Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on the Future of Long-Term Care

Presents findings from a survey of experts on the challenges for long-term care -- securing adequate financing, developing the required healthcare workforce, and improving the quality of long-term care -- and strategies for addressing them

Culture Change in Nursing Homes: How Far Have We Come?

Presents findings from the Commonwealth Fund 2007 National Survey of Nursing Homes on the extent to which nursing homes have adopted the principles of culture change and are delivering resident-centered care, as well as the benefits the changes have brou

Experimental search for anisotropic flux flow resistivity in the a-b plane of optimally doped epitaxial thin films of YBCO

Transport measurements along the node and anti-node directions in the a-b plane of optimally doped and epitaxial thin films of YBCO are reported. Low bias magnetoresistance measurements near and below T_c show that the flux flow resistivity along the node and anti-node directions versus magnetic field are indistinguishable. This result suggests that within the experimental error of our measurements, no correspondence is found between the flux pinning properties in YBCO and the d-wave nature of the order parameter.Comment: 5 figure

Toward improved streamflow forecasts: Value of semidistributed modeling

The focus of this study is to assess the performance improvements of semidistributed applications of the U.S. National Weather Service Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting model on a watershed using radar-based remotely sensed precipitation data. Specifically, performance comparisons are made within an automated multicriteria calibration framework to evaluate the benefit of "spatial distribution" of the model input (precipitation), structural components (soil moisture and streamflow routing computations), and surface characteristics (parameters). A comparison of these results is made with those obtained through manual calibration. Results indicate that for the study watershed, there are performance improvements associated with semidistributed model applications when the watershed is partitioned into three subwatersheds; however, no additional benefit is gained from increasing the number of subwatersheds from three to eight. Improvements in model performance are demonstrably related to the spatial distribution of the model input and streamflow routing. Surprisingly, there is no improvement associated with the distribution of the surface characteristics (model parameters)

Conformative Filtering for Implicit Feedback Data

Implicit feedback is the simplest form of user feedback that can be used for item recommendation. It is easy to collect and is domain independent. However, there is a lack of negative examples. Previous work tackles this problem by assuming that users are not interested or not as much interested in the unconsumed items. Those assumptions are often severely violated since non-consumption can be due to factors like unawareness or lack of resources. Therefore, non-consumption by a user does not always mean disinterest or irrelevance. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Conformative Filtering (CoF) to address the issue. The motivating observation is that if there is a large group of users who share the same taste and none of them have consumed an item before, then it is likely that the item is not of interest to the group. We perform multidimensional clustering on implicit feedback data using hierarchical latent tree analysis (HLTA) to identify user `tastes' groups and make recommendations for a user based on her memberships in the groups and on the past behavior of the groups. Experiments on two real-world datasets from different domains show that CoF has superior performance compared to several common baselines

Photoinduced melting of superconductivity in the high-Tc superconductor La2-xSrxCuO4 probed by time-resolved optical and THz techniques

Dynamics of depletion and recovery of superconducting state in La2-xSrxCuO_4 thin films is investigated utilizing optical pump-probe and optical pump - THz probe techniques as a function of temperature and excitation fluence. The absorbed energy density required to suppress superconductivity is found to be about 8 times higher than the thermodynamically determined condensation energy density and nearly temperature independent between 4 and 25 K. These findings indicate that during the time when superconducting state suppression takes place (~0.7 ps), a large part (nearly 90%) of the energy is transferred to the phonons with energy lower than twice the maximum value of of the SC gap and only 10% is spent on Cooper pair breaking.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Expression of PIK3CA mutant E545K in the mammary gland induces heterogeneous tumors but is less potent than mutant H1047R.

The phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling cascade is a key mediator of cellular growth, survival and metabolism and is frequently subverted in human cancer. The gene encoding for the alpha catalytic subunit of PI3K (PIK3CA) is mutated and/or amplified in ∼30% of breast cancers. Mutations in either the kinase domain (H1047R) or the helical domain (E545K) are most common and result in a constitutively active enzyme with oncogenic capacity. PIK3CA(H1047R) was previously demonstrated to induce tumors in transgenic mouse models; however, it was not known whether overexpression of PIK3CA(E545K) is sufficient to induce mammary tumors and whether tumor initiation by these two types of mutants differs. Here, we demonstrate that expression of PIK3CA(E545K) in the mouse mammary gland induces heterogenous mammary carcinomas but with a longer latency than PIK3CA(H1047R)-expressing mice. Our results suggest that the helical domain mutant PIK3CA(E545K) is a less potent inducer of mammary tumors due to less efficient activation of downstream Akt signaling

Evidence for pairing above Tc from the dispersion in the pseudogap phase of cuprates

In the underdoped high temperature superconductors, instead of a complete Fermi surface above Tc, only disconnected Fermi arcs appear, separated by regions that still exhibit an energy gap. We show that in this pseudogap phase, the energy-momentum relation of electronic excitations near E_F behaves like the dispersion of a normal metal on the Fermi arcs, but like that of a superconductor in the gapped regions. We argue that this dichotomy in the dispersion is hard to reconcile with a competing order parameter, but is consistent with pairing without condensation