11,331 research outputs found
Evaluation of the Effectiveness of a Humor Workshop on the Perceived Stress of Nurse Practitioner Students
A quasi-experimental one-group pretest posttest design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a humor workshop on the perceived stress of a sample of nurse practitioner students (n = 9) at a major university. Testing aimed at measuring perceived stress, was completed before and after participation in a orkshop focusing on the application of humor skills in the healthcare environment. For the total sample, the mean pretest score was 15.22, SD = 5.42 and the mean posttest score was 1 0.33, SD = 3.90. A dependent samples !-test revealed a statistically significant difference (t = 4.55, p \u3c .002). Results indicate that participation in a humor workshop of this type may be associated with lower levels of perceived stress
Influence of data type and rate on short arc lunar orbit determination
Error analysis for selecting optimum rates for taking counted doppler rate and range data for tracking short arc of lunar satellite orbi
Coordinate systems for differential correction
System of state transition partial derivatives for which tracking information normal matrix for lunar orbiter is nearly diagonalize
Convergence Conditions for Random Quantum Circuits
Efficient methods for generating pseudo-randomly distributed unitary
operators are needed for the practical application of Haar distributed random
operators in quantum communication and noise estimation protocols. We develop a
theoretical framework for analyzing pseudo-random ensembles generated through a
random circuit composition. We prove that the measure over random circuits
converges exponentially (with increasing circuit length) to the uniform (Haar)
measure on the unitary group and describe how the rate of convergence may be
calculated for specific applications.Comment: 4 pages (revtex), comments welcome. v2: reference added, title
changed; v3: published version, minor changes, references update
Efficient Symmetry Reduction and the Use of State Symmetries for Symbolic Model Checking
One technique to reduce the state-space explosion problem in temporal logic
model checking is symmetry reduction. The combination of symmetry reduction and
symbolic model checking by using BDDs suffered a long time from the
prohibitively large BDD for the orbit relation. Dynamic symmetry reduction
calculates representatives of equivalence classes of states dynamically and
thus avoids the construction of the orbit relation. In this paper, we present a
new efficient model checking algorithm based on dynamic symmetry reduction. Our
experiments show that the algorithm is very fast and allows the verification of
larger systems. We additionally implemented the use of state symmetries for
symbolic symmetry reduction. To our knowledge we are the first who investigated
state symmetries in combination with BDD based symbolic model checking
The 125 GeV boson: A composite scalar?
Assuming that the 125 GeV particle observed at the LHC is a composite scalar
and responsible for the electroweak gauge symmetry breaking, we consider the
possibility that the bound state is generated by a non-Abelian gauge theory
with dynamically generated gauge boson masses and a specific chiral symmetry
breaking dynamics motivated by confinement. The scalar mass is computed with
the use of the Bethe-Salpeter equation and its normalization condition as a
function of the SU(N) group and the respective fermionic representation. If the
fermions that form the composite state are in the fundamental representation of
the SU(N) group, we can generate such light boson only for one specific number
of fermions for each group. In the case of small groups, like SU(2) to SU(5),
and two fermions in the adjoint representation we find that is quite improbable
to generate such light composite scalar.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, discussion extended, references added; version
to appear in Phys. Rev.
Visual, Motor and Attentional Influences on Proprioceptive Contributions to Perception of Hand Path Rectilinearity during Reaching
We examined how proprioceptive contributions to perception of hand path straightness are influenced by visual, motor and attentional sources of performance variability during horizontal planar reaching. Subjects held the handle of a robot that constrained goal-directed movements of the hand to the paths of controlled curvature. Subjects attempted to detect the presence of hand path curvature during both active (subject driven) and passive (robot driven) movements that either required active muscle force production or not. Subjects were less able to discriminate curved from straight paths when actively reaching for a target versus when the robot moved their hand through the same curved paths. This effect was especially evident during robot-driven movements requiring concurrent activation of lengthening but not shortening muscles. Subjects were less likely to report curvature and were more variable in reporting when movements appeared straight in a novel “visual channel” condition previously shown to block adaptive updating of motor commands in response to deviations from a straight-line hand path. Similarly, compromised performance was obtained when subjects simultaneously performed a distracting secondary task (key pressing with the contralateral hand). The effects compounded when these last two treatments were combined. It is concluded that environmental, intrinsic and attentional factors all impact the ability to detect deviations from a rectilinear hand path during goal-directed movement by decreasing proprioceptive contributions to limb state estimation. In contrast, response variability increased only in experimental conditions thought to impose additional attentional demands on the observer. Implications of these results for perception and other sensorimotor behaviors are discussed
Parameterized Model-Checking for Timed-Systems with Conjunctive Guards (Extended Version)
In this work we extend the Emerson and Kahlon's cutoff theorems for process
skeletons with conjunctive guards to Parameterized Networks of Timed Automata,
i.e. systems obtained by an \emph{apriori} unknown number of Timed Automata
instantiated from a finite set of Timed Automata templates.
In this way we aim at giving a tool to universally verify software systems
where an unknown number of software components (i.e. processes) interact with
continuous time temporal constraints. It is often the case, indeed, that
distributed algorithms show an heterogeneous nature, combining dynamic aspects
with real-time aspects. In the paper we will also show how to model check a
protocol that uses special variables storing identifiers of the participating
processes (i.e. PIDs) in Timed Automata with conjunctive guards. This is
non-trivial, since solutions to the parameterized verification problem often
relies on the processes to be symmetric, i.e. indistinguishable. On the other
side, many popular distributed algorithms make use of PIDs and thus cannot
directly apply those solutions
Genetic Interrelations of Two Andromonoecious Types of Maize, Dwarf and Anther Ear
Attention was called by Montgomery (1906)to the occasional appearance
of perfect flowers in the staminate inflorescence of maize and similar
cases were reported by Kempton (1913). Montgomery (1911) described
with illustrations a true-breeding type of semi-dwarf dent maize, the ears
of which were perfect-flowered. Perfect-flowered maize was described
and illustrated also by Blaringhem (1908, pp. 180-183). East and
Hayes (1911, pp. 13, 14) noted and illustrated a perfect-flowered sweet
corn. Weatherwax (1916, 1917) showed that typically pistillate
flowers of maize exhibit in microscopic sections the rudiments of stamens
and that staminate flowers show rudiments of pistils
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