The VA Office of Inspector General Office of Healthcare Inspections conducted an inspection at the request of Senator Joe Donnelly and Congressman Marlin Stutzman regarding the suspension (pause) of all inpatient admissions at the Fort Wayne campus (the facility) of the VA Northern Indiana Healthcare System (VANIHCS), Fort Wayne, IN, in October 2012. The OIG was asked to review overall quality of care and management at the facility, define what issues led to suspension of inpatient care, and determine what measures need to be taken to return the facility to normal operations. We reviewed medical records and nursing administrative documents and identified issues with quality of inpatient care in multiple cases. Several factors likely contributed to the circumstances that allowed this to happen: the facility did not effectively and consistently fill upper and mid-level leadership positions, there were lapses in clinical judgment by individual providers, and there was limited compliance in maintaining nurse competencies. Managers that were in place often did not provide necessary leadership. Some prior budget deficits had been addressed, at least in part, by not filling key staff positions. As of May 2013, inpatient operations had not resumed at full capacity but are being phased in. We determined that the facility, Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) 11, and Veterans Health Administration (VHA) could have improved communication to stakeholders regarding the pause. In view of recurring qualitative issues relating to patient care, lack of long-term stability in upper and mid-level leadership positions, and workload, VISN 11 may need to consider the scope of services the facility is capable of reliably providing, namely, the appropriate designation for ICU level care in the near term and whether an ICU is viable in the long-term.

关键词：住院治疗;悬挂护理;管理不善;服务质量

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This report provides information about federal and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 113th and 112th Congresses. Three appendixes suggest further reading on this topic and describe censorship and circumvention technologies.

关键词：互联网;通讯工具;全球市场;大众媒体；社交网络

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With a focus on complex environments,the present paper describes a new algorithm in scale changed object tracking through color feature.Mean shift (MS) iterative procedure is the best color-based algorithm to find the location of an object.The algorithm performance is not acceptable once tracking scale changed objects in complex environments.In this paper,the main aim is to improve the MS method,using corrected background-weighted histogram (CBWH) algorithm to reduce the interference of background in target localization.To fit the object scale change,the sum of gradient mode (SGM) is employed.The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the traditional mean shift tracking in the following aspects:1) it provides consistent object tracking throughout the video; 2) it is not influenced by the tracked objects scale changes; 3) it is less prone to the background clutter

关键词：目标跟踪;均值漂移;背景资料;梯度模式

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Congestion and hazardous traffic situations for the drivers on the road can occur around work zones and snowplow operation during the winter season due to low visibility. An information warning system for such environments can improve traffic mobility and thereby driver safety. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and other related technologies are being aggressively pursued to devise such automated traffic-information systems. Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) has been considered as a key enabling wireless communication technology to realize such automated traffic warning systems. DSRC-based traffic-information systems use vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and/or vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication using DSRC technology to acquire and disseminate travel safety information. To take advantage of the disseminated information messages, a vehicle needs to be equipped with DSRC technology.

关键词：交通安全；通信系统；信息系统

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Private communication may benefit signalers by reducing the costs imposed by potential eavesdroppers such as parasites, predators, prey, or rivals. It is likely that private communication channels are influenced by the evolution of signalers, intended receivers and potential eavesdroppers, but most studies only examine how private communication benefits signalers. Here, we address this shortcoming by examining visual private communication from a potential eavesdropper's perspective. Specifically, we ask if a signaler would face fitness consequences if a potential eavesdropper could detect its signal more clearly. By integrating studies on private communication with those on the evolution of vision, we suggest that published studies find few taxon-based constraints that could keep potential eavesdroppers from detecting most hypothesized forms of visual private communication. However, we find that private signals may persist over evolutionary time if the benefits of detecting a particular signal do not outweigh the functional costs a potential eavesdropper would suffer from evolving the ability to detect it. We also suggest that all undetectable signals are not necessarily private signals: potential eavesdroppers may not benefit from detecting a signal if it co-occurs with signals in other more detectable sensory modalities. In future work, we suggest that researchers consider how the evolution of potential eavesdroppers' sensory systems influences private communication. Specifically, we suggest that examining the fitness correlates and evolution of potential eavesdroppers can help (1) determine the likelihood that private communication channels are stable over evolutionary time, and (2) demonstrate that undetectable signals are private signals by showing that signalers benefit from a reduction in detection by potential eavesdroppers.

