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Stages of Grief
No full textIn four movements, this suite recounts the stages of grief I have experienced because of my grandmother’s recent death using a flute, B-flat clarinet, violin, violoncello, and piano instrumentation. The first movement, called Tears, depicts the initial despair that occurred in my family and I as we sat with her at her bedside during her last breaths. The second movement, Reach, portrays the numbness and shock as the reality of her death sinks in to our minds despite the desire that it is all a dream. The third movement, Break, illustrates the frustration and anger that arises from different family members around me as they fall into unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with their grief. A short, tender interlude is placed in the middle of this chaos to represent a phone call I made to escape the situation for a brief time. The fourth movement, Yearn, introduces many different moods on top of an overarching, persistent sadness as we go through the funeral proceedings. The focus is to show how my family reacted in different ways despite us all experiencing similar amounts of grief. The total length is about 12 minutes
On Diffeomorphism Groups of Surfaces
Get PDFLet be a closed, connected, smooth manifold. What are the symmetries of ? From a geometric viewpoint, the symmetries of are precisely its isometries, the self maps which preserve lengths and angles. In the smooth category, the symmetries of are its diffeomorphisms, the self maps which are smooth and have a smooth inverse. Does expanding our notion of symmetries to include diffeomorphisms result in ``more\u27\u27 symmetries in a meaningful sense? As a formal conjecture, the claim is that the isometry group of is a deformation retract of the diffeomorphism group of . If is the -sphere, this is the Smale conjecture, and it holds only in dimension less than four. In this thesis, we restrict to be a surface, and we prove the Earle-Eells theorem: if is neither the sphere, torus, projective plane, nor Klein bottle, then the isometry group of is a deformation retract of the diffeomorphism group of . We follow Gramain\u27s 1973 proof via Hatcher\u27s 2014 exposition, rather than the original proofs of Earle and Eells in 1969 and 1970
Pre-Vent CPAP Belly Device
Get PDFThe CPAP Belly Pre-Vent device was developed to prevent stomach distension caused by Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) treatment in premature neonatal patients under 2 kg. CPAP therapy provides critical respiratory support but can lead to air accumulation in the stomach due to esophageal insufficiency. This accumulation, known as CPAP belly, can interfere with lung expansion and feeding efficiency. The goal of this project was to design, develop, and test a device that passively vents excess air from the stomach to alleviate these issues.
The main phases of the project consist of identifying customer requirements and translating them to engineering requirements, concept generation, device prototyping, and analyzing the results. For this device, key customer requirements included being able to prevent stomach distention by venting out air, perform in the possibility of blockages, being able to be structurally sound, and usable by the medical staff.
Using these requirements, engineering specifications such as preventing 1.5x area growth of the stomach model, performing within 25% of unobstructed flow during simulate blockages and a maximum external diameter of 8 French.
After testing, none of the proportional area changes surpassed the the failure threshold. In addition, when compared to the passive venting test, simulating blockages provided results that were statistically insignificant, suggesting that the blockage mitigation features on the device were effective.
The Pre-Vent CPAP Belly Device successfully meets customer and engineering requirements, demonstrating effective passive venting of excess air while being able to combat any potential obstruction and interference within the body. This innovation presents a practical solution for neonatal patients experiencing CPAP belly, improving respiratory outcomes and feeding efficiency in the NICU setting. Future work will involve testing with greater sample sizes, more development in manufacturing processes, and biocompatibility testing
Sprinter Start Block Training Aid
No full textCurrently, track and field sprinters ranging from beginner level to world-class have no practical tool that provides quantitative feedback of value on quality of start and quality of the three distinct phases of their sprint race, such that they can quantify the value of their adjustments. Our team will create a device that integrates with the sprint starting block to provide quantifiable data on the quality of a sprinter’s start. This Statement of Work describes drawbacks of current solutions, existing patents, customer requirements, engineering specifications, and our project plan
Downtown L.A. to Glendale Light Rail Line Project Study
Get PDFLos Angeles is undergoing a transit revival driven by persistent traffic congestion, a growing population, and an evolving mindset that increasingly favors public transportation.
