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Reactive risk assessments (RRAs) such as incident reporting and root cause analysis (RCA), as well as proactive risk assessments (PRAs) such as failure mode and effects analysis, are generally conducted independently in health care. Literature promotes combining risk assessment techniques. This concept builds on previous methodologies and presents an innovative, scalable, and generalizable risk assessment methodology.A Combined Proactive Risk Assessment (CPRA) technique entails combining incident reports (RRAs), combining proactive risk assessments (PRAs), and merging components of PRA and RRA. Using specific keywords, this technique aligns patient safety reporting data with process steps and failure modes to assess risk within any of the process steps. This technique was tested by using PRAs from several Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities and national patient safety data from the VHA National Center for Patient Safety's database. Reported events and RCAs related to the outpatient blood draw process were used for this illustration. Repeatability was determined by independently applying the technique to two years of data and auditing results.Aggregating PRAs from multiple facilities identified 220% more failure modes; and integrating incident reports into PRA identified 310% more failure modes than the single facility average. Overlaying safety reports onto a comprehensive process flow diagram revealed that 85.8% of events occurred in three of seven process steps. Accuracy of this technique was generally above 85%.This technique is promising for identifying vulnerable points in health care processes or to compliment a traditional PRA. Single PRAs are less likely to identify all potential failures or focus on the most hazardous process steps. This technique may aid in assessing key health care processes at an enterprise level.

The crystal structure of the title compound, [AuCl(C

A novel synthesis of diphenyl(2-thienyl)phosphine, along with its' oxide, sulfide and selenide derivatives, is reported here. These phosphines have been characterized by NMR, IR, MS and X-Ray crystallography. The phosphine oxide derivative was reacted with a selection of lanthanide(III) nitrates and triflates, LnX

Potential energy landscape (PEL) concepts have been useful in conceptualizing the effects of intermolecular interactions on dynamic and thermodynamic properties of liquids and glasses. "Basins", or regions of reduced potential energy associated with locally preferred molecular packing are important PEL features. The molecular configurations at the bottom of these basins are referred to as inherent structures (ISs). Experimental methods for directly characterizing PEL features such as these are rare, largely relegating PEL concepts to theory and simulation studies, and impeding their exploration in real systems. Recently, we showed that quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) data from propylene carbonate (PC) exhibit signatures of picosecond timescale motion that are consistent with intrabasin motion and interbasin transitions [Cicerone et al., J. Chem. Phys., 2017, 146, 054502]. Here we present optically-heterodyne-detected optical Kerr effect (OHD-OKE) spectroscopy studies on PC. The data exhibit signatures of motion within and transitions between basins that agree quantitatively with and extend the QENS results. We show that the librational component of the OKE response corresponds to intrabasin dynamics, and the enigmatic intermediate OKE response corresponds to interbasin transition events. The OKE data extend the measurement range of these parameters and reveal their utility in characterizing PEL features of real systems.

Extraction of quantitative Raman signatures from BCARS spectra is fraught with challenges in computational time and spectral distortions. Here we present new linear methods that are capable of real-time performance and with significantly reduced error.

The insistence among later eighteenth-century critics of the Gothic novel that sound strongly marks the genre confirms the intuition that sounds in these works are meaningful. The Castle of Otranto is laden with the profusely sonic dimensions that commence with the text's opening pages. The analogue in modern film of Foley effects resonates because these are sounds, applied post-production, that often are louder and more striking than real world sounds; similarly, film and the novel, unlike ordinary experience, can offer true silence. Walpole was experimenting with a new written technology of sound description, related to effects on the stage of his day. Such theatrical sounds form part of the historical background to the analogy with Foley effects in modern film. Walpole is pioneering a new kind of rendering of psycho-acoustic ambience in the novel, and also psycho-acoustically actuated action. He opens up modes of experience not found in fiction prior to this novel – both with the use of written sound effects, and also with the psychic introjection of these effects to produce terror and horror in the minds of fictional characters.

