Attitudes & Roles Regarding Firearm Access and Suicide Prevention in Vermont Middle & High Schools

Adolescent suicide is a serious public health concern in Vermont, and the presence of firearms in the home is a known risk factor. Suicide attempts with firearms are more likely to be completed than attempts with other means, with an 85% mortality rate of suicide with firearms compared to 5% with other means. This project aimed to assess attitudes, comfort, and perceived roles among school personnel in addressing gun safety and access to firearms with Vermont students and parents.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1298/thumbnail.jp

Energy-aware synthesis for networks on chip architectures

The Network on Chip (NoC) paradigm was introduced as a scalable communication infrastructure for future System-on-Chip applications. Designing application specific customized communication architectures is critical for obtaining low power, high performance solutions. Two significant design automation problems are the creation of an optimized configuration, given application requirement the implementation of this on-chip network. Automating the design of on-chip networks requires models for estimating area and energy, algorithms to effectively explore the design space and network component libraries and tools to generate the hardware description. Chip architects are faced with managing a wide range of customization options for individual components, routers and topology. As energy is of paramount importance, the effectiveness of any custom NoC generation approach lies in the availability of good energy models to effectively explore the design space. This thesis describes a complete NoC synthesis flow, called NoCGEN, for creating energy-efficient custom NoC architectures. Three major automation problems are addressed: custom topology generation, energy modeling and generation. An iterative algorithm is proposed to generate application specific point-to-point and packet-switched networks. The algorithm explores the design space for efficient topologies using characterized models and a system-level floorplanner for evaluating placement and wire-energy. Prior to our contribution, building an energy model required careful analysis of transistor or gate implementations. To alleviate the burden, an automated linear regression-based methodology is proposed to rapidly extract energy models for many router designs. The resulting models are cycle accurate with low-complexity and found to be within 10% of gate-level energy simulations, and execute several orders of magnitude faster than gate-level simulations. A hardware description of the custom topology is generated using a parameterizable library and custom HDL generator. Fully reusable and scalable network components (switches, crossbars, arbiters, routing algorithms) are described using a template approach and are used to compose arbitrary topologies. A methodology for building and composing routers and topologies using a template engine is described. The entire flow is implemented as several demonstrable extensible tools with powerful visualization functionality. Several experiments are performed to demonstrate the design space exploration capabilities and compare it against a competing min-cut topology generation algorithm

Pharmacologic inhibition of reactive gliosis blocks TNF-α-mediated neuronal apoptosis.

Reactive gliosis is an early pathological feature common to most neurodegenerative diseases, yet its regulation and impact remain poorly understood. Normally astrocytes maintain a critical homeostatic balance. After stress or injury they undergo rapid parainflammatory activation, characterized by hypertrophy, and increased polymerization of type III intermediate filaments (IFs), particularly glial fibrillary acidic protein and vimentin. However, the consequences of IF dynamics in the adult CNS remains unclear, and no pharmacologic tools have been available to target this mechanism in vivo. The mammalian retina is an accessible model to study the regulation of astrocyte stress responses, and their influence on retinal neuronal homeostasis. In particular, our work and others have implicated p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling as a key regulator of glutamate recycling, antioxidant activity and cytokine secretion by astrocytes and related Müller glia, with potent influences on neighboring neurons. Here we report experiments with the small molecule inhibitor, withaferin A (WFA), to specifically block type III IF dynamics in vivo. WFA was administered in a model of metabolic retinal injury induced by kainic acid, and in combination with a recent model of debridement-induced astrocyte reactivity. We show that WFA specifically targets IFs and reduces astrocyte and Müller glial reactivity in vivo. Inhibition of glial IF polymerization blocked p38 MAPK-dependent secretion of TNF-α, resulting in markedly reduced neuronal apoptosis. To our knowledge this is the first study to demonstrate that pharmacologic inhibition of IF dynamics in reactive glia protects neurons in vivo

Implementing Interactive Voice Recognition Technology to Activate Vulnerable Patients

