Time-order errors and standard-position effects in duration discrimination: An experimental study and an analysis by the sensation-weighting model

Studies have shown that the discriminability of successive time intervals depends on the presentation order of the standard (St) and the comparison (Co) stimuli. Also, this order affects the point of subjective equality. The first effect is here called the standard-position effect (SPE); the latter is known as the time-order error. In the present study, we investigated how these two effects vary across interval types and standard durations, using Hellström’s sensation-weighting model to describe the results and relate them to stimulus comparison mechanisms. In Experiment 1, four modes of interval presentation were used, factorially combining interval type (filled, empty) and sensory modality (auditory, visual). For each mode, two presentation orders (St–Co, Co–St) and two standard durations (100 ms, 1,000 ms) were used; half of the participants received correctness feedback, and half of them did not. The interstimulus interval was 900 ms. The SPEs were negative (i.e., a smaller difference limen for St–Co than for Co–St), except for the filled-auditory and empty-visual 100-ms standards, for which a positive effect was obtained. In Experiment 2, duration discrimination was investigated for filled auditory intervals with four standards between 100 and 1,000 ms, an interstimulus interval of 900 ms, and no feedback. Standard duration interacted with presentation order, here yielding SPEs that were negative for standards of 100 and 1,000 ms, but positive for 215 and 464 ms. Our findings indicate that the SPE can be positive as well as negative, depending on the interval type and standard duration, reflecting the relative weighting of the stimulus information, as is described by the sensation-weighting model.

Mapping spectroscopic uncertainties into prospective methane retrieval errors from Sentinel-5 and its precursor

Sentinel-5 (S5) and its precursor (S5P) are future European satellite missions aiming at global monitoring of methane (CH4) column-average dry air mole fractions (XCH4). The spectrometers to be deployed onboard the satellites record spectra of sunlight backscattered from the Earth's surface and atmosphere. In particular, they exploit CH4 absorption in the shortwave infrared spectral range around 1.65 mu m (S5 only) and 2.35 mu m (both S5 and S5P) wavelength. Given an accuracy goal of better than 2% for XCH4 to be delivered on regional scales, assessment and reduction of potential sources of systematic error such as spectroscopic uncertainties is crucial. Here, we investigate how spectroscopic errors propagate into retrieval errors on the global scale. To this end, absorption spectra of a ground-based Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) operating at very high spectral resolution serve as estimate for the quality of the spectroscopic parameters. Feeding the FTS fitting residuals as a perturbation into a global ensemble of simulated S5- and S5P-like spectra at relatively low spectral resolution, XCH4 retrieval errors exceed 0.6% in large parts of the world and show systematic correlations on regional scales, calling for improved spectroscopic parameters.

The International Financial Reporting Standards and Their Implementation into the US Accounting System

This paper examines the differences between the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The areas closely examined are the differences inrevenue recognition and reporting of intangibles. By investigating the differences in the two sets of standards I put into context the changes that would be necessary for domestic companies adopting the IFRS. The differences between these two standards are important because the implementation of IFRS into the U.S. is a current issue for domestic companies. It is important to note how the new standards will affect different companies in different ways. Depending on the size and industry, some companies will have a harder time transitioning to the new standards. However, once these companies make the transition to IFRS they will have better recognition and reporting of revenues and intangibles.

Position Errors Caused by GPS Height of Instrument Blunders

Height of instrument (HI) blunders in GPS measurements cause position errors. These errors can be pure vertical, pure horizontal, or a mixture of both. There are different error regimes depending on whether both the base and the rover both have HI blunders, if just the base has an HI blunder, or just the rover has an HI blunder. The resulting errors are on the order of 30 cm for receiver separations of 1000 km for an HI blunder of 2 m. Given the complicated nature of the errors, we believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect such errors by visual inspection. This serves to underline the necessity to enter GPS HI's correctly.

Position Errors Caused by GPS HI Blunders

Height of instrument (HI) blunders in GPS measurements cause position errors. These errors can be pure vertical, pure horizontal, or a mixture of both. There are different error regimes depending on whether both the base and the rover both have HI blunders, if just the base has an HI blunder, or just the rover has an HI blunder. The resulting errors are on the order of 30 cm for receiver separations of 1000 km for an HI blunder of 2 m. Given the complicated nature of the errors, we believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect such errors by visual inspection. This serves to underline the necessity to enter GPS HIs correctly.

