Browsing by Subject "Coordination"
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Item The coordination and implementation of the Affordable Care Act in Texas : Medicaid eligibility and the environmental context(2012-08) Daneel, Asha Staudt; Warner, David C.; Travis, Dnika J.The Affordable Care Act (ACA) seeks to increase the low-income population’s access to health care coverage by expanding Medicaid eligibility and providing subsidies to individuals meeting certain income thresholds. The citizens of Texas would benefit greatly from the ACA provisions, as the state offers limited opportunities for individuals to access insurance, evidenced by the 6.3 million residents without health care coverage. But political leaders in Texas have a long-standing commitment to limited government, low taxes, and states’ rights in a federal system of government. In the 1990s, Texas legislators, with bipartisan support, laid the groundwork over the last decade for the minimal, yet significant preparations that administration used to coordinate ACA implementation. Yet legislators’ commitment to limited government and states’ rights placed additional constraints on the ability of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) to implement ACA provisions by refusing to utilize the 82nd legislative session to prepare the state for impending deadlines. Instead, administrators developed an interagency effort, the Eligibility Modernization Project (EMP), to streamline eligibility determinations and increase clients’ access to information and services. EMP’s initiatives mirror ACA provisions, but also seeks to achieve policy goals that both Republican and Democratic legislators support, such as providing effective and efficient eligibility determinations. Nevertheless, legislators and administrators must go beyond EMP’s efforts to adequately prepare the eligibility system for impending ACA deadlines. Policy recommendations include further streamlining and integrating the health subsidy system with a state-based health insurance exchange, increasing access to coverage by expanding Medicaid eligibility, adequately preparing the workforce for changes, and promoting long-term planning. These solutions will provide a sounder infrastructure for HHSC to prepare for ACA coordination and implementation, while increasing access to health care coverage for the low-income population.Item Interference alignment from theory to practice(2013-05) El Ayach, Omar; Heath, Robert W., Ph. D.Wireless systems in which multiple users simultaneously access the propagation medium suffer from co-channel interference. Untreated interference limits the total amount of data that can be communicated reliably across the wireless links. If interfering users allocate a portion of the system's resources for information exchange and coordination, the effect of interference can be mitigated. Interference alignment (IA) is an example of a cooperative signaling strategy that alleviates the problem of co-channel interference and promises large gains in spectral efficiency. To enable alignment in practical wireless systems, channel state information (CSI) must be shared both efficiently and accurately. In this dissertation, I develop low-overhead CSI feedback strategies that help networks realize the information-theoretic performance of IA and facilitate its adoption in practical systems. The developed strategies leverage the concepts of analog, digital, and differential feedback to provide IA networks with significantly more accurate and affordable CSI when compared to existing solutions. In my first contribution, I develop an analog feedback strategy to enable IA in multiple antenna systems; multiple antennas are one of IA's key enabling technologies and perhaps the most promising IA use case. In my second contribution, I leverage temporal correlation to improve CSI quantization in limited feedback single-antenna systems. The Grassmannian differential strategy developed provides several orders of magnitude in CSI compression and ensures almost-perfect IA performance in various fading scenarios. In my final contribution, I complete my practical treatment of IA by revisiting its performance when CSI acquisition overhead is explicitly accounted for. This last contribution settles the viability of IA, from a CSI acquisition perspective, and demonstrates the utility of the proposed feedback strategies in transitioning interference alignment from theory to practice.Item The Role of Muscle Fatigue on Movement Timing and Stability during Repetitive Tasks(2009-05) Gates, Deanna H.; Dingwell, Jonathan B.; Barr, Ronald; Griffin, Lisa; Moore, J.; Rylander, H.Repetitive stress injuries are common in the workplace where workers perform repetitive tasks continuously throughout the day. Muscle fatigue may lead to injury either directly through muscle damage or indirectly through changes in coordination, development of muscle imbalances, kinematic and muscle activation variability, and/or movement instability. To better understand the role of muscle fatigue in changes in movement parameters, we studied how muscle fatigue and muscle imbalances affected the control of movement timing, variability, and stability during a repetitive upper extremity sawing task. Since muscle fatigue leads to delayed muscle and cognitive response times, we might expect the ability to maintain movement timing would decline with muscle fatigue. We compared timing errors pre- and post-fatigue as subjects performed this repetitive sawing task synchronized with a metronome using standard techniques and a goal-equivalent manifold (GEM) approach. No differences in basic performance parameters were found. Significant decreases in the temporal correlations of the timing errors and velocities indicated that subjects made more frequent corrections to their movements post-fatigue. Muscle fatigue may lead to movement instability through a variety of mechanisms including delayed muscle response times and muscle imbalances. To measure movement stability, we must first define a state space that describes the movement. We compared a variety of different state space definitions and found that state spaces composed of angles and velocities with little redundant information provide the most consistent results. We then studied the affect of fatigue on the shoulder flexor muscles and general fatigue of the arm on movement stability. Subjects were able to maintain stability in spite of muscle fatigue, shoulder strength imbalance and decreased muscle cocontraction. Little is known about the time course for adaptations in response to fatigue. We studied the effect of muscle fatigue on movement coordination, kinematic variability and movement stability while subjects performed the same sawing task at two work heights. Increasing the height of the task caused subjects to make more adjustments to their movement patterns in response to muscle fatigue. Subjects also exhibited some increases in kinematic variability at the shoulder but no changes in movement stability. These findings suggest that people alter their kinematic patterns in response to fatigue possibly to maintain stability at the expense of increased variability.Item Three explanations for the link between language style matching and liking(2011-08) Ireland, Molly Elizabeth 1984-; Pennebaker, James W.People who match each other’s language styles in dialogue tend to have more positive interactions. A person’s language style is defined by his or her use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles), a class of short, commonly used words that make up the grammatical structure of language. The language style matching (LSM) metric indexes the degree of similarity between two individual’s patterns of function word usage. Previous research assumes that function word similarity and its positive social correlates, such as liking, result from convergence that occurs within an interaction. However, the link between language style similarity and liking may alternately be explained by two kinds of preexisting similarity. First, people tend to like each other more to the degree that they are similar in terms of attitudes, backgrounds, and personality, and these kinds of interpersonal similarity tend to manifest themselves in similar function word use. Second, processing fluency research suggests that people will process typical language styles—which are by definition similar to most other language styles in a normal population—more fluently and thus will like typical speakers more than less typical speakers. Two studies compared the relationship between liking and three measures of function word similarity (convergence, baseline similarity, and typicality) during brief conversations. Each language similarity variable was hypothesized to positively predict measures of liking individually. However, consistent with the behavior coordination literature, only LSM, a measure of within-conversation language convergence, was expected to predict liking above and beyond the other predictors. Study 1 revealed that both men and women in mixed-sex dyads were more interested in contacting their partners the more that their language styles converged during 4-minute face-to-face conversations. Men were also more interested in contacting their female partners to the degree that women’s baseline language styles matched their own. Study 2 found that men, but not women, were more interested in contacting their partners the more that they matched each other’s language styles during 8-minute online chats. Results support the hypothesis that language convergence, theoretically an index of interpersonal engagement, positively predicts quasi-behavioral measures of liking.