1,348 research outputs found
Cassane diterpenoids from lonchocarpus laxiflorus
This article examines cassane diterpenoids from lonchocarpus laxiflorus
Conjugate gradient algorithms and the Galerkin boundary element method
Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/08981221 Copyright Elsevier Ltd. DOI: 10.1016/j.camwa.2004.02.002Peer reviewe
The Maine Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Pilot: Implementation Evaluation
The purpose of this Maine Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Pilot is to improve quality of care, efficiency, and patient/family satisfaction provided by primary care practices. Its premise is that the resources provided to practices through the Pilot (including enhanced payments, training, consultation, and learning collaborative) will help them transform themselves and reach a higher level of functionality as medical homes, which in turn will lead to improvements in quality of care, efficiency, and patient/family satisfaction. The three-year Pilot was convened by MaineCare, the Maine Quality Forum, and Quality Counts. The participating payers are MaineCare (Maine Medicaid), Aetna, Anthem, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
Three aspects of the Pilot are being evaluated by the Muskie School of Public Service: 1) patientâs experiences; 2) the implementation process and interim results during Year 1; and 3) changes in the quality and efficiency of primary care. This report focuses on findings from the implementation evaluation.
A national evaluation of a PCMH demonstration concluded that several factors, including practicesâ workplace culture and resilience (or âadaptive reserve,â including communication, leadership, learning culture, teamwork and work environment) were major determinants in the degree to which practices could transform themselves into medical homes. The implementation evaluation describes the processes the Pilot practices engaged in during the first year and profiles adaptive reserve and several other factors that may contribute to their success in achieving the Pilotâs objectives.
The objectives of the implementation evaluation are to Profile the characteristics of the Pilot practices Describe the practicesâ objectives and strategies for implementing the Pilot Describe the implementation process during Year 1 Provide practical guidance to the practices, the Pilot conveners, and MaineCare Develop profiles of the Pilot practices for use in the quality and efficiency evaluation Make recommendations for use by evaluators of other PCMH pilot
From community-based to centralised national management - A wrong turning for the governance of the marine protected area in Apo Island, Philippines?
Before the mid-1990s, Apo Island, Philippines, was often described as one of the world's best examples of community-based marine management. This paper studies the less-documented transition of the island during the late 1990s from community-based management to centralised national state management. Extensive interviewing of islanders has revealed deep misgivings about the centralised regimeâthe Protected Area Management Board (PAMB). PAMB's aim of implementing the National Integrated Protected Areas Systems (NIPAS) Act was initially looked upon favourably by islanders, but it has lost that support because of its exclusion of stakeholders from management and its poor institutional performance. The paper's conclusion is that the implementation of the NIPAS Act highlights the limitations of top-down management, and that there is a need to restore an element of local stakeholder participation in the governance of Apo's marine protected area (MPA). A system of co-management between community and national state actors is essential to ensure the long-term sustainability of Apo's marine resources
Magnetic switching in granular FePt layers promoted by near-field laser enhancement
Light-matter interaction at the nanoscale in magnetic materials is a topic of
intense research in view of potential applications in next-generation
high-density magnetic recording. Laser-assisted switching provides a pathway
for overcoming the material constraints of high-anisotropy and high-packing
density media, though much about the dynamics of the switching process remains
unexplored. We use ultrafast small-angle x-ray scattering at an x-ray
free-electron laser to probe the magnetic switching dynamics of FePt
nanoparticles embedded in a carbon matrix following excitation by an optical
femtosecond laser pulse. We observe that the combination of laser excitation
and applied static magnetic field, one order of magnitude smaller than the
coercive field, can overcome the magnetic anisotropy barrier between "up" and
"down" magnetization, enabling magnetization switching. This magnetic switching
is found to be inhomogeneous throughout the material, with some individual FePt
