.
Dr. Srivatsa is a neonatologist with Neonatology Associates of Atlanta. He will present on The Safe Use of Oxygen in the NICU – From Delivery Room to Discharge.
Dr. Stewart, a pediatric and fetal cardiologist with Pediatric and Congenital Cardiology Associates, will present Single Ventricle Management: Early Diagnosis and Follow-up.
Robert Ursprung, M.D.
Dr. Ursprung is a practicing neonatologist in Fort Worth, Texas, and serves as the Mednax director of HRO/Patient Safety. He will speak on Creating a Higher Reliability Organization (HRO) and Maintaining a Culture of Safety.
Specialty Review is happening March 1-6. During the conference, expert faculty will guide attendees through a comprehensive neonatology review to prepare them for the neonatal-perinatal medicine certification exam. The conference even includes a Jeopardy-style competition, Battle of the Boards, which will spark minds and fun.
Below are just of few of the brilliant clinicians you can expect to learn from at Specialty Review. View the full agenda for more information.
David L. Weisoly, D.O.
Dr. Weisoly, neonatologist with Pediatrix Medical Group in Houston and Specialty Review course director, will conduct several sessions on various topics including fetal and neonatal growth disorders, neonatal pharmacology and the essentials of neonatal nutrition.
Dr. Aye joins us from Stanford University School of Medicine and specializes in pediatric endocrinology. She will present on topics including neonatal thyroid and pituitary and adrenal gland disorders. She will also review glucose homeostasis and calcium and phosphorus metabolism.
Fernando Moya, M.D.
Currently practicing as a neonatologist at Betty Cameron Women and Children’s Hospital in Wilmington, North Carolina, Dr. Moya has more than 30 years of experience as an academic neonatologist, researcher and educator. He will share his knowledge on neonatal thermoregulation and heat loss and water balance, electrolytes and acid base management.
Reserve your spot today to hear from these fantastic speakers and many others. Early bird pricing is available now through Dec. 31. Register now!
This tool is aimed at anyone who has ever said, “When I get a bigger shop, I’m getting a router table”. At 14-1/2″ high, 16″ deep and 21″ wide, the Benchtop Router Table from Rockler Woodworking and Hardware fits into even the dinkiest of shop spaces, and at 20 pounds, moving it around won’t break your back.
Constructed of MDF with a melamine laminate, the tabletop sits on a set of hardwood legs which clamp to your workbench — it comes ready for assembly, with all the screws and T-bolts you’ll need.
The heart of the benchtop table, like the full-size one in Rockler’s line, is a 20-3/4″ fence. The 1/4″ anodized aluminum angle is machined straight to within.010 inches, in order to create an accurate 90 angle.
The table also promises to minimize the gap around bits with two 10-3/8″ laminated MDF fence faces that slide in a T-slot. Like the larger Rockler table, the benchtop uses an accessory kit that includes both fence and table featherboards, a stop block and a dust port.
An aluminum miter gauge track, 1/4″ MDF insert with 1-1/2″ center hole, and safety bit guard round out the features of the router table. It’s pre-drilled for the Porter-Cable 690 Series routers, with custom adapter plates available for the DeWalt DW621, Bosch 1617 and 1618, and Sears Craftsman 1-1/2 HP or less routers. You can also purchase blank plates and drill to fit other routers.This the continent. Now after seven years of writing and worldbuilding in the setting, some features in the outline are no longer canon. Some are initial ideas I didn’t like in practice and reworked, others I replaced with concepts I enjoyed more. Growth and evolution is good, but the core essay is now full of contradictory apocrypha and not an easy reference anymore thanks to supplemental notes I added from later writings.
There also existed gaps in my worldbuilding from the beginning I’d left to “fill in later”. They weren’t crucial things to starting the first stories. While I don’t regret that choice, now I’ve reached a point where kicking those cans further down the road needs to stop. My writing keeps having to pause as I fill the gaps. The task is momentum breaking as not only do I have to invent answers but also make sure my solutions don’t contradict any of the Burus stories I’ve already written.
So I decided to compile a new “World Bible”: A big revision and expansion to the original essay to integrate and organize my later notes. I’d expunge or revise the apocrypha, and fill-in the major worldbuilding voids — like the lack of a deep history and an unfinished geography — that keep hindering me. A core feature of this restructuring would be a map to organize everything around and keep it all straight.
A map would have multiple uses. Beyond a worldbuilding tool, my wife has long championed the idea of creating a setting map I can place in each Burus story I publish. I’ve got nine stories set in Burus, so I’d get plenty of mileage out of the cartography. With the base map as a template, I can also create smaller-scale maps focused for each tale. They will interconnect the stories and add value to each book.
Creating a map for the setting wasn’t my plan from the start. In truth, I’ve had some gruff history with fantasy maps. Part of my problem was they are so common in fantasy fiction that they felt trite to me: I didn’t want to make one to buck the trend and rolled my eyes at suggestions otherwise. My experiences stuck for over a decade in cyclical “worldbuilding dungeons” also factored into making me averse to the task. Those lonely days left scars. My fears about writing led to a heavy reliance on maps and research to plot every minute detail to craft “perfect” settings. I didn’t write a single goddamned word of fiction for a decade.
That said, my opinions changed in the intervening years and are different now than when I first envisioned Burus.
Yes, maps are nigh-ubiquitous for constructed fantasy world settings. When I was a staunch anti-mapper, I’d often wax dismissive and cynical: “Authors and publishers do it because Tolkien did it,” I’d say. “They think that if they slip a map into a hack rehash of Tolkien’s work it’ll make more money.” Today I still maintain that some authors and publishers go the map route only for those reasons. But all? Most? I don’t think so anymore. Over the years, I’ve come to see it’s not just because Tolkien made a map of Middle Earth for The Lord of the Rings and it became iconic because of the book’s popularity. Tolkien’s cartography became iconic because Christopher Tolkien’s map synergizes with his father’s words so beautifully, and the map aided his readers.
It’s not always simple imitation. Instead, I believe Tolkien provided a stunning example of how maps help readers navigate complex constructed world settings or regain their bearings should they become lost in them. Unlike stories set on Earth where contemporary or historical maps can guide us, imaginary worlds can get confusing when they range between locations. A map is a solid way to present points of reference and reinforce the world’s setting. The method isn’t even unique to fantasy anymore, with many examples of maps in science fiction.
Maps are powerful tools for an author as well. They are fundamental aids for determining how distant points A and B are in a traveling narrative, how long a journey might take to travel between them, and what lies along the way. Worldbuilding-wise, maps prompt ideas and highlight problems with an overview that text notes alone cannot provide. For example, a map immediately shows how close regions are and how they connect. From this vantage you can speculate about many things. About what the climate and geography might be. About the people that might live there. And if there’s people, there’ll be routes of trade and places of conflict too. All of these highlight pathways upon which you can build the stage for your storytelling.
The points made above kept being driven home as I worked on the Burus map. These are places I’d thought a lot about and written of, but never mapped. Yet far from just drawing the map from my notes, the more I drew the map, the more I wrote new worldbuilding ideas and corrected inconsistencies I uncovered visualizing the geography.
And here we come back to Tolkien again, much to my chagrin. For as I encountered successive challenges piecing together a map of a constructed world I’d written copious notes for and completed multiple fictions in, I discovered this quote from J. R. R. to novelist Naomi Mitchison in 1954:
.”The full letter, a wonderful read, can be found in “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien” and also transcribed online.
Yes Professor, your words ring true to me as well, stuck neck-deep in a mapmaking-worldbuilding feedback loop. I too have found it weary work to