Cognitive Preference and Skill Acquisition: The Relationship Between Student Nurse Anesthetists and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists Thinking Styles

Decision-making in healthcare is a complex and, at times, uncertain process. In the United States Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNA) administer the majority of anesthesia. Nurse Anesthetists must draw on their educational background, clinical experience, and cognitive processes to make sound clinical judgments. To avoid errors understanding the relationship between cognitive preference and skill acquisition is critical. This study was designed to describe the cognitive preferences of Student Nurse Anesthetists (SRNAs) and CRNAs in the United States. The 2 cognitive preferences explored are rational (analytical) and experiential (intuitive) decision-making. The researcher used a quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive correlational design. The researcher administered the Rational Experiential Inventory (REI-40) via electronic survey to enrolled SRNAs and practicing CRNAs. The REI-40 is a validated psychometric tool involving 40 questions. Twenty questions evaluate each decision-making style. Ten questions assess engagement (e.g., enjoyment and reliance), and 10 questions assess the ability (e.g., capability and use) of each style. The demographics (e.g., age, gender, clinical experience, setting, and education) were collected and compared with the cognitive preference. This study revealed that SRNAs’ and CRNAs’ dominant cognitive preference was rational thinking and experiential thinking was greater than mid-scale. There was no statistical difference in how SRNAs and CRNAs scored on the REI-40 Inventory. Furthermore, there were no strong correlations between years of experience and cognitive preferences. However, there was a statistically significant difference in experiential cognitive ability and engagement when compared by gender identity. Ideally how one feels, and thinks should be aligned when making clinical decisions. This is the art and science of the profession. Research has revealed that human factors such as cognitive biases, heuristics, personal experience, and emotions play a role in decision-making. The development and integration of experiential decision-making is essential to aligning clinical judgment and safe patient care. This study describes SRNAs’ and CRNAs’ cognitive preferences and the relationship to the level of skill acquisition. This knowledge contributes to the understanding of CRNAs’ decision-making processes. Furthermore, there are ramifications for developing continuing education and clinical support tools for the profession

Heat flux microsensor measurements and calibrations

A new thin-film heat flux gage has been fabricated specifically for severe high temperature operation using platinum and platinum-10 percent rhodium for the thermocouple elements. Radiation calibrations of this gage were performed at the AEDC facility over the available heat flux range (approx. 1.0 - 1,000 W/cu cm). The gage output was linear with heat flux with a slight increase in sensitivity with increasing surface temperature. Survivability of gages was demonstrated in quench tests from 500 C into liquid nitrogen. Successful operation of gages to surface temperatures of 750 C has been achieved. No additional cooling of the gages is required because the gages are always at the same temperature as the substrate material. A video of oxyacetylene flame tests with real-time heat flux and temperature output is available

FutureHuman3D: Forecasting Complex Long-Term 3D Human Behavior from Video Observations

We present a generative approach to forecast long-term future human behavior in 3D, requiring only weak supervision from readily available 2D human action data. This is a fundamental task enabling many downstream applications. The required ground-truth data is hard to capture in 3D (mocap suits, expensive setups) but easy to acquire in 2D (simple RGB cameras). Thus, we design our method to only require 2D RGB data while being able to generate 3D human motion sequences. We use a differentiable 2D projection scheme in an autoregressive manner for weak supervision, and an adversarial loss for 3D regularization. Our method predicts long and complex behavior sequences (e.g. cooking, assembly) consisting of multiple sub-actions. We tackle this in a semantically hierarchical manner, jointly predicting high-level coarse action labels together with their low-level fine-grained realizations as characteristic 3D human poses. We observe that these two action representations are coupled in nature, and joint prediction benefits both action and pose forecasting. Our experiments demonstrate the complementary nature of joint action and 3D pose prediction: our joint approach outperforms each task treated individually, enables robust longer-term sequence prediction, and outperforms alternative approaches to forecast actions and characteristic 3D poses.Comment: Project Page: https://future-human-3d.christian-diller.de/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18du85YFXL

Boon or Bane? Advance Tax Rulings as a Measure to Mitigate Tax Uncertainty and Foster Investment