We present a new collection of processing techniques, collectively "factorized Kramers--Kronig and error correction" (fKK-EC), for (a) Raman signal extraction, (b) denoising, and (c) phase- and scale-error correction in coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) hyperspectral imaging and spectroscopy. These new methods are orders-of-magnitude faster than conventional methods and are capable of real-time performance, owing to the unique core concept: performing all processing on a small basis vector set and using matrix/vector multiplication afterwards for direct and fast transformation of the entire dataset. Experimentally, we demonstrate that a 703026 spectra image of chicken cartilage can be processed in 70 s (approximately 0.1 ms / spectrum), which is approximately 70 times faster than with the conventional workflow (approximately 7.0 ms / spectrum). Additionally, we discuss how this method may be used for machine learning (ML) by re-using the transformed basis vector sets with new data. Using this ML paradigm, the same tissue image was processed (post-training) in approximately 33 s, which is a speed-up of approximately 150 times when compared with the conventional workflow., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, corrected typo in Eq. 25

Insects are, by any measure, the most successful animal group on the planet. One contributor to this success is their ability to move seamlessly through virtually any environment. This capacity has not been lost on engineers who attempt to build agile robots. However, no current robot moves with an insect’s agility and adaptability. A great deal of this capacity arises from remarkable control systems that process large amounts of sensory data, both locally in thoracic ganglia and in brain circuits, and then use this information to control and modify movements as needed. This article will review these systems.

The high-frequency portion of the optical Kerr effect (OKE) spectrum of benzene shifts to higher frequency with decreasing temperature at constant pressure. This behavior has been interpreted previously in terms of an increase in librational frequencies due to the decrease in free volume with liquid densification. However, decreasing temperature also provides less access to the more repulsive portion of the intermolecular potential, which would cause the blue edge of the spectrum to red-shift. To explore the relative importance of these phenomena, molecular dynamics simulations of benzene are used to isolate the effects of temperature and density on the spectrum. The simulations show that, at constant density, the high-frequency portion of the spectrum shifts to lower frequency with decreasing temperature. In contrast, at constant temperature, the high-frequency portion of the spectrum shifts to higher frequency with increasing density. These results indicate that density plays a greater role in determining the position of the blue edge of the low-frequency Raman spectrum of benzene than does temperature. Empirical fits show that the effects of changing density or temperature are similar in experimental and simulated OKE spectra. Furthermore, line-shape analysis of simulated spectra under isochoric and isothermal conditions shows that the effects of density and temperature are separable, suggesting that OKE spectroscopy is a viable technique for in situ measurement of the density of van der Waals liquids.

Ultrafast optical Kerr effect (OKE) spectroscopy is a widely used method for studying the depolarized, Raman-active intermolecular dynamics of liquids. Through appropriate manipulation of OKE data, it is possible to determine the reduced spectral density (RSD), which is the Bose-Einstein-corrected, low-frequency Raman spectrum with the contribution of diffusive reorientation removed. OKE RSDs for van der Waals liquids can often be fit well to an empirical function that is the sum of a Bucaro-Litovitz function and an antisymmetrized Gaussian (AG). Although these functions are not directly representative of specific intermolecular dynamics, the AG fit parameters can provide useful insights into the microscopic properties of liquids. Here we show that fits using the AG function are typically not well-determined, and that equally good results can be obtained with a wide range of fitting parameters. We propose the use of a physically motivated constraint on the amplitude of the AG function, and demonstrate that this constraint leads to more intuitive trends in the fit parameters for temperature-dependent RSDs in 1,3,5-trifluorobenzene and hexafluorobenzene.

Solvents for cleaning optics often come into contact with plastic and/or rubber during storage and transfer. To explore the effects that exposure to these materials can have on solvents, we used vibrational sum-frequency-generation spectroscopy to study a silica optic following cleaning with solvents that had come into contact with either low-density polyethylene, high-density polyethylene, or rubber. Our studies show that even brief contact of acetone, methanol, or isopropanol with plastic or rubber can cause otherwise pure solvents to leave a persistent residue.