关键词：通信和广播系统;声学探测器;通道;秘密行动

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Distributed teams are geographically separated and rely on networked communication technologies to mediate their interactions. A limitation of these networked communication technologies is that they generate transmission delays that result from network congestion or routing issues. Communication delays in distributed environments is an important and challenging problem that has not been adequately addressed. Communication delays are particularly insidious in air traffic control, and space and military operations, where communication and information sharing are paramount to team success. For the purposes of this research, we define communication delay as the time interval between a team member speaking a message (sender) and when another team member (recipient) hears it. The goal of this research is to better understand the effect of communication delays on team collaboration and team processes to maximize distributed team performance. This paper will explore the issue of communication delays in network-enabled environments, and describe an experiment developed to better understand the effects of communication delays on distributed team member trust, shared understanding, and satisfaction. Research questions are as follows: (1) What effect do audio communication delays have on distributed team trust, shared understanding (task accuracy), satisfaction, and cognitive workload; and (2) What effect does a video channel have on distributed team trust, satisfaction, and team member cognitive workload, when team member communication is delayed. For the purposes of this research, we will focus on synchronous audio and video communication technologies.

关键词：延迟，信息交流；局域网；语音传输;队（人事）;视频网络

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β-type titanium alloys comprising low cost elements such as Fe, Mn, Cr, Sn, Al, O and N and having low Young's modulus are currently being developed. Examples of such alloys include Ti-10Cr-Al, Ti-Mn, Ti-Mn-Fe, Ti-Mn-Al, Ti-Cr-Al, Ti-Sn-Cr, Ti-Cr-Sn-Zr, Ti-(Cr, Mn)-Sn, and Ti-12Cr. Ti-5Fe-3Nb-3Zr belongs to that class of titanium alloys in which rare metals such as Nb, Ta, and Zr have been reduced using Fe. Ti-5Fe-3Nb-3Zr has a Young's modulus of around 76 GPa and has greater strength than that of Ti-6Al-4V ELI for biomedical applications. The characteristics of Ti-5Fe-3Nb-3Zr and other low-cost beta-type titanium alloys with low Young's moduli are discussed from the viewpoint of biomedical applications.

 

关键词：β型钛合金;低的杨氏模量;低成本元件;普通金属;间隙元素;生物医学应用

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关键词：临床路径分析；模式挖掘；新兴模式；改变模式检测；生物医学

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Since March 1, 2008 there has been a ban on wireless telephone and electronic communication devices in New Jersey while operating a motor vehicle. But from general observation on any roadway, it appears that there are still drivers who are talking on their phones or texting while driving. From 2006 to 2009, NJ crashes, injuries, and deaths for handheld devices have averaged 1837, 769, and 6, respectively, while hands-free averaged 1570 crashes, 659 injuries, and 3 deaths. It is generally believed that the number of crashes attributable to phone or text use is under-reported as drivers will rarely admit to their use and enforcement normally does not witness the crash event. Additionally, law enforcement resources may be limited and issuing citations for phone or text use may be competing with other enforcement priorities. The objectives of this research were to ascertain whether the legislation has had any effect on actual crash and citation data as well as driver attitude toward the phone and text use while driving and the legislative ban. The results showed that actual hand-held cell phone crashes increased after the ban was implemented but citations issued also increased. Survey results indicated that drivers were knowledgeable about NJ's law but admitted to violating that law anyway. Drivers supported more enforcement but recognized that the law is difficult to enforce. Recommendations included potential revisions to NJ's crash form; consistent national legislation; and evaluation of other states' programs.

关键词：无线通讯；电子设备；蜂窝通信

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In this paper we introduce CARRQR, a communication avoiding rank revealing QR factorization with tournament pivoting. We show that CARRQR reveals the numerical rank of a matrix in an analogous way to QR factorization with column pivoting (QRCP). Although the upper bound of a quantity involved in the characterization of a rank revealing factorization is worse for CARRQR than for QRCP, our numerical experiments on a set of challenging matrices show that this upper bound is very pessimistic, and CARRQR is an effective tool in revealing the rank in practical problems. Our main motivation for introducing CARRQR is that it minimizes data transfer, modulo poly- logarithmic factors, on both sequential and parallel machines, while previous factorizations as QRCP are communication sub-optimal and require asymptotically more communication than CARRQR. Hence CARRQR is expected to have a better performance on current and future computers, where communication is a major bottleneck that highly impacts the performance of an algorithm.

关键词：通信优化算法;避免传播;数据传输;通信

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