A Guide to Display Provider Quality Information and Involving Consumers in Generating Provider Ratings for Consumer Driven Health Plans Web Site

Provider’s quality information is one of the most important pieces of information that a consumer seeks out when searching for a health care provider. Most often, a consumer finds a provider by word of mouth from friends or relatives. This approach has its benefit but often times it does not work because each individual consumer has his or her own priority and likings. The ideal approach would be to have a web tool that provides quality ratings for providers from claim information as well as from consumer feedback. Current tools in the market do not involve the consumer intricately enough to generate provider ratings. These tools also do not provide adequate information about providers upon which a user can make an informed decision regarding providers for their treatments. This paper will discuss a prototype web user interface(UI) where a consumer can lookup a provider by various criteria and view quality ratings information. A process will be outlined on how to involve the consumer in generating provider ratings. Quality metrics will be suggested upon which quality ratings could be assigned to health care providers in order to aid the consumer in the decision making process

Design and Development of an Energy Efficient Multimedia Cloud Data Center with Minimal SLA Violation

Multimedia computing (MC) is rising as a nascent computing paradigm to process multimedia applications and provide efficient multimedia cloud services with optimal Quality of Service (QoS) to the multimedia cloud users. But, the growing popularity of MC is affecting the climate. Because multimedia cloud data centers consume an enormous amount of energy to provide services, it harms the environment due to carbon dioxide emissions. Virtual machine (VM) migration can effectively address this issue; it reduces the energy consumption of multimedia cloud data centers. Due to the reduction of Energy Consumption (EC), the Service Level Agreement violation (SLAV) may increase. An efficient VM selection plays a crucial role in maintaining the stability between EC and SLAV. This work highlights a novel VM selection policy based on identifying the Maximum value among the differences of the Sum of Squares Utilization Rate (MdSSUR) parameter to reduce the EC of multimedia cloud data centers with minimal SLAV. The proposed MdSSUR VM selection policy has been evaluated using real workload traces in CloudSim. The simulation result of the proposed MdSSUR VM selection policy demonstrates the rate of improvements of the EC, the number of VM migrations, and the SLAV by 28.37%, 89.47%, and 79.14%, respectively

Josephson Coupling in the Dissipative State of a Thermally Hysteretic μ\mu-SQUID

Micron-sized superconducting interference devices ($\mu$-SQUIDs) based on constrictions optimized for minimizing thermal runaway are shown to exhibit voltage oscillations with applied magnetic flux despite their hysteretic behavior. We explain this remarkable feature by a significant supercurrent contribution surviving deep into the resistive state, due to efficient heat evacuation. A resistively shunted junction model, complemented by a thermal balance determining the amplitude of the critical current, describes well all experimental observations, including the flux modulation of the (dynamic) retrapping current and voltage by introducing a single dimensionless parameter. Thus hysteretic $\mu$-SQUIDs can be operated in the voltage read-out mode with a faster response. The quantitative modeling of this regime incorporating both heating and phase dynamics paves the way for further optimization of $\mu$-SQUIDs for nano-magnetism.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, Revise

Controlling hysteresis in superconducting constrictions with a resistive shunt

We demonstrate control of the thermal hysteresis in superconducting constrictions by adding a resistive shunt. In order to prevent thermal relaxation oscillations, the shunt resistor is placed in close vicinity of the constriction, making the inductive current-switching time smaller than the thermal equilibration time. We investigate the current-voltage characteristics of the same constriction with and without the shunt-resistor. The widening of the hysteresis-free temperature range is explained on the basis of a simple model.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, including Supplementary Informatio

Operator correlations in a quenched non-Hermitian Luttinger liquid

We study operator correlations of a spinful Luttinger liquid after introducing a non-Hermitian interaction quench, yielding supersonic modes and dominant superconducting correlations as signatures of the non-unitary dynamics as well as spin-charge separation. A comparative analysis with the Hermitian counterpart, i.e, when the quench is Hermitian, shows a significant difference in the behavior of the model. We derive exact expressions for different operator correlations and show that the superconducting correlations decay slower than the charge and spin-density wave correlations, especially, within the short-time limit, and at the long-time limit all the operator correlations merge differed only by phase factors in the case of non-hermitian interaction quench whereas they do not merge in the case of Hermitian interaction quench. In both cases known Luttinger liquid universality is retained at the long time limit. We also analyze how the dynamics of operator correlations vary in the presence of anisotropy in the quenching parameters.Comment: 15 pages, comments welcom

