Model theory of finite-by-Presburger Abelian groups and finite extensions of pp-adic fields

We define a class of pre-ordered abelian groups that we call finite-by-Presburger groups, and prove that their theory is model-complete. We show that certain quotients of the multiplicative group of a local field of characteristic zero are finite-by-Presburger and interpret the higher residue rings of the local field. We apply these results to give a new proof of the model completeness in the ring language of a local field of characteristic zero (a result that follows also from work of Prestel-Roquette)

Model Completeness for Henselian Fields with finite ramification valued in a ZZ-Group

We prove that the theory of a Henselian valued field of characteristic zero, with finite ramification, and whose value group is a $Z$-group, is model-complete in the language of rings if the theory of its residue field is model-complete in the language of rings. We apply this to prove that every infinite algebraic extension of the field of $p$-adic numbers $\Bbb Q_p$ with finite ramification is model-complete in the language of rings. For this, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for model-completeness of the theory of a perfect pseudo-algebraically closed field with pro-cyclic absolute Galois group

Enrichments of Boolean Algebras: a uniform treatment of some classical and some novel examples

We give a unified treatment of the model theory of various enrichments of infinite atomic Boolean algebras, with special attention to quantifier-eliminations, complete axiomatizations and decidability. A classical example is the enrichment by a predicate for the ideal of finite sets, and a novel one involves predicates giving congruence conditions on the cardinality of finite sets. We focus on three examples, and classify them by expressive power

Physician Communication Attitudes and Success in Patient-doctor Communication Amongst Medical School Students

The aim of this research paper is to assess the issue of difficulty in verbal communication amongst medical practitioners and their patients. In recent years, the push for efficiency and speed has caused physicians to decrease the time they spend with their patients. This push for efficiency has caused a strain in the healthy development of physician-patient relationships. Therefore, hospitals and clinics are suffering from a decrease of patient satisfaction and loss of customers and revenue. Previous studies have been done to assess the use of implementing techniques from the hospitality industry and having a more humanistic approach to health care in order to solve this problem (Kaplan, Greenfield, & Ware, 1989). Our study exams medical school students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Medicine. The students were evaluated based on scores from the Objective Structured Clinical Examination and compared with attitude surveys they had taken before the exam. We will be using a regression model and scatter plot regression graph to analyze our date. By using previous literature we predicted that medical school students who believed that patients should control the conversation during patient examination would have a higher OSCE score. We also believe that we should see a similar trend of increase of OSCE scores for students that believe psychosocial factors should be discussed more during patient examination. We concluded that our results were insignificant due to a small sample size, although our correlation results confirmed our hypothesis that a more humanistic approach results in better patient satisfaction and recovery outcomes

The effects of self-report cognitive failures and cognitive load on antisaccade performance

Individuals reporting high levels of distractibility in everyday life show impaired performance in standard laboratory tasks measuring selective attention and inhibitory processes. Similarly, increasing cognitive load leads to more errors/distraction in a variety of cognitive tasks. How these two factors interact is currently unclear; highly distractible individuals may be affected more when their cognitive resources are taxed, or load may linearly affect performance for all individuals. We investigated the relationship between self-reported levels of cognitive failures (CF) in daily life and performance in the antisaccade task, a widely used tool examining attentional control. Levels of concurrent cognitive demand were manipulated using a secondary auditory discrimination task. We found that both levels of self-reported CF and task load increased antisaccade latencies while having no effect on prosaccade eye-movements. However individuals rating themselves as suffering few daily life distractions showed a comparable load cost to those who experience many. These findings suggest that the likelihood of distraction is governed by the addition of both internal susceptibility and the external current load placed on working memory

Uniformly defining valuation rings in Henselian valued fields with finite or pseudo-finite residue fields

We give a definition, in the ring language, of Z_p inside Q_p and of F_p[[t]] inside F_p((t)), which works uniformly for all $p$ and all finite field extensions of these fields, and in many other Henselian valued fields as well. The formula can be taken existential-universal in the ring language, and in fact existential in a modification of the language of Macintyre. Furthermore, we show the negative result that in the language of rings there does not exist a uniform definition by an existential formula and neither by a universal formula for the valuation rings of all the finite extensions of a given Henselian valued field. We also show that there is no existential formula of the ring language defining Z_p inside Q_p uniformly for all p. For any fixed finite extension of Q_p, we give an existential formula and a universal formula in the ring language which define the valuation ring