University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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Ten Clementines Hitting the Floor: Accumulated Cinema and the Reality of Self
No full textTen Clementines Hitting the Floor is an installation consisting of four screens, three tables, one vase, three plastic flowers, one white tablecloth, and three fake lemons. One suspended screen, on which is projected a sun that never sets, hovers over three television sets, on which play loops of one- to two-second clips that I recorded with an Apple iPhone. This portable device allowed me to realize Gene Youngblood's 1970 forecast of an "expanded cinema" and to update his theories to what I call "accumulated cinema." Each clip represents a moment in which I was present and involved no post editing of clip size or structure. The clips were recorded in real time and remain that way. The installation is an exploration of time, accumulation, and the construction of the reality of self. Albert Camus's philosophy of the absurd, discussed in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, formed the theoretical base from which I examined reality and the construction of self by exploring the notion of knowledge through experience and the importance of the present moment
Oblivion: An Analysis of the Decline of Feminism Within the Owenite Movement
No full textFeminism within the British Owenite movement was complex in its language and meaning and difficult to define. Using publications by Robert Owen, writings by other Owenites and Owenite newspapers, the Pioneer, and the New Moral World, this paper is an attempt to analyze feminism within the Owenite movement. Historians such as Barbara Taylor and Anna Clark suggest that feminism was wholly rejected by the British working class in the later 1830s and 1840s because of Owenism's marriage with the working class. Instead of such a rise-and-fall narrative, the evidence in Owenite periodicals suggests that feminism was always a marginal strain within Owenite attitudes to women's issues, and mixed with far more traditional gender views even among the more progressive thinkers on the subject
Detection Performance and Computational Complexity of Radar Compressive Sensing for Noisy Signals
No full textIn recent years, compressive sensing has received a lot of attention due to its ability to reduce the sampling bandwidth, yet reproduce a good reconstructed signal back. Compressive sensing is a new theory of sampling which allows the reconstruction of a sparse signal by sampling at a much lower rate than the Nyquist rate. This concept can be applied to several imaging and detection techniques. In this thesis, we explore the use of compressive sensing for radar applications. By using this technique in radar, the use of matched filter can be eliminated and high rate sampling can be replaced with low rate sampling. We analyze compressive sensing in the context of radar by applying varying factors such as noise and different measurement matrices. Different reconstruction algorithms are compared by generating Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to determine their detection performance, which in turn are also compared against a traditional radar system. Computational complexity and MATLAB run time are also measured for the different algorithms. We also propose an algorithm called Simplified Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, which works well in noisy environments and has a very low computational complexity
Hand Hygiene and Infection Control in Emergency Health Services
No full textHospital-acquired infections (HAIs) affect millions of patients annually.1 Hand hygiene compliance of clinical staff has been identified by numerous studies as a major contributing factor to HAIs around the world. Infection control and hand hygiene in the pre-hospital environment can also contribute to patient harm and spread of infections. EMS practitioners are not monitored as closely as hospital personnel in terms of hand hygiene training and compliance. Their ever-changing work environment is not conducive to the same traditional hospital-based aseptic techniques and education. This study aimed to determine the current state of hand hygiene practices among EMS providers and to provide recommendations for improving practices in the emergency health services environment. This study was a prospective, observational prevalence study and survey, conducted over a 2-month period. Participants were selected from unannounced visits to three selected hospital emergency departments in the mid-Atlantic region. There were two data components to the study: a participant survey and hand swabs for pathogenic cultures. This study recruited a total sample of 62 participants. Overall, the study revealed that a significant number of EMS providers have a heavy bacterial load on their hands after patient care, compared to the hypothesized proportion of 50% (p-value = < 0.001). All levels of provider had a similar distribution of bacterial load. Survey results revealed that many providers do not perform hand hygiene before or in between patients, as recommended by the CDC guidelines. This study has shown that EMS providers are potential vectors of microorganisms if proper hand hygiene is not performed. Since EMS providers treat a variety of patients and operate in a variety of environments, providers may expose patients to potentially pathogenic organisms, and themselves be exposed. Proper application of accepted standards for hand hygiene can help reduce the presence of microbes on provider hands and subsequent transmission to patients and the environment
On Prediction and Estimation for Datastreams Utilizing Sparsity and Structure
No full textWith the unprecedented fast growth of data, we have better opportunities to understand our complex world, and simultaneously face pervasive challenges in efficiently inferring the meaning behind these vast amounts of data. It is particularly important to explore the intrinsic structures in data to increase our rational understanding of the latent mechanisms that generate them. In modeling, structures are features used to characterize the underlying systems, such as the rank of a system, the number of clusters, the levels of hierarchy, and the order of spatio-temporal correlations in multiple measurements. In this thesis, we present our research contributions on utilizing structures and sparsity in observed data to improve estimation and prediction of trajectories of system states for two systems: the highway traffic system and the human physiology systems. Both systems exhibit features that are seen in many other applications. For the traffic problem, it is useful to know the near--term traffic conditions after the occurrence of some events which have noticeable impact on the road traffic. Often used macroscopic models, which view road traffic as fluid flowing in