4,950 research outputs found
Paying for Quality: Understanding and Assessing Physician Pay-for-Performance Initiatives
Reviews the structure, prevalence, measurement issues, perception, and impact of current quality incentive programs, and discusses how much and under what circumstances they will improve quality of care. Includes descriptions of select programs
Creek College
Creek College is a project bridging art and environmental conservation. We offer a range of art classes and experiences in exchange for activities that aid in the restoration of watersheds suffering from environmental degradation.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/creek_college/1000/thumbnail.jp
Spectral flow of non-hermitian Heisenberg spin chain with complex twist
We investigate the spectral flow of the integrable non-hermitian Heisenberg
spin chain under boundary conditions with complex twist angle. It is shown that
the period of the spectral flow is up to a certain critical imaginary
twist, beyond which the period jumps successively to higher values. We argue
that this phenomenon caused by non-hermitian properties of the system is
closely related to the metal-insulator transition caused by non-hermitian
hoppings for the one-dimensional insulator.Comment: 10 pages, revtex, to appear in NP
Anisotropic superconductivity in graphite intercalation compound YbC6
We report anisotropy of the upper critical field (Bc2) of an intercalated
graphite superconductor YbC6 (Tc = 6.5 K) determined from angular dependent
magnetoresistance measurements. Though the perpendicular coherence length is
much longer than interlayer spacing, measured angular dependences of Bc2 are
well fitted by the Lawrence-Doniach model or the Tinkham model, which are known
to be applicable to quasi two-dimensional materials or thin films, rather than
the effective mass model. This observation is similar to the measurements for
the other intercalated graphite superconductor, CaC6, by Jobiliong et al. [E.
Jobiliong, H.D. Zhou, J.A. Janik, Y.-J. Jo, L. Balicas, J.S. Brooks, C.R.
Wiebe, Phys. Rev. B 76 (2007) 31 052511]. A possible explanation for the
unexpected applicability of these models is that our YbC6 samples are
synthesized as thin flakes in the host graphite.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
Human Infections with Plasmodium knowlesi, the Philippines.
Five human cases of infection with the simian malaria parasite Plasmodium knowlesi from Palawan, the Philippines, were confirmed by nested PCR. This study suggests that this zoonotic infection is found across a relatively wide area in Palawan and documents autochthonous cases in the country
Interacting dimers on the honeycomb lattice: An exact solution of the five-vertex model
The problem of close-packed dimers on the honeycomb lattice was solved by
Kasteleyn in 1963. Here we extend the solution to include interactions between
neighboring dimers in two spatial lattice directions. The solution is obtained
by using the method of Bethe ansatz and by converting the dimer problem into a
five-vertex problem. The complete phase diagram is obtained and it is found
that a new frozen phase, in which the attracting dimers prevail, arises when
the interaction is attractive. For repulsive dimer interactions a new
first-order line separating two frozen phases occurs. The transitions are
continuous and the critical behavior in the disorder regime is found to be the
same as in the case of noninteracting dimers characterized by a specific heat
exponent \a=1/2.Comment: latex, 29 pages + 7 figure
Decision-making capacity for treatment in psychiatric and medical in-patients: Cross-sectional, comparative study
BackgroundIs the nature of decision-making capacity (DMC) for treatment significantly different in medical and psychiatric patients?AimsTo compare the abilities relevant to DMC for treatment in medical and psychiatric patients who are able to communicate a treatment choice.MethodA secondary analysis of two cross-sectional studies of consecutive admissions: 125 to a psychiatric hospital and 164 to a medical hospital. The MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool ā Treatment and a clinical interview were used to assess decision-making abilities (understanding, appreciating and reasoning) and judgements of DMC. We limited analysis to patients able to express a choice about treatment and stratified the analysis by low and high understanding ability.ResultsMost people scoring low on understanding were judged to lack DMC and there was no difference by hospital (P=0.14). In both hospitals there were patients who were able to understand yet lacked DMC (39% psychiatric v. 13% medical in-patients, P<0.001). Appreciation was a better ātestā of DMC in the psychiatric hospital (where psychotic and severe affective disorders predominated) (P<0.001), whereas reasoning was a better test of DMC in the medical hospital (where cognitive impairment was common) (P=0.02).ConclusionsAmong those with good understanding, the appreciation ability had more salience to DMC for treatment in a psychiatric setting and the reasoning ability had more salience in a medical setting.</jats:sec
Object Discovery via Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection
Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) is a task that detects objects in
an image using a model trained only on image-level annotations. Current
state-of-the-art models benefit from self-supervised instance-level
supervision, but since weak supervision does not include count or location
information, the most common ``argmax'' labeling method often ignores many
instances of objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel multiple
instance labeling method called object discovery. We further introduce a new
contrastive loss under weak supervision where no instance-level information is
available for sampling, called weakly supervised contrastive loss (WSCL). WSCL
aims to construct a credible similarity threshold for object discovery by
leveraging consistent features for embedding vectors in the same class. As a
result, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on MS-COCO 2014 and 2017 as
well as PASCAL VOC 2012, and competitive results on PASCAL VOC 2007.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 2022. For project page, see
https://jinhseo.github.io/research/wsod.html For code, see
https://github.com/jinhseo/OD-WSC
Recommended from our members
A moderate increase in dietary zinc reduces DNA strand breaks in leukocytes and alters plasma proteins without changing plasma zinc concentrations.
BackgroundFood fortification has been recommended to improve a population's micronutrient status. Biofortification techniques modestly elevate the zinc content of cereals, but few studies have reported a positive impact on functional indicators of zinc status.ObjectiveWe determined the impact of a modest increase in dietary zinc that was similar to that provided by biofortification programs on whole-body and cellular indicators of zinc status.DesignEighteen men participated in a 6-wk controlled consumption study of a low-zinc, rice-based diet. The diet contained 6 mg Zn/d for 2 wk and was followed by 10 mg Zn/d for 4 wk. To reduce zinc absorption, phytate was added to the diet during the initial period. Indicators of zinc homeostasis, including total absorbed zinc (TAZ), the exchangeable zinc pool (EZP), plasma and cellular zinc concentrations, zinc transporter gene expression, and other metabolic indicators (i.e., DNA damage, inflammation, and oxidative stress), were measured before and after each dietary-zinc period.ResultsTAZ increased with increased dietary zinc, but plasma zinc concentrations and EZP size were unchanged. Erythrocyte and leukocyte zinc concentrations and zinc transporter expressions were not altered. However, leukocyte DNA strand breaks decreased with increased dietary zinc, and the level of proteins involved in DNA repair and antioxidant and immune functions were restored after the dietary-zinc increase.ConclusionsA moderate 4-mg/d increase in dietary zinc, similar to that which would be expected from zinc-biofortified crops, improves zinc absorption but does not alter plasma zinc. The repair of DNA strand breaks improves, as do serum protein concentrations that are associated with the DNA repair process. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02861352
- ā¦