170 research outputs found
âThey hear âAfricaâ and they think that there canât be any good servicesâ â perceived context in cross-national learning: a qualitative study of the barriers to Reverse Innovation.
BACKGROUND: Country-of-origin of a product can negatively influence its rating, particularly if the product is from a low-income country. It follows that how non-traditional sources of innovation, such as low-income countries, are perceived is likely to be an important part of a diffusion process, particularly given the strong social and cognitive boundaries associated with the healthcare professions. METHODS: Between September and December 2014, we conducted eleven in-depth face-to-face or telephone interviews with key informants from innovation, health and social policy circles, experts in international comparative policy research and leaders in Reverse Innovation in the United States. Interviews were open-ended with guiding probes into the barriers and enablers to Reverse Innovation in the US context, specifically also to understand whether, in their experience translating or attempting to translate innovations from low-income contexts into the US, the source of the innovation matters in the adopter context. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed thematically using the process of constant comparison. RESULTS: Our findings show that innovations from low-income countries tend to be discounted early on because of prior assumptions about the potential for these contexts to offer solutions to healthcare problems in the US. Judgments are made about the similarity of low-income contexts with the US, even though this is based oftentimes on flimsy perceptions only. Mixing levels of analysis, local and national, leads to country-level stereotyping and missed opportunities to learn from low-income countries. CONCLUSIONS: Our research highlights that prior expectations, invoked by the Low-income country cue, are interfering with a transparent and objective learning process. There may be merit in adopting some techniques from the cognitive psychology and marketing literatures to understand better the relative importance of source in healthcare research and innovation diffusion. Counter-stereotyping techniques and decision-making tools may be useful to help decision-makers evaluate the generalizability of research findings objectively and transparently. We suggest that those interested in Reverse Innovation should reflect carefully on the value of disclosing the source of the innovation that is being proposed, if doing so is likely to invoke negative stereotypes
Quark Description of Hadronic Phases
We extend our proposal that major universality classes of hadronic matter can
be understood, and in favorable cases calculated, directly in the microscopic
quark variables, to allow for splitting between strange and light quark masses.
A surprisingly simple but apparently viable picture emerges, featuring
essentially three phases, distinguished by whether strangeness is conserved
(standard nuclear matter), conserved modulo two (hypernuclear matter), or
locked to color (color flavor locking). These are separated by sharp phase
transitions. There is also, potentially, a quark phase matching hadronic
K-condensation. The smallness of the secondary gap in two-flavor color
superconductivity corresponds to the disparity between the primary dynamical
energy scales of QCD and the much smaller energy scales of nuclear physics.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure
Robin conditions on the Euclidean ball
Techniques are presented for calculating directly the scalar functional
determinant on the Euclidean d-ball. General formulae are given for Dirichlet
and Robin boundary conditions. The method involves a large mass asymptotic
limit which is carried out in detail for d=2 and d=4 incidentally producing
some specific summations and identities. Extensive use is made of the
Watson-Kober summation formula.Comment: 36p,JyTex, misprints corrected and a section on the massive case
adde
Quark mass dependence of the nucleon axial-vector coupling constant
We study the quark mass expansion of the axial-vector coupling constant g_A
of the nucleon. The aim is to explore the feasibility of chiral effective field
theory methods for extrapolation of lattice QCD results - so far determined at
relatively large quark masses corresponding to pion masses larger than 0.6 GeV
- down to the physical value of the pion mass. We compare two versions of
non-relativistic chiral effective field theory: One scheme restricted to pion
and nucleon degrees of freedom only, and an alternative approach which
incorporates explicit Delta(1230) resonance degrees of freedom. It turns out
that, in order to approach the physical value of g_A in a leading-one-loop
calculation, the inclusion of the explicit Delta(1230) degrees of freedom is
crucial. With information on important higher order couplings constrained from
analyses of inelastic pion production processes, a chiral extrapolation
function for g_A is obtained, which works well from the chiral limit across the
physical point into the region of present lattice data. The resulting
enhancement of our extrapolation function near the physical pion mass is found
to arise from an interplay between long- and short- distance physics.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX, 7 figure
The Overall Coefficient of the Two-loop Superstring Amplitude Using Pure Spinors
Using the results recently obtained for computing integrals over
(non-minimal) pure spinor superspace, we compute the coefficient of the
massless two-loop four-point amplitude from first principles. Contrasting with
the mathematical difficulties in the RNS formalism where unknown normalizations
of chiral determinant formulae force the two-loop coefficient to be determined
only indirectly through factorization, the computation in the pure spinor
formalism can be smoothly carried out.Comment: 29 pages, harvmac TeX. v2: add reference
Further functional determinants
Functional determinants for the scalar Laplacian on spherical caps and
slices, flat balls, shells and generalised cylinders are evaluated in two,
three and four dimensions using conformal techniques. Both Dirichlet and Robin
boundary conditions are allowed for. Some effects of non-smooth boundaries are
discussed; in particular the 3-hemiball and the 3-hemishell are considered. The
edge and vertex contributions to the coefficient are examined.Comment: 25 p,JyTex,5 figs. on request
Zeta function determinant of the Laplace operator on the -dimensional ball
We present a direct approach for the calculation of functional determinants
of the Laplace operator on balls. Dirichlet and Robin boundary conditions are
considered. Using this approach, formulas for any value of the dimension, ,
of the ball, can be obtained quite easily. Explicit results are presented here
for dimensions and .Comment: 22 pages, one figure appended as uuencoded postscript fil
Right Handed Weak Currents in Sum Rules for Axialvector Constant Renormalization
The recent experimental results on deep inelastic polarized lepton scattering
off proton, deuteron and He together with polari% zed neutron
-decay data are analyzed. It is shown that the problem of Ellis-Jaffe
and Bjorken sum rules deficiency and the neutron paradox could be solved
simultaneously by assuming the small right handed current (RHC) admixture in
the weak interaction Lagrangian. The possible RHC impact on pion-nucleon
-term and Gamow-Teller sum rule for nuclear reactions is
pointed out.Comment: to be published in Phys. Rev. Lett. LaTeX, 8 pages, 21 k
Energy States of Colored Particle in a Chromomagnetic Field
The unitary transformation, which diagonalizes squared Dirac equation in a
constant chromomagnetic field is found. Applying this transformation, we find
the eigenfunctions of diagonalized Hamiltonian, that describe the states with
definite value of energy and call them energy states. It is pointed out that,
the energy states are determined by the color interaction term of the particle
with the background chromofield and this term is responsible for the splitting
of the energy spectrum.
We construct supercharge operators for the diagonal Hamiltonian, that ensure
the superpartner property of the energy states.Comment: 25 pages, some calculation details have been removed, typos correcte
New physics searches at near detectors of neutrino oscillation experiments
We systematically investigate the prospects of testing new physics with tau
sensitive near detectors at neutrino oscillation facilities. For neutrino beams
from pion decay, from the decay of radiative ions, as well as from the decays
of muons in a storage ring at a neutrino factory, we discuss which effective
operators can lead to new physics effects. Furthermore, we discuss the present
bounds on such operators set by other experimental data currently available.
For operators with two leptons and two quarks we present the first complete
analysis including all relevant operators simultaneously and performing a
Markov Chain Monte Carlo fit to the data. We find that these effects can induce
tau neutrino appearance probabilities as large as O(10^{-4}), which are within
reach of forthcoming experiments. We highlight to which kind of new physics a
tau sensitive near detector would be most sensitive.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, REVTeX
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