Employee satisfaction and its affects (sic) on customer service in a healthcare facility

Includes bibliographical references

Creating long-lived neutral-atom traps in a cryogenic environment

We describe techniques for creating long-lived magneto-optical and magnetostatic traps for neutral atoms. These traps exist in a sealed cryogenic environment with a temperature near 4 K, where the background gas pressure can be extremely low. To date we have observed cesium magneto-optical traps with background-limited lifetimes in excess of 1 h, and magnetostatic traps with lifetimes of nearly 10 min. From these observations we use the known He-Cs van der Waals collision cross section to infer typical background gas pressures in our apparatus below 4×10^(-12) Torr. With hardware improvements we expect this pressure can be made much lower, extending the magnetostatic-trap lifetimes one to two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, with a cryogenic system one can use superconducting magnets and SQUID detectors to trap and to nondestructively sense spin-polarized atoms. With superconducting microstructures one can achieve very large magnetic-field gradients and curvatures, as high as ∼10^6 G/cm and ∼10^9 G/cm^2, respectively, for use in magnetic and magneto-optical traps

The effect of the integration interval on the measurement accuracy of RMS values and powers in systems with nonsinusoidal waveforms

In this paper the possibility of errors in the measurement of average values (in particular rms values or active powers) in power systems under nonsinusoidal conditions are discussed. The errors considered are either due to the fact that the measurement time interval is not an exact multiple of the fundamental period of the voltage and current signals, or due to the presence of interharmonics or subharmonics. The errors are calculated and the results are illustrated by means of simple examples

Bit-interleaved coded modulation in the wideband regime

The wideband regime of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) in Gaussian channels is studied. The Taylor expansion of the coded modulation capacity for generic signal constellations at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is derived and used to determine the corresponding expansion for the BICM capacity. Simple formulas for the minimum energy per bit and the wideband slope are given. BICM is found to be suboptimal in the sense that its minimum energy per bit can be larger than the corresponding value for coded modulation schemes. The minimum energy per bit using standard Gray mapping on M-PAM or M^2-QAM is given by a simple formula and shown to approach -0.34 dB as M increases. Using the low SNR expansion, a general trade-off between power and bandwidth in the wideband regime is used to show how a power loss can be traded off against a bandwidth gain.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation Revisited: A Mismatched Decoding Perspective

We revisit the information-theoretic analysis of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) by modeling the BICM decoder as a mismatched decoder. The mismatched decoding model is well-defined for finite, yet arbitrary, block lengths, and naturally captures the channel memory among the bits belonging to the same symbol. We give two independent proofs of the achievability of the BICM capacity calculated by Caire et al. where BICM was modeled as a set of independent parallel binary-input channels whose output is the bitwise log-likelihood ratio. Our first achievability proof uses typical sequences, and shows that due to the random coding construction, the interleaver is not required. The second proof is based on the random coding error exponents with mismatched decoding, where the largest achievable rate is the generalized mutual information. We show that the generalized mutual information of the mismatched decoder coincides with the infinite-interleaver BICM capacity. We also show that the error exponent -and hence the cutoff rate- of the BICM mismatched decoder is upper bounded by that of coded modulation and may thus be lower than in the infinite-interleaved model. We also consider the mutual information appearing in the analysis of iterative decoding of BICM with EXIT charts. We show that the corresponding symbol metric has knowledge of the transmitted symbol and the EXIT mutual information admits a representation as a pseudo-generalized mutual information, which is in general not achievable. A different symbol decoding metric, for which the extrinsic side information refers to the hypothesized symbol, induces a generalized mutual information lower than the coded modulation capacity.Comment: submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Conference version in 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Toronto, Canada, July 200

Normal mere exposure effect with impaired recognition in Alzheimer’s disease.

We investigated the mere exposure effect and the explicit memory in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients and elderly control subjects, using unfamiliar faces. During the exposure phase, the subjects estimated the age of briefly flashed faces. The mere exposure effect was examined by presenting pairs of faces (old and new) and asking participants to select the face they liked. The participants were then presented with a forced-choice explicit recognition task. Controls subjects exhibited above-chance preference and recognition scores for old faces. The AD patients also showed the mere exposure effect but no explicit recognition. These results suggest that the processes involved in the mere exposure effect are preserved in AD patients despite their impaired explicit recognition. The results are discussed in terms of Seamon et al.’s proposal (1995) that processes involved in the mere exposure effect are equivalent to those subserving perceptual priming. These processes would depend on extrastriate areas which are relatively preserved in AD patients

Clustering Educational Categories in a Heterogeneous Labour Market

In most countries, the systems of educational classification are based on administrative criteria. For labour market analyses, however, a classification that demarcates an individual''s competences obtained by the courses attended is a better alternative. In this paper we will develop an educational classification that is based on the observed substitution possibilities of workers with different educational backgrounds within similar jobs. As an additional criterion we use the recognisability of the groups distinguished. In addition, we incorporate the criterion of statistical reliability. This results in an educational classification with 113 distinct categories.education, training and the labour market;