Making Pigs Fly

[Excerpt] You\u27ll see a union in this hospital when pigs fly. So went the opening statement by the new Vice President of Human Resources at St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois. Poor staffing ratios, out-dated equipment, lack of respect and nonexistent communications between staff and management compelled the nurses of St. Joe\u27s to bring in the Illinois Nurses Association in February, 1991. Fifteen years earlier, the nurses had tried to organize a union but had lost the election. Ironically, the issues were the same — nothing had changed. The odds still appeared to be against the nurses. St. Joe\u27s management hired the notorious law firm Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather and Geraldson and two anti-union consultants, Modern Management, Inc. and Management Science Associates. They forced the nurses out on strike for 61 days in the dead of winter, and tried to use a Colorado-based scab nursing agency, U.S. Nursing, to bring in replacements. This time, however, the outcome was different. On March 16, 1993, after the longest strike in Illinois nursing history, the St. Joe\u27s Nurses Association/INA signed their first contract with the medical center. Had it not been for the overwhelming community support, built over the months of organizing and negotiating, there is little chance that we would have won our struggle for a union. We gained support not only because our cause was just, but because we had strong primary and secondary leadership in the union and a communication network which reached every St. Joe\u27s nurse. We took these same strengths and skills and applied them in the public arena. Anti-union management, union-busting lawyers and consultants could not stop us

Zero-inflated truncated generalized Pareto distribution for the analysis of radio audience data

Extreme value data with a high clump-at-zero occur in many domains. Moreover, it might happen that the observed data are either truncated below a given threshold and/or might not be reliable enough below that threshold because of the recording devices. These situations occur, in particular, with radio audience data measured using personal meters that record environmental noise every minute, that is then matched to one of the several radio programs. There are therefore genuine zeros for respondents not listening to the radio, but also zeros corresponding to real listeners for whom the match between the recorded noise and the radio program could not be achieved. Since radio audiences are important for radio broadcasters in order, for example, to determine advertisement price policies, possibly according to the type of audience at different time points, it is essential to be able to explain not only the probability of listening to a radio but also the average time spent listening to the radio by means of the characteristics of the listeners. In this paper we propose a generalized linear model for zero-inflated truncated Pareto distribution (ZITPo) that we use to fit audience radio data. Because it is based on the generalized Pareto distribution, the ZITPo model has nice properties such as model invariance to the choice of the threshold and from which a natural residual measure can be derived to assess the model fit to the data. From a general formulation of the most popular models for zero-inflated data, we derive our model by considering successively the truncated case, the generalized Pareto distribution and then the inclusion of covariates to explain the nonzero proportion of listeners and their average listening time. By means of simulations, we study the performance of the maximum likelihood estimator (and derived inference) and use the model to fully analyze the audience data of a radio station in a certain area of Switzerland.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS358 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Optimization and Parallelization of a force field for silicon using OpenMP

The force field by Lenosky and coworkers is the latest force field for silicon which is one of the most studied materials. It has turned out to be highly accurate in a large range of test cases. The optimization and parallelization of this force field using OpenMp and Fortan90 is described here. The optimized program allows us to handle a very large number of silicon atoms in large scale simulations. Since all the parallelization is hidden in a single subroutine that returns the total energies and forces, this subroutine can be called from within a serial program in an user friendly way.Comment: The program can be obtained upon request from the author ([email protected]

La mort et le rien

Ce texte se veut une explicitation simple d’une parole énigmatique de Heidegger : La mort est l’écrin du rien. Il invite à une lecture du texte original qui a besoin de prendre la parole avant le débit des discussions de second degré. Des « scientifiques » s’en trouveront frustrés. Mais tout esprit attentif pourra entrevoir à partir de l’oeuvre même comment la mort, assumée véritablement dans la vie, tout en affichant impitoyablement le rien des choses laisse se profiler l’être, et partant introduit la pensée dans le dépaysement de l’étrange, de l’originel, de ce qui ne renvoie plus à autre chose comme à son fondement. Cet abîme du rien entretient l’interrogation et dispense à la pensée l’ouverture d’une inquiétude salvatrice.This text works towards a simple explanation of an enigmatic speech by Heidegger: La mort est l’écrin du rien. It invites a reading of the original text that needs to speak before the flow of second order discussions. "Scientists" will find themselves frustrated. But all attentive minds can glimpse from the work itself, how death, genuinely accepted in life, though mercilessly announcing nothingness, left to emanate being and hence introduces thinking in the disorientation of the strange, of the original, of that which no longer refers to something else, like its foundation. This abyss of nothingness maintains a questioning and offers to a thinking the opening of a saving anxiety

Measurement of macroscopic plasma parameters with a radio experiment: Interpretation of the quasi-thermal noise spectrum observed in the solar wind

The ISEE-3 SBH radio receiver has provided the first systematic observations of the quasi-thermal (plasma waves) noise in the solar wind plasma. The theoretical interpretation of that noise involves the particle distribution function so that electric noise measurements with long antennas provide a fast and independent method of measuring plasma parameters: densities and temperatures of a two component (core and halo) electron distribution function have been obtained in that way. The polarization of that noise is frequency dependent and sensitive to the drift velocity of the electron population. Below the plasma frequency, there is evidence of a weak noise spectrum with spectral index -1 which is not yet accounted for by the theory. The theoretical treatment of the noise associated with the low energy (thermal) proton population shows that the moving electrical antenna radiates in the surrounding plasma by Carenkov emission which becomes predominant at the low frequencies, below about 0.1 F sub P