Registered nurses’ descriptions of caring: a phenomenographic interview study

Background: Nursing has come a long way since the days of Florence Nightingale and even though no consensus exists it would seem reasonable to assume that caring still remains the inner core, the essence of nursing. In the light of the societal, contextual and political changes that have taken place during the 21st century, it is important to explore whether these might have influenced the essence of nursing. The aim of this study was to describe registered nurses’ conceptions of caring. Methods: A qualitative design with a phenomenographic approach was used. The interviews with twenty-one nurses took place between March and May 2013 and the transcripts were analysed inspired by Marton and Booth’s description of phenomenography. Results: The analysis mirrored four qualitatively different ways of understanding caring from the nurses’ perspective: caring as person-centredness, caring as safeguarding the patient’s best interests, caring as nursing interventions and caring as contextually intertwined. Conclusion: The most comprehensive feature of the nurses’ collective understanding of caring was their recognition and acknowledgment of the person behind the patient, i.e. person-centredness. However, caring was described as being part of an intricate interplay in the care context, which has impacted on all the described conceptions of caring. Greater emphasis on the care context, i.e. the environment in which caring takes place, are warranted as this could mitigate the possibility that essential care is left unaddressed, thus contributing to better quality of care and safer patient care

Policy guidelines for open access and data dissemination and preservation

The RECODE project identified two overarching issues that are inhibiting take-up of policies related to open access to research data: a lack of a coherent open data ecosystem; and a lack of attention to the specificity of research practices, processes and forms of data collections. Against this background, the report provides policy recommendations on open access to research data targeted at key stakeholders in promoting open access: research funders; data managers; research institutions; and publishers. These recommendations will assist the above stakeholders in furthering the goals of open access to research data in each of their organizations and networks. Recommendations include both overarching and stakeholder-specific ones as suggestions to address and attend to these two issues by building on or learning from existing experience. In doing so, RECODE recognises that in some situations it is appropriate to build consensus and transfer good practice across disciplines and stakeholder groups, while in others it is appropriate to enable and support specific groups to maintain their particularity in relation to disseminating, preserving and re-using research data. In addition, for each stakeholder group good practice examples are provided that can serve as “models” for providing open access to research data. Finally, the recommendations and good practice examples will reduce “costs” associated with providing open access, as stakeholders do not need to develop their own expertise, but can use this information as a foundation to develop their own policies, support actions and initiatives

Algorithms for Automated Live Migration of Virtual Machines

We present two strategies to balance the load in a system with multiple virtual machines (VMs) through automated live migration. When the push strategy is used, overloaded hosts try to migrate workload to less loaded nodes. On the other hand, when the pull strategy is employed, the light-loaded hosts take the initiative to offload overloaded nodes. The performance of the proposed strategies was evaluated through simulations. We have discovered that the strategies complement each other, in the sense that each strategy comes out as “best” under different types of workload. For example, the pull strategy is able to quickly re-distribute the load of the system when the load is in the range low-to-medium, while the push strategy is faster when the load is medium-to-high. Our evaluation shows that when adding or removing a large number of virtual machines in the system, the “best” strategy can re-balance the system in 4–15 minutes

Cognitive amplify-and-forward relay networks with beamforming under primary user power constraint over Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, we analyze the performance of cognitive amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks with beamforming under the peak interference power constraint of the primary user (PU). We focus on the scenario that beamforming is applied at the multi-antenna secondary transmitter and receiver. Also, the secondary relay network operates in channel state information assisted AF mode, and the signals undergo independent Nakagami-m fading. In particular, closed-form expressions for the outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) of the considered network over Nakagami-m fading are presented. More importantly, asymptotic closed-form expressions for the outage probability and SER are derived. These tractable closed-form expressions for the network performance readily enable us to evaluate and examine the impact of network parameters on the system performance. Specifically, the impact of the number of antennas, the fading severity parameters, the channel mean powers, and the peak interference power is addressed. The asymptotic analysis manifests that the peak interference power constraint imposed on the secondary relay network has no effect on the diversity gain. However, the coding gain is affected by the fading parameters of the links from the primary receiver to the secondary relay network

