Digital lace:a collision of responsive technologies

Designing with properties such as colour-change and light using electronics and digital control brings new challenges within art and design, and a range of new possibilities for aesthetics, tactility and functionality. Heimtextil 2014 (accessed April 2014) promotes emerging materials and technologies as one of four trends which highlight the increasing demand for unique products utilizing novel material properties and digital making. However, there is still limited insight into the creative potential of these materials that are fundamental to the exploitation of 'smart' material properties, the development of new 'smart' surfaces and digital tools that facilitate designing with colour-change and light-emitting properties specific to textiles. This submission to the Fiber arts category presents new material concepts as Digital Lace: a novel, multifaceted textile which will be presented as an interactive table runner for a digitally manufactured console table. Digital Lace explicitly pools together the digital-craft skills base and disparate expertise of printed textile practitioner and thermochromic specialist, Sara Robertson (SR) and constructed textile practitioner and light-emitting optical fibre specialist, Sarah Taylor (ST). Within the context of 'smart', material development and experimentation, Digital lace exploits and amalgamates the responsive technologies of dye and fibre with digital-control

Women at Risk: Why Increasing Numbers of Women Are Failing to Get the Health Care They Need and How the Affordable Care Act Will Help

Presents findings from the 2010 Biennial Health Insurance Survey about rates of uninsurance and care delayed due to cost among women, as well as obstacles faced in the individual market. Examines how reform provisions will change their access to coverage

How the Affordable Care Act Is Helping Young Adults Stay Covered

Based on 2010 Biennial Health Insurance Survey data, examines how provisions to extend eligibility for Medicaid and dependent coverage and create insurance exchanges will affect coverage and access to care among young adults

Inquiry-Based Professional Development: How Did The Activities In The Mississippi Rivers Institute Affect Participant Confidence In Teaching Environmental Education?

The research question addressed in this project was, how did the activities in the Mississippi Rivers Institute affect participant confidence in teaching environmental education? These areas were: (a) river and watershed inquiry; (b) use of science notebooks in the classroom; (c) forest inquiry; (d) macroinvertebrate inquiry; (e) geology inquiry; (f) engineering activities; and (g) an overall comfort-ability level with using inquiry in the classroom. It documents the creation of the Rivers Institute as an effective professional development opportunity for educators. The author reviews the literature available on the best practices in environmental education professional development and she describes the success and struggles in implementing a quality learning experience. The author provides a roadmap for the Rivers Institute that can be used to replicate its effectiveness anywhere in the world

An investigation of the design potential of thermochromic textiles used with electronic heat-profiling circuitry

The research documented in this thesis is based on a practice-led PhD study funded by the AHRC, supported also by LCR Hallcrest, manufacturers of thermochromic dyes. In addition to the written thesis, the research outcomes also include a range of fabric samples and prototype pieces that explore the design potential of thermochromic dye systems on textiles when used in combination with electronic heat-profiling circuitry. A particular ambition of the research was to highlight and exploit the complexity of a wide range of thermochromic dye systems within the area of textile design. The research was multidisciplinary in nature, bridging design, colour chemistry and power electronics. A number of electronic heating systems, some digitally-controlled, were designed and constructed as a means to activate and control the colour change effects on thermochromic fabrics. Both leuco and liquid crystal types of thermochromic systems were explored. However, a significant focus developed on liquid crystal dye systems which offered particular opportunities in their application to textiles, including the previously unexploited design potential of their ability to change through a spectrum of colours, facilitated further by access to some unique materials made available by the industrial collaboration. The research contributes to knowledge in several ways: • it demonstrates the additive colour mixing properties of liquid crystal dye systems when layered on textiles, which have not previously been exploited in textile design. • the electronic systems that have been developed within the research offer tools for visualising colour-change, controlling, and mixing colour on a textile surface. • the approach through textile design exploited combinations of thermochromic effects with pattern, for example using laser technology, to enhance further the colour changing surfaces. It demonstrates a diverse range of thermochromic effects. The research described in this thesis not only adds significantly to knowledge and practice-led exploitation of design using thermochromic dye systems on textiles but also presents a diverse range of opportunities for new design research directions

