3,677 research outputs found
Injury Risk Estimation Expertise Assessing the ACL Injury Risk Estimation Quiz
Background: Available methods for screening anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk are effective but limited in application as
they generally rely on expensive and time-consuming biomechanical movement analysis. A potential efficient alternative to biomechanical
screening is skilled movement analysis via visual inspection (ie, having experts estimate injury risk factors based on
observations of athletes’ movements).
Purpose: To develop a brief, valid psychometric assessment of ACL injury risk factor estimation skill: the ACL Injury Risk Estimation
Quiz (ACL-IQ).
Study Design: Cohort study (diagnosis); Level of evidence, 3.
Methods: A total of 660 individuals participated in various stages of the study, including athletes, physicians, physical therapists,
athletic trainers, exercise science researchers/students, and members of the general public in the United States. The ACL-IQ was
fully computerized and made available online (www.ACL-IQ.org). Item sampling/reduction, reliability analysis, cross-validation,
and convergent/discriminant validity analysis were conducted to optimize the efficiency and validity of the assessment.
Results: Psychometric optimization techniques identified a short (mean time, 2 min 24 s), robust, 5-item assessment with high
reliability (test-retest: r = 0.90) and consistent discriminability (average difference of exercise science professionals vs general
population: Cohen d = 1.98). Exercise science professionals and general population individuals scored 74% and 53% correct,
respectively. Convergent and discriminant validity was demonstrated. Scores on the ACL-IQ were most associated with ACL
knowledge and various cue utilities and were least associated with domain-general spatial/decision-making ability, personality,
or other demographic variables. Overall, 23% of the total sample (40% exercise science professionals; 6% general population)
performed better than or equal to the ACL nomogram.
Conclusion: This study presents the results of a systematic approach to assess individual differences in ACL injury risk factor
estimation skill; the assessment approach is efficient (ie, it can be completed in\3 min) and psychometrically robust. The results
provide evidence that some individuals have the ability to visually estimate ACL injury risk factors more accurately than other
instrument-based ACL risk estimation methods (ie, ACL nomogram). The ACL-IQ provides the foundation for assessing the efficacy
of observational ACL injury risk factor assessment (ie, does simple skilled visual inspection reduce ACL injuries?). It also
provides a representative task environment that can be used to increase our understanding of the perceptual-cognitive mechanisms
underlying observational movement analysis and to improve injury risk assessment performance
Scaling of the low temperature dephasing rate in Kondo systems
We present phase coherence time measurements in quasi-one-dimensional Ag
wires doped with Fe Kondo impurities of different concentrations . Due to
the relatively high Kondo temperature of this system, we
are able to explore a temperature range from above down to below . We show that the magnetic contribution to the dephasing rate
per impurity is described by a single, universal curve when plotted as a
function of . For , the dephasing rate is remarkably well
described by recent numerical results for spin impurities. At lower
temperature, we observe deviations from this theory. Based on a comparison with
theoretical calculations for , we discuss possible explanations for the
observed deviations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
Continuous variable entanglement sharing in non-inertial frames
We study the distribution of entanglement between modes of a free scalar
field from the perspective of observers in uniform acceleration. We consider a
two-mode squeezed state of the field from an inertial perspective, and
analytically study the degradation of entanglement due to the Unruh effect, in
the cases of either one or both observers undergoing uniform acceleration. We
find that for two observers undergoing finite acceleration, the entanglement
vanishes between the lowest frequency modes. The loss of entanglement is
precisely explained as a redistribution of the inertial entanglement into
multipartite quantum correlations among accessible and unaccessible modes from
a non-inertial perspective. We show that classical correlations are also lost
from the perspective of two accelerated observers but conserved if one of the
observers remains inertial.Comment: 19 pages, 13 EPS figures (most low-res due to oversize); terminology
revise
Expertise Shapes Multimodal Imagery for Wine
Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine smells and tastes because they have learned the ability, or whether they are better imaginers in the first place, and so become experts. To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain-specific effect of expertise. Critically, in a second study, we followed a group of students commencing a wine course and a group of matched control participants. Students and controls did not differ before the course, but after the wine course students reported more vivid wine imagery. We provide evidence that expertise improves imagery, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses
Mutually unbiased bases: tomography of spin states and star-product scheme
Mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) are considered within the framework of a
generic star-product scheme. We rederive that a full set of MUBs is adequate
for a spin tomography, i.e. knowledge of all probabilities to find a system in
each MUB-state is enough for a state reconstruction. Extending the ideas of the
tomographic-probability representation and the star-product scheme to
MUB-tomography, dequantizer and quantizer operators for MUB-symbols of spin
states and operators are introduced, ordinary and dual star-product kernels are
found. Since MUB-projectors are to obey specific rules of the star-product
scheme, we reveal the Lie algebraic structure of MUB-projectors and derive new
relations on triple- and four-products of MUB-projectors. Example of qubits is
considered in detail. MUB-tomography by means of Stern-Gerlach apparatus is
discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 1 table, partially presented at the 17th Central European
Workshop on Quantum Optics (CEWQO'2010), June 6-11, 2010, St. Andrews,
Scotland, U
Collisional Plasma Models with APEC/APED: Emission Line Diagnostics of Hydrogen-like and Helium-like Ions
New X-ray observatories (Chandra and XMM-Newton) are providing a wealth of
high-resolution X-ray spectra in which hydrogen- and helium-like ions are
usually strong features. We present results from a new collisional-radiative
plasma code, the Astrophysical Plasma Emission Code (APEC), which uses atomic
data in the companion Astrophysical Plasma Emission Database (APED) to
calculate spectral models for hot plasmas. APED contains the requisite atomic
data such as collisional and radiative rates, recombination cross sections,
dielectronic recombination rates, and satellite line wavelengths. We compare
the APEC results to other plasma codes for hydrogen- and helium-like
diagnostics, and test the sensitivity of our results to the number of levels
included in the models. We find that dielectronic recombination with
hydrogen-like ions into high (n=6-10) principal quantum numbers affects some
helium-like line ratios from low-lying (n=2) transitions.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, accepted by ApJ Letter
An experimental observation of geometric phases for mixed states using NMR interferometry
Examples of geometric phases abound in many areas of physics. They offer both
fundamental insights into many physical phenomena and lead to interesting
practical implementations. One of them, as indicated recently, might be an
inherently fault-tolerant quantum computation. This, however, requires to deal
with geometric phases in the presence of noise and interactions between
different physical subsystems. Despite the wealth of literature on the subject
of geometric phases very little is known about this very important case. Here
we report the first experimental study of geometric phases for mixed quantum
states. We show how different they are from the well understood, noiseless,
pure-state case.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Relation between geometric phases of entangled bi-partite systems and their subsystems
This paper focuses on the geometric phase of entangled states of bi-partite
systems under bi-local unitary evolution. We investigate the relation between
the geometric phase of the system and those of the subsystems. It is shown that
(1) the geometric phase of cyclic entangled states with non-degenerate
eigenvalues can always be decomposed into a sum of weighted non-modular pure
state phases pertaining to the separable components of the Schmidt
decomposition, though the same cannot be said in the non-cyclic case, and (2)
the geometric phase of the mixed state of one subsystem is generally different
from that of the entangled state even by keeping the other subsystem fixed, but
the two phases are the same when the evolution operator satisfies conditions
where each component in the Schmidt decomposition is parallel transported
Hilbert Spaces from Path Integrals
It is shown that a Hilbert space can be constructed for a quantum system
starting from a framework in which histories are fundamental. The Decoherence
Functional provides the inner product on this "History Hilbert space". It is
also shown that the History Hilbert space is the standard Hilbert space in the
case of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.Comment: 22 pages. Minor updates to match published versio
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