Using \u27Homemade\u27 Documentary Video in Religious Studies

On the whole, the lesson I learned from making Abraham\u27s Children, and the one I would like to pass on, is a fairly simple one. If an instructor can imagine a video that would enhance his or her religious studies teaching in specific ways, but cannot seem to find a strong candidate available in the current market, that instructor may want to consider producing a homemade video with the primary goal of improving his or her own students\u27 education, and the secondary aim of making your project available for purchase to colleagues who may be facing similar pedagogical challenges. In our current higher educational climate, in which there appears to be much interest in and funding for improving undergraduate instruction through the application of new media technologies, those of us who teach religion and who think we have ideas for quality instructional films, might well want to strike while the iron\u27s hot, and see if there is not some way we can create these films ourselves. I speak from experience when I say that the process can be an extremely rewarding one

Residence Times of Minnesota Groundwaters

ABSTRACT-Tritium, 14C, and nitrate analyses for eighty groundwater samples from selected Minnesota aquifers indicate a range of residence times from a few days or weeks to tens of thousands of years. The presence of significant nitrate contamination in groundwater is confined to recent or mixed groundwaters. Isotopic studies can yield information that will be useful in the design of effective groundwater protection plans in Minnesota

SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector

We present a method for detecting objects in images using a single deep neural network. Our approach, named SSD, discretizes the output space of bounding boxes into a set of default boxes over different aspect ratios and scales per feature map location. At prediction time, the network generates scores for the presence of each object category in each default box and produces adjustments to the box to better match the object shape. Additionally, the network combines predictions from multiple feature maps with different resolutions to naturally handle objects of various sizes. Our SSD model is simple relative to methods that require object proposals because it completely eliminates proposal generation and subsequent pixel or feature resampling stage and encapsulates all computation in a single network. This makes SSD easy to train and straightforward to integrate into systems that require a detection component. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and ILSVRC datasets confirm that SSD has comparable accuracy to methods that utilize an additional object proposal step and is much faster, while providing a unified framework for both training and inference. Compared to other single stage methods, SSD has much better accuracy, even with a smaller input image size. For $300\times 300$ input, SSD achieves 72.1% mAP on VOC2007 test at 58 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X and for $500\times 500$ input, SSD achieves 75.1% mAP, outperforming a comparable state of the art Faster R-CNN model. Code is available at https://github.com/weiliu89/caffe/tree/ssd .Comment: ECCV 201

Supply chain strategy in post-earthquake Haiti

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. [41]-[42]).Introduction: Partners In Health (PIH) is an international, non-profit healthcare organization with operations in several countries on multiple continents. PIH focuses on providing healthcare treatment to people living in some of the poorest places in the world, and has been operating in Haiti since 1985. At that time, PIH established a small community clinic in the central Haiti village of Cange. Today that facility has grown to become an entire medical complex, featuring a 104-bed, full-service hospital with two operating rooms, adult and pediatric wards, and clinics treating a variety of diseases and issues, from women's health to infectious diseases. In addition, Zamni Lasante ("Partners In Health" in Haitian Creyeol) has also expanded its operations to 11 other sites across Haiti's Central Plateau and beyond (Figure 1). Today, ZL ranks as one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti - serving a catchment area of 1.2 million across the Central Plateau and the Lower Artibonite. ZL employs over 4,000 people, almost all of them Haitians, including doctors, nurses and community health workers (Zamni Lasante/ Haiti). From its beginnings 25 years ago, PIH/ZL has grown tremendously, and recent years have been no exception. Since 2004, patient encounters have increased almost threefold, from 0.9 million to 2.6 million, and the number of clinical sites has almost doubled. This growth has corresponded to an increase in drugs and supplies. In 2006, approximately 1000 m3 of drugs and supplies were moved through the system. Only two years later, in 2008, that number had more than doubled to 2200 m3 . This significant increase has greatly strained the underlying supply chain.by Scott C. Alexander.M.Eng.in Logistic

Spectral Deconvolution and Quantification of Natural Organic Material and Fluorescent Tracer Dyes

Fluorescent dyes have become an integral part of the study and management of ground water in karst environments. Researchers have striven to reduce detection limits and analyze multiple dyes in a single sample while minimizing dye concentrations for environmental, aesthetic and health reasons. The unambiguous separation from background, identification and quantification of fluorescent tracer dyes has increasingly taken on legal implications. Synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy and curve fitting software represent a major advances in the quantitative analysis of low levels of tracer dyes against naturally occurring background fluorescence. Determination of levels of detection (LOD) and levels of quantification (LOQ) are an important part of dye trace design and implementation. Factors that impact LOD and LOQ include levels of natural fluorescent compounds, absolute fluorescence of the specific dyes, the presence of multiple dyes with overlapping peaks and instrumental noise. Characterization of the spectral shapes and concentration dependences of the natural fluorescence background and applied tracer dyes are important to the determination of a positive dye trace result. Rather than representing noise, the natural fluorophores contain information about the flow environment. Spectral deconvolution with curve fitting software is an important tool in the karst researcher’s toolbox

Severe Lumbar Disability Is Associated With Decreased Psoas Cross-Sectional Area in Degenerative Spondylolisthesis

Study Design: Retrospective cohort. Objectives: Alterations in lumbar paraspinal muscle cross-sectional area (CSA) may correlate with lumbar pathology. The purpose of this study was to compare paraspinal CSA in patients with degenerative spondylolisthesis and severe lumbar disability to those with mild or moderate lumbar disability, as determined by the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI). Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 101 patients undergoing lumbar fusion for degenerative spondylolisthesis. Patients were divided into ODI score ≤40 (mild/moderate disability, MMD) and ODI score \u3e40 (severe disability, SD) groups. The total CSA of the psoas and paraspinal muscles were measured on preoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Results: There were 37 patients in the SD group and 64 in the MMD group. Average age and body mass index were similar between groups. For the paraspinal muscles, we were unable to demonstrate any significant differences in total CSA between the groups. Psoas muscle CSA was significantly decreased in the SD group compared with the MMD group (1010.08 vs 1178.6 mm2, P =.041). Multivariate analysis found that psoas CSA in the upper quartile was significantly protective against severe disability (P =.013). Conclusions: We found that patients with severe lumbar disability had no significant differences in posterior lumbar paraspinal CSA when compared with those with mild/moderate disability. However, severely disabled patients had significantly decreased psoas CSA, and larger psoas CSA was strongly protective against severe disability, suggestive of a potential association with psoas atrophy and worsening severity of lumbar pathology. © The Author(s) 2018