Application of Lean Methodology in a Low - Resource Emergency Department in Ethiopia

Medical Schoolhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148167/1/harrisj.pd

A Non-Traditional Approach: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Women Artists and the Nocturnal Genre Scene Market

Nocturnal genre scenes were on the rise in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. With new technologies and advances taking place during this time, people were staying out later and partaking in more nocturnal activities. Both men and women engaged in these new nightly endeavors, but there were still notable expectations in regards to gender roles for men and women. As seen in the scholarship included within this thesis, men were allotted more freedom than women. The Dutch artists who chose to specialize in nocturnal genre scenes depicted these well-known gender roles within their paintings. Seventeenth-century women artists Judith Leyster and Gesina ter Borch worked within the realm of nocturnal genre scenes. Based on the gender roles of the time, these two prominent artists challenged what was deemed acceptable for women in their scenes; whereas their male contemporaries tended to depict what was considered respectable. While previous scholarship has examined the nocturnal scenes of both Leyster and Gesina, as well as their peers, there has not been a discussion on how the specific paintings included would fare on the market. As seen by a variety of scholars, the seventeenth-century Dutch art market was growing rapidly. This development allowed artists to start specializing and tailoring their paintings to attract potential buyers, such as a group known as collectors. This group mostly consisted of middle-to-upper class citizens, but varied in their employment and age. Therefore, while this thesis analyzes nocturnal genre scenes and the seventeenth-century gender roles depicted in them, it also focuses on the market success of these artists and their scenes

Optimization of Prosthetic Hands: Utilizing Modularity to Improve Grip Force, Grasp, and Versatility

It has been demonstrated that although many varieties of upper limb prosthetics exist, commercially available prosthetics are outdated and unsatisfactory. Ineffectiveness and limitations have led to some prosthesis wearers having to own multiple devices, whereas others have given up on them entirely. Even though ample research has been conducted to design and test new hand designs, the industry appears to rest in an overall stagnated state. It was proposed here, that one problem with prosthetic research is an excess of variables involved in testing, and therefore the improper application of the scientific method. It seems that each time a research team desires to test a new idea, a completely new hand and system is designed to house it. A costly and time-consuming cycle is then initiated which may lead to comparing the merits of one hand to the performance of distinct hand designs with multiple differences. Since these comparisons involve multiple variables, the results are often inconclusive and many projects end up shelved. To help advance prosthetic improvement, it seems necessary to unclog the process by lowering costs, speeding up development, and implementing an improved basis for comparison. The proposed method for achieving the first two objectives is to make use of a 3D printed hand platform. Such prosthetics are durable, inexpensive, and quick to manufacture and assemble. This allows for rapid transition from idea to prototype, and from observation to improvement. The method for improving comparison is the addition of modularity into the prosthetic. If a single hand could be reconfigured to implement different attributes and ideas, the merit of each innovation could be independently demonstrated and verified. In this research, a 3D printed hand was chosen which could accommodate configurations capable of adding adaptation as well as a resting state of partial curvature to the basic hand. The various configurations, including neither, each, and both changes were then tested in a series of experiments. These were arranged to discover the maximum weight that could be sustained while the hand attempted to maintain grasp on various bar shapes. These tests were run in two different test setups: attached to a non-amputee’s arm and suspended by clamps, in order to determine the influence introduced by the limitations of human strength and physiology. These rounds of testing successfully demonstrated that small modifications to the prosthetic could yield improvements in performance (even with a basic, low-cost hand), and that the merit of various ideas can be independently demonstrated on a singular platform

The Structure and Function of Photosystem I and Photosystem I – Hydrogenase Protein Fusions: An Experimental and Computational Study

Photosystem I (PSI) is a membrane protein involved in the photosynthetic cycle of plants, algae, and cyanobacteria that is of specific interest due to its ability to harness solar energy to generate reducing power. This work seeks to form an in vitro hybrid protein fusion between the membrane integral PSI protein and the membrane-bound hydrogenase (MBH) enzyme, in an effort to improve electron transport between these two proteins. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) was used to characterize the detergent-solubilized solution structure of trimeric PSI from the cyanobacterium Thermosynechococcus elongatus, which showed that the detergent interacts primarily with the hydrophobic periphery of PSI. The SANS results were used as a guide to constructing a model of trimeric PSI embedded in a detergent belt. Subsequent all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the PSI-detergent complex suggested that the detergent environment could negatively impact the long-term stability of PSI, but is not likely to affect PSI activity or hinder its ligation to the MBH. Having verified that the solution structure of the PSI-detergent complex will not affect formation of PSI-MBH fusions, the membrane-bound [NiFe]-hydrogenase of Ralstonia eutropha was genetically engineered to express a Gly3 [Gly-Gly-Gly] tag on the N-terminus of the small subunit to allow for site-specific ligation to the psaE subunit of PSI. H2 [hydrogen] uptake activity results show a complete loss of activity in the mutant R. eutropha strain, possibly due to mutations introduced during previous genetic engineering work. In parallel, MD simulations of the PSI-MBH fusion protein indicate this ligation strategy is not optimal for electron transport between these proteins. This MD approach can be used to evaluate other PSI-MBH fusion strategies, possibly targeting other stromal subunits of PSI. Finally, MD simulations of previously studied PSI-[FeFe]-hydrogenase fusions were conducted, revealing significant distortion of the protein structure that could limit their long-term stability