nanoparticles neither switching nor demagnetizing. The origin of this behavior
is identified as the near-field modification of the incident laser radiation
around FePt nanoparticles. The fraction of not-switching nanoparticles is
influenced by the heat flow between FePt and a heat-sink layer
Heterotic Compactification, An Algorithmic Approach
We approach string phenomenology from the perspective of computational
algebraic geometry, by providing new and efficient techniques for proving
stability and calculating particle spectra in heterotic compactifications. This
is done in the context of complete intersection Calabi-Yau manifolds in a
single projective space where we classify positive monad bundles. Using a
combination of analytic methods and computer algebra we prove stability for all
such bundles and compute the complete particle spectrum, including gauge
singlets. In particular, we find that the number of anti-generations vanishes
for all our bundles and that the spectrum is manifestly moduli-dependent.Comment: 36 pages, Late
Meson screening masses from lattice QCD with two light and the strange quark
We present results for screening masses of mesons built from light and
strange quarks in the temperature range of approximately between 140 MeV to 800
MeV. The lattice computations were performed with 2+1 dynamical light and
strange flavors of improved (p4) staggered fermions along a line of constant
physics defined by a pion mass of about 220 MeV and a kaon mass of 500 MeV. The
lattices had temporal extents Nt = 4, 6 and 8 and aspect ratios of Ns / Nt \geq
4. At least up to a temperature of 140 MeV the pseudo-scalar screening mass
remains almost equal to the corresponding zero temperature pseudo-scalar (pole)
mass. At temperatures around 3Tc (Tc being the transition temperature) the
continuum extrapolated pseudo-scalar screening mass approaches very close to
the free continuum result of 2 \pi T from below. On the other hand, at high
temperatures the vector screening mass turns out to be larger than the free
continuum value of 2 \pi T. The pseudo-scalar and the vector screening masses
do not become degenerate even for a temperature as high as 4Tc. Using these
mesonic spatial correlation functions we have also investigated the restoration
of chiral symmetry and the effective restoration of the axial symmetry. We have
found that the vector and the axial-vector screening correlators become
degenerate, indicating chiral symmetry restoration, at a temperature which is
consistent with the QCD transition temperature obtained in previous studies. On
the other hand, the pseudo-scalar and the scalar screening correlators become
degenerate only at temperatures larger than 1.3Tc, indicating that the
effective restoration of the axial symmetry takes place at a temperature larger
than the QCD transition temperature.Comment: Published versio
Parameter estimation in spatially extended systems: The Karhunen-Loeve and Galerkin multiple shooting approach
Parameter estimation for spatiotemporal dynamics for coupled map lattices and
continuous time domain systems is shown using a combination of multiple
shooting, Karhunen-Loeve decomposition and Galerkin's projection methodologies.
The resulting advantages in estimating parameters have been studied and
discussed for chaotic and turbulent dynamics using small amounts of data from
subsystems, availability of only scalar and noisy time series data, effects of
space-time parameter variations, and in the presence of multiple time-scales.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 4 Tables Corresponding Author - V. Ravi Kumar,
e-mail address: [email protected]
Two-loop scalar self-energies in a general renormalizable theory at leading order in gauge couplings
I present results for the two-loop self-energy functions for scalars in a
general renormalizable field theory, using mass-independent renormalization
schemes based on dimensional regularization and dimensional reduction. The
results are given in terms of a minimal set of loop-integral basis functions,
which are readily evaluated numerically by computers. This paper contains the
contributions corresponding to the Feynman diagrams with zero or one vector
propagator lines. These are the ones needed to obtain the pole masses of the
neutral and charged Higgs scalar bosons in supersymmetry, neglecting only the
purely electroweak parts at two-loop order. A subsequent paper will present the
results for the remaining diagrams, which involve two or more vector lines.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures, revtex4, axodraw.sty. Version 2: sentence after
eq. (A.13) corrected, references added. Version 3: typos in eqs. (5.17),
(5.20), (5.21), (5.32) are corrected. Also, the MSbar versions of eqs. (5.32)
and (5.33) are now include
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