Occam's Quantum Strop: Synchronizing and Compressing Classical Cryptic Processes via a Quantum Channel

A stochastic process's statistical complexity stands out as a fundamental property: the minimum information required to synchronize one process generator to another. How much information is required, though, when synchronizing over a quantum channel? Recent work demonstrated that representing causal similarity as quantum state-indistinguishability provides a quantum advantage. We generalize this to synchronization and offer a sequence of constructions that exploit extended causal structures, finding substantial increase of the quantum advantage. We demonstrate that maximum compression is determined by the process's cryptic order---a classical, topological property closely allied to Markov order, itself a measure of historical dependence. We introduce an efficient algorithm that computes the quantum advantage and close noting that the advantage comes at a cost---one trades off prediction for generation complexity.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/oqs.ht

Optimizing Quantum Models of Classical Channels: The reverse Holevo problem

Given a classical channel---a stochastic map from inputs to outputs---the input can often be transformed to an intermediate variable that is informationally smaller than the input. The new channel accurately simulates the original but at a smaller transmission rate. Here, we examine this procedure when the intermediate variable is a quantum state. We determine when and how well quantum simulations of classical channels may improve upon the minimal rates of classical simulation. This inverts Holevo's original question of quantifying the capacity of quantum channels with classical resources. We also show that this problem is equivalent to another, involving the local generation of a distribution from common entanglement.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/qfact.htm; substantially updated from v

A Process Improvement Initiative in a Medical Faculty Group Practice Central Business Office

The academic Faculty Group Practice (FGP) business office exists to support and manage revenue cycle functions associated with an institution's clinical practice mission. Activities such as producing and transmitting insurance claims and patient statements; posting payments, responding to customer billing inquiries occur. Key indicators for gauging performance include claim denial rates, collection rates, charge lags, days revenue outstanding (DRO). A portion of business office work involves charge corrections, an overlooked contributor to costs and rework. Corrections are often the result of internal processes, systems and behaviors. This improvement initiative focused on a business office's charge corrections from two perspectives: transaction flow and cause. Analysis centered on developing a best practice for timely and efficiently processing transactions while identifying and reducing circumstances causing corrections. It was conducted using PDCA methodology and lean tools for problem solving, documented in an A3 format. Several outcomes were realized: a successful business model for problem solving with employee engagement driving results; development of a new measurement system; 61% improvement in charge correction processing time which allowed increased FTE production capacity; and 28% and 56% reductions in correction volume for the top 2 clinical departments by improving upstream coding activities, EMR use, and pre-billing edits

Extreme Quantum Advantage for Rare-Event Sampling

We introduce a quantum algorithm for efficient biased sampling of the rare events generated by classical memoryful stochastic processes. We show that this quantum algorithm gives an extreme advantage over known classical biased sampling algorithms in terms of the memory resources required. The quantum memory advantage ranges from polynomial to exponential and when sampling the rare equilibrium configurations of spin systems the quantum advantage diverges.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/eqafbs.ht

Existing regulatory circuitries govern backbone and acquired host association factors in the human pathogen Vibrio parahaemolyticus

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a poorly characterized human gastrointestinal pathogen whose virulence mechanisms are not well understood. Though closely related to Vibrio cholerae, V. parahaemolyticus infections are inflammatory and utilize virulence traits that are unique from the Cholera toxins yet remain poorly characterized. Vibrio spp. in general share an extensive core genome dedicated to environmental survival and unique, often horizontally acquired, gene content that is reserved for species specific lifestyles. This diversity has resulted in a genus of highly specialized bacteria partaking in dramatically different lifestyles ranging from symbiosis to pathogenesis. We propose that a comparative genomic and transcriptomic analysis of a conserved host association regulon (GacA) in the closely related V. fischeri (symbiont) and V. parahaemolyticus (pathogen), to exploit key lifestyle differences will expose genes that are unique to pathogenesis. In this study we identified a small, core regulon that is GacA activated comprised mostly of genes involved in central metabolism. Unique gene content in the V. parahaemolyticus GacA regulon contained both backbone and horizontally acquired elements that were activated or repressed in a highly selective fashion. Temperature was an important cue in virulence gene activation as determined through phenotypic and transcriptional assays and acted with GacA in an additive fashion. Specifically, expression of the classic virulence marker tdh was enhanced in a GacA mutant at 37°C; however the mutant was defective at initiating an infection in mice potentially discounting the relevance of TDH in disease. Though TDH is currently accepted as a clinical identifier, further work may be necessary to confirm a genuine correlation with disease causing strains. In addition, comparative genomics revealed a significant reorganization of the GacA regulon in V. parahaemolyticus suggesting that its control has been uncoupled from quorum sensing circuitry unlike in other characterized regulons. The GacA regulon of V. parahaemolyticus has undergone subtle regulatory changes resulting in GacA repression of select horizontally acquired elements and may serve as an ideal model of the evolution of regulatory networks and the emergence of novel virulence mechanisms

Exploring the Problem-Finding and Problem-Solving Approach for Designing Organizations

An emerging problem-finding and problem-solving approach suggests that management's discovering problems to solve, opportunities to seize, and challenges to respond to, are vital to organizations. This paper explores the extent to which the problem-finding and problem-solving approach can provide a foundation for joining the capabilities, dynamic capabilities, and governance perspectives as a way to help scholars and practitioners to coherently design organizations from the perspective of design science. The problem-finding and problem-solving approach offers a unit of analysis and a set of behavioral assumptions that enable us to address open questions within the extant literature and to propose new questions in management research.

Sancti et linguae : the classical world in the eyes of Hibernia

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 5, 2008)Text in English and Greek.Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.This thesis will examine Irish views of the classical world primarily through texts written in Ireland and on the continent by Irishmen up to the beginning of the Carolingian period (with brief glances to the period ahead), but also through some archaeological evidence and a few references to Irish scholars by their contemporaries. This Irish evidence will show that the Greeks represented the law of number together with great, ancient deeds (associated with each other through the primal act of Creation) while the Romans represented the law of letter with the accompanying great words. Taken individually, remarks made by early medieval Irish writers about classical language and literature may seem random or trivial to the casual observer, but this is not the case. Though they did not make their conception of Rome and Greece explicit, they nevertheless betrayed this very conception by their use of classical material. The Greeks were the wise heroes, skilled in the science of number. The Romans were the lawgivers and rulers, skilled in the use of writing. Great deeds belonged to ancient Greece, a great kingdom, to the Romans. As the Greek civilization was older, it was more worthy of respect in Irish thought, and thus the language of ancient Greece, both through its association with the nobility of its famous figures and through its suitability to numerical scientia, was the most suited to exalted topics and heavenly.Includes bibliographical reference

The Discourse of Management and the Management of Discourse

Discourse is a pervasive tool of management; one might even say that discourse is what managers do. A widespread assumption among managers is that discourse is not only a pervasive tool, but an effective one for precise communication of information, for making decisions, and for enlisting action, essentially a transmission tool. This paper maintains that the transmission view is a limited conception of language use, one which leads to a faulty conception of what managers do. It ignores the need for an ethics of communication and misjudges the creative aspects of language use. Management discourse is a far more complex and fluid phenomenon, one requiring not just effective use, but management itself. In other words consideration of the discourse of management leads us to the need for the management of discourse.