Psychometric determination of job stress in health occupations

The primary purpose of this study was to develop an instrument to measure stress in health occupations. The effects of job stress on productivity, health insurance utilization, workers\u27 compensation claims, and turnover cost organizations billions of dollars annually. Given that health occupations are subject to high levels of stress and that the workforce is experiencing labor shortages, healthcare organizations are especially interested in human resource development programs that deal with identifying, acknowledging, and managing occupational stress. Development of the instrument was accomplished by an extensive review of related literature, feedback from subject matter experts using the Delphi technique, pilot testing of a proposed instrument, and field-testing the instrument on a national sample. A 14-member Delphi panel examined a list of 117 stressors from a review of literature. The panel reached a consensus on 3 8 items that formed the pilot version of the scale. The pilot scale was administered to 181 RNs, 10 pharmacists, and 25 radiologic technologists working at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Based on a factor analysis, the scale was administered to 2,000 RNs, 500 pharmacists, and 500 radiologic technologists employed by subsidiary hospitals of HCA, Inc., an international healthcare organization. The subsequent factor analysis resulted in the Health Occupations Stress Scale consisting of 18 items and 4 subscales

CyberCraft: Protecting Electronic Systems with Lightweight Agents

The United States military is seeking new and innovative methods for securing and maintaining its computing and network resources locally and world-wide. This document presents a work-in-progress research thrust toward building a system capable of meeting many of the US military’s network security and sustainment requirements. The system is based on a Distributed Multi-Agent System (DMAS), that is secure, small, and scalable to the large networks found in the military. It relies on a staged agent architecture capable of dynamic configuration to support changing mission environments. These agents are combined into Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer (HP2P) networks to provide scalable solutions. They employ Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) communications (with digital signatures), and support trust chain management concepts. This document, a work-in-progress, presents the motivation and current challenges in choosing a network communications architecture capable of supporting one million or more agents in a DMAS

Timing Mark Detection on Nuclear Detonation Video

During the 1950s and 1960s the United States conducted and filmed over 200 atmospheric nuclear tests establishing the foundations of atmospheric nuclear detonation behavior. Each explosion was documented with about 20 videos from three or four points of view. Synthesizing the videos into a 3D video will improve yield estimates and reduce error factors. The videos were captured at a nominal 2500 frames per second, but range from 2300-3100 frames per second during operation. In order to combine them into one 3D video, individual video frames need to be correlated in time with each other. When the videos were captured a timing system was used that shined light in a video every 5 milliseconds creating a small circle exposed in the frame. This paper investigates several method of extracting the timing from images in the cases when the timing marks are occluded and washed out, as well as when the films are exposed as expected. Results show an improvement over past techniques. For normal videos, occluded videos, and washed out videos, timing is detected with 99.3%, 77.3%, and 88.6% probability with a 2.6%, 11.3%, 5.9% false alarm rate, respectively

Machine Learning Nuclear Detonation Features

Nuclear explosion yield estimation equations based on a 3D model of the explosion volume will have a lower uncertainty than radius based estimation. To accurately collect data for a volume model of atmospheric explosions requires building a 3D representation from 2D images. The majority of 3D reconstruction algorithms use the SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform) feature detection algorithm which works best on feature-rich objects with continuous angular collections. These assumptions are different from the archive of nuclear explosions that have only 3 points of view. This paper reduces 300 dimensions derived from an image based on Fourier analysis and five edge detection algorithms to a manageable number to detect hotspots that may be used to correlate videos of different viewpoints for 3D reconstruction. Furthermore, experiments test whether histogram equalization improves detection of these features using four kernel sizes passed over these features. Dimension reduction using principal components analysis (PCA), forward subset selection, ReliefF, and FCBF (Fast Correlation-Based Filter) are combined with a Mahalanobis distance classifiers to find the best combination of dimensions, kernel size, and filtering to detect the hotspots. Results indicate that hotspots can be detected with hit rates of 90% and false alarms ¡ 1%

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Intertemporal Choice

People often make shortsighted decisions to receive small benefits in the present rather than large benefits in the future, that is, to favor their current selves over their future selves. In two studies using fMRI, we demonstrated that people make such decisions in part because they fail to engage in the same degree of self-referential processing when thinking about their future selves. When participants predicted how much they would enjoy an event in the future, they showed less activity in brain regions associated with introspective self-reference—such as the ventromedial pFC (vMPFC)—than when they predicted how much they would enjoy events in the present. Moreover, the magnitude of vMPFC reduction predicted the extent to which participants made shortsighted monetary decisions several weeks later. In light of recent findings that the vMPFC contributes to the ability to simulate future events from a first-person perspective, these data suggest that shortsighted decisions result in part from a failure to fully imagine the subjective experience of one's future self.Psycholog

Structured P2P Technologies for Distributed Command and Control

The utility of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems extends far beyond traditional file sharing. This paper provides an overview of how P2P systems are capable of providing robust command and control for Distributed Multi-Agent Systems (DMASs). Specifically, this article presents the evolution of P2P architectures to date by discussing supporting technologies and applicability of each generation of P2P systems. It provides a detailed survey of fundamental design approaches found in modern large-scale P2P systems highlighting design considerations for building and deploying scalable P2P applications. The survey includes unstructured P2P systems, content retrieval systems, communications structured P2P systems, flat structured P2P systems and finally Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer (HP2P) overlays. It concludes with a presentation of design tradeoffs and opportunities for future research into P2P overlay systems