Bus Operator Awareness Research and Development Training Program

This training is designed to enhance the abilities of bus operators to: Quickly and effectively evaluate suspicious and dangerous activities Take actions to protect yourself and your passengers, and Provide timely and accurate information to law enforcement through your control center This summary and the full instructor-led course were developed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in cooperation with the National Transportation Security Center of Excellence (NTSCOE), managed through the Science and Technology Directorate of DHS. Through the intensive efforts of four universities and two federal agencies, the team conducted extensive research both nationally and abroad to identify appropriate countermeasures and related skill sets for bus operators relative to identifying suspicious and dangerous activity and reacting appropriately with a focus on life safety concerns

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationMutations, deletions, and epigenetic silencing of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p16INK4A are associated with several cancer types, but are more commonly associated with familial melanoma predisposition and melanoma tumors. p16INK4A functions as a tumor suppressor by negatively regulating the cell cycle, however several outstanding questions remain. It remains unclear why compromise of p16INK4A predisposes to melanoma over other cancers, and why several melanoma-associated p16INK4A mutations do not compromise CDK4-binding. This study describes a novel function of p16INK4A in regulating intracellular oxidative stress independently of its role in cell cycle inhibition, and analyzes these functions in several familial melanomaassociated p16INK4A point mutants. I also demonstrate that, due in part to the prooxidizing nature of melanogenesis, melanocytes have higher constitutive levels of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) than other cell types, suggesting why genetic compromise of p16INK4A preferentially predisposes to melanoma. This dissertation demonstrates that p16INK4A was rapidly upregulated following ultraviolet-irradiation and H2O2-induced oxidative stress (Chapter 2). Depletion of p16INK4A increased ROS and oxidative DNA damage in several cell types, which was exacerbated by H2O2. Aberrant ROS levels in Cdkn2a-deficient fibroblasts were elevated relative to controls and normalized by expression of exogenous p16INK4A. Finally, p16INK4A-mediated suppression of ROS could not be attributed to the potential effects of iv p16 on cell cycle phase. I then constructed 12 different familial melanoma-associated point mutants and analyzed their capacity to restore normal cell-cycle phase and ROS levels in p16INK4A-deficient fibroblasts (Chapter 3). Whereas wild-type p16INK4A fully restored both functions, various p16INK4A mutants showed different abilities to normalize ROS and cell cycle profiles. Different mutations were found to affect both, neither, or only one of the functions of p16INK4A, indicating that these two regulatory functions can be uncoupled. Structural analysis indicated that these distinct functions may be mediated by distinct regions of the protein. Lastly, in normal melanocytes, inhibition of melanin was sufficient to decrease levels of intracellular ROS to levels constitutively observed in fibroblasts (Chapter 4), indicating that the unique process of melanin production may be responsible for high basal levels of ROS and preferential susceptibility to oncogenic transformation brought on by genetic compromise of p16INK4A

Negative effects of makeup use on perceptions of leadership ability across two ethnicities

Cosmetics alter social perceptions, and prior work suggests that cosmetic use may aid female intrasexual competition, making women appear more dominant to other women but more prestigious to other men. It is unclear whether these findings reflect general improvements in perceptions of traits related to women's dominance or if they are specific to mating contexts only. Here, across two ethnicities, we examined effects of cosmetics used for a social night out on perceptions of women's leadership ability, a trait that denotes competence/high status outside of mating contexts. Participants of African and Caucasian ethnicity judged faces for leadership ability where half of the trials differed in ethnicity (own- vs. other-ethnicity face pairs) and the subtlety of the color manipulation (50% vs. 100%). Regardless of the participant's sex or ethnicity, makeup used for a social night out had a negative effect on perceptions of women's leadership ability. Our findings suggest that, in prior work, women are afforded traits related to dominance, as makeup enhances perceptions of traits that are important for successful female mating competition but not other components of social dominance such as leadership

Impact of pressure dissipation on fluid injection into layered aquifers

Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and subsurface storage is one method for reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions to mitigate climate change. It is well known that large-scale fluid injection into the subsurface leads to a buildup in pressure that gradually spreads and dissipates through lateral and vertical migration of water. This dissipation can have an important feedback on the shape of the CO2 plume during injection, and the impact of vertical pressure dissipation, in particular, remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the impact of lateral and vertical pressure dissipation on the injection of CO2 into a layered aquifer system. We develop a compressible, two-phase model that couples pressure dissipation to the propagation of a CO2 gravity current. We show that our vertically integrated, sharp-interface model is capable of efficiently and accurately capturing water migration in a layered aquifer system with an arbitrary number of aquifers. We identify two limiting cases --- `no leakage' and `strong leakage' --- in which we derive analytical expressions for the water pressure field for the corresponding single-phase injection problem. We demonstrate that pressure dissipation acts to suppress the formation of an advancing CO2 tongue during injection, resulting in a plume with a reduced lateral extent. The properties of the seals and the number of aquifers determine the strength of pressure dissipation and subsequent coupling with the CO2 plume. The impact of pressure dissipation on the shape of the CO2 plume is likely to be important for storage efficiency and security

