Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on Health Care Delivery System Reform

Presents findings of a survey of experts on reforming delivery systems -- organized delivery systems, patient-centered medical homes, and retail clinics -- and recommended policy strategies, such as improving the primary care system

Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on the Transparency of Health Care Quality and Price Information in the United States

Presents findings from a survey of experts on collecting and reporting public information on the quality and price of healthcare services; the role of transparency in improving quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness; and obstacles

Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on the Quality and Safety of Health Care in the United States

Presents findings from an annual survey of a diverse group of experts on strategies to improve the quality and safety of health care in the United States

U.S. Variations in Child Health System Performance: A State Scorecard

Ranks state child health systems on thirteen measurements of five dimensions: access, quality, costs, equity, and potential to lead healthy lives. Highlights variations, regional patterns, and correlations between indicators and with demographic factors

The two-body problem of ultra-cold atoms in a harmonic trap

We consider two bosonic atoms interacting with a short-range potential and trapped in a spherically symmetric harmonic oscillator. The problem is exactly solvable and is relevant for the study of ultra-cold atoms. We show that the energy spectrum is universal, irrespective of the shape of the interaction potential, provided its range is much smaller than the oscillator length.Comment: Final version accepted for publication in Am. Journ. Phy

Ab initio electronic structure calculations of solid, solution-processed metallotetrabenzoporphyrins

An ab initio study of the electronic structures of solid metallotetrabenzoporphyrins (MTBPs) utilized in organic transistors and photovoltaics is presented. Bandstructures, densities of states, and orbitals are calculated for H2, Cu, Ni, and Zn core substitutions of the unit cell of solid TBP, as deposited via soluble precursors that are thermally annealed to produce polycrystalline, semiconducting thin-films. While the unit cells of the studied MTBPs are nearly isomorphous, substitution of the core atoms alters the structure of the bands around the energy bandgap and the composition of the densities of states. Cu and Ni core substitutions introduce nearly-dispersionless energy bands near the valence and conduction band edges, respectively, that form acceptor or deep generation/recombination states.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

Revisiting chaos in stimulus-driven spiking networks: signal encoding and discrimination

Highly connected recurrent neural networks often produce chaotic dynamics, meaning their precise activity is sensitive to small perturbations. What are the consequences for how such networks encode streams of temporal stimuli? On the one hand, chaos is a strong source of randomness, suggesting that small changes in stimuli will be obscured by intrinsically generated variability. On the other hand, recent work shows that the type of chaos that occurs in spiking networks can have a surprisingly low-dimensional structure, suggesting that there may be "room" for fine stimulus features to be precisely resolved. Here we show that strongly chaotic networks produce patterned spikes that reliably encode time-dependent stimuli: using a decoder sensitive to spike times on timescales of 10's of ms, one can easily distinguish responses to very similar inputs. Moreover, recurrence serves to distribute signals throughout chaotic networks so that small groups of cells can encode substantial information about signals arriving elsewhere. A conclusion is that the presence of strong chaos in recurrent networks does not prohibit precise stimulus encoding.Comment: 8 figure