Purpose: To help better align the intersections of patient needs, quality of care, and cost, we implemented an automated monitoring program that aimed to reduce preventable hospital admissions for vulnerable patients. Interactive voice recognition (IVR) is a form of remote patient monitoring that enables the clinical team to intervene sooner when a patient’s symptoms worsen. The goal was to improve patient activation by having them recognize symptom exacerbation and record their responses to a weekly IVR survey which was sent to the clinical team for potential action. Methods: At a health care organization in Southern California, ninety chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients who were in enrolled in a self-management program completed IVR surveys based on COPD symptom zones. Patients answered the weekly surveys for 6 months and the data were transmitted to the clinical team for review and potential action. Results and Conclusion: When COPD program patients used IVR, hospital admissions decreased and a positive return on investment was projected. Patients stated that automated monitoring helped them become more involved and motivated in their care. Clinicians indicated that using IVR freed up their time to concentrate on patients who were more at-risk for disease exacerbation and expanded their clinical capacity. In an era of clinical and financial accountability, being able to better identify patients who are at risk for hospital admission and who may benefit from more intensive management are key elements to help improve quality of care and the patient experience

The olfactory basis of orchid pollination by mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes are important vectors of disease and require sources of carbohydrates for reproduction and survival. Unlike host-related behaviors of mosquitoes, comparatively less is understood about the mechanisms involved in nectar-feeding decisions, or how this sensory information is processed in the mosquito brain. Here we show that Aedes spp. mosquitoes, including Aedes aegypti, are effective pollinators of the Platanthera obtusata orchid, and demonstrate this mutualism is mediated by the orchid's scent and the balance of excitation and inhibition in the mosquito's antennal lobe (AL). The P. obtusata orchid emits an attractive, nonanal-rich scent, whereas related Platanthera species-not visited by mosquitoes-emit scents dominated by lilac aldehyde. Calcium imaging experiments in the mosquito AL revealed that nonanal and lilac aldehyde each respectively activate the LC2 and AM2 glomerulus, and remarkably, the AM2 glomerulus is also sensitive to N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET), a mosquito repellent. Lateral inhibition between these 2 glomeruli reflects the level of attraction to the orchid scents. Whereas the enriched nonanal scent of P. obtusata activates the LC2 and suppresses AM2, the high level of lilac aldehyde in the other orchid scents inverts this pattern of glomerular activity, and behavioral attraction is lost. These results demonstrate the ecological importance of mosquitoes beyond operating as disease vectors and open the door toward understanding the neural basis of mosquito nectar-seeking behaviors

A Free-Form Prediction for the Reappearance of Supernova Refsdal in the Hubble Frontier Fields Cluster MACSJ1149.5+2223

The massive cluster MACSJ1149.5+2223(z=0.544) displays five very large lensed images of a well resolved spiral galaxy at $z_{\rm spect}=1.491$. It is within one of these images that the first example of a multiply-lensed supernova has been detected recently as part of the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space. The depth of this data also reveals many HII regions within the lensed spiral galaxy which we identify between the five counter-images. Here we expand the capability of our free-form method to incorporate these HII regions locally, with other reliable lensed galaxies added for a global solution. This improved accuracy allows us to estimate when the Refsdal supernova will appear within the other lensed images of the spiral galaxy to an accuracy of $\sim$ 7\%. We predict this supernova will reappear in one of the counter-images (RA=11:49:36.025, DEC=+22:23:48.11, J2000) and on November 1$^{st}$ 2015 (with an estimated error of $\pm$ 25 days) it will be at the same phase as it was when it was originally discovered, offering a unique opportunity to study the early phases of this supernova and to examine the consistency of the mass model and the cosmological model that have an impact on the time delay prediction.Comment: 12 images, 11 pages. Mateches accepted version in MNRAS. MNRAS in pres

Constellation Program Lessons Learned in the Quantification and Use of Aerodynamic Uncertainty

The NASA Constellation Program has worked for the past five years to develop a re- placement for the current Space Transportation System. Of the elements that form the Constellation Program, only two require databases that define aerodynamic environments and their respective uncertainty: the Ares launch vehicles and the Orion crew and launch abort vehicles. Teams were established within the Ares and Orion projects to provide repre- sentative aerodynamic models including both baseline values and quantified uncertainties. A technical team was also formed within the Constellation Program to facilitate integra- tion among the project elements. This paper is a summary of the collective experience of the three teams working with the quantification and use of uncertainty in aerodynamic environments: the Ares and Orion project teams as well as the Constellation integration team. Not all of the lessons learned discussed in this paper could be applied during the course of the program, but they are included in the hope of benefiting future projects