178,498 research outputs found
Errors in Veterinary Practice: Preliminary Lessons for Building Better Veterinary Teams
Case studies in two typical UK veterinary practices were undertaken to explore teamwork, including interprofessional working. Each study involved one week of whole team observation based on practice locations (reception, operating theatre), one week of shadowing six focus individuals (veterinary surgeons, veterinary nurses and administrators) and a final week consisting of semistructured interviews regarding teamwork. Errors emerged as a finding of the study. The definition of errors was inclusive, pertaining to inputs or omitted actions with potential adverse outcomes for patients, clients or the practice. The 40 identified instances could be grouped into clinical errors (dosing/drugs, surgical preparation, lack of follow-up), lost item errors, and most frequently, communication errors (records, procedures, missing face-to-face communication, mistakes within face-to-face communication). The qualitative nature of the study allowed the underlying cause of the errors to be explored. In addition to some individual mistakes, system faults were identified as a major cause of errors. Observed examples and interviews demonstrated several challenges to interprofessional teamworking which may cause errors, including: lack of time, part-time staff leading to frequent handovers, branch differences and individual veterinary surgeon work preferences. Lessons are drawn for building better veterinary teams and implications for Disciplinary Proceedings considered
Generalized decoding, effective channels, and simplified security proofs in quantum key distribution
Prepare and measure quantum key distribution protocols can be decomposed into
two basic steps: delivery of the signals over a quantum channel and
distillation of a secret key from the signal and measurement records by
classical processing and public communication. Here we formalize the
distillation process for a general protocol in a purely quantum-mechanical
framework and demonstrate that it can be viewed as creating an ``effective''
quantum channel between the legitimate users Alice and Bob. The process of
secret key generation can then be viewed as entanglement distribution using
this channel, which enables application of entanglement-based security proofs
to essentially any prepare and measure protocol. To ensure secrecy of the key,
Alice and Bob must be able to estimate the channel noise from errors in the
key, and we further show how symmetries of the distillation process simplify
this task. Applying this method, we prove the security of several key
distribution protocols based on equiangular spherical codes.Comment: 9.1 pages REVTeX. (v3): published version. (v2): revised for improved
presentation; content unchange
Interactive Channel Capacity Revisited
We provide the first capacity approaching coding schemes that robustly
simulate any interactive protocol over an adversarial channel that corrupts any
fraction of the transmitted symbols. Our coding schemes achieve a
communication rate of over any
adversarial channel. This can be improved to for
random, oblivious, and computationally bounded channels, or if parties have
shared randomness unknown to the channel.
Surprisingly, these rates exceed the interactive channel capacity bound
which [Kol and Raz; STOC'13] recently proved for random errors. We conjecture
and to be the optimal rates for their respective settings
and therefore to capture the interactive channel capacity for random and
adversarial errors.
In addition to being very communication efficient, our randomized coding
schemes have multiple other advantages. They are computationally efficient,
extremely natural, and significantly simpler than prior (non-capacity
approaching) schemes. In particular, our protocols do not employ any coding but
allow the original protocol to be performed as-is, interspersed only by short
exchanges of hash values. When hash values do not match, the parties backtrack.
Our approach is, as we feel, by far the simplest and most natural explanation
for why and how robust interactive communication in a noisy environment is
possible
Mixed State Entanglement and Quantum Error Correction
Entanglement purification protocols (EPP) and quantum error-correcting codes
(QECC) provide two ways of protecting quantum states from interaction with the
environment. In an EPP, perfectly entangled pure states are extracted, with
some yield D, from a mixed state M shared by two parties; with a QECC, an arbi-
trary quantum state can be transmitted at some rate Q through a
noisy channel without degradation. We prove that an EPP involving one-
way classical communication and acting on mixed state (obtained
by sharing halves of EPR pairs through a channel ) yields a QECC on
with rate , and vice versa. We compare the amount of entanglement
E(M) required to prepare a mixed state M by local actions with the amounts
and that can be locally distilled from it by EPPs using one-
and two-way classical communication respectively, and give an exact expression
for when is Bell-diagonal. While EPPs require classical communica-
tion, QECCs do not, and we prove Q is not increased by adding one-way classical
communication. However, both D and Q can be increased by adding two-way com-
munication. We show that certain noisy quantum channels, for example a 50%
depolarizing channel, can be used for reliable transmission of quantum states
if two-way communication is available, but cannot be used if only one-way com-
munication is available. We exhibit a family of codes based on universal hash-
ing able toachieve an asymptotic (or ) of 1-S for simple noise models,
where S is the error entropy. We also obtain a specific, simple 5-bit single-
error-correcting quantum block code. We prove that {\em iff} a QECC results in
high fidelity for the case of no error the QECC can be recast into a form where
the encoder is the matrix inverse of the decoder.Comment: Resubmission with various corrections and expansions. See also
http://vesta.physics.ucla.edu/~smolin/ for related papers and information. 82
pages latex including 19 postscript figures included using psfig macro
Distillation Protocols for Mixed States of Multilevel Qubits and the Quantum Renormalization Group
We study several properties of distillation protocols to purify multilevel
qubit states (qudits) when applied to a certain family of initial mixed
bipartite states. We find that it is possible to use qudits states to increase
the stability region obtained with the flow equations to distill qubits. In
particular, for qutrits we get the phase diagram of the distillation process
with a rich structure of fixed points. We investigate the large- limit of
qudits protocols and find an analytical solution in the continuum limit. The
general solution of the distillation recursion relations is presented in an
appendix. We stress the notion of weight amplification for distillation
protocols as opposed to the quantum amplitude amplification that appears in the
Grover algorithm. Likewise, we investigate the relations between quantum
distillation and quantum renormalization processes.Comment: REVTEX4 file, 12 pages, 3 tables, color figure
Energy-efficient wireless communication
In this chapter we present an energy-efficient highly adaptive network interface architecture and a novel data link layer protocol for wireless networks that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for diverse traffic types. Due to the dynamic nature of wireless networks, adaptations in bandwidth scheduling and error control are necessary to achieve energy efficiency and an acceptable quality of service. In our approach we apply adaptability through all layers of the protocol stack, and provide feedback to the applications. In this way the applications can adapt the data streams, and the network protocols can adapt the communication parameters
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