Turning Point for Measurement System Although the current performance measurement system has served VA well, we are at a turning point. The Executive Career Field (ECF) plan for 2008 is the beginning of a new use of performance measurement. In 1995, when measures became a formalized part of the ECF plan by which all Senior Executives in the Veterans Health Administration are evaluated, all VA p...

Parkinson's disease is characterized by tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural abnormalities ascribed to the loss of nigrostriatal dopamine (DA). Symptoms similar to the human condition can be produced in the rat by DA-depleting 6-hydroxydopamine injections made into the nigrostriatal system. After a unilateral lesion, the rat symptoms include sensory and motor impairments and turning bia...

When a real homotopy is used for solving a polynomial system with real coefficients, bifurcation of some of the homotopy paths at singular points is inevitable. The main result of this paper shows that, generically, the solution set of a real homotopy contains no singular point other than a finite number of quadratic turning points. At a quadratic turning point, the bifurcation phenomenon is qu...

If a point is in the ¿u-limit set and the a-limit set of the same point, then we call it a y-limit point. Then a y-limit point is an w-limit point and thus a nonwandering point. In this paper, we prove that, on the interval, a nonwandering point which is not a y-limit point is in the closure of the set of forward images of turning points, and such points are not always the forward images of tur...

The time-optimal trajectory for an airplane from some starting point to some final point is studied by many authors. Here, we consider the extension of robot planer motion of Dubins model in three dimensional spaces. In this model, the system has independent bounded control over both the altitude velocity and the turning rate of airplane movement in a non-obstacle space. Here, in this paper a g...

Among all aspects of IT Portfolio Management (ITPM), we find the key concept of efficient frontier to be the most applicable illustration for managing IT resources as multiple heterogeneous IT portfolios. To better assist decision-makers (e.g., senior executives) in selecting the most qualified IT portfolio choice, we propose a new IT Portfolio Efficient Frontier model that incorporates decisio...

The dynamics of one dimensional iterative maps in the regime of fully developed chaos is studied in detail. Motivated by the observation of dynamical structures around the unstable fixed point we introduce the geometrical concept of a turning point which represents a local minimum or maximum of the trajectory. Following we investigate the highly organized and structured distribution of turning ...

Piecewise growth curvemodel (PGCM) is often usedwhen the underlying growth process is not linear and is hypothesized to consist of phasic developments connected by turning points (or knots or change points). When fitting a PGCM, the conventional practice is to specify turning points a priori. However, the true turning points are often unknown and misspecifications of turning points may occur. T...