Ommaya reservoir placement has been an option for patients requiring cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) access since the 1960s. It is preferred to repeat lumbar punctures, both in terms of patient comfort and the consistency of intrathecal drug concentration. Technological developments have advanced the placement technique, allowing for better accuracy and reduced complications. Freehand placement was f...

This supplement is directly tied to a Technical Note that appears in the July/August 2006 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering (the full citation is J. Cornette, “Gauss-Vaníček and Fourier Transform Spectral Analysis of Marine Diversity,” vol. 9, no. 4, 2007, pp. 61–63). In the Technical Note, I compared Gauss-Vaníček spectral analysis of 542 million years of marine diversity with a Four...

This essay is intended as a letter to both myself and others, to hold up in the sharpest possible terms an ideal of research I believe is worth working toward. I’ve deliberately limited the essay to ten pages, hoping that the resulting omissions are compensated by the forced brevity. This is a rather personal essay; it’s not the sort of thing I’d usually make publicly available. I’ve made the e...

Vascular compression of the trigeminal nerve in the cerebellopontine angle is now generally accepted as the primary source or "trigger" causing trigeminal neuralgia. A clear clinicopathological association exists in the neurovascular relationship. In general, pain in the third division of the trigeminal nerve is caused by rostral compression, pain in the second division is caused by medial or m...

This note presents a detailed formal derivation of the equilibrium conditions of a variation of the deep habit model developed by Ravn, Schmitt-Grohé, and Uribe (2003). In the present note, the single-period utility function depends on the quasi ratio of current consumption to the stock of habit of each variety, whereas in the original deep habit model it depends on the quasi difference of thes...

In class, I focus on explaining the Keynesian model in words and with diagrams. I don’t walk through the underlying math, mainly because most students find diagrams easier to follow. However, going through the math at least once – at your own pace – will help you better understand the diagrams and how to use them correctly; and some students may find the math easier than the diagrams, or useful...

This paper incorporates material from a variety of previously published works with various authors, including Laura Grit’s thesis and David Irwin’s thesis. It supersedes related material from those sources.

Experimental data always contains measurement errors (or noise, in signal processing). This paper is concerned with the removal of outliers from a data set consisting of only a handful of points. The data set has a unimodal probability distribution function, the mode is thus a reliable estimate of the central tendency. The approach is nonparametric; for the data set (x(i), y(i)) only the ordina...

The orbitozygomatic craniotomy is one of the workhorse approaches of skull base surgery, providing wide, multidirectional access to the anterior and middle cranial fossae as well as the basilar apex. Complete removal of the orbitozygomatic bar increases the angles of exposure, decreases the working depth of the surgical field, and minimizes brain retraction. In many cases, however, only a porti...

Existing methods rely primarily on heat to remove crosslinks and adducts, which is only partially effective and leads to additional fragmentation of labile nucleic acids such as RNA. In contrast, the catalytic CAT5TM technology developed by Cell Data Sciences and included in the RNAstormTM kit greatly accelerates the removal of formaldehyde damage and allows the use of milder conditions, result...