Setting school-level outcome standards

To establish international standards for medical schools, an appropriate panel of experts must decide on performance standards. A pilot test of such standards was set in the context of a multidimensional (multiple-choice question examination, objective structured clinical examination, faculty observation) examination at 8 leading schools in China. Methods  A group of 16 medical education leaders from a broad array of countries met over a 3-day period. These individuals considered competency domains, examination items, and the percentage of students who could fall below a cut-off score if the school was still to be considered as meeting competencies. This 2-step process started with a discussion of the borderline school and the relative difficulty of a borderline school in achieving acceptable standards in a given competency domain. Committee members then estimated the percentage of students falling below the standard that is tolerable at a borderline school and were allowed to revise their ratings after viewing pilot data. Results  Tolerable failure rates ranged from 10% to 26% across competency domains and examination types. As with other standard-setting exercises, standard deviations from initial to final estimates of the tolerable failure rates fell, but the cut-off scores did not change significantly. Final, but not initial cut-off scores were correlated with student failure rates ( r =  0.59, P  = 0.03). Discussion  This paper describes a method to set school-level outcome standards at an international level based on prior established standard-setting methods. Further refinement of this process and validation using other examinations in other countries will be needed to achieve accurate international standards.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/71572/1/j.1365-2929.2005.02374.x.pd

On the Round Complexity of Asynchronous Crusader Agreement

We present new lower and upper bounds on the number of communication rounds required for asynchronous Crusader Agreement (CA) and Binding Crusader Agreement (BCA), two primitives that are used for solving binary consensus. We show results for the information theoretic and authenticated settings. In doing so, we present a generic model for proving round complexity lower bounds in the asynchronous setting. In some settings, our attempts to prove lower bounds on round complexity fail. Instead, we show new, tight, rather surprising round complexity upper bounds for Byzantine fault tolerant BCA with and without a PKI setup

Visualizing Poiseuille flow of hydrodynamic electrons

Hydrodynamics is a general description for the flow of a fluid, and is expected to hold even for fundamental particles such as electrons when inter-particle interactions dominate. While various aspects of electron hydrodynamics were revealed in recent experiments, the fundamental spatial structure of hydrodynamic electrons, the Poiseuille flow profile, has remained elusive. In this work, we provide the first real-space imaging of Poiseuille flow of an electronic fluid, as well as visualization of its evolution from ballistic flow. Utilizing a scanning nanotube single electron transistor, we image the Hall voltage of electronic flow through channels of high-mobility graphene. We find that the profile of the Hall field across the channel is a key physical quantity for distinguishing ballistic from hydrodynamic flow. We image the transition from flat, ballistic field profiles at low temperature into parabolic field profiles at elevated temperatures, which is the hallmark of Poiseuille flow. The curvature of the imaged profiles is qualitatively reproduced by Boltzmann calculations, which allow us to create a 'phase diagram' that characterizes the electron flow regimes. Our results provide long-sought, direct confirmation of Poiseuille flow in the solid state, and enable a new approach for exploring the rich physics of interacting electrons in real space

Model theory of operator algebras III: Elementary equivalence and II_1 factors

We use continuous model theory to obtain several results concerning isomorphisms and embeddings between II_1 factors and their ultrapowers. Among other things, we show that for any II_1 factor M, there are continuum many nonisomorphic separable II_1 factors that have an ultrapower isomorphic to an ultrapower of M. We also give a poor man's resolution of the Connes Embedding Problem: there exists a separable II_1 factor such that all II_1 factors embed into one of its ultrapowers.Comment: 16 page

Scalable architecture for trapped-ion quantum computing using RF traps and dynamic optical potentials

Qubits based on ions trapped in linear radio-frequency traps form a successful platform for quantum computing, due to their high fidelity of operations, all-to-all connectivity and degree of local control. In principle there is no fundamental limit to the number of ion-based qubits that can be confined in a single 1D register. However, in practice there are two main issues associated with long trapped-ion crystals, that stem from the 'softening' of their modes of motion, upon scaling up: high heating rates of the ions' motion, and a dense motional spectrum; both impede the performance of high-fidelity qubit operations. Here we propose a holistic, scalable architecture for quantum computing with large ion-crystals that overcomes these issues. Our method relies on dynamically-operated optical potentials, that instantaneously segment the ion-crystal into cells of a manageable size. We show that these cells behave as nearly independent quantum registers, allowing for parallel entangling gates on all cells. The ability to reconfigure the optical potentials guarantees connectivity across the full ion-crystal, and also enables efficient mid-circuit measurements. We study the implementation of large-scale parallel multi-qubit entangling gates that operate simultaneously on all cells, and present a protocol to compensate for crosstalk errors, enabling full-scale usage of an extensively large register. We illustrate that this architecture is advantageous both for fault-tolerant digital quantum computation and for analog quantum simulations

Phylogenetic evidence from freshwater crayfishes that cave adaptation is not an evolutionary dead-end.