A neuromechanical simulation of the cockroach Blaberus discoidalis was developed to explore changes in locomotion when the animal transitions from walking straight to turning. The simulation was based upon the biological data taken from three sources. Neural circuitry was adapted from the extensive literature primarily obtained from the studies of neural connections within thoracic ganglia of stick insect and adapted to cockroach. The 3D joint kinematic data on straight, forward walking for cockroach were taken from a paper that describes these movements in all joints simultaneously as the cockroach walked on an oiled-plate tether (Bender et al. in PloS one 5(10):1---15, 2010b). Joint kinematics for turning were only available for some leg joints (Mu and Ritzmann in J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol 191(11):1037---54, 2005) and thus had to be obtained using the methods that were applied for straight walking by Bender et al. (PloS one 5(10):1---15, 2010b). Once walking, inside turning, and outside turning were characterized, phase and amplitude changes for each joint of each leg were quantified. Apparent reflex reversals and joint activity changes were used to modify sensory coupling pathways between the CPG at each joint of the simulation. Oiled-plate experiments in simulation produced tarsus trajectories in stance similar to those seen in the animal. Simulations including forces that would be experienced if the insect was walking freely (i.e., weight support and friction) again produced similar results. These data were not considered during the design of the simulation, suggesting that the simulation captures some key underlying the principles of walking, turning, and transitioning in the cockroach. In addition, since the nervous system was modeled with realistic neuron models, biologically plausible reflex reversals are simulated, motivating future neurobiological research.

There is a growing appreciation that dynamic processes play an important role in determining the line shape in surface-selective, nonlinear spectroscopies such as vibrational sum-frequency-generation (VSFG). Here we analyze the influence that reorientation can have on VSFG spectra when the vibrational transition frequency is a function of orientation. Under these circumstances, reorientation-induced spectral diffusion (RISD) causes the underlying spectral line shape to become time dependent. Unlike previously reported mechanisms through which reorientation can contribute to the VSFG signal, RISD influences the line shape regardless of the degree of polarization of the Raman transition that is probed. We assess the impact of RISD on VSFG spectra using a model system of liquid acetonitrile at a silica interface. Comparison of delay-time-dependent VSFG spectra with simulations that employ static line shapes suggests that RISD contributes substantially to the spectra, particularly at delay times that are comparable to or greater than the probe pulse duration. The observed behavior is in qualitative agreement with a two-state RISD model that uses orientational distributions determined from previous molecular dynamics simulations.

Cockroach shelter-seeking strategy may initially look like an undirected random search, but we show that they are attracted to darkened shelters. They arrive at a shelter in about half the time control cockroaches take to reach the same location with no shelter present. We were able to identify six statistically significant trends from the behavior of 134 cockroaches in 1-min naïve walking trials with four different shelter configurations. By combining these trends into a model, we built a stochastic algorithm that significantly biases a simulated agent toward a target location. We call this model RAMBLER (Randomized Algorithm Mimicking Biased Lone Exploration in Roaches). RAMBLER could be adapted for a mobile robot equipped with an onboard camera and antenna-like contact sensors.

