Academic technology transfer in its current form began with the passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980, which allowed universities to retain ownership of federally funded intellectual property. Since that time, a profession has evolved that has transformed how inventions arising in universities are treated, resulting in significant impact to US society. While there have been a number of articles highlighting benefits of technology transfer, now, more than at any other time since the Bayh–Dole Act was passed, the profession and the impacts of this groundbreaking legislation have come under intense scrutiny. This article serves as an examination of the many positive benefits and evolution, both financial and intrinsic, provided by academic invention and technology transfer, summarized in Table 1.
Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges’s narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator’s claims of the library’s universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing.
Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library — is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion?
While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges’s imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.
This presentation was part of a panel titled: "Panel: Innovative Digital Humanities Projects at Emory University." Presented at the NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable that focused on Digital Humanities: Preserving the Past, Capturing the Present & Building the Future. The NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable took place at the Pitts Theology Library / Candler School of Theology / Emory University in Atlanta.
Drawbacks of traditional approximate and exact confidence intervals for binomial proportions are well recognized. Alternatives include an interval based on inverting the score test, adaptations of exact testing, and Bayesian credible intervals. We propose an approach that calls for selecting an optimal value κ between 0 and 0.5 based on stipulated coverage criteria over a grid of regions comprising the parameter space. One then bases lower and upper limits of a credible interval on Beta(κ, 1−κ) and Beta(1−κ, κ) priors, respectively. The result tends toward a Jeffreys prior-based interval if the goal is to constrain average overall coverage at ≤ 1−α across the full parameter space, and toward the Clopper-Pearson interval if the goal is to constrain region-specific lower and upper lack of coverage rates ≤ α/2 as region widths approach zero. We suggest an intermediate target that demonstrably improves region-specific coverage balance when compared with existing methods.
Supervised training of human activity recognition (HAR) systems based on body-worn inertial measurement units (IMUs) is often constrained by the typically rather small amounts of labeled sample data. Systems like IMUTube have been introduced that employ cross-modality transfer approaches to convert videos of activities of interest into virtual IMU data. We demonstrate for the first time how such large-scale virtual IMU datasets can be used to train HAR systems that are substantially more complex than the state-of-the-art. Complexity is thereby represented by the number of model parameters that can be trained robustly. Our models contain components that are dedicated to capture the essentials of IMU data as they are of relevance for activity recognition, which increased the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 1100 compared to state-of-the-art model architectures. We evaluate the new model architecture on the challenging task of analyzing free-weight gym exercises, specifically on classifying 13 dumbbell execises. We have collected around 41 h of virtual IMU data using IMUTube from exercise videos available from YouTube. The proposed model is trained with the large amount of virtual IMU data and calibrated with a mere 36 min of real IMU data. The trained model was evaluated on a real IMU dataset and we demonstrate the substantial performance improvements of 20% absolute F1 score compared to the state-of-the-art convolutional models in HAR.
by
Raymond L. Ownby;
Amarilis Acevedo;
Drenna Waldrop-Valverde;
Robin Jacobs;
Joshua Caballero;
Rosemary Davenport;
Ana-Maria Homs;
Sara J. Czaja;
David Loewenstein
Current measures of health literacy have been criticized on a number of grounds, including use of a limited range of content, development on small and atypical patient groups, and poor psychometric characteristics. In this paper, we report the development and preliminary validation of a new computer-administered and -scored health literacy measure addressing these limitations. Items in the measure reflect a wide range of content related to health promotion and maintenance as well as care for diseases. The development process has focused on creating a measure that will be useful in both Spanish and English, while not requiring substantial time for clinician training and individual administration and scoring. The items incorporate several formats, including questions based on brief videos, which allow for the assessment of listening comprehension and the skills related to obtaining information on the Internet. In this paper, we report the interim analyses detailing the initial development and pilot testing of the items (phase 1 of the project) in groups of Spanish and English speakers. We then describe phase 2, which included a second round of testing of the items, in new groups of Spanish and English speakers, and evaluation of the new measure’s reliability and validity in relation to other measures. Data are presented that show that four scales (general health literacy, numeracy, conceptual knowledge, and listening comprehension), developed through a process of item and factor analyses, have significant relations to existing measures of health literacy.
A detailed understanding of the CSF dynamics is needed for design and optimization of intrathecal drug delivery devices, drugs, and protocols. Preclinical research using large-animal models is important to help define drug pharmacokinetics-pharmacodynamics and safety. In this study, we investigated the impact of catheter implantation in the sub-dural space on CSF flow dynamics in Cynomolgus monkeys. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed before and after catheter implantation to quantify the differences based on catheter placement location in the cervical compared to the lumbar spine. Several geometric and hydrodynamic parameters were calculated based on the 3D segmentation and flow analysis. Hagen-Poiseuille equation was used to investigate the impact of catheter implantation on flow reduction and hydraulic resistance. A linear mixed-effects model was used in this study to investigate if there was a statistically significant difference between cervical and lumbar implantation, or between two MRI time points. Results showed that geometric parameters did not change statistically across MRI measurement time points and did not depend on catheter location. However, catheter insertion did have a significant impact on the hydrodynamic parameters and the effect was greater with cervical implantation compared to lumbar implantation. CSF flow rate decreased up to 55% with the catheter located in the cervical region. The maximum flow rate reduction in the lumbar implantation group was 21%. Overall, lumbar catheter implantation disrupted CSF dynamics to a lesser degree than cervical catheter implantation and this effect remained up to two weeks post-catheter implantation in Cynomolgus monkeys.
In the summer of 2010, to provide a “one-stop shop” service point to Woodruff Library patrons, the Circulation, Reference, and Learning Commons (LC) desks merged into the unified Library Service Desk (LSD) under Access Services. Last year, due to organizational changes in the library and IT, and anticipated support needs of the new LC spaces and technologies, Student Digital Life opened a separate LC Technical Support desk. The lessons of the year of the two desks, funding considerations, and the persistent goal to streamline the experience of our patrons resulted in transitioning the functions of the LC desk to LSD, thus evolving it to new organizational and operational levels.
Day 3: Night falls around your ship, a dark sky illuminated by multiple constellations above the outline of the Aegean coast. Passing the headland of Tisaia, you watch for the crags of Pelion to guide your way: you are heading northwest to the Tomb of Dolops. Suddenly one crewmember falls ill, then another – the ship’s water has gone foul, and you lose five men before you can get to port. Are your funds sufficient to hire their replacements?
Day 7: Your crew suddenly feels uneasy, so you drop anchor, though there are no pirates or storms in sight. After prayers to Poseidon for your good fortune, a group of dolphins jump about the ship, playing for a moment before disappearing. Your crew takes it as a good sign and their spirits are lifted. As they begin to raise anchor, you notice the ship feels a bit faster than before. The waters seem to push you forward: this is both fortunate and suspicious!