Web-Enabled Customer Involvement in Innovation Activities : a Firm's Perspective

Customer involvement in innovation activities is a common practice among companies in most industries. It has been widely researched by scholars to demonstrate its risks and advantages. Yet, the growing importance and recognition of the Internet are transforming the scope, boundaries, and dynamics of interactions among firms and customers. Progressing information and communication technologies (ICTs) (including the Internet) enable faster, cheaper, and more efficient collaboration. The demonstrated benefits of using various web-based methods for customer involvement in innovation activities have encouraged companies to adopt a new approach. Despite this, there is a lack of knowledge about associated challenges. In addition, prior research was unable to provide empirical evidence of the claimed benefits ensuing from web-enabled customer involvement. As a result, companies may experience unforeseen difficulties and may not be able to achieve what they expect from their implementation of web-based methods. This thesis aims to address this research gap by exploring web-enabled customer involvement from a firm’s perspective. The overall purpose of this dissertation is to increase the understanding of web-enabled customer involvement in innovation activities by exploring its use and its impact on firms’ innovation, as well as management competences needed for its efficient realization. The thesis draws on the concept of absorptive capacity and includes four empirical studies from various industries. The adoption levels of a wide range of web-based methods were identified and compared with the findings of the previous study, thereby uncovering interesting changes in their popularity, as well as differences in adoption among companies in various industries. The empirical findings of this thesis show that web-based methods increase a company’s probability to introduce service innovations. Three types of challenges related to different types of web-based methods were identified and verified. It was also possible to identify corresponding management practices to handle these challenges. The management practices form three firm competences, constituting a specific absorptive capacity. It was proved that all dimensions of this specific absorptive capacity are needed for successful and effective customer involvement. Insights of this thesis contribute to increasing the understanding of web-enabled customer involvement. Therefore, the thesis provides companies with empirically verified knowledge that is necessary to make decisions about the implementation and management of web-enabled customer involvement

Performance Analysis of a Cognitive Radio Network with a Buffered Relay

In this paper, we analyze the packet transmission time in a cognitive cooperative radio network (CCRN) where a secondary transmitter (SU-Tx) sends packets to a secondary receiver (SU-Rx) through the help of a secondary relay (SR). In particular, we assume that the SU-Tx and SR are subject to the joint constraint of the timeout probability of the primary user (PU) and the peak transmit powers of the secondary users. On this basis, we investigate the impact of the transmit power of the PUs and channel mean powers on the packet transmission time of the CCRN. Utilizing the concept of timeout, adaptive transmit power allocation policies for the SU-Tx and SR are considered. More importantly, analytical expressions for the endto- end throughput, end-to-end packet transmission time, and stable condition for the SR operation are obtained. Our results indicate that the second hop of the considered CCRN is not a bottleneck if the channel mean powers of the interference links of the networks are small and the SR peak transmit power is set to a high value

Software Quality Evaluation for Evolving Systems in Distributed Development Environments

Context: There is an overwhelming prevalence of companies developing software in global software development (GSD) contexts. The existing body of knowledge, however, falls short of providing comprehensive empirical evidence on the implication of GSD contexts on software quality for evolving software systems. Therefore there is limited evidence to support practitioners that need to make informed decisions about ongoing or future GSD projects. Objective: This thesis work seeks to explore changes in quality, as well as to gather confounding factors that influence quality, for software systems that evolve in GSD contexts. Method: The research work in this thesis includes empirical work that was performed through exploratory case studies. This involved analysis of quantitative data consisting of defects as an indicator for quality, and measures that capture software evolution, and qualitative data from company documentations, interviews, focus group meetings, and questionnaires. An extensive literature review was also performed to gather information that was used to support the empirical investigations. Results: Offshoring software development work, to a location that has employees with limited or no prior experience with the software product, as observed in software transfers, can have a negative impact on quality. Engaging in long periods of distributed development with an offshore site and eventually handing over all responsibilities to the offshore site can be an alternative to software transfers. This approach can alleviate a negative effect on quality. Finally, the studies highlight the importance of taking into account the GSD context when investigating quality for software that is developed in globally distributed environments. This helps with making valid inferences about the development settings in GSD projects in relation to quality. Conclusion: The empirical work presented in this thesis can be useful input for practitioners that are planning to develop software in globally distributed environments. For example, the insights on confounding factors or mitigation practices that are linked to quality in the empirical studies can be used as input to support decision-making processes when planning similar GSD projects. Consequently, lessons learned from the empirical investigations were used to formulate a method, GSD-QuID, for investigating quality using defects for evolving systems. The method is expected to help researchers avoid making incorrect inferences about the implications of GSD contexts on quality for evolving software systems, when using defects as a quality indicator. This in turn will benefit practitioners that need the information to make informed decisions for software that is developed in similar circumstances

