theory. Connections between this work and psychological theories of mental imagery are also discussed.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78795/1/swinterm_1.pd

Noise-driven oscillations in microbial population dynamics

Microbial populations in the natural environment are likely to experience growth conditions very different from those of a typical laboratory xperiment. In particular, removal rates of biomass and substrate are unlikely to be balanced under realistic environmental conditions. Here, we consider a single population growing on a substrate under conditions where the removal rates of substrate and biomass are not necessarily equal. For a large population, with deterministic growth dynamics, our model predicts that this system can show transient (damped) oscillations. For a small population, demographic noise causes these oscillations to be sustained indefinitely. These oscillations arise when the dynamics of changes in biomass are faster than the dynamics of the substrate, for example, due to a high microbial death rate and/or low substrate flow rates. We show that the same mechanism can produce sustained stochastic oscillations in a two-species, nutrient-cycling microbial ecosystem. Our results suggest that oscillatory population dynamics may be a common feature of small microbial populations in the natural environment, even in the absence of complex interspecies interactions.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figure