United States Air Force Graduate Degrees from 1990 to 2000: A Comparison

Throughout its history, the United States Air Force has been concerned with technical graduate education. In 1947, the Ridenour Report stated the importance and need of Air Force officers with technical graduate degrees. This emphasis has served the Air Force well, but there is concern among senior Air Force leaders that there has been an erosion of these technical skills and graduate education. This research will examine the issues surrounding technical graduate education in the Air Force and will address the possible loss of such technical education. The results of this research provide specific statistical data and analysis on the types and numbers of graduate degrees achieved by Air Force line officers in the years 1990 and 2000. It will discuss the results for all Air Force line officers and will then examine specific Air Force Specialty Codes. This research will enable further investigation into the impact that graduate education will play on the future of the United States Air Force. Based on the data analysis, this study concludes that there has been no significant change in the percentage of overall technical graduate education from 1990 to 2000. There has, in fact, been a slight increase in the percentage of technical graduate degrees in the following career fields: Pilots (1 lXX), Civil Engineers (32EX), Communications and Information Officers (33 SX), and Developmental Engineers (63 AX). All other areas examined showed no statistically significant changes

Physician Executive Leadership: Assessing a Student-Led Approach to Healthcare Leadership Education in Medical School

Poster presented at: 14th Annual AMA Research Symposium in Orlando, Fl Objective: To investigate the effectiveness of Physican Leadership, an open access, student-led healthcare leadership program at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, in preparing to face five key emerging topics in medical practice: healthcare economics, health policy, care and quality and safety, law and medicine, and patient experience. The Problem: Gaps in Medical Education Healthcare in the US continues to evolve, and topics such as health policy, health finance, and patient experience are not central to the practice of medicine. However, the sheer volume of material students are required to learn in the preclinical years makes it challenging to introduce new subjects into traditional medical school curricula. As a result, these topics in healthcare leadership are often left out. Indeed, only 40-50% of medical student report appropriate training in the practice of medicine, including subjects as medical economics, healthcare systems, and managed care.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/pel/1002/thumbnail.jp

The Dynamical Implications of Multiple Stellar Formation Events in Galactic Globular Clusters

Various galactic globular clusters display abundance anomalies that affect the morphology of their colour-magnitude diagrams. In this paper we consider the possibility of helium enhancement in the anomalous horizontal branch of NGC 2808. We examine the dynamics of a self-enrichment scenario in which an initial generation of stars with a top-heavy initial mass function enriches the interstellar medium with helium via the low-velocity ejecta of its asymptotic giant branch stars. This enriched medium then produces a second generation of stars which are themselves helium-enriched. We use a direct N-body approach to perform five simulations and conclude that such two-generation clusters are both possible and would not differ significantly from their single-generation counterparts on the basis of dynamics. We find, however, that the stellar populations of such clusters would differ from single-generation clusters with a standard initial mass function and in particular would be enhanced in white dwarf stars. We conclude, at least from the standpoint of dynamics, that two-generation globular clusters are feasible.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap

An Exploration of 1st and 2nd Generation CPTED for End of Year School Leavers at Rottnest Island

The end-of-year post exam celebrations for Year 12 secondary school students presents a unique crime prevention proposition in Australia each year. Students of approximately 17 years of age congregate in a variety of locations in large groups known as ‘Leavers’. Traditionally a number of \u27rite of passage\u27 activities, fuelled by additional factors such as alcohol, drugs and peer pressure, have resulted in an increased risk of crime and anti-social behaviour. This paper examines mitigation strategies aligned with Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) when placed at an event. Using the annual Leavers cohort at Rottnest Island, W.A., a number of 1st and 2nd generation CPTED instruments are discussed and evaluated. The additional isolation factor of the island highlights the value of 2nd generation social cohesion and its likely impact in reducing a number of crime-related social issues. The paper concludes that increased 2nd generation CPTED treatments significantly improve crime reduction and fear of crime in temporary locations when used for mass gatherings at events

Compact Binary Populations in Globular Clusters and Prospects for Gravitational Wave Detection

The inspiral and merger of compact binary stars will be major detection events for interferometric gravitational wave observatories. These observatories operate most effectively by comparing their output to template waveforms. In order to make these templates the physical parameters of the source population must be understood. Compact binaries in the galactic field have been investigated using population synthesis models but in dense stellar environments interactions can alter the binary population and may enhance the merger rate. I study compact binaries in star clusters using a Monte Carlo model for the dynamics. I find that the black hole population interacts strongly, leading to an enhancement in both the number of black hole binaries and the black hole binary merger rate. Due to the high interaction rate the majority of black hole binaries are ejected and thus the mergers occur in the galactic field. I find a promising rate of $1-100$ detections per year for the next generation of ground-based gravitational wave detectors and two possible sources for space-based detectors, both highly eccentric. I conclude that star clusters must be taken into account in order to predict accurate event rates for gravitational wave detectors

Scalable Multi-Chain Coordination via the Hierarchical Longest Chain Rule

This paper introduces BlockReduce, a Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain system which achieves high transaction throughput through a hierarchy of merged mined blockchains, each operating in parallel on a partition the overall application state. Most notably, the full PoW available within the network is applied to all blockchains in BlockReduce, and cross-blockchain state transitions are enabled seamlessly within the core protocol. This paper shows that, given a hierarchy of blockchains and its associated security model, the protocol scales superlinearly in transaction throughput with the number of blockchains operated by the protocol