As Los Angeles prepares for the future, it finds valuable lessons in its past. This light rail proposal draws inspiration from the extensive Pacific Electric Railway system that once formed the backbone of L.A. County’s transit network. Specifically, this study reimagines segments of the historic Glendale-Burbank Line, Echo Park Local Line, and San Fernando Valley Line. These routes once covered key corridors such as Sunset Boulevard and Brand Boulevard, but today, they are underserved by rail transit. This proposal seeks to reconnect central Los Angeles communities, reduce car dependency, and support a more efficient and equitable public transit system by reintroducing rail along these significant and congested routes
Efficacy of Monophasic and Biphasic Pulsed Field Ablation Waveforms: A Model Study
Get PDFCardiac arrhythmias are conditions where the heart’s normal sinus rhythm is interrupted by accelerated or premature rhythms. The most prevalent of these rhythms is atrial fibrillation (AF), where disorganized impulses cause the atria to quiver and pump blood inefficiently. As of 2025, AF affects over 10 million people. Aside from invasive surgical treatments, antiarrhythmic drugs, or one time cardioversions, atrial fibrillation is treated with catheter ablation. The longstanding ablation solutions for AF have been the cryoballoon or radiofrequency catheter ablation. However, limitations for these two ablation modalities are due to the nature of cell destruction; both thermal methods pose a risk of damaging tertiary structures to the heart. Pulsed field ablation (PFA) offers a non-thermal method for ablation, applying large amplitude, high frequency pulses to the tissue, causing cardiac cells to lyse. To interrogate the efficacy of specific pulse waveforms, modeling and simulation of lesion formation in cardiac tissue was performed using Comsol Multiphysics. Monophasic and biphasic pulses, some incorporating a biphasic delay parameter, were delivered to an area of tissue via a quadripolar catheter’s tip electrode towards an external return electrode. When analyzing monophasic pulses, charge delivered to the tissue was identified as the most reliable indicator of predicting lesion formation. When comparing monophasic and biphasic pulses of identical amplitude and pulse width, monophasic lesions yielded larger lesions. When a biphasic delay is incorporated between the two phases of a biphasic waveform, a longer delay results in a larger lesion formed
A Case Study of Leveraging Auxiliary Data to Improve Treatment Effect Estimation Precision in an HIV Clinical Trial
Get PDFRandomized controlled trials (RCTs) are typically the gold standard for evaluating treatment efficacy in the medical field, yet they can have small sample sizes due to logistical, ethical, and financial constraints. This limitation can result in imprecise treatment effect estimates. Recent methods have sought to enhance the precision of RCT estimates by incorporating information from large, observational, “auxiliary” datasets. An auxiliary dataset includes units that were not randomized in the trial itself, but may be similar to the RCT sample. By leveraging predictive models trained on these auxiliary data, researchers can adjust for potentially more powerful covariates, thereby reducing variance in treatment effect estimation without compromising the integrity of the randomization. Previous applications of this approach have shown its efficacy using educational experiments, where the auxiliary data originate from the same data source as the RCT. To extend and validate the robustness of this approach across domains, this thesis applies the estimation approach to a medical RCT, using publicly available data from an entirely different source.
We analyzed the CHOICES (CTN-0055) RCT, which investigated the feasibility and acceptability of extended-release naltrexone (XR-NTX) as treatment for HIV-infected individuals with opioid or alcohol use disorders for 51 participants. We supplement this analysis with data from NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey), a nationally representative survey that collects extensive health and nutrition data from thousands of adults and children across the United States, making it an ideal large-scale auxiliary dataset for our analysis. We leveraged the auxiliary NHANES dataset to develop an auxiliary model that predicts recent alcohol use. We compared methods that integrate experimental and auxiliary data using these model predictions to more standard estimators of the effect of XR-NTX on alcohol use. Our findings did not demonstrate improved precision from incorporating auxiliary model predictions, highlighting potential challenges when applying auxiliary data using an external data source. This case study provides insights into the practical limitations and considerations of using auxiliary data for precision enhancement in small-sample medical RCTs