On the Performance Assessment of Advanced Cognitive Radio Networks

Due to the rapid development of wireless communications together with the inflexibility of the current spectrum allocation policy, radio spectrum becomes more and more exhausted. One of the critical challenges of wireless communication systems is to efficiently utilize the limited frequency resources to be able to support the growing demand of high data rate wireless services. As a promising solution, cognitive radios have been suggested to deal with the scarcity and under-utilization of radio spectrum. The basic idea behind cognitive radios is to allow unlicensed users, also called secondary users (SUs), to access the licensed spectrum of primary users (PUs) which improves spectrum utilization. In order to not degrade the performance of the primary networks, SUs have to deploy interference control, interference mitigating, or interference avoidance techniques to minimize the interference incurred at the PUs. Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have stimulated a variety of studies on improving spectrum utilization. In this context, this thesis has two main objectives. Firstly, it investigates the performance of single hop CRNs with spectrum sharing and opportunistic spectrum access. Secondly, the thesis analyzes the performance improvements of two hop cognitive radio networks when incorporating advanced radio transmission techniques. The thesis is divided into three parts consisting of an introduction part and two research parts based on peer-reviewed publications. Fundamental background on radio propagation channels, cognitive radios, and advanced radio transmission techniques are discussed in the introduction. In the first research part, the performance of single hop CRNs is analyzed. Specifically, underlay spectrum access using M/G/1/K queueing approaches is presented in Part I-A while dynamic spectrum access with prioritized traffics is studied in Part I-B. In the second research part, the performance benefits of integrating advanced radio transmission techniques into cognitive cooperative radio networks (CCRNs) are investigated. In particular, opportunistic spectrum access for amplify-and-forward CCRNs is presented in Part II-A where collaborative spectrum sensing is deployed among the SUs to enhance the accuracy of spectrum sensing. In Part II-B, the effect of channel estimation error and feedback delay on the outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) of multiple-input multiple-output CCRNs is investigated. In Part II-C, adaptive modulation and coding is employed for decode-and-forward CCRNs to improve the spectrum efficiency and to avoid buffer overflow at the relay. Finally, a hybrid interweave-underlay spectrum access scheme for a CCRN is proposed in Part II-D. In this work, the dynamic spectrum access of the PUs and SUs is modeled as a Markov chain which then is utilized to evaluate the outage probability, SER, and outage capacity of the CCRN

An Organic View of Prototyping in Information System Development

This paper presents an organic view of prototyping for managing dynamic factors involved in evolutionary design of information systems (IS). Those dynamic factors can be caused by, for example, continuing suggestions from users, changes in the technologies, and users-designers learning related stepwise progresses. Expanding the evolutionary prototyping to ‘start small and grow’, the organic view of prototyping proposes two prerequisites to do so, namely 1) a sustainable and adaptive ‘embryo’ – an organic structure of the future system, and 2) an embedded learning and feedback management that the actors of the system (users, designers, decision makers, administrators) can communicate with each other. An example of eHealth system design demonstrates how the prerequisites can be implemented

Quality of Experience on Smartphones : Network, Application, and Energy Perspectives

Smartphones have become crucial enablers for users to exploit online services such as learning, leisure, communicating, and socializing. The user-perceived quality of applications and services is an important factor to consider, in order to achieve lean resource management, to prevent user churn and revenue depletion of service or network providers. This is often studied within the scope of Quality of Experience (QoE), which has attracted researchers both in academia and industry. The objective of this thesis is to study the most important factors influencing QoE on smartphones and synthesize solutions for intervention. The temporal impairments during a real-time energy-hungry video streaming are studied. The aim is to quantify the influence of temporal impairments on the user-perceived video QoE at the network and application level together with energy measurements, and also to propose solutions to reduce smartphone energy consumption without degrading the user’s QoE on the smartphone for both user-interactive, e.g., video, and non-interactive cases. QoE measurements on smartphones are performed throughout in-the-wild user studies. A set of quantitative Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment tools are implemented and deployed for automatic data logging at the network- and application-level. Online momentary survey, Experience Sampling Method (ESM) software, and Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) along weekly face-to-face user interviews are employed. The subjective QoE is obtained through qualitative feedback including Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as well as in-situ indications of poor experiences by users. Additionally, energy measurements on smartphones are conducted in controlled-lab environment with the Monsoon device. The QoE of smartphone applications and services perceived by users depends on many factors including anomalies in the network, application, and also the energy consumption. At the network-level, high packet delay variation causes long video freezes that eventually impact negatively the end-user perceived quality. The freezes can be quantified as large time gaps in-between the displayed pictures during a video stream at the application-level. We show that the inter-picture time in cellular-based video stream can be represented via two-state exponential ON/OFF models. We show models representing the non-linear relationship between the QoE and the mean inter-picture time. It is shown that energy measurements help to reveal the temporal impairments in video stream enabling energy consumption as a QoE indicator. Next, energy waste and saving during temporal impairments are identified. Additionally, other video streaming use cases, e.g., “download first and watch later”, are studied and appropriate energy-saving download scheduling mechanisms are recommended. The possibility for decreasing energy consumption when the smartphone screen is OFF, while maintaining QoE, is revealed. We first show exponential models to represent user’s interaction with smartphone, then propose a NyxEnergySaver software, to control the cellular network interface in a personalized manner to save smartphone energy. According to our findings, more than 30% smartphone energy can be saved without impacting the user-perceived QoE