Comprehensive Pain Assessment for Veterans in Long-Term Care

Background Literature supports the need for comprehensive pain assessment (CPA) in long-term care facilities. CPAs provide valuable information for facility providers and health care staff to intervene appropriately regardless of cognitive ability. Without the use of such tools, pain can go undertreated or ignored for this underserved population causing undue suffering and poor quality of life. Chronic pain perpetuates an endless cycle of immobility, falls, injury, functional decline, and eventual death for this population. Purpose: A CPA was implemented, evaluated, and integrated into the care processes in a long-term care facility for veterans Method: The IHI improvement model with a 2-cycle plan, do study and act (PDSA) process was used to implement a CPA care process in a long-term care facility for veterans. Demographic data were collected, and chart audit data were analyzed using Excel. Charting compliance was used for the first cycle because the baseline compliance was zero. The percentage of change was calculated for the second cycle. Results: For cycle 1, compliance for the pain assessment was 5.14%. Following the first cycle, compliance was 70.2% for all elements. Compliance after cycle two improved to 78.7%., which did not quite meet the 80% benchmark set but showed dramatic improvement from baseline. The total positive change of 13% over this 8-week quality improvement project exceeded the 10% improvement benchmark for a positive percentage of change. Implications: Proper evaluation of the resident’s chronic pain improved the quality of care and provided a replicable process for other long-term care facilities

Toward a Parallel Implementation of J: Data Parallelism in Functional, Array-Oriented Languages with Function Rank

The notion of function rank has important implications for the field of parallel computing. In particular, certain formalizations of function rank can be helpful for exploiting potential concurrency in the form of data parallelism, because function rank can allow the programmer to express safely, easily, and in an automatically data parallel fashion both the application of a function to subcollections of a regularly shaped multidimensional collection and the extension of a function to similar problems in higher dimensions. This paper illustrates this importance by discussing solutions using function rank to three parallel problems, each chosen to represent a different parallel design patterns. Addi- tionally, included are both a set of proposals for a parallel implementation of J, which is an array-oriented, functional programming language with function rank, as well as a prototype implementation of a parallel regular collections library using function rank in Scala. Perfor- mance results for solutions using the prototype Scala library (as well as C with OpenMP, for comparison) to each of the problems are also given, though this work is intended only as a proof of concept

Sensorimotor Synchronization and Individual Differences in Intelligence: A Chronometric Perspective on Music Evolution

The ability to adapt movement, such as drumstick-tapping, to synchronize with external rhythmic stimuli has been extensively studied in experimental research, but the causes of individual differences in synchronization error are only beginning to be understood. Several studies have demonstrated that differences in the ability to accurately maintain an equal-interval beat and in the ability to synchronize accurately with an equal-interval pulse are moderately related to measures of general intelligence. Based on a signaling hypothesis of music evolution, and by analogy to mental chronometry research, it was hypothesized that additional time-sensitive cognitive requirements that are present when humans synchronize with groups of other performers may be important causes of the relationship between rhythmic synchronization accuracy and intelligence. This hypothesis predicted (1) that perceptible differences in the quality of improvised creative output by musical non-experts are related to quantitative differences in interval timing and synchronization abilities, and (2) that the relationship between general intelligence and rhythmic synchronization accuracy is increased when elements of stimulus ambiguity and unpredictability are introduced. Two studies demonstrated links among mental traits, timing accuracy, and social perception of creative output. The strongest predictor of average accuracy across synchronization tasks was self-rated prior skill attainment with musical instruments. For particular tasks that included unpredictable phase shifts in rhythmic stimuli, synchronization accuracy was related to differences in general intelligence. Differences in measurable rhythmic timing accuracy were in turn predicted by subjective ratings of the quality of improvised drumming performances. However, because intelligence did not account for additional variability in rhythmic accuracy beyond that accounted for by self-rated musical instrument skill attainment, only weak support was found for the hypothesis that complex background stimuli produced by group musical synchronization were ecologically important as part of a system for signaling mental speed