pipes, suffer from various inaccuracies, which could be mitigated by incorporating past observations to correct predictions. However, we often have limited observation and computing resources (e.g. probe vehicles, smartphones, bandwidth, sensors) to gather and process past observations. We describe a novel low-overhead strategy to adaptively select observation sites in real-time by using the density of the mesh of the numerical solution of the underlying mathematical model to capture the variability of that solution. We show that our proposed strategy improves the numerical accuracy of near--term traffic forecasting with limited observation resources as compared with with uniform deployment of the observation resources. In addition to deploying limited observation resources, one is often concerned with detecting special traffic events. To this end, we propose a novel method to decompose traffic observations into normal background and sparse events. Our method couples multiple traffic datastreams so that they share a certain sparse spatio--temporal structure. We also study the utility of sparseness and structure in physiological datastreams. Missing values hinder the use of many machine learning methods. We show how to incorporate ideas from compressive sensing into handling the missing values problem in continuous intracranial pressure (ICP) datastreams from patients with traumatic brain injury. We experimentally evaluate the proposed method in experiments where randomly selected ICP values are marked as missing. We find our method gives estimated missing values that are in better agreement with the true values as compared with k--nearest neighbor and expectation maximization data imputation methods. Moreover, predicting the near--term intracranial pressure for traumatic brain injury patients is of great importance to clinicians. Traditional regression methods, need an explicit parametric form of the model to fit. However, due to our limited knowledge of the complex brain physiology, it is difficult to specify an accurate parametric model. To overcome this difficulty, our model uses Gaussian processes to quantify our prior beliefs on the smoothness of the regression model, and performs regression in an infinite dimensional space. We show that the proposed Gaussian process regression model shows predicts ICP changes in clinically useful timeframes and may support future development of minimally-invasive ICP monitoring systems, earlier intervention strategies, and better patient outcomes
Furthering Understanding of Outcomes in Families with Complex Acculturation Gaps: The Utility of a Family Resilience Model
No full textIn light of mixed findings regarding the malevolence or benevolence of acculturation gaps in mixed-generation immigrant families, this research adopted a qualitative methodology in order to explore the rich complexity of acculturation gaps. Through individual, dyadic, and family semi-structured interviews with two Salvadoran immigrant families this study (a) explored the ways in which family members arrived at their current ascription to practices, values, and identifications, or their acculturative status, (b) identified gaps in components of such statuses among multiple members of the families, and (c) utilized a family resilience model to investigate ways in which the families navigated acculturation gaps. The individual and family narratives were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory, guided by the theories of bidimensional acculturation, acculturation-gap distress, and family resilience. This research revealed that family members often changed their practices in response to their current contexts, but tended to view their values and identifications as enduring, a result of their family and the culture in which they were raised. It also noted that many gaps occurred between all members of the family, but that gaps were most prevalent and contentious between the eldest child of each family and their fathers. Finally, this research identified 18 diverse ways in which families navigated these gaps depending on their quality. As such, this research demonstrated that (1) a family resilience model can be applied to the study of acculturation gaps and (2) expansion of this model as applied to acculturation gaps might be indicated
A multidisciplinary approach to divergence in the Icterus graduacauda and Icterus chrysater group: genetic, morphometric and ecological divergence across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
No full textResearchers studying earliest stages of speciation have the opportunity to study the divergence of multiple sets of characters. In this study I compared genetic, morphometric and ecological variation between two sister species of orioles, Icterus graduacauda and Icterus chrysater, across a well-known geographic gap, The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (50 km wide). In addition, I compared populations of Icterus chrysater across a much larger gap (around 600 km). s Morphometric analyses comparing Icterus graduacauda and Icterus chrysater revealed that both species show similar overall size with no diagnosable character differences between them. Furthermore, Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) showed niche conservatism east and west of the isthmus, suggesting the two species share abiotic requirements, thus could potentially inhabit the same areas. However, in spite of the close proximity and bioclimatic similarity, coalescent analysis with the program IM shows no evidence of gene flow. These two taxa have very distinct plumage patterns, and in orioles plumage likely plays an important role in mate choice. Thus, this lack of gene flow may be the result of behavioral isolation based on plumage differences. However, for the comparison within I. chrysater, despite the large gap between north and south populations, IM shows strong evidence of gene flow. Additionally, ENM revealed evidence of ecological divergence between northern and southern populations, and there is some morphometric divergence. Therefore, within I. chrysater, I found evidence of gene flow in spite of a larger geographic gap, along with some niche and morphometric divergence. However, as these two populations have no known plumage differences, gene flow across the gap could be facilitated by the similarity in plumage patterns. The graduacauda/chrysater group is interesting because despite their similar overall morphometrics, environment and behavior, no hybrids have been found. Importantly, the differences in plumage could be one way that behavioral isolation is maintained. In contrast, within I. chrysater, the lack of plumage differences could be contributing to the gene flow that occurs in spite of the large gap between the two populations. Future studies are needed to test the importance of plumage in preventing and allowing gene flow in this species complex