Gaps in Health Insurance: Why So Many Americans Experience Breaks in Coverage and How the Affordable Care Act Will Help

Presents findings from the Health Insurance Tracking Survey of U.S. Adults, including the percentage of those who were uninsured during 2011, reasons for gaps in coverage, access to regular and preventive care, and the impact of federal healthcare reform

Realizing Health Reform's Potential: When Unemployed Means Uninsured: The Toll of Job Loss on Health Coverage, and How the Affordable Care Act Will Help

Examines how the 2010 healthcare reform will significantly expand affordable health coverage options for the unemployed who cannot afford COBRA. Calls for re-establishing COBRA premium subsidies to bridge coverage gaps until it is implemented in 2014

An Update on Vitamin D: The Role in Chronic Disease, Clinical Practice Implications, and the Current Status of Nurse Practitioner Knowledge

The discovery that a large portion of the United States population is vitamin D deficient, has led to hundreds of studies in the last decade which aim to discover the role of vitamin D in overall health and to determine what clinical consequences occur in a deficient state. The current clinical knowledge regarding vitamin D deficiency is reviewed, including the definition of vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency and its correlation to chronic disease states; the risk factors and epidemiology of vitamin D deficiency; and appropriate clinical screening and treatment of vitamin D deficiency. A research study completed in 2012 to determine the knowledge level of nurse practitioners regarding vitamin D deficiency demonstrated that nurse practitioners overall have poor knowledge of vitamin D deficiency. One subset of vitamin D studies focus on the connection between vitamin D deficiency and Type 2 Diabetes (DM2). Although a cause and effect relationship between vitamin D deficiency and increased risk of DM2 is still elusive, many studies have demonstrated an association between the two chronic disease states. A Literature Review from 2012 demonstrated that patients who are diabetic are more likely than the general population to have vitamin D deficiency. Additionally, individuals who were deficient in vitamin D are more likely to suffer from DM2, be diagnosed at an earlier age and have poorer control of sugar levels. This research indicates that vitamin D deficiency may play a role in the development and treatment of DM2, however, more research is needed to examine that role

42 - A comparison of two automated bat-call classifying software programs.

Bats are an integral part of many ecosystems and provide numerous valuable services such as pollination, seed dispersal and, in our region, insect control. Sampling the bat community to assess ecosystem health and document bat species of conservation interest is typically accomplished by capturing individuals in combination with collecting acoustic data. Acoustic sampling has the advantages of being effective in many varied habitat types, potentially less biased than capture data, and non-invasive to the bats. Many surveys are now entirely acoustic as the technology and ability to assign species identification to each has advanced substantially during the last few decades. In fact, regulatory agencies currently allow acoustic only surveys to assess the presence/probably absence of endangered bat species when automated acoustic identification software is used to assign calls. Unfortunately, identifying species based on calls is extremely challenging and often plagued by high inaccuracies. Our objective for this project was to assess the reliability of software programs that are approved for bat surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. To accomplish this objective, we used Anabat Swift detectors to record calls for 129 detector nights during July-August, 2018. We used two different automated acoustic identification software programs to assign species identity to all recorded files. Our preliminary analyses indicate substantial differences between results produced by these two software programs. We recommend caution when relying solely on acoustic data and automated software programs to determine presence/probably absence of bat species of conservation concern within a landscape

IV Estimation of Panels with Factor Residuals

This paper proposes a new instrumental variables approach for consistent and asymptotically effi cient estimation of panel data models with weakly exogenous or endogenous regressors and residuals generated by a multifactor error structure. In this case, the standard dynamic panel estimators fail to provide consistent estimates of the parameters. The novelty of our approach is that we introduce new parameters to represent the unobserved covariances between the instruments and the factor component of the residual; these parameters are estimable when N is large. Some important estimation and identi cation issues are studied in detail. The fi nite sample performance of the proposed estimators is investigated using simulated data. The results show that the method produces reliable estimates of the parameters over several parametrisations