Debate over Fair Value Accounting: Should we allow Politics to take an active role in setting accounting standards or should we trust that the SEC knows best?

In light of the recent economic downfall, there has been significant media coverage on the topic of fair value accounting. There are many critics of the accounting rule, who place blame on it for the destruction of billions of dollars in capital between financial institutions. Other commentators, however, see the rule as necessary and applaud its ability to bring the turmoil in the economy into the spotlight promptly so that it could be addressed effectively. This paper will begin by conducting a study of fair-value accounting from its inception in previous standards and then follow it through to Statement No. 157. I will then discuss the SEC’s most recent study of FAS157 and their decision as a result of the study.

Accounting for Athletics: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

The Balanced Scorecard is a managerial accounting system designed for internal use in order to align four different facets of a business with its overall vision and strategy. It emphasizes that an organization should not be judged on financial performance alone, but also on a variety of non-financial metrics. Using the Balanced Scorecard, the Athletic Department at the University of Connecticut has been analyzed as to which metrics are the most important in terms of fulfilling their mission statement.

Nursing-related medication errors: A review of factors that facilitate and hinder error reporting, and recommendations for improvement

Medication errors, one of the most frequent types of medical errors, are a common cause of patient harm in hospital systems today. Nurses at the bedside are in a position to encounter many of these errors since they are there at the start of the process (ordering/prescribing) and the end of the process (administration). One of the recommendations from the IOM (Institute of Medicine) report, "To Err is Human," was for organizations to identify and learn from medical errors through event reporting systems. While many organizations have reporting systems in place, research studies report a significant amount of underreporting by nurses. A systematic review of the literature was performed to identify contributing factors related to the reporting and not reporting of medication errors by nurses at the bedside.^ Articles included in the literature review were primary or secondary studies, dated January 1, 2000 – July 2009, related to nursing medication error reporting. All 634 articles were reviewed with an algorithm developed to standardize the review process and help filter out those that did not meet the study criteria. In addition, 142 article bibliographies were reviewed to find additional studies that were not found in the original literature search.^ After reviewing the 634 articles and the additional 108 articles discovered in the bibliography review, 41 articles met the study criteria and were used in the systematic literature review results.^ Fear of punitive reactions to medication errors was a frequent barrier to error reporting. Nurses fear reactions from their leadership, peers, patients and their families, nursing boards, and the media. Anonymous reporting systems and departments/organizations with a strong safety culture in place helped to encourage the reporting of medication errors by nursing staff.^ Many of the studies included in this literature review do not allow results that can be generalized. The majority of them took place in single institutions/organizations with limited sample sizes. Stronger studies with larger sample sizes need to be performed, utilizing data collection methods that have been validated, to determine stronger correlations between safety cultures and nurse error reporting.^

DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS, MEAN SQUARED ERRORS, AND CONFIDENCE LIMITS FOR RIDGE REGRESSION ESTIMATORS

A large number of ridge regression estimators have been proposed and used with little knowledge of their true distributions. Because of this lack of knowledge, these estimators cannot be used to test hypotheses or to form confidence intervals.^ This paper presents a basic technique for deriving the exact distribution functions for a class of generalized ridge estimators. The technique is applied to five prominent generalized ridge estimators. Graphs of the resulting distribution functions are presented. The actual behavior of these estimators is found to be considerably different than the behavior which is generally assumed for ridge estimators.^ This paper also uses the derived distributions to examine the mean squared error properties of the estimators. A technique for developing confidence intervals based on the generalized ridge estimators is also presented. ^

Errors in the administration of medication in inpatient hospitals: A systematic review of the research literature on commercial computerized physician order entry systems

Errors in the administration of medication represent a significant loss of medical resources and pose life altering or life threatening risks to patients. This paper considered the question, what impact do Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems have on medication errors in the hospital inpatient environment? Previous reviews have examined evidence of the impact of CPOE on medication errors, but have come to ambiguous conclusions as to the impact of CPOE and decision support systems (DSS). Forty-three papers were identified. Thirty-one demonstrated a significant reduction in prescribing error rates for all or some drug types; decreases in minor errors were most often reported. Several studies reported increases in the rate of duplicate orders and failures to remove contraindicated drugs, often attributed to inappropriate design or to an inability to operate the system properly. The evidence on the effectiveness of CPOE to reduce errors in medication administration is compelling though it is limited by modest study sample sizes and designs. ^

