5,727 research outputs found

    Printed wiring board system programmer's manual

    Get PDF
    The printed wiring board system provides automated techniques for the design of printed circuit boards and hybrid circuit boards. The system consists of four programs: (1) the preprocessor program combines user supplied data and pre-defined library data to produce the detailed circuit description data; (2) the placement program assigns circuit components to specific areas of the board in a manner that optimizes the total interconnection length of the circuit; (3) the organizer program assigns pin interconnections to specific board levels and determines the optimal order in which the router program should attempt to layout the paths connecting the pins; and (4) the router program determines the wire paths which are to be used to connect each input pin pair on the circuit board. This document is intended to serve as a programmer's reference manual for the printed wiring board system. A detailed description of the internal logic and flow of the printed wiring board programs is included

    Measuring governance at health facility level: developing and validation of simple governance tool in Zambia.

    Get PDF
    BACKGROUND: Governance has been cited as a key determinant of economic growth, social advancement and overall development. Achievement of millennium development goals is partly dependant on governance practices. In 2007, Health Systems 20/20 conducted an Internet-based survey on the practice of good governance. The survey posed a set of good practices related to health governance and asked respondents to indicate whether their experience confirmed or disconfirmed those practices. We applied the 17 governance statements in rural health facilities of Zambia. The aim was to establish whether the statements were reliable and valid for assessing governance practices at primary care level. METHODS: Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. We first applied the governance statements developed by the health system 20/20 and then conducted focus group discussion and In-depth interviews to explore some elements of governance including accountability and community participation. The target respondents were the health facility management team and community members. The sample size include 42 health facilities. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 17 and Nvivo version 9. RESULTS: The 95% one-sided confidence interval for Cronbach's alpha was between 0.69 and 0.74 for the 16 items.The mean score for most of the items was above 3. Factor analysis yielded five principle components: Transparency, community participation, Intelligence & vision, Accountability and Regulation & oversight. Most of the items (6) clustered around the transparency latent factor. Chongwe district performed poorly in overall mean governance score and across the five domains of governance. The overall scores in Chongwe ranged between 51 and 94% with the mean of 80%. Kafue and Luangwa districts had similar overall mean governance scores (88%). Community participation was generally low. Generally, it was noted that community members lacked capacity to hold health workers accountable for drugs and medical supplies. CONCLUSIONS: The study successfully validated and applied the new tool for evaluating health system governance at health facility level. The results have shown that it is feasible to measure governance practices at health facility level and that the adapted tool is fairly reliable with the 95% one-sided confidence interval for Cronbach's alpha laying between 0.69 and 0.74 for the 16 items. Caution should be taken when interpreting overall scores as they tended to mask domain specific variations

    Differences in antiretroviral scale up in three South African provinces: the role of implementation management

    Get PDF
    BACKGROUND: South Africa's antiretroviral programme is governed by defined national plans, establishing treatment targets and providing funding through ring-fenced conditional grants. However, in terms of the country's quasi-federal constitution, provincial governments bear the main responsibility for provision of health care, and have a certain amount of autonomy and therefore choice in the way their HIV/AIDS programmes are implemented. METHODS: The paper is a comparative case study of the early management of ART scale up in three South African provincial governments--Western Cape, Gauteng and Free State--focusing on both operational and strategic dimensions. Drawing on surveys of models of ART care and analyses of the policy process conducted in the three provinces between 2005 and 2007, as well as a considerable body of grey and indexed literature on ART scale up in South Africa, it draws links between implementation processes and variations in provincial ART coverage (low, medium and high) achieved in the three provinces. RESULTS: While they adopted similar chronic disease care approaches, the provinces differed with respect to political and managerial leadership of the programme, programme design, the balance between central standardisation and local flexibility, the effectiveness of monitoring and evaluation systems, and the nature and extent of external support and programme partnerships. CONCLUSIONS: This case study points to the importance of sub-national programme processes and the influence of factors other than financing or human resource capacity, in understanding intervention scale up

    Search for New Physics with Jets and Missing Transverse Momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

    Get PDF
    A search for new physics is presented based on an event signature of at least three jets accompanied by large missing transverse momentum, using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36 inverse picobarns collected in proton--proton collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC. No excess of events is observed above the expected standard model backgrounds, which are all estimated from the data. Exclusion limits are presented for the constrained minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model. Cross section limits are also presented using simplified models with new particles decaying to an undetected particle and one or two jets

    Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

    Get PDF
    A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

    Combined search for the quarks of a sequential fourth generation

    Get PDF
    Results are presented from a search for a fourth generation of quarks produced singly or in pairs in a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011. A novel strategy has been developed for a combined search for quarks of the up and down type in decay channels with at least one isolated muon or electron. Limits on the mass of the fourth-generation quarks and the relevant Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements are derived in the context of a simple extension of the standard model with a sequential fourth generation of fermions. The existence of mass-degenerate fourth-generation quarks with masses below 685 GeV is excluded at 95% confidence level for minimal off-diagonal mixing between the third- and the fourth-generation quarks. With a mass difference of 25 GeV between the quark masses, the obtained limit on the masses of the fourth-generation quarks shifts by about +/- 20 GeV. These results significantly reduce the allowed parameter space for a fourth generation of fermions.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
    • …
    corecore