3,626 research outputs found
Veteran Employment: A Study into Barriers in Healthcare Industry Positions
Introduction: While there are many challenges veterans face while making the transition to the civilian lifestyle, undoubtedly one of the more frustrating factors is finding employment. While the veteran unemployment rate has dropped in recent years, it currently sits at ~3.4%. Therefore, an estimated 323, 000 veterans are currently unemployed. Given these statistics, what are the common barriers veterans face when seeking employment, specifically in healthcare industry positions?
Methods: Two (30 minute) interviews will be conducted with individuals heavily involved in veteran employment at Jefferson Hospitals. The questions asked the interviewee’s opinions on factors that make veterans successful in gaining employment and conversely what they might be missing. The responses of these interviews will be analyzed for reoccurring themes regarding hiring veterans.
Results: While the interviews have not yet been conducted, based on the existing literature, it is thought that the common hurdles highlighted in the interviews will include unpreparedness for civilian jobs, translation of military skills, unaddressed mental illness, stigma around hiring veterans, and cultural differences between the two work forces.
Conclusion: Once the interviews are conducted, the data from them will elucidate the next steps. Should the factors listed above truly be the most common hurdles veterans face, the next step would be piloting a program that focuses on navigating employment and providing specific trainings as outlined by Jefferson hospital hiring managers
A network epidemic model with preventive rewiring: comparative analysis of the initial phase
This paper is concerned with stochastic SIR and SEIR epidemic models on
random networks in which individuals may rewire away from infected neighbors at
some rate (and reconnect to non-infectious individuals with
probability or else simply drop the edge if ), so-called
preventive rewiring. The models are denoted SIR- and SEIR-, and
we focus attention on the early stages of an outbreak, where we derive
expression for the basic reproduction number and the expected degree of
the infectious nodes using two different approximation approaches. The
first approach approximates the early spread of an epidemic by a branching
process, whereas the second one uses pair approximation. The expressions are
compared with the corresponding empirical means obtained from stochastic
simulations of SIR- and SEIR- epidemics on Poisson and
scale-free networks. Without rewiring of exposed nodes, the two approaches
predict the same epidemic threshold and the same for both types of
epidemics, the latter being very close to the mean degree obtained from
simulated epidemics over Poisson networks. Above the epidemic threshold,
pairwise models overestimate the value of computed from simulations,
which turns out to be very close to the one predicted by the branching process
approximation. When exposed individuals also rewire with (perhaps
unaware of being infected), the two approaches give different epidemic
thresholds, with the branching process approximation being more in agreement
with simulations.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figure
The double mass hierarchy pattern: simultaneously understanding quark and lepton mixing
The charged fermion masses of the three generations exhibit the two strong
hierarchies m_3 >> m_2 >> m_1. We assume that also neutrino masses satisfy
m_{nu 3} > m_{nu 2} > m_{nu 1} and derive the consequences of the hierarchical
spectra on the fermionic mixing patterns. The quark and lepton mixing matrices
are built in a general framework with their matrix elements expressed in terms
of the four fermion mass ratios m_u/m_c, m_c/m_t, m_d/m_s, and m_s/m_b and
m_e/m_mu, m_mu/m_tau, m_{nu 1}/m_{nu 2}, and m_{nu 2}/m_{nu 3}, for the quark
and lepton sector, respectively. In this framework, we show that the resulting
mixing matrices are consistent with data for both quarks and leptons, despite
the large leptonic mixing angles. The minimal assumption we take is the one of
hierarchical masses and minimal flavour symmetry breaking that strongly follows
from phenomenology. No special structure of the mass matrices has to be assumed
that cannot be motivated by this minimal assumption. This analysis allows us to
predict the neutrino mass spectrum and set the mass of the lightest neutrino
well below 0.01 eV. The method also gives the 1 sigma allowed ranges for the
leptonic mixing matrix elements. Contrary to the common expectation, leptonic
mixing angles are found to be determined solely by the four leptonic mass
ratios without any relation to symmetry considerations as commonly used in
flavor model building. Still, our formulae can be used to build up a flavor
model that predicts the observed hierarchies in the masses---the mixing follows
then from the procedure which is developed in this work.Comment: 28 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables; v2: references added, Appendix C
added, additional clarification and explanations in Sec. 2; matches version
accepted by Nucl. Phys.
False Analog Data Injection Attack Towards Topology Errors: Formulation and Feasibility Analysis
In this paper, we propose a class of false analog data injection attack that
can misguide the system as if topology errors had occurred. By utilizing the
measurement redundancy with respect to the state variables, the adversary who
knows the system configuration is shown to be capable of computing the
corresponding measurement value with the intentionally misguided topology. The
attack is designed such that the state as well as residue distribution after
state estimation will converge to those in the system with a topology error. It
is shown that the attack can be launched even if the attacker is constrained to
some specific meters. The attack is detrimental to the system since
manipulation of analog data will lead to a forged digital topology status, and
the state after the error is identified and modified will be significantly
biased with the intended wrong topology. The feasibility of the proposed attack
is demonstrated with an IEEE 14-bus system.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures, Proc. of 2018 IEEE Power and Energy Society
General Meetin
How Many Communities Are There?
Stochastic blockmodels and variants thereof are among the most widely used
approaches to community detection for social networks and relational data. A
stochastic blockmodel partitions the nodes of a network into disjoint sets,
called communities. The approach is inherently related to clustering with
mixture models; and raises a similar model selection problem for the number of
communities. The Bayesian information criterion (BIC) is a popular solution,
however, for stochastic blockmodels, the conditional independence assumption
given the communities of the endpoints among different edges is usually
violated in practice. In this regard, we propose composite likelihood BIC
(CL-BIC) to select the number of communities, and we show it is robust against
possible misspecifications in the underlying stochastic blockmodel assumptions.
We derive the requisite methodology and illustrate the approach using both
simulated and real data. Supplementary materials containing the relevant
computer code are available online.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure
Texture zeros and hierarchical masses from flavour (mis)alignment
We introduce an unconventional interpretation of the fermion mass matrix
elements. As the full rotational freedom of the gauge-kinetic terms renders a
set of infinite bases called weak bases, basis-dependent structures as mass
matrices are unphysical. Matrix invariants, on the other hand, provide a set of
basis-independent objects which are of more relevance. We employ one of these
invariants to give a new parametrization of the mass matrices. By virtue of it,
one gains control over its implicit implications on several mass matrix
structures. The key element is the trace invariant which resembles the equation
of a hypersphere with a radius equal to the Frobenius norm of the mass matrix.
With the concepts of alignment or misalignment we can identify texture zeros
with certain alignments whereas Froggatt-Nielsen structures in the matrix
elements are governed by misalignment. This method allows further insights of
traditional approaches to the underlying flavour geometry.Comment: 27 pages; v2 matches version accepted by NPB, discussion on Dirac CP
phase for neutrinos adde
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