Oak Park Public Library

The farm crisis of the 1980s, which took place in a nation where barely 2 percent of the population currently farm, is largely forgotten. However, the causes of the steep economic downturn—high inflation and rapid deflation—were replicated a few years later in the Savings and Loan debacle, and during the much more serious subprime recession of 2008. In each case, borrowers bought land and homes in an inflationary market and were forced to pay off expensive mortgages in a climate of deflation.Pamela Riney-Kehrberg's most striking contribution in When a Dream Dies is to utilize the papers of two Republican governors: Robert Ray and Terry Branstad. Hitherto these materials were unavailable to researchers. Farmers who were distressed wrote thousands of letters to the governors outlining their straitened circumstances and pleaded for relief. These letters give insights into the financial and psychological trauma of a distressed farm population. However, they are less useful to gauge the situation of the Iowa farm population as a whole, given that around 60 percent did not suffer the indignity of the forced sale of land and equipment, the need to seek off-farm employment, or the ignominy of bankruptcy.The agricultural establishment—the Extension Service, the Farm Bureau, most of the agricultural press, and the Iowa state government—were slow to detect the dangers of the downturn. Riney-Kehrberg provides a balanced analysis of how these institutions eventually met the challenge of the crisis. Her discussion of the boom years of the late 1970s and early 1980s is insightful. Before the establishment mobilized, a loose coalition of neopopulists stepped into the breach to aid the farm community. The Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, in the shape of PrairieFire and Catholic Rural Life, made the most vital contributions. On the other hand, the American Agricultural Movement was overshadowed in Iowa by locally based organizations. PrairieFire borrowed tactics from the civil rights movement, and with a call-in hotline it began to assist farms under stress. In particular, PrairieFire learned to expertly manipulate the media. Television stations eagerly covered protests, which pressured the state government to intervene. Iowa's major paper, the Des Moines Register, provided expert and extensive coverage throughout the 1980s.Riley-Kehrberg's previous work on the lives of farm women and children is especially salient. For while she explores the travails of male farmers and their struggles with banks and the Farm Credit System, she gives farm women kudos for their willingness to assist in the struggle to confront the rigidity of bankers to negotiate delinquent loans. Only when the state government mobilized and introduced a moratorium on farm foreclosures did lenders alter their tactics. Although violence was almost nonexistent in Iowa, one particular incident—a farmer murdered a loan officer in late 1985—jolted the establishment to action. Similarly, shame, guilt, psychological strain, and ignominy of the loss of a farm, saw male farm suicides increase in the 1980s. Iowa's record, however, was less serious than in bordering states. By the fall of 1985 the Iowa farm crisis moved toward its partial resolution phase. The unwieldy bankruptcy laws were tailored to the needs of farmers when Chapter 12 was written; the Extension Service introduced new programs and literature; Republican politicians began to sound like neopopulists; and vitally, arbitration instead of confrontation forced the Farm Credit System and the banks toward forbearance when they dealt with indebtedness. One special irony was that some farm families, whose job it was to produce food, had to utilize the Food Stamp program to eat.How did the farm crisis affect Iowa in the long term? Early in the book the Committee on Economic Development is mentioned. This obscure organization championed the rationalization of the economy and, in particular, that farming should jettison its excess population and push farmers toward the nonfarm sector. The farm crisis obviously quickened this process. Most counties lost farmers, small towns and businesses suffered, and school consolidations took place. Farm children decided to pursue other careers, and after high school or college they moved to Iowa cities or out of state. Many farm women took off-farm jobs, and if a family remained on the land, the husband often farmed part-time. State government sought to bolster revenue. By the mid-1980s gambling was legalized: horse and dog race tracks and riverboat casinos enticed Iowans to spend their disposable income. State politics changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iowa saw close competition between parties. By the twenty-first century the state grew more conservative; Republicans dominated statewide offices, with Democrats only competitive in the metro areas.In sum, Riney-Kehrberg puts a human face on the Iowa farm crisis of the 1980s. She avoids, for the most part, a close analysis of the complexities of the financial downturn, but she gauges the trauma of the times for all members of the farm family in this handsomely produced book.

In the era of technology, virtual assistants are all around us and have changed the way we interact with technology. To better understand the inner workings of virtual assistants, we visualized and demonstrated one way that mimics the audio classification techniques of virtual assistants by developing a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) trained on mel spectrograms to classify audio. Our hypothesis is that mel spectrograms of the wake and non-wake words can be used to accurately classify audio. Out of the 85 files in our dataset, our classifier was trained and validated on 58 files of data and tested on 27 files of data. When evaluating our test performance, our model achieved a value of 1 for precision, recall and accuracy. Our classifier achieved a 100% accuracy in classifying wake words and non-wake words.

