Cultural Self-Efficacy of Graduating Baccalaureate Nursing Students in a State Funded University in the Silicon Valley

The purpose of the study was to examine the level of cultural self-efficacy of graduating baccalaureate nursing students, who care for diverse populations, in a state funded university in the Silicon Valley, California. The level of cultural self-efficacy was measured using Bernal and Froman\u27s Cultural Self-Efficacy Scale (CSES). A convenience sample of 48 nursing students completed an 8-item demographic questionnaire and a 26-item CSES. The subjects of this study were found to have an increased level of cultural confidence in comparison with previous studies. This study suggests nurse educators continue to incorporate cultural concepts and skills in the nursing curriculum

On non-trivial barrier solutions of the dividend problem for a diffusion under constant and proportional transaction costs

In Bai and Paulsen (SIAM J. Control optim. 48, 2010) the optimal dividend problem under transaction costs was analyzed for a rather general class of diffusion processes. It was divided into several subclasses, and for the majority of subclasses the optimal policy is a simple barrier policy; whenever the process hits an upper barrier $\bar{u}^*$, reduce it to $\bar{u}^*-\xi$ through a dividend payment. After transaction costs, the shareholder receives $k\xi-K$. It was proved that a simple barrier strategy is not always optimal, and here these more difficult cases are solved. The optimal solutions are rather complicated, but interesting

A Note on the Bellare-Rivest Protocol for Translucent Cryptography

We remark that the Bellare-Rivest protocol for translucent cryptography [J. Cryptology (1999) 12: 117-139] can not truly enable the government to decrypt partial encrypted communications

Frequency-Selective Vandermonde Decomposition of Toeplitz Matrices with Applications

The classical result of Vandermonde decomposition of positive semidefinite Toeplitz matrices, which dates back to the early twentieth century, forms the basis of modern subspace and recent atomic norm methods for frequency estimation. In this paper, we study the Vandermonde decomposition in which the frequencies are restricted to lie in a given interval, referred to as frequency-selective Vandermonde decomposition. The existence and uniqueness of the decomposition are studied under explicit conditions on the Toeplitz matrix. The new result is connected by duality to the positive real lemma for trigonometric polynomials nonnegative on the same frequency interval. Its applications in the theory of moments and line spectral estimation are illustrated. In particular, it provides a solution to the truncated trigonometric $K$-moment problem. It is used to derive a primal semidefinite program formulation of the frequency-selective atomic norm in which the frequencies are known {\em a priori} to lie in certain frequency bands. Numerical examples are also provided.Comment: 23 pages, accepted by Signal Processin