Activity

On 13 February 2020, the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability held the Michigan Environmental Justice Summit 2020 Commemorating the Thirtieth Anniversary of Michigan’s 1990 Conference on Race and the Environment and Looking Toward the Future. The Summit hosted a dynamic panel of community environmental justice leaders throughout the region who have “boots on the ground” in the progress and pursuit of environmental justice. The panelists included Donele Wilkins, the President/CEO of the Green Door Initiative in Detroit, MI; Andrea Pierce, Chair and Founder of the Anishinaabek Caucus, Idle No More Michigan, MI; and Theresa Landrum, co-founder of the 48217 Community and Environmental Health Organization, Detroit, MI. This article includes an edited transcript of the panel discussion. The panelists detail multiple grassroots efforts to remedy environmental injustice in Michigan.To design a reasonable dimensional tolerance of a transmission shaft, the higher product quality while lower manufacturing cost must be considered. This paper provides a mathematical model and a flowchart which elucidates the relationship between process capability index (PCI), reliability, tolerance and manufacturing cost, considering the characteristics of the shaft diameter, the material and manufacturing process. A 10.904% cost reduction under certain PCI range of a real case shows the effectiveness of the model and flowchart, thus it can be applied to those technical area when optimizing product design.The Brazilian state apparatus was reformed throughout the 1990s, influenced by New Public Management (NPM). NPM was embodied in the health care sector by the creation of Social Health Organizations (Organizações Sociais de Saúde or OSS), private non-profit entities to provide welfare services. We performed a systematic review of the literature outlining the origins and role of OSS in Brazil. Alexidine ic50 Our selected articles (peer-reviewed) cover the origins/performance of OSS and their services provision between 1998 and 2018, in English or Portuguese. Databases used were Lilacs, Bireme, Medline, Pubmed, and SciELO. We identified 4,732 articles applying a pre-defined set of descriptors, from which we selected 49 for analysis. The main findings reveal that NPM is the central theme of most articles about OSS in Brazil (n = 26). There is evidence corroborating our hypothesis that transferring management of public health care services to private non-profit organizations is a softer version of privatization as, although financing is kept public, the rationale and ethos of OSS services institutionally and operationally mimic the private sector. The practical consequence is that attainment of health care in Brazil ends up being neither fully commodified (based on ability to pay) nor fulfilled as a citizen’s right following its national constitution.Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex injury that has a multi-faceted recovery process. The current “gold standard” for classifying severity of TBI symptoms is the Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOSE), a crude measure of overall dysfunction after TBI. Exploratory factor analysis performed on TRACK-TBI Pilot (N = 297) identified candidate multi-variate outcome measures of neuropsychological impairment and cognitive speed and flexibility at 6 months post-TBI that were confirmed in data from the COBRIT study (N = 645) using confirmatory factor analysis. These new outcome measures were used as the dependent variables in an ordinal logistic regression model, using common data elements (CDE) collected in the emergency department as independent variables, including basic demographics, socioeconomic status, medical history, and measures of blood alcohol and blood pressure. We directly compared these prediction models with the GOSE as the 6-month outcome variable and found that in both the TRACK-TBI pilot and COBRIT studies, both neuropsychiatric complications (approx. 36.0% and 22.3% variance explained) and cognitive speed and flexibility (approx. 33.9% and 24.5% variance explained) were better explained by the prediction model, compared with GOSE (approx. 19.9% and 14.4% variance explained), respectively. While differences in overall distributions of impairment between TRACK-TBI pilot and COBRIT exist and should be explored further for applications of these prediction models, we think these multi-variate end-points more accurately characterize patients’ functioning at six-months post-TBI. A multi-variate assessment of end-points seems especially important for characterizing TBI outcomes in cases where gross impairment, such as those measured by the GOSE, may be less evident.Cranial sutures play critical roles in facilitating postnatal skull development and function. The diversity of function is reflected in the highly variable suture morphology and complexity. Suture complexity has seldom been studied, resulting in little consensus on the most appropriate approach for comparative, quantitative analyses. Here, we provide the first comprehensive comparison of current approaches for quantifying suture morphology, using a wide range of two-dimensional suture outlines across extinct and extant mammals (n = 79). Five complexity metrics (sinuosity index (SI), suture complexity index (SCI), fractal dimension (FD) box counting, FD madogram and a windowed short-time Fourier transform with power spectrum density (PSD) calculation) were compared with each other and with the shape variation in the dataset. Analyses of suture shape demonstrate that the primary axis of variation captured attributes other than complexity, supporting the use of a complexity metric over raw shape data for sutural complexity analyses. Each approach captured different aspects of complexity. PSD successfully discriminates different sutural features, such as looping patterns and interdigitation amplitude and number, while SCI best-captured variation in interdigitation number alone. Therefore, future studies should consider the relevant attributes for their question when selecting a metric for comparative analysis of suture variation, function and evolution.