Amy Reynolds and Gary R. Hicks Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era. Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2011. 218 pp.Matthew C. Ehrlich Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.Journalism often disappoints its audience. That was true during the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002-2003. Even when journalists and news organizations have tried to rectify the shortcomings that critics have identified, journalists have failed to sustain those reform efforts.Prophets of the Fourth Estate, by Amy Reynolds and Gary R. Hicks, demonstrates the longevity of many criticisms of the press, and Matthew C. Ehrlich's Radio Utopia examines how one medium tried to provide better journalism and why that effort faded after a few years.Reynolds and Hicks focus on press critics of the early twentieth century, with a special emphasis on Charles Edward Russell, Moorfield Storey, and Oswald Garrison Villard. For the most part, the authors allow these critics to speak for themselves, reprinting in part or in full essays the critics published early in the twentieth century. Many complaints have as much force today as they did one hundred years ago.Russell, who had worked for both Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, complained in a 1914 piece for Pearson's Magazine that the control of the press was not vested in the reporters and editors but in advertisers and financiers. Newspapers were reluctant to publish stories that might offend advertisers, who provided most of their revenue. Financiers controlled access to capital that news organizations needed to acquire modern machinery and pay production costs. Publications that offended financial interests could find themselves starved of capital. Even the Chautauqua movement, the talk radio of the World War I era, was vulnerable to commercial pressures. Speakers favorable to the interests of wealthy businesses were subsidized.For Storey, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its first president and legal director, sensationalism was undermining the value of news media. Instead of enlightening the public about the problems of labor, taxation, foreign policy, and other complexities of the twentieth century, news reporters were pursuing stories about the prurient details of private lives.Villard, who owned the New York Evening Post and The Nation, worried about the growing concentration of media ownership. Some cities, he noted in a 1919 piece published in The Atlantic Monthly, had only one morning newspaper. And the number of companies providing features and editorial material to weekly newspapers was dwindling rapidly.Other essays in Prophets of the Fourth Estate examine threats to the press posed by wartime government censorship, increases in postal fees, and public relations. In every case, contemporary parallels come to mind easily.The authors provide brief but helpful biographical information about Russell, Storey, and Villard, but other writers included in the book have little or no identifying information about them. One excerpt is a piece by Robert L. Duffus about an advertising campaign by a meatpacking company to rebuild its reputation after a Federal Trade Commission investigation, but the authors provide no information about Duffus or about where or when the article was published.Sometimes Reynolds and Hicks introduce an essay with background information. An unsigned editorial from a 1918 edition of The Public, an opinion magazine, on the impact of postal rate reform followed almost seven pages of background information on the history of postal rates for newspapers and magazines and the effects of changes in those rates on the industry.Elsewhere, however, explanation is missing. One Russell piece mentions "General Otis" and "the McNamaras. …

Propionitrile has been studied at the liquid/vapor, silica/vapor, and silica/liquid interfaces using vibrational sum-frequency generation (VSFG) spectroscopy and optical Kerr effect (OKE) spectrosc...

We evaluated the efficacy and safety of patient-specific immunotherapy with mitumprotimut-T idiotype keyhole limpet hemocyanin and granulocyte-monocyte colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) following rituximab in patients with follicular B-cell lymphoma. Patients with previously untreated or relapsed/refractory CD20+ follicular lymphoma received 4 weekly infusions of rituximab and those with a complete response (CR), partial response (PR), or stable disease received mitumprotimut-T and GM-CSF injections subcutaneously. Courses were given monthly for 6 doses, every 2 months for 6 doses, and then every 3 months until disease progression. Computed tomography scans were obtained every 3 to 6 months and reviewed centrally. The primary endpoint was event-free survival (EFS). Among 103 patients treated with rituximab, 92 (54 relapsed/refractory and 38 previously untreated) received mitumprotimut-T/GM-CSF; median age was 53 years, 91% had stage III to IV disease, and 59% had failed earlier therapy. The premitumprotimut-T objective response rate was 47% (2 CRs, 41 PRs). During the mitumprotimut-T treatment phase, 16 patients converted to CR resulting in an overall objective response rate of 60% (18 CRs, 37 PRs). Median EFS was 15.2, 20.8, and 13.5 months for all, treatment-naive, and relapsed/refractory disease patients, respectively. Anti-Id cellular immune responses were detected in 13 of 18 (72%) patients and humoral immune responses in 17 of 83 (20%) patients. Adverse events were usually mild-to-moderate. The most common adverse event was injection site reactions. Mitumprotimut-T/GM-CSF-induced anti-Id cellular immune responses in most patients. The occurrence of late CRs and favorable EFS suggested a clinical benefit of active immunotherapy and led to a placebo-controlled phase 3 trial.

