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 $4\pi$ 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

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 – 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&lt;0.001). Appreciation was a better ‘test’ of DMC in the psychiatric hospital (where psychotic and severe affective disorders predominated) (P&lt;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

Unresolved problems in superconductivity of CaC6

We discuss the current status of the theory of the "high-temperature" superconductivity in intercalated graphites YbC6 and CaC6. We emphasize that while the general picture of conventional, phonon-driven superconductivity has already emerged and is generally accepted, there are still interesting problems with this picture, such as weak-coupling regime inferred from specific heat suggesting coupling exclusively with high-energy carbon phonons coming in direct contradiction with the isotope effect measurements suggesting coupling exclusively with the low-energy intercalant modes. At the same time, the first principle calculations, while explaining Tc, contradict both of the experiments above by predicting equal coupling with both groups of phonons.Comment: Contribution to the Proceedings of the M2S Conference in Dresden, 200