The Potential of Least Squares Vector Field Fitting in the Improvement of DESI Fiber Positioner Performance

Honors (Bachelor's)PhysicsUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147357/1/bfreud.pd

Errors Using Observational Methods for Ergonomics Assessment in Real Practice

[EN] Objective: The degree in which practitioners use the observational methods for musculoskeletal disorder risks assessment correctly was evaluated. Background: Ergonomics assessment is a key issue for the prevention and reduction of work-related musculoskeletal disorders in workplaces. Observational assessment methods appear to be better matched to the needs of practitioners than direct measurement methods, and for this reason, they are the most widely used techniques in real work situations. Despite the simplicity of observational methods, those responsible for assessing risks using these techniques should have some experience and know-how in order to be able to use them correctly. Method: We analyzed 442 risk assessments of actual jobs carried out by 290 professionals from 20 countries to determine their reliability. Results: The results show that approximately 30% of the assessments performed by practitioners had errors. In 13% of the assessments, the errors were severe and completely invalidated the results of the evaluation. Conclusion: Despite the simplicity of observational method, approximately 1 out of 3 assessments conducted by practitioners in actual work situations do not adequately evaluate the level of potential musculoskeletal disorder risks. Application: This study reveals a problem that suggests greater effort is needed to ensure that practitioners possess better knowledge of the techniques used to assess work-related musculoskeletal disorder risks and that laws and regulations should be stricter as regards qualifications and skills required by professionals.This work was supported by the Programa estatal de investigacion, desarrollo e innovacion orientada a los retos de la sociedad of the government of Spain under Grant DPI2016-79042-R.Diego-Mas, JA.; Alcaide Marzal, J.; Poveda Bautista, R. (2017). Errors Using Observational Methods for Ergonomics Assessment in Real Practice. Human Factors The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. 59(8):1173-1187. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187208177234961173118759

Biases in human behavior

The paper shows that biases in individual’s decision-making may result from the process of mental editing by which subjects produce a “representation” of the decision problem. During this process, individuals make systematic use of default classifications in order to reduce the short-term memory load and the complexity of symbolic manipulation. The result is the construction of an imperfect mental representation of the problem that nevertheless has the advantage of being simple, and yielding “satisficing” decisions. The imperfection origins in a trade-off that exists between the simplicity of representation of a strategy and his efficiency. To obtain simplicity, the strategy’s rules have to be memorized and represented with some degree of abstraction, that allow to drastically reduce their number. Raising the level of abstraction with which a strategy’s rule is represented, means to extend the domain of validity of the rule beyond the field in which the rule has been experimented, and may therefore induce to include unintentionally domains in which the rule is inefficient. Therefore the rise of errors in the mental representation of a problem may be the "natural" effect of the categorization and the identification of the building blocks of a strategy. The biases may be persistent and give rise to lock-in effect, in which individuals remain trapped in sub-optimal strategies, as it is proved by experimental results on stability of sub-optimal strategies in games like Target The Two. To understand why sub-optimal strategies, that embody errors, are locally stable, i.e. cannot be improved by small changes in the rules, it is considered Kauffman’ NK model, because, among other properties, it shows that if there are interdependencies among the rules of a system, than the system admits many sub-optimal solutions that are locally stable, i.e. cannot be improved by simple mutations. But the fitness function in NK model is a random one, while in our context it is more reasonable to define the fitness of a strategy as efficiency of the program. If we introduce this kind of fitness, then the stability properties of the NK model do not hold any longer: the paper shows that while the elementary statements of a strategy are interdependent, it is possible to achieve an optimal configuration of the strategy via mutations and in consequence the sub-optimal solutions are not locally stable under mutations. The paper therefore provides a different explanation of the existence and stability of suboptimal strategies, based on the difficulty to redefine the sub-problems that constitute the building blocks of the problem’s representation

Exploring pharmacist experiences of delivering individualized prescribing error feedback in an acute hospital setting

Highlights • Delivery of prescribing error feedback is valued by hospital pharmacists and considered sustainable. • Pharmacists report altered prescribing behaviour and improved prescribing following receipt of feedback. • Pharmacists report greater team-work and prescriber communication following delivery of feedback. • Delivering prescribing error feedback can improve the self-confidence and self-worth of pharmacists

Emerging Technology in Business and Finance

In the globalized scenario where technologies are developing continuously with time, these novel methods are affecting the business and finance in the significant way. In this chapter we are going to discuss about the major emerging technologies in the field of entrepreneurship, application development, finance, and business. The authors are going to start with the introduction about the business, finance, entrepreneurship and application development, and the effect of the emerging technologies on these fields and the way in which technologies are developing from time to time, about adoption of these technologies by industries. The changes in the technologies with special reference to developed and developing country will also be the part of this chapter. Moving ahead we are discussing about these technologies in prevailing businesses as well as upcoming business. Some of the technologies we are going to discuss are Embedded Business Intelligence, Amplified Visual Presentation, Augmented Analytics, Cloud Management. Beside these technologies, we are going to cover about the growing automation in the finance sector such as Cloud banking, Robotic process automation, Blockchain, Internet of things, etc. This chapter will cover all the technologies while getting the complete knowledge about what, why, where, when and how it is changing in the present finance and business scenario. Just like the two opposite faces of the coin, one side these emerging technologies are boon for the business and finances then on the other side there are certain risks involved in these technologies, which can be a great threat to our business as well as in our routine life. So, we also discuss about the potential risks associated with these technologies. We will end our chapter by giving our conclusion, precautions, and suggestions on these technologies

Explicit Teaching of Science Process Skills: Learning Outcomes and Assessments of Pre-service Science Teachers

Science process skills (SPSs) are one of the most important skills possessed by students in conducting scientific activities. Therefore, it is crucial for science teachers to understand and practice these skills. Considering the role of teachers in developing students' SPSs, the focus of this study is on developing pre-service science teachers’ SPSs. This study aims at determining the effects of explicit teaching of SPSs upon pre-service teachers’ SPSs. To accomplish this, action research was employed. The study involved 10 pre-service science teachers who voluntarily participated in the study and were from Science Education Departments at a state university in Türkiye. Data were collected by using two methods: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative data were obtained by using the Science Process Skills Scale. Meanwhile, the qualitative data were obtained from semi-structured interviews and diaries. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was utilized in the quantitative data, and a content analysis technique was used in the analysis of the qualitative data. The results of the study indicated that explicit teaching of SPSs contributes to the development of pre-service teachers’ SPSs, and that all pre-service teachers prefer explicit teaching in the teaching or development of SPSs

Iterative Phase Optimization of Elementary Quantum Error Correcting Codes

Performing experiments on small-scale quantum computers is certainly a challenging endeavor. Many parameters need to be optimized to achieve high-fidelity operations. This can be done efficiently for operations acting on single qubits, as errors can be fully characterized. For multiqubit operations, though, this is no longer the case, as in the most general case, analyzing the effect of the operation on the system requires a full state tomography for which resources scale exponentially with the system size. Furthermore, in recent experiments, additional electronic levels beyond the two-level system encoding the qubit have been used to enhance the capabilities of quantum-information processors, which additionally increases the number of parameters that need to be controlled. For the optimization of the experimental system for a given task (e.g., a quantum algorithm), one has to find a satisfactory error model and also efficient observables to estimate the parameters of the model. In this manuscript, we demonstrate a method to optimize the encoding procedure for a small quantum error correction code in the presence of unknown but constant phase shifts. The method, which we implement here on a small-scale linear ion-trap quantum computer, is readily applicable to other AMO platforms for quantum-information processing