The Effect of Personal Portable Alarms on Clinical Staff’s Perception of Safety at an Adult Psychiatric Hospital Unit

The aim of this evidence-based project was to introduce portable personal alarms to all clinical staff on an acute adult psychiatric locked unit at the Mesa Vista Behavioral Health Hospital, San Diego. The purpose was to increase staff’s perceived and actual safety. The project resulted in an increase of staff’s perception of safety in areas such patient safety as perceived by staff, improved perception of addressing medical errors, and improved perception of learning culture at the facility. While 80% of responding staff found the concept of portable personal alarms beneficial, most agreed alternative models of alarms should be investigated, due to high sensitivity of introduced alarms. The results demonstrate significance of early detection of high risk situations in relation to safety attitudes and identified additional areas of staff’s safety concerns

Toxic pollutants, health indices and population dynamics of Harbor Seals in San Francisco Bay, 1989-1992

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Effective pairing interaction in the two-dimensional Hubbard model within a spin rotationally invariant approach

We implement the rotationally-invariant formulation of the two-dimensional Hubbard model, with nearest-neighbors hopping $t$, which allows for the analytical study of the system in the low-energy limit. Both U(1) and SU(2) gauge transformations are used to factorize the charge and spin contributions to the original electron operator in terms of the corresponding gauge fields. The Hubbard Coulomb energy $U$ term is then expressed in terms of quantum phase variables conjugate to the local charge and variable spin-quantization axis, providing a useful representation of strongly correlated systems. It is shown that these gauge fields play a similar role as phonons in the BCS theory: they act as the "glue" for fermion pairing. By tracing out gauge degrees of freedom, the form of paired states is established and the strength of the pairing potential is determined. It is found that the attractive pairing potential in the effective low-energy fermionic action is non-zero in a rather narrow range of $U/t$.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Experimental stand for investigation of induction hardening of steel elements

The experimental stand for investigation of induction surface hardening of gear wheels was described in the paper. In order to control parameters of the process a specialized equipment for identification of all important process parameters including registration of temperature changes in time and measurements of current intensity was installed. Exemplary results are presented. It is planned that the stand will be used as a demonstrator for a presentation of advantages of modern induction hardening technologies

Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection

An increasing number of domains are providing us with detailed trace data on human decisions in settings where we can evaluate the quality of these decisions via an algorithm. Motivated by this development, an emerging line of work has begun to consider whether we can characterize and predict the kinds of decisions where people are likely to make errors. To investigate what a general framework for human error prediction might look like, we focus on a model system with a rich history in the behavioral sciences: the decisions made by chess players as they select moves in a game. We carry out our analysis at a large scale, employing datasets with several million recorded games, and using chess tablebases to acquire a form of ground truth for a subset of chess positions that have been completely solved by computers but remain challenging even for the best players in the world. We organize our analysis around three categories of features that we argue are present in most settings where the analysis of human error is applicable: the skill of the decision-maker, the time available to make the decision, and the inherent difficulty of the decision. We identify rich structure in all three of these categories of features, and find strong evidence that in our domain, features describing the inherent difficulty of an instance are significantly more powerful than features based on skill or time.Comment: KDD 2016; 10 page

The conduction pathway of potassium channels is water free under physiological conditions.

Ion conduction through potassium channels is a fundamental process of life. On the basis of crystallographic data, it was originally proposed that potassium ions and water molecules are transported through the selectivity filter in an alternating arrangement, suggesting a "water-mediated" knock-on mechanism. Later on, this view was challenged by results from molecular dynamics simulations that revealed a "direct" knock-on mechanism where ions are in direct contact. Using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance techniques tailored to characterize the interaction between water molecules and the ion channel, we show here that the selectivity filter of a potassium channel is free of water under physiological conditions. Our results are fully consistent with the direct knock-on mechanism of ion conduction but contradict the previously proposed water-mediated knock-on mechanism