A Copernican View of Health Care Antitrust

Sage and Hammer use the analogy of Copernican astronomy to suggest that understanding the dramatic change wrought by managed care requires a conceptual reorientation regarding the meaning of competition in health care and its appropriate legal and regulatory oversight. Both share the belief that misperceiving the world limits potential for technical and social progress

Using A Nameserver to Enhance Control System Efficiency

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) control system uses a nameserver to reduce system response time and to minimize the impact of client name resolution on front-end computers. The control system is based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS), which uses name-based broadcasts to initiate data communication. By default, when EPICS process variables (PV) are requested by client applications, all front-end computers receive the broadcasts and perform name resolution processing against local channel name lists. The nameserver is used to offload the name resolution task to a single node. This processing, formerly done on all front-end computers, is now done only by the nameserver. In a control system with heavily loaded front-end computers and high peak client connection loads, a significant performance improvement is seen. This paper describes the name server in more detail, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of making name resolution a centralized service.Comment: ICALEPCS 200

Isomonodromic deformations of connections with singularities of parahoric formal type

In previous work, the authors have developed a geometric theory of fundamental strata to study connections on the projective line with irregular singularities of parahoric formal type. In this paper, the moduli space of connections that contain regular fundamental strata with fixed combinatorics at each singular point is constructed as a smooth Poisson reduction. The authors then explicitly compute the isomonodromy equations as an integrable system. This result generalizes work of Jimbo, Miwa, and Ueno to connections whose singularities have parahoric formal type.Comment: 32 pages. One of the main theorems (Theorem 5.1) has been significantly strengthened. It now states that the isomonodromy equations give rise to an integrable system on the moduli space of framed connections with fixed combinatorics instead of only on a principal GL_n bundle over this space. Sections 5 and 6 have been substantially rewritte

Loading of a surface-electrode ion trap from a remote, precooled source

We demonstrate loading of ions into a surface-electrode trap (SET) from a remote, laser-cooled source of neutral atoms. We first cool and load $\sim$ $10^6$ neutral $^{88}$Sr atoms into a magneto-optical trap from an oven that has no line of sight with the SET. The cold atoms are then pushed with a resonant laser into the trap region where they are subsequently photoionized and trapped in an SET operated at a cryogenic temperature of 4.6 K. We present studies of the loading process and show that our technique achieves ion loading into a shallow (15 meV depth) trap at rates as high as 125 ions/s while drastically reducing the amount of metal deposition on the trap surface as compared with direct loading from a hot vapor. Furthermore, we note that due to multiple stages of isotopic filtering in our loading process, this technique has the potential for enhanced isotopic selectivity over other loading methods. Rapid loading from a clean, isotopically pure, and precooled source may enable scalable quantum information processing with trapped ions in large, low-depth surface trap arrays that are not amenable to loading from a hot atomic beam