Politicians and tax practitioners often claim that tax uncertainty negatively affects investment. In many countries, firms can request fee-based Advance Tax Rulings (ATRs) to mitigate tax uncertainty. We analyze theoretically the circumstances under which investors request ATRs, how tax authorities should price them and how they can affect investment. We assume that tax authorities integrate investors' reasoning into their decisions. We find that it is often optimal for tax authorities to charge prohibitively high fees to discourage firms from requesting an ATR. However, we find that revenue-maximizing tax authorities offer ATRs if the ruling enables them either to significantly reduce their tax audit costs or to increase the probability of detecting ambiguous tax issues. Under certain circumstances, ATRs may effectively foster investment and potentially benefit both the tax authorities and taxpayers. Our results provide new explanations for why taxpayers that face high levels of tax uncertainty often do not request ATRs, even when the fee is rather low. Our results also hold when the tax authority maximizes social wealth instead of its revenues. Regulatory changes in ATR requirements might serve as a natural quasi-experiment for an empirical study of our predictions regarding investment decisions. (authors' abstract)Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

Investigating subclasses of abstract dialectical frameworks

Dialectical frameworks (ADFs) are generalizations of Dung argumentation frameworks where arbitrary relationships among arguments can be formalized. This additional expressibility comes with the price of higher computational complexity, thus an understanding of potentially easier subclasses is essential. Compared to Dung argumentation frameworks, where several subclasses such as acyclic and symmetric frameworks are well understood, there has been no in-depth analysis for ADFs in such direction yet (with the notable exception of bipolar ADFs). In this work, we introduce certain subclasses of ADFs and investigate their properties. In particular, we show that for acyclic ADFs, the different semantics coincide. On the other hand, we show that the concept of symmetry is less powerful for ADFs and further restrictions are required to achieve results that are similar to the known ones for Dung's frameworks. A particular such subclass (support-free symmetric ADFs) turns out to be closely related to argumentation frameworks with collective attacks (SETAFs); we investigate this relation in detail and obtain as a by-product that even for SETAFs symmetry is less powerful than for AFs. We also discuss the role of odd-length cycles in the subclasses we have introduced. Finally, we analyse the expressiveness of the ADF subclasses we introduce in terms of signatures

Frequency response of human skin in vivo to mechanical stimulation

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).The frequency-dependent response of human skin was measured, in vivo, to mechanical stimulation at a scale useful in the development of tactile displays. Sinusoidal vibration stimuli of varying frequencies and amplitudes were applied with a flat-ended 0.5 mm diameter cylindrical probe under two conditions: it was either glued to the skin or not. Both normal and tangential stimlui were applied to the skin surface in the glued case and only normal stimuli were applied in the nonglued case. The stimuli were applied to live human subjects at four body sites: the finger pad, wrist, forearm, and forehead. The force displacement response was measured and used to calculate mechanical impedance, power absorption and duty factor (an estimate of the fraction of time that the stimulator is in contact with the skin). Results showed the mechanical impedance generally increasing in magnitude with frequency and higher in magnitude for tangential stimulation than for normal stimulation. Power absorption linearly increased with frequency, and duty factor decreased with increasing frequency and amplitude. The measured properties varied widely between body sites and subjects. A mathematical model previously developed to calculate bulk and shear moduli from normal and tangential impedance data was tested against data at the four body sites. However, because the model assumed isotropy and semi-infinite thickness of the stimulated tissue, data taken did not fit the model well, especially at the finger tip.by Timothy Thomas Diller.S.M

Alternsgerechtes Arbeiten im Focus: Das Modellprojekt 'Oberpinzgau - Fit mit 50plus'

Im Auftrag des AMS Salzburg setzten der AMD Salzburg und der Regionalverband Oberpinzgau in der Zeit von Herbst 2006 bis Herbst 2007 das Projekt 'Oberpinzgau - Fit mit 50plus' um. Es sollten Interventionsmodelle für ein alternsgerechtes Arbeiten entwickelt und erprobt werden, und zwar unter spezieller Berück sichtigung der kleinbetrieblichen Struktur. Maßnahmen waren eine Fragebogenerhebung unter der 50- bis 65-jährigen Bevölkerung des Oberpinzgaus, Forumtheater-Aufführungen zur Bewusstseinsbildung in den Gemeinden, Arbeitsbewältigungs-Coachings für die älteren Arbeitnehmenden der Region, Betriebsberatungen, Vernetzungsarbeit zwischen Kleinbetrieben und der Aufbau eines ExpertInnen-Netzwerkes für spezielle Angebote in der Region. Entsprechend dem Auftrag der Realisierung eines Modellprojektes für das Arbeiten in einer Region mit Klein- und Mittelbetrieben werden im vorliegenden AMS report die durchgeführten Arbeiten reflektiert. Hierbei galt es, nicht nur die Erfolge herauszustreichen, sondern vielmehr auch auf die Stolpersteine, auf die 'Lessons learnt' aufmerksam zu machen