Image, institution and leadership : Philip Lindsley and the modern university presidency 1825-1850

Colleges and universities have historically found that their projected image, character, prestige, and reputation is highly significant to success, even though these illusive indicators of quality may be little more than emotional responses to what people believe, rather than reality. These over-simplifications are based on filtered messages and perceptions, and when they occur, a Gestalt view results that relates to the institution as a whole. One avenue often utilized by institutions of higher education to achieve this institutional image or character is through the president or major spokesman.;One important historic case of the spokesman\u27s role in higher education is that of Philip B. Lindsley, educator and Presbyterian clergyman, who served as president of the University of Nashville from 1825 to 1850. He is, in effect, the nineteenth century precursor of the twentieth century university president. While involved in all aspects of his small and struggling institution, he devoted much of his time and energy addressing the external affairs of the university. He solicited monetary support both from individual citizens of Nashville and from the State of Tennessee for his private nonsectarian institution. He was keenly aware of the power of the press in influencing public policy just as he understood that higher education is not an isolated entity, but instead, one that must fit within the overall needs of society--economically, socially, educationally (at all levels of lower public education), and morally.;The Lindsley of nineteenth century Nashville stood in dramatic relief to most college presidents of the time. But his legacy was not to be in his own university, which closed shortly after his resignation in 1850. Instead, the significance of Philip Lindsley would be in the themes he addressed, through public speeches and published papers, regarding the direction of higher education in Tennessee and beyond.;In this frontier environment, where the impossible was thought only slightly less attainable than the difficult, Philip Lindsley confused the visionary with the real and turned his dreams into illusions. Herein lies his importance as a type and role for the American college president.;His professional inscription stands separate from the University of Nashville. He became a symbol of educational leadership through the celebration of his philosophies and creeds. After a while and with his repeated oratory, Philip Lindsley\u27s reputation gained increased acceptance merely because of his recognition. Image and institution ceased to be one

A preliminary checklist of the caddisflies : (Insecta: Trichoptera) of Oklahoma

One hundred forty-five species of caddisflies representing 15 families and 46 genera are reported from Oklahoma. Thirty-nine species are new state records. Families having the greatest species richness were Hydroptilidae (44 species), Leptoceridae (31 species), Hydropsychidae (26 species), and Polycentropodidae (13 species)

Unlocking the potential of information flow: Maximizing free-energy transduction in a model of an autonomous rotary molecular motor

Molecular motors fulfill critical functions within all living beings. Understanding their underlying working principles is therefore of great interest. Here we develop a simple model inspired by the two-component biomolecular motor Fo-F1 ATP synthase. We analyze its energetics and characterize information flows between the machine's components. At maximum output power we find that information transduction plays a minor role for free-energy transduction. However, when the two components are coupled to different environments (e.g., when in contact with heat baths at different temperatures), we show that information flow becomes a resource worth exploiting to maximize free-energy transduction. Our findings suggest that real-world powerful and efficient information engines could be found in machines whose components are subjected to fluctuations of different strength, since in this situation the benefit gained from using information for work extraction can outweigh the costs of information generation.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Green fluorescent diamidines as diagnostic probes for trypanosomes

LED fluorescence microscopy offers potential benefits to the diagnosis of human African trypanosomiasis, as well as to other aspects of diseases management, such as detection of drug resistant strains. To advance such approaches reliable and specific fluorescent markers to stain parasites in human fluids are needed. Here we report a series of novel green fluorescent diamidines and their suitability as probes to stain trypanosomes

Rotating Backing Brush

In the final steps of GAF’s shingle production process, small asphalt particles called fines are applied. Some fines adhere well to the shingle sheet, while others temporarily stick only to fall off the sheet further down the manufacturing line. As a result, the shingle plant floor is covered in fines that have fallen due to vibrations and gravity. The technicians and engineers at GAF want a cleaner working environment and to potentially reuse the loose fines. We are a senior project team that solved this problem by designing a system to remove and collect loose fines. In this document, the Senior Project Report, we fully describe our design process, final design, and results. After extensive research and consultation with GAF, we defined the scope of the project and set specifications for our design. With these specifications, we used ideation methods to generate several possible solutions, which were narrowed down to our final concept. The final design consists of a rotating brush that spins against the motion of the shingle sheet to remove the loose asphalt fines into a collection system which then captures the removed fines. After testing a variety of bristles, we narrowed our selection to brushes made of Nylon 6-6. The final three bristle types we compared were 0.028” crimped, 0.028” level, and 0.022” level. With our system parameters of 4.5” long bristles, brush speed of 450 rpm, and overlap of approximately 0.07 inches, we recommend 0.022” level to GAF, but note that our testing was insufficient to conclude that the 0.022” level was definitively better. Furthermore, results from our testing suggests that any of the three types may satisfy our specifications. Longevity, overlap, and brush speed are all additional parameters that we recommend testing further

