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

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.

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

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 $U_1, \dots, U_n$ 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

Winning Cores in Parity Games

We introduce the novel notion of winning cores in parity games and develop a deterministic polynomial-time under-approximation algorithm for solving parity games based on winning core approximation. Underlying this algorithm are a number properties about winning cores which are interesting in their own right. In particular, we show that the winning core and the winning region for a player in a parity game are equivalently empty. Moreover, the winning core contains all fatal attractors but is not necessarily a dominion itself. Experimental results are very positive both with respect to quality of approximation and running time. It outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms significantly on most benchmarks