Purpose To evaluate patient-specific immunotherapy with mitumprotimut-T (idiotype keyhole limpet hemocyanin [Id-KLH]) and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in CD20+ follicular lymphoma. Patients and Methods Patients with treatment-naive or relapsed/refractory disease achieving a complete response (CR), partial response (PR), or stable disease (SD) with four weekly rituximab infusions were randomly assigned to mitumprotimut-T/GM-CSF or placebo/GM-CSF, with doses given monthly for six doses, every 2 months for six doses, and then every 3 months until disease progression (PD). Randomization was stratified by prior therapy (treatment-naive or relapsed/refractory) and response to rituximab (CR/PR or SD). The primary end point was time to progression (TTP) from randomization. Results A total of 349 patients were randomly assigned; median age was 54 years, 79% were treatment naive, and 86% had stage III/IV disease. Median TTP was 9.0 months for mitumprotimut-T/GM-CSF and 12.6 months for placebo/GM-CSF (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.384; P = .019). TTP was comparable between the two arms in treatment-naive patients (HR = 1.196; P = .258) and shorter with mitumprotimut-T/GM-CSF in relapsed/refractory disease (HR = 2.265; P = .004). After adjusting for Follicular Lymphoma International Prognostic Index (FLIPI) scores, the difference in TTP between the two arms was no longer significant. Overall objective response rate, rate of response improvement, and duration of response were comparable between the two arms. Toxicity was similar in the two arms; 76% of adverse events were mild or moderate, and 94% of patients had injection site reactions. Conclusion TTP was shorter with mitumprotimut-T/GM-CSF compared with placebo/GM-CSF. This difference was possibly due to the imbalance in FLIPI scores.

We present a camera-based method for automatically quantifying the individual and social behaviors of fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, interacting within a planar arena. Our system includes machine vision algorithms that accurately track many individuals without swapping identities and classification algorithms that detect behaviors. The data may be represented as an ethogram that plots the time course of behaviors exhibited by each fly, or as a vector that concisely captures the statistical properties of all behaviors displayed within a given period. We found that behavioral differences between individuals are consistent over time and are sufficient to accurately predict gender and genotype. In addition, we show that the relative positions of flies during social interactions vary according to gender, genotype, and social environment. We expect that our software, which permits high-throughput screening, will complement existing molecular methods available in Drosophila, facilitating new investigations into the genetic and cellular basis of behavior.

4-Mesyloxypyran-2-ones joined to furan by a three-carbon linker undergo intramolecular-crossed [4+4]-photocycloaddition with high or complete selectivity for the exo cycloadduct. When a C2-symmetric ketal was present on the tether adjacent to the pyranone ring, moderate levels of asymmetric induction were obtained.

We share a physical world with invertebrates, and as such we share the need to detect the effects of air and water currents, temperature, and gravity. Challenged by size and exhibiting tremendous evolutionary diversity, invertebrates exhibit some clever sensory solutions not available to us mammals. However, lessons learned from studies on invertebrate body senses also highlight convergent mechanisms for solving physical problems common to various taxa. Comparative research therefore holds value not just for more fully clarifying the diversity of solutions, but also for understanding how and why we humans arrived at our particular ones.

Animals such as cockroaches depend on exploration of unknown environments, and their strategies may inspire robotic approaches. We have previously shown that cockroach behavior, with respect to shelters and the walls of an otherwise empty arena, can be captured with a stochastic state-based algorithm. We call this algorithm RAMBLER, randomized algorithm mimicking biased lone exploration in roaches. In this work, we verified and extended this model by adding a barrier in the previously used arena and conducted more cockroach experiments. In two arena configurations, our simulated model's path length distribution was similar to the experimental distribution (mean experimental path length 3.4 and 3.2 m, mean simulated path length 3.9 and 3.3 m). By analyzing cockroach behavior before, along, and at the end of the barrier, we have generalized RAMBLER to address arbitrarily complex 2D mazes. For biology, this is an abstract behavioral model of a decision-making process in the cockroach brain. For robotics, this is a strategy that may improve exploration for goals, especially in unpredictable environments with non-convex obstacles. Generally, cockroach behavior seems to recommend variability in the absence of planning, and following paths defined by walls.