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Evaluating the appropriateness and use of domain critical errors
The consequences associated with the uses and interpretations of scores for many credentialing testing programs have important implications for a range of stakeholders. Within licensure settings specifically, results from examination programs are often one of the final steps in the process of assessing whether individuals will be allowed to enter practice. This article focuses on the concept of domain critical errors and suggests a framework for considering their use in practice. Domain critical errors are defined here as knowledge, skills, abilities, or judgments that are essential to the definition of minimum qualifications in a testing program\u27s pass-fail decision-making process. Using domain critical errors has psychometric and policy implications, particularly for licensure programs that are mandatory for entry-level practice. Because these errors greatly influence pass-fail decisions, the measurement community faces an ongoing challenge to promote defensible practices while concurrently providing assessment literacy development about the appropriate design and use of testing methods like domain critical errors. Accessed 4,769 times on https://pareonline.net from October 17, 2012 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right
Heterotic Cosmic Strings
We show that all three conditions for the cosmological relevance of heterotic
cosmic strings, the right tension, stability and a production mechanism at the
end of inflation, can be met in the strongly coupled M-theory regime. Whereas
cosmic strings generated from weakly coupled heterotic strings have the well
known problems posed by Witten in 1985, we show that strings arising from
M5-branes wrapped around 4-cycles (divisors) of a Calabi-Yau in heterotic
M-theory compactifications, solve these problems in an elegant fashion.Comment: 25 pages, v2: section and references adde
Handling qualities of a wide-body transport airplane utilizing Pitch Active Control Systems (PACS) for relaxed static stability application
Piloted simulation studies have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of two pitch active control systems (PACS) on the flying qualities of a wide-body transport airplane when operating at negative static margins. These two pitch active control systems consisted of a simple 'near-term' PACS and a more complex 'advanced' PACS. Eight different flight conditions, representing the entire flight envelope, were evaluated with emphasis on the cruise flight conditions. These studies were made utilizing the Langley Visual/Motion Simulator (VMS) which has six degrees of freedom. The simulation tests indicated that (1) the flying qualities of the baseline aircraft (PACS off) for the cruise and other high-speed flight conditions were unacceptable at center-of-gravity positions aft of the neutral static stability point; (2) within the linear static stability flight envelope, the near-term PACS provided acceptable flying qualities for static stabilty margins to -3 percent; and (3) with the advanced PACS operative, the flying qualities were demonstrated to be good (satisfactory to very acceptable) for static stabilty margins to -20 percent
D-term inflation without cosmic strings
We present a superstring-inspired version of D-term inflation which does not
lead to cosmic string formation and appears to satisfy the current CMB
constraints. It differs from minimal D-term inflation by a second pair of
charged superfields which makes the strings non-topological (semilocal). The
strings are also BPS, so the scenario is expected to survive supergravity
corrections. The second pair of charged superfields arises naturally in several
brane and conifold scenarios, but its effect on cosmic string formation had not
been noticed so far.Comment: 10 pages, uses REVTEX 4; minor typos corrected, references added,
version to be publishe
How Advanced Change Patterns Impact the Process of Process Modeling
Process model quality has been an area of considerable research efforts. In
this context, correctness-by-construction as enabled by change patterns
provides promising perspectives. While the process of process modeling (PPM)
based on change primitives has been thoroughly investigated, only little is
known about the PPM based on change patterns. In particular, it is unclear what
set of change patterns should be provided and how the available change pattern
set impacts the PPM. To obtain a better understanding of the latter as well as
the (subjective) perceptions of process modelers, the arising challenges, and
the pros and cons of different change pattern sets we conduct a controlled
experiment. Our results indicate that process modelers face similar challenges
irrespective of the used change pattern set (core pattern set versus extended
pattern set, which adds two advanced change patterns to the core patterns set).
An extended change pattern set, however, is perceived as more difficult to use,
yielding a higher mental effort. Moreover, our results indicate that more
advanced patterns were only used to a limited extent and frequently applied
incorrectly, thus, lowering the potential benefits of an extended pattern set
Warping and F-term uplifting
We analyse the effective supergravity model of a warped compactification with
matter on D3 and D7-branes. We find that the main effect of the warp factor is
to modify the F-terms while leaving the D-terms invariant. Hence warped models
with moduli stabilisation and a small positive cosmological constant resulting
from a large warping can only be achieved with an almost vanishing D-term and a
F-term uplifting. By studying string-motivated examples with gaugino
condensation on magnetised D7-branes, we find that even with a vanishing
D-term, it is difficult to achieve a Minkowski minimum for reasonable parameter
choices. When coupled to an ISS sector the AdS vacua is uplifted, resulting in
a small gravitino mass for a warp factor of order 10^-5.Comment: 24 pages, v3: typos, minor clarifications adde
The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database: update 2011
The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public resource that promotes understanding about the interaction of environmental chemicals with gene products, and their effects on human health. Biocurators at CTD manually curate a triad of chemical–gene, chemical–disease and gene–disease relationships from the literature. These core data are then integrated to construct chemical–gene–disease networks and to predict many novel relationships using different types of associated data. Since 2009, we dramatically increased the content of CTD to 1.4 million chemical–gene–disease data points and added many features, statistical analyses and analytical tools, including GeneComps and ChemComps (to find comparable genes and chemicals that share toxicogenomic profiles), enriched Gene Ontology terms associated with chemicals, statistically ranked chemical–disease inferences, Venn diagram tools to discover overlapping and unique attributes of any set of chemicals, genes or disease, and enhanced gene pathway data content, among other features. Together, this wealth of expanded chemical–gene–disease data continues to help users generate testable hypotheses about the molecular mechanisms of environmental diseases. CTD is freely available at http://ctd.mdibl.org
Five High-Redshift Quasars Discovered in Commissioning Imaging Data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
We report the discovery of five quasars with redshifts of 4.67 - 5.27 and
z'-band magnitudes of 19.5-20.7 M_B ~ -27. All were originally selected as
distant quasar candidates in optical/near-infrared photometry from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and most were confirmed as probable high-redshift
quasars by supplementing the SDSS data with J and K measurements. The quasars
possess strong, broad Lyman-alpha emission lines, with the characteristic sharp
cutoff on the blue side produced by Lyman-alpha forest absorption. Three
quasars contain strong, broad absorption features, and one of them exhibits
very strong N V emission. The amount of absorption produced by the Lyman-alpha
forest increases toward higher redshift, and that in the z=5.27 object (D_A ~
0.7) is consistent with a smooth extrapolation of the absorption seen in lower
redshift quasars. The high luminosity of these objects relative to most other
known objects at z >~ 5 makes them potentially valuable as probes of early
quasar properties and of the intervening intergalactic medium.Comment: 13 pages in LaTex format, two postscirpt figures. Submitted to the
Astronomical Journa
Constraints on Exotic Mixing of Three Neutrinos
Exotic explanations are considered for atmospheric neutrino observations. Our
analysis includes matter effects and the mixing of all three neutrinos under
the simplifying assumption of only one relevant mixing scale. Constraints from
accelerator, reactor and solar neutrinos are included. We find that the
proposed mixing mechanisms based on violations of Lorentz invariance or on
violations of the equivalence principle cannot explain the recent observations
of atmospheric neutrino mixing. However the data still allow a wide range of
energy dependences for the vacuum mixing scale, and also allow large
electron-neutrino mixing of atmospheric neutrinos. Next generation long
baseline experiments will constrain these possibilities.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figure
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