Background: Inhaled epoprostenol (iEPO) has been described in clinical practice for patients with pulmonary hypertension or ARDS for 20 years. iEPO using a pump system with mesh nebulizer has been administered with 2 strategies: 1) Using one concentration adjusting dose with the pump rate across full range of doses; and 2) limiting the pump rate range and changing the concentration of iEPO. We wanted to determine whether a single formulation concentration could be used across prescribed dose ranges. Methods: A collection filter was placed between the model lung (TTL, Michigan Instruments) and a critical care ventilator (PB840, Covidien) with a heated wire circuits and humidifier (MR850, Fisher & Paykel). A mesh nebulizer (Aerogen) was placed at the dry side of humidifier. Epoprostenol (Veletri) (1.5g) was reconstituted with sterile water to concentrations of 30, 15 and 7.5 mg/mL. The solution was drawn into a 60 mL syringe and attached to a continuous tubing set, which was connected to the mesh nebulizer. Tidal volumes were set to simulate adults of 50, 70 and 90 kg of ideal body weight. iEPO dosage was set at 50 and 30 ng/kg/min. Aerosol was collected for 20 min. Drug eluted from the filter was assayed with UV spectrophotometry (205 nm). Results: In the bench study with iEPO, at 50ng/kg/min, delivered dose was similar between 30mg/mL and 15mg/mL (11,676. 2 ± 1,093.8 vs 11201.7 ± 653. 4 ng, P=0.693). However, at 30 ng/kg/min: delivered dose rate for 30 mg/mL (9,768. 1 ± 1,040.3) was greater than 15 mg/mL (7,069.6 ± 686.6) which was greater than 7.5 mg (5229.5 ± 418.5 ng; P=0.003), representing delivered 9lung9 deposition of 23.0 ± 0.8, 16.9 ± 0.7 and 12.5 ± 0.4 %, respectively (P

American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine Fellow and long-time member of the Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology Editorial Advisory Board, Floyd Dunn, a groundbreaking pioneer in the science of ultrasound and bioacoustics, died on January 24, 2015. A veteran of the World War II Battle of the Ardennes, he was 90 years old. His death comes 30 days after that of his wife of 64 years, Elsa Dunn. Floyd attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, arriving in 1946 in the Department of Electrical Engineering as an undergraduate student on the GI Bill. He earned three degrees, including his PhD in 1956. For more than 20 years, he directed the Bioacoustics Research Laboratory that had been founded by his research advisor William J. Fry and his brother Frances J. Fry in 1946. Floyd chaired the Bioengineering Faculty from 1978 to 1982. He retired and accepted emeritus status in 1995. In 1996, he and Elsa moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Floyd remained scientifically active. Floyd had an extraordinarily creative science and engineering career at the interface between diagnostic and therapeutic ultrasound and living systems, and his influential research significantly promoted diagnostic and therapeutic ultrasound. He was the first to quantify in vivo the temperature-dependent ultrasonic absorption coefficient, a pivotal finding that significantly influenced therapeutic ultrasound; the first to document that ultrasonic images resulted from structural protein constituents, a seminal finding that initiated worldwide research activities in ultrasonic tissue characterization; and the first to recognize the need to quantify the non-linearity parameter in biological materials. His innovative experimental preparations revealed that physical interactions of ultrasound in living systems occur under conditions where thermal and cavitation events are innocuous, thus illustrating the control achievable in producing reversible and irreversible changes in living systems. Floyd's revolutionary work contributed to the safety and efficacy of diagnostic and therapeutic ultrasound. This included determining ultrasonic thresholds for irreversible structural changes. These thresholds became the de facto worldwide standards from which government, academic and research bodies established diagnostic ultrasound safety criteria. Floyd was widely recognized for his professional achievements. He was a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He was a past president of the Acoustical Society of America. He held fellowships in seven professional associations and was a member of eight editorial boards. He was a recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal, the ASA Gold and Silver Medals, as well as the AIUM William J. Fry Memorial Lecture Award in 1984 and the AIUM Joseph P. Holmes Basic Science Pioneer Award in 1990. He received the University of Illinois Senior Scholar and Distinguished Alumnus awards and the Medal of Special Merit of the Acoustical Society of Japan, and was an honorary member of the Japan Society for Ultrasound in Medicine. For sustained leadership in biomedical ultrasound, Floyd Dunn stood alone. Devoting his career efforts to the subject for nearly six decades, he maintained a steady flow of productive research and built one of the largest organizations devoted to the field. Through leadership and participation in numerous organizations behind the scenes, he encouraged the development of the field at home and abroad. Floyd Dunn was involved in the first major blossoming of biomedical ultrasound in the 1950s and 1960s including a few years when he nearly single-handedly kept the field alive. Today, biomedical ultrasound is a major industry, and basic research in the field receives a significant fraction from the National Institutes of Health budget. No single scientist is more responsible for this success than Floyd Dunn. Floyd Dunn is survived by his daughter, Andi Dunn, his son, Roo Dunn, and five grandchildren.