Barriers to Increased Engineering Graduate Enrollments: Counterforces and Their Implementation

This paper highlights the role of the faculty member in recruiting students currently enrolled in B.S. programs in engineering and the sciences into full-time pursuit of a graduate-level engineering degree. The faculty member is demonstrated to be in a unique position to influence such students, providing strong counterforces to a confluence of attitudes and pressures experienced during the B.S. experience which effectively create a barrier to full-time engineering graduate study. We analyze this barrier via the method of force field analysis, and demonstrate that effective recruitment into full-time graduate study must be based on a four-fold strategy of education, expectations, improved B.S. experience and better control of the B.S. environment. Approaches to implement these strategies are discussed.     

The isolated air perfused rat heart

A simple method has been developed for continuous monitoring of metabolic activity of an isolated, perfused rat heart by O2/CO2 respirometer. Since respirometer provides vital data on oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production of a preserved organ on a continuous basis over a long period of time, it will be possible to use this method to monitor viability of not only isolated heart but also any given donor organ under preservation.     

A new protocol for training severely impaired patients in the usage of memory journals

Although memory disorders are frequently seen in survivors of brain injuries, remediation of patients with severe memory disorders is still relatively neglected in clinical practice due to pessimism by clinicians regarding the efficacy of such remediation. With respect to memory journal training, a further reason for this neglect is likely the lack of readily accessible protocols that therapists can use to work with these patients. The purpose of the present paper is to describe a new memory journal training protocol that was developed to teach brain injury survivors how to compensate for severe memory impairments by using three strengths of most brain injury survivors: immediate attention, procedural memory, and old learning. A training protocol is described that involves baseline testing and a needs assessment, five levels of training exercises, and discharge probe testing. It is concluded that patients with severely impaired memory abilities can learn the present system when care is taken to individualize journals, conduct proper needs assessments, and provide structured training exercises geared to the strengths of memory impaired persons.     

Weak interactions and lessons from crystallization

Ideas derived from the study of the process of crystallization may provide insights into molecular recognition in biological systems. Both processes exploit the cooperativity which arises from the formation of a large array of weak interactions.     

Aeromagnetic compensation using neural networks

Airborne magnetic surveys in geophysical exploration can be subject to interference effects from the aircraft. Principal sources are the permanent magnetism of various parts of the aircraft, induction effects created by the earth's magnetic field and eddy-current fields produced by the aircraft's manoeuvres. Neural networks can model these effects as functions of roll, pitch, heading and their time derivatives, together with vertical acceleration, charging currents to the generator, etc., without assuming an explicit physical model. Separation of interference effects from background regional and diurnal fields can also be achieved in a satisfactory way.     

Determination of tablet coating distribution by deconvolution of uncoated and coated tablet weight distributions

PURPOSE: The purpose of this research is to obtain the tablet coating distribution from weight distributions of uncoated and coated tablets. METHODS: The method of deconvolution with digital smoothing was used to calculate the distribution of coating applied to a tablet population from separate random measurements of individual uncoated and coated tablets. RESULTS: It was demonstrated that the calculated coating weight distribution agrees well with the measured distribution. The effect of the smoothing factor on the solution is illustrated. CONCLUSIONS: This method can be used during development to facilitate process scale-up/optimization. In routine production, the method can assess the reproducibility and consistency of a coating process.     

Activation of auditory cortex during silent lipreading

Watching a speaker's lips during face-to-face conversation (lipreading) markedly improves speech perception, particularly in noisy conditions. With functional magnetic resonance imaging it was found that these linguistic visual cues are sufficient to activate auditory cortex in normal hearing individuals in the absence of auditory speech sounds. Two further experiments suggest that these auditory cortical areas are not engaged when an individual is viewing nonlinguistic facial movements but appear to be activated by silent meaningless speechlike movements (pseudospeech). This supports psycholinguistic evidence that seen speech influences the perception of heard speech at a prelexical stage.     

Conserved features of TBE1 transposons in ciliated protozoa

BACKGROUND: Accessory function (AF) is one way antigen presenting cells generate sufficient secondary signals for optimal T-cell proliferation and IL-2 production. In general, alveolar macrophages (AM) are inferior accessory cells in comparison to monocytes whereas in sarcoidosis AF of AM is increased. METHODS: We compared the accessory index (AI) of AM and peripheral blood monocytes (PBM) of 41 patients with inactive sarcoidosis (SAR I, n = 12); active sarcoidosis with new or progressing symptoms (SAR II, n = 19), active sarcoidosis with spontaneous remission (SAR III, n = 10), tuberculosis (TB, n = 12), hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP, n = 12), Wegener's disease (WD, n = 2), undefined alveolitis (UA, n = 8) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD, n = 6) by employing the histoincompatibility-insensitive Jurkat cells as indicator cells. RESULTS: Compared with the controls (1.08 +/- 0.3) AMs of all groups but SAR I (AI: 0.96 +/- 0.42) exhibited significantly increased AIs (SAR II: 3.6 +/- 3.9; SAR III: 3.2 +/- 2.4; TB: 2.8 +/- 2.2; HP: 3 +/- 2; UA: 2.7 +/- 2.3; COPD: 3.1 +/- 2.2; p < 0.05 for all comparisons). Only in HP, AI of PBM was significantly increased compared with controls (3 +/- 1.5, 1.3 +/- 0.5, respectively; p < 0.001). Alveolar macrophages from patients with arcoidosis, TB, and HB express the costimulatory molecule CD80 on their surface and anti-CD80 antibodies inhibited the IL-2 release of Jurkat cells in this system to 59 +/- 27%. CONCLUSIONS: Our data demonstrate that AM from patients with various diseases have the capability to act as competent accessory cells and that the reported accessory function of these cells is at least in part mediated by the expression of CD80.