The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which originates in the Pacific, is the strongest and most well-known mode of tropical climate variability. Its reach is global, and it can force climate variations of the tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans by perturbing the global atmospheric circulation. Less appreciated is how the tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans affect the Pacific. Especially noteworthy is the multidecadal Atlantic warming that began in the late 1990s, because recent research suggests that it has influenced Indo-Pacific climate, the character of the ENSO cycle, and the hiatus in global surface warming. Discovery of these pantropical interactions provides a pathway forward for improving predictions of climate variability in the current climate and for refining projections of future climate under different anthropogenic forcing scenarios.
The layered semiconductor SnSe is one of the highest-performing thermoelectric materials known. We demonstrate, through a first-principles lattice-dynamics study, that the high-temperature Cmcm phase is a dynamic average over lower-symmetry minima separated by very small energetic barriers. Compared to the low-temperature Pnma phase, the Cmcm phase displays a phonon softening and enhanced three-phonon scattering, leading to an anharmonic damping of the low-frequency modes and hence the thermal transport. We develop a renormalization scheme to quantify the effect of the soft modes on the calculated properties, and confirm that the anharmonicity is an inherent feature of the Cmcm phase. These results suggest a design concept for thermal insulators and thermoelectric materials, based on displacive instabilities, and highlight the power of lattice-dynamics calculations for materials characterization.
BackgroundTreatment effectiveness holds considerable importance in the association between service quality and satisfaction in medical service studies. While complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use grows more prominent, comprehensive evaluations of the quality of medical service at CAM-oriented hospitals are scarce. This study assesses the quality of medical services provided at a CAM-oriented hospital of Korean medicine using the service encounter system approach and analyzes the influence of treatment effectiveness on patient loyalty.MethodsA survey study using one-on-one interviews was conducted using a cross-sectional design in outpatients visiting one of fifteen Korean medicine facilities located throughout Korea. A total of 880 surveys were completed from June to July, 2014, and 728 surveys were included in the final analysis after excluding incomplete or incorrect questionnaires. The reliability and validity of the surveys was confirmed using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and confirmatory factor analysis, and a structural equation modeling analysis was performed to verify causality and association between factors (quality of medical service, treatment effectiveness, patient satisfaction, and intent to revisit).ResultsThe measured factors of physician performance and quality of service procedures had a positive effect on treatment effectiveness. The impression of the facilities and environment directly impacted satisfaction rates for interpersonal-based medical service encounters, while treatment effectiveness positively affected satisfaction regarding quality of medical service. However, treatment effectiveness had a more significant effect on satisfaction compared to facilities and environment, and it indirectly affected satisfaction and directly influenced intent to revisit. Treatment effectiveness and satisfaction both positively influenced intent to revisit.ConclusionsThe importance of treatment effectiveness should be recognized when examining quality of medical services, and we hope that these findings may contribute to future studies.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12906-017-1691-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
In this paper, we report an analysis of electrical bias stress instability in amorphous InGaZnO (a-IGZO) thinfilm transistors (TFTs). Understanding the variations of TFT characteristics under an electrical bias stress is important for commercial goals. In this experiment, the positive gate bias is initially applied to the tested a-IGZO TFTs, and subsequently, the negative gate bias is applied to the TFTs. For comparison with the subsequently negative-gate-bias-applied TFTs, another experiment is performed by directly applying the negative gate bias to the tested TFTs. For the positive gate bias stress, a positive shift in the threshold voltage (V th ) with no apparent change in the subthreshold swing (S SUB ) is observed. On the other hand, when the negative gate bias is subsequently applied, the TFTs exhibit higher mobility with no significant change in S SUB , whereas the shift of the V th is much smaller than that in the positive gate bias stress case. These phenomena are most likely induced by positively charged donor-like subgap density of states and the detrapping of trapped interface charge during the positive gate bias stress. The proposed mechanism was verified by device simulation. Thus, the proposed model can explain the instability for both positive and negative bias stresses in a-IGZO TFTs.Index Terms-Density of states (DOS), electrical instability, InGaZnO (IGZO), modeling, thin-film transistors (TFTs).
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