Disturbance Related to Unconventional Oil and Gas Development in the Appalachian Basin

Little research has been done on the land cover change of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) wells across the Appalachian basin. In the last decade, UOG development has increased drastically across the region. Permitted well data from 2007 to 2017 were assembled into a geospatial database and analyzed with current aerial imagery to determine the activity of permitted wells in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. To capture all disturbance related to UOG development, a 25-hectare buffer was placed around each active well as the study extent. A supervised classification approach was used to determine the pre-development and post-development landcover across all 4,212 well pad buffers in the region. Overall, the average forested and grass land cover percentage decreased by 4.3 and 0.8 percent across the Appalachian basin, while the impervious surface percentage gained an average of 5.2 percent respectively. The largest land cover change category was forest to grass, with an average of 3.8 hectares per well pad buffer across the region. Forest and grass land cover changed to impervious land cover by an average of 0.8 and 0.9 hectares per well buffer. The trend suggests that well pads are currently being placed in areas with higher grass landcover. Thus as development continues in the region, results indicate that impacts could increase in more forested cover types

Lunar surface exploration by satellite. An integrated experiment package to perform measurements of the composition of the lunar surface Final report

Integrated experiment package to measure lunar surface composition - gamma ray, alpha particle, X ray fluorescence, and neutron albedo experiment

Combat Robot

The senior capstone project that was tasked to the team was the decision of choosing a challenge within a national robotics competition. The group decided to compete at the National Robotics Challenge in Marion, Ohio. The idea was to participate in the combat robot competition at this NRC event. Once this decision had been made the next steps were to get an idea of what the rules and requirements of the competition were and to try and to sketch a very rough drawing of what the ideal robot should look like. From there it was decided to start a timeline of the goals and objectives throughout the whole project. This would serve as a baseline, and it was later altered and updated as the project progressed. The next step was then started by making some 3D mockups in SOLIDWORKS to get an idea of what the weight of our main chassis would be. This chassis was printed off utilizing the 3D printer to understand what the durability and weight was going to be of this 3D printed chassis. The main objective for this project was to have the robot fully operational a month before the competition on April 7th. Many different skills were used during this process, including but not limited too soldering, understanding of circuitry, use of SOLIDWORKS, and other general engineering practices

Adapting Global Service-Learning Project and Community Partnership Outcomes Using a “Tele-engineering” Approach in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Water Supply in Developing Countries (WSDC) service-learning course at Purdue University has fostered a strong partnership with the La Vega region in the Dominican Republic since 2012. During this time, an interdisciplinary group of engineering and science students has helped design drinking water treatment systems and the group has developed water, sanitation, and health (WASH) education materials. These WASH education and water safety approaches often have been conducted in person in the past. However, with the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and the inability to travel in the fall and spring semesters of the 2020–2021 academic year, the students have been exploring (1) the impact of the pandemic on the community schools in the La Vega province, (2) the impact of the pandemic on the current water treatment systems, and (3) possible solutions to implement a “virtual installation” of a water treatment system at our newest partner school in the community of Desecho. The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new way that we may approach our service-learning experiences in the future. More specifically, in the future, it may be more effective to serve as a “virtual consulting firm” of engineers and consultants, rather than builders, for the implementation and design of the water treatment systems. In this way, we may facilitate a partnership that fosters community agency and solution-based approaches to technical issues are led by local community members

Epidemiology and population structure of Xylella fastidiosa, the causal agent of bacterial leaf scorch, among urban trees in the District of Columbia

A survey of urban trees affected by bacterial leaf scorch caused by Xylella fastidiosa was conducted in the District of Columbia during 2012 and 2013. Disease occurred most frequently with Quercus palustris, Q. rubra, Ulmus americana, and Platanus occidentalis. Eight other symptomatic and five asymptomatic tree species were found infected. The bacterium was also detected on asymptomatic portion of seven tree species. The occurrence of crown dieback was found significantly associated with X. fastidiosa-infection on Q. palustris, Q. rubra, U. americana, and P. occidentalis. A multi-locus sequence typing analysis using 10 housekeeping loci for X. fastidiosa revealed five clonal strains among the urban trees. These strains were host specific, with only one clone being associated with members of the red oak family, American elm, American sycamore, and two clones being associated with mulberry. Long-term management strategies aimed at mitigating the occurrence of bacterial leaf scorch disease are discussed

Analysis of the Hydrogen-rich Magnetic White Dwarfs in the SDSS

We have calculated optical spectra of hydrogen-rich (DA) white dwarfs with magnetic field strengths between 1 MG and 1000 MG for temperatures between 7000 K and 50000 K. Through a least-squares minimization scheme with an evolutionary algorithm, we have analyzed the spectra of 114 magnetic DAs from the SDSS (95 previously published plus 14 newly discovered within SDSS, and five discovered by SEGUE). Since we were limited to a single spectrum for each object we used only centered magnetic dipoles or dipoles which were shifted along the magnetic dipole axis. We also statistically investigated the distribution of magnetic-field strengths and geometries of our sample.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of the 16th European Workshop on White Dwarfs, Barcelona, 200