DEVELOPMENT OF NOVEL METHODS TO MINIMIZE THE IMPACT OF SEQUENCING ERRORS IN THE NEXT-GENERATION SEQUENCING DATA ANALYSIS

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has become a prominent tool in biological and biomedical research. However, NGS data analysis, such as de novo assembly, mapping and variants detection is far from maturity, and the high sequencing error-rate is one of the major problems. . To minimize the impact of sequencing errors, we developed a highly robust and efficient method, MTM, to correct the errors in NGS reads. We demonstrated the effectiveness of MTM on both single-cell data with highly non-uniform coverage and normal data with uniformly high coverage, reflecting that MTM’s performance does not rely on the coverage of the sequencing reads. MTM was also compared with Hammer and Quake, the best methods for correcting non-uniform and uniform data respectively. For non-uniform data, MTM outperformed both Hammer and Quake. For uniform data, MTM showed better performance than Quake and comparable results to Hammer. By making better error correction with MTM, the quality of downstream analysis, such as mapping and SNP detection, was improved. SNP calling is a major application of NGS technologies. However, the existence of sequencing errors complicates this process, especially for the low coverage (

Improving disclosure of medical errors: Including patients and family members in the disclosure process

Over the last decade, adverse events and medical errors have become a main focus of interest for the standards of quality and safety in the U.S. healthcare system (Weinstein & Henderson, 2009). Particularly when a medical error occurs, the disclosure of medical errors and its practices have become a focal point of the healthcare process. Patients and family members who have experienced a medical error might be able to provide knowledge and insight on how to improve the disclose process. However, patient and family member are not typically involved in the disclosure process, thus their experiences go unnoticed. ^ The purpose of this research was to explore how best to include patients and family members in the disclosure process regarding a medical error. The research consisted of 28 qualitative interviews from three stakeholder groups: Hospital Administrators, Clinical Service Providers, and Patients and Family Members. They were asked for their ideas and suggestions on how best to include patients and family members in the disclosure process. Framework Analysis was used to analyze this data and find prevalent themes based on the primary research question. A secondary aim was to index categories created based on the interviews that were collected. Data was used from the Texas Disclosure and Compensation Study with Dr. Eric Thomas as the Principal Investigator. Full acknowledgement of access to this data is given to Dr. Thomas. ^ The themes from the research revealed that each stakeholder group was interested and open to including patients and family members in the disclosure process and that the disclosure process should not be a "one-way" avenue. The themes gave many suggestions regarding how to best include patients and family members in the disclosure process of a medical error. Secondary aims revealed several ways to assess the ideas and suggestion given by the stakeholders. Overall, acceptability of getting the perspective of patients and family members was the most common theme. Comparison of each stakeholder group revealed that including patients and family members would be beneficial to improving hospital disclosure practices. ^ Conclusions included a list of recommendations and measureable appropriate strategies that could provide hospital with key stakeholders insights on how to improve their disclosure process. Sharing patients and family members experience with healthcare providers can encourage a shift in culture where patients are valued and active in participating in hospital practices. To my knowledge, this research is the very first of its kind and moves the disclosure process conversation forward in a patient-family member inclusion direction that will assist in improving disclosure practices. Future research should implement and evaluate the success of the various inclusion strategies.^

Homogenized radiosonde record at station Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen, 1993-2014

Radiosonde measurements obtained at the Arctic site Ny-Ålesund (78.9° N, 11.9° E), Svalbard, from 1993 to 2014 have been homogenized accounting for instrumentation discontinuities by correcting known errors in the manufacturer provided profiles. From the homogenized data record, the first Ny-Ålesund upper-air climatology of wind, temperature and humidity is presented, forming the background for the analysis of changes during the 22-year period. Particularly during the winter season, a strong increase in atmospheric temperature and humidity is observed, with a significant warming of the free troposphere in January and February up to 3 K per decade. This winter warming is even more pronounced in the boundary layer below 1 km, presumably amplified by mesoscale processes including e.g. orographic effects or the boundary layer capping inversion. Though the largest contribution to the increasing atmospheric water vapour column in winter originates from the lowermost 2 km, no increase in the contribution by specific humidity inversions is detected. Instead, we find an increase in the humidity content of the large scale background humidity profiles. At the same time, the tropospheric flow in winter is found to occur less frequent from northerly directions and to the same amount more frequent from the South. We conclude that changes in the atmospheric circulation lead to an enhanced advection of warm and moist air from lower latitudes to the Svalbard region in the winter season, causing the warming and moistening of the atmospheric column above Ny-Ålesund.