Age characteristics of a shelf-break eddy in the western Arctic and implications for shelf-basin exchange

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 113 (2008): C02018, doi:10.1029/2007JC004429.Radioisotope evaluation of a cold-core, anticyclonic eddy surveyed in September 2004 on the Chukchi Sea continental slope was used to determine its age since formation over the shelf environment. Because the eddy can be shown to have been generated near the shelf break, initial conditions for several age-dependent tracers could be relatively well constrained. A combination of 228Ra/226Ra, excess 224Ra, and 228Th/228Ra suggested an age on the order of months. This age is consistent with the presence of elevated concentrations of nutrients, organic carbon, suspended particles, and shelf-derived neritic zooplankton within the eddy compared to ambient offshore water in the Canada Basin but comparable to values measured in the Chukchi shelf and shelf-break environment. Hence this feature, at the edge of the deep basin, was poised to deliver biogeochemically significant shelf material to the central Arctic Ocean.This work was supported by National Science Foundation Polar Programs grants OPP-662690 and OPP-66040N to the University of Miami (DK), and Office of Naval Research grant N00014-02-1-0317 (RP)

PACE Solver Description: DreyFVS

We describe DreyFVS, a heuristic for Directed Feedback Vertex Set submitted to the 2022 edition of Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge. The Directed Feedback Vertex Set problem asks to remove a minimal number of vertices from a digraph such that the resulting digraph is acyclic. Our algorithm first performs a guess on a reduced instance by leveraging the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, to then improve this solution by pipelining two local search methods

Plastic deformation of microsamples: Intermittent dislocation avalanches and their acoustic emission

On the micrometer scale, deformation properties of metals change profoundly: the smooth and continuous behavior of bulk materials is often replaced by jerky flow due to random strain bursts of various sizes. The reason for this behavior is the complex intermittent redistribution of lattice dislocations due to external loading. This process also leads to the formation of the uneven step-like surface upon deformation. Our highly sensitive micromechanical platform can detect the strain bursts caused by dislocation avalanches in three different ways: (i) by stress and strain measurements using a capacitive displacement sensor measuring the elongation of a spring, (ii) by detection of the emitted acoustic signal using a sensitive piezoelectric transducer and (iii) by visual images using the electron beam of the SEM. In my presentation, I will present two of our recent results obtained with the help of this toolbox. Please click Download on the upper right corner to see the full abstract

Automatic detection of microsleep episodes with deep learning

Brief fragments of sleep shorter than 15 s are defined as microsleep episodes (MSEs), often subjectively perceived as sleepiness. Their main characteristic is a slowing in frequency in the electroencephalogram (EEG), similar to stage N1 sleep according to standard criteria. The maintenance of wakefulness test (MWT) is often used in a clinical setting to assess vigilance. Scoring of the MWT in most sleep-wake centers is limited to classical definition of sleep (30-s epochs), and MSEs are mostly not considered in the absence of established scoring criteria defining MSEs but also because of the laborious work. We aimed for automatic detection of MSEs with machine learning, i.e. with deep learning based on raw EEG and EOG data as input. We analyzed MWT data of 76 patients. Experts visually scored wakefulness, and according to recently developed scoring criteria MSEs, microsleep episode candidates (MSEc), and episodes of drowsiness (ED). We implemented segmentation algorithms based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a combination of a CNN with a long-short term memory (LSTM) network. A LSTM network is a type of a recurrent neural network which has a memory for past events and takes them into account. Data of 53 patients were used for training of the classifiers, 12 for validation and 11 for testing. Our algorithms showed a good performance close to human experts. The detection was very good for wakefulness and MSEs and poor for MSEc and ED, similar to the low inter-expert reliability for these borderline segments. We provide a proof of principle that it is feasible to reliably detect MSEs with deep neuronal networks based on raw EEG and EOG data with a performance close to that of human experts. Code of algorithms ( https://github.com/alexander-malafeev/microsleep-detection ) and data ( https://zenodo.org/record/3251716 ) are available