CoinPress: Practical Private Mean and Covariance Estimation

We present simple differentially private estimators for the mean and covariance of multivariate sub-Gaussian data that are accurate at small sample sizes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms both theoretically and empirically using synthetic and real-world datasets---showing that their asymptotic error rates match the state-of-the-art theoretical bounds, and that they concretely outperform all previous methods. Specifically, previous estimators either have weak empirical accuracy at small sample sizes, perform poorly for multivariate data, or require the user to provide strong a priori estimates for the parameters.Comment: Code is available at https://github.com/twistedcubic/coin-pres

EXTRACTION, MODIFICATION, AND CHARACTERIZATION OF NATURAL POLYMERS USED IN TRANSDERMAL DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM: AN UPDATED REVIEW

The modified/regulated drug delivery system helps to sustain the delivery of the drug for a prolonged period. The modified drug delivery system is primarily aimed at ensuring protection, the effectiveness of the drug, and patient compliance. The transdermal drug delivery system (TDDS) falls within the modified drug delivery system, in which the goal is to deliver the drug at a fixed dose and regulated rate through the skin. Polymers are the backbone of the framework for providing transdermal systems. The polymer should be stable, non-toxic, economical, and provide a sustainable release of the drug. In general, natural polymers used in the TDDS as rate-controlling agents, protective, and stabilizing agents and also used to minimize the frequency of dosing and improve the drug’s effectiveness by localizing at the site of action. Nowadays, manufacturers are likely to use natural polymers due to many issues associated with drug release and side effects with synthetic polymers. Drug release processes from natural polymers include oxidation, diffusion, and swelling. Natural polymers may be used as the basis to achieve predetermined drug distribution throughout the body. The use of natural materials for traditional and modern types of dosage forms are gums, mucilages, resins, and plant waste etc. Thus, the main objective of this review article is to give a brief knowledge about the extraction, modification, characterization, and biomedical application of conventional natural polymers used in the transdermal drug delivery system and their future prospective

Octanuclear heterobimetallic {Ni4Ln4} assemblies possessing Ln4 square grid [2×2] motifs : synthesis, structure and magnetism

Octanuclear heterobimetallic complexes, [Ln4Ni4(H3L)4(µ3-OH)4(µ2-OH)4]4Cl·xH2O·yCHCl3 (Dy3+ , x = 30.6, y = 2 (1); Tb3+ , x = 28, y = 0 (2) ; Gd3+ , x = 25.3, y = 0 (3); Ho3+ , x = 30.6, y = 3 (4)) (H5L = N1, N3-bis(6-formyl-2-(hydroxymethyl) -4-methylphenol) diethylenetriamine) are reported. These are assembled by the cumulative coordination action of four doubly deprotonated compartmental ligands, [H3L] 2- , along with eight exogenous –OH ligands. Within the core of these complexes, four Ln3+ are distributed to the four corners of a perfect square grid while four Ni2+ are projected away from the plane of the Ln4 unit. Each of the four Ni2+ possesses distorted octahedral geometry while all the Ln3+ are crystallographically equivalent and are present in an elongated square antiprism geometry. The magnetic properties of compound 3 are dominated by an easy-plane single-ion anisotropy of the Ni2+ ions [DNi = 6.7(7) K] and dipolar interactions between Gd3+ centers. Detailed ac magnetometry reveals the presence of distinct temperature-dependent out-of-phase signals for compounds 1 and 2, indicative of slow magnetic relaxation. Magnetochemical analysis of complex 1 implies the 3d and the 4f metal ions are engaged in ferromagnetic interactions with SMM behavior, while dc magnetometry of compound 2 is suggestive of an antiferromagnetic Ni-Tb spin-exchange with slow magnetic relaxation due to a field-induced level crossing. Compound 4 exhibits an easy-plane single-ion anisotropy for the Ho3+ ions and weak interactions between spin centers