Caves are perceived as isolated, extreme habitats with a uniquely specialized biota, which long ago led to the idea that caves are evolutionary dead-ends. This implies that cave-adapted taxa may be doomed for extinction before they can diversify or transition to a more stable state. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested in a phylogenetic framework with multiple independently evolved cave-dwelling groups. Here, we use the freshwater crayfish, a group with dozens of cave-dwelling species in multiple lineages, as a system to test this hypothesis. We consider historical patterns of lineage diversification and habitat transition as well as current patterns of geographic range size. We find that while cave-dwelling lineages have small relative range sizes and rarely transition back to the surface, they exhibit remarkably similar diversification patterns to those of other habitat types and appear to be able to maintain a diversity of lineages through time. This suggests that cave adaptation is not a dead-end for freshwater crayfish, which has positive implications for our understanding of biodiversity and conservation in cave habitats

Ions in mixed dielectric solvents: density profiles and osmotic pressure between charged interfaces

The forces between charged macromolecules, usually given in terms of osmotic pressure, are highly affected by the intervening ionic solution. While in most theoretical studies the solution is treated as a homogeneous structureless dielectric medium, recent experimental studies concluded that, for a bathing solution composed of two solvents (binary mixture), the osmotic pressure between charged macromolecules is affected by the binary solvent composition. By adding local solvent composition terms to the free energy, we obtain a general expression for the osmotic pressure, in planar geometry and within the mean-field framework. The added effect is due to the permeability inhomogeneity and nonelectrostatic short-range interactions between the ions and solvents (preferential solvation). This effect is mostly pronounced at small distances and leads to a reduction in the osmotic pressure for macromolecular separations of the order 1--2 nm. Furthermore, it leads to a depletion of one of the two solvents from the charged macromolecules (modeled as planar interfaces). Lastly, by comparing the theoretical results with experimental ones, an explanation based on preferential solvation is offered for recent experiments on the osmotic pressure of DNA solutions.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

A New Class of Changing-Look LINERs

We report the discovery of six active galactic nuclei (AGN) caught "turning on" during the first nine months of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey. The host galaxies were classified as LINERs by weak narrow forbidden line emission in their archival SDSS spectra, and detected by ZTF as nuclear transients. In five of the cases, we found via follow-up spectroscopy that they had transformed into broad-line AGN, reminiscent of the changing-look LINER iPTF 16bco. In one case, ZTF18aajupnt/AT2018dyk, follow-up HST UV and ground-based optical spectra revealed the transformation into a narrow-line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) with strong [Fe VII, X, XIV] and He II 4686 coronal lines. Swift monitoring observations of this source reveal bright UV emission that tracks the optical flare, accompanied by a luminous soft X-ray flare that peaks ~60 days later. Spitzer follow-up observations also detect a luminous mid-infrared flare implying a large covering fraction of dust. Archival light curves of the entire sample from CRTS, ATLAS, and ASAS-SN constrain the onset of the optical nuclear flaring from a prolonged quiescent state. Here we present the systematic selection and follow-up of this new class of changing-look LINERs, compare their properties to previously reported changing-look Seyfert galaxies, and conclude that they are a unique class of transients well-suited to test the uncertain physical processes associated with the LINER accretion state.Comment: Submitted to ApJ, 31 pages, 17 Figures (excluding Appendix due to file size constraints but will be available in electronic version

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: measuring the cosmic expansion history using the Alcock-Paczynski test and distant supernovae

Astronomical observations suggest that today's Universe is dominated by a dark energy of unknown physical origin. One of the most notable consequences in many models is that dark energy should cause the expansion of the Universe to accelerate: but the expansion rate as a function of time has proven very difficult to measure directly. We present a new determination of the cosmic expansion history by combining distant supernovae observations with a geometrical analysis of large-scale galaxy clustering within the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, using the Alcock-Paczynski test to measure the distortion of standard spheres. Our result constitutes a robust and non-parametric measurement of the Hubble expansion rate as a function of time, which we measure with 10-15% precision in four bins within the redshift range 0.1 < z < 0.9. We demonstrate that the cosmic expansion is accelerating, in a manner independent of the parameterization of the cosmological model (although assuming cosmic homogeneity in our data analysis). Furthermore, we find that this expansion history is consistent with a cosmological-constant dark energy.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication by MNRA