Remote processing of firm microdata at the Bank of Italy

Providing the possibility to run personalised econometric/statistical analyses on the appropriate data sets by remote processing allows greater flexibility in the production of economic information. Binding confidentiality requirements are required with business survey data. The Bank of Italy's infrastructure allows its business survey data to be exploited, while preserving anonymity of individual data. The system is based on the LISSY platform and has been already adopted by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and other research centres. Firms' privacy is safeguarded by forbidding potentially confidentiality-breaking programme statements and by denying the visualisation of individual data. Data confidentiality is protected by removing key identifiers from the database and by trimming data in the right tail of the distribution. The platform provides its services through plain-text e-mails. The authorised user sends an e-mail containing an identifying header followed by a statistical programme to a predetermined address. The system checks the validity of the header, strips out the code and submits it in a batch to one of the econometric/statistical packages available (SAS and Stata). The outputs are mailed back to the user after passing an array of automatic and manual checks.microdata, confidentiality, remote access

Remote Management: Increased Management Efficiency as a Means to Increased Commitment in Remote Field Personnel

Master's thesis in Strategic ManagementIn Norway, there are thousands of offshore employees working in service companies and relying on remote management (Blomgren, Harstad & Hause-Reve, 2012). Due to current downturn in the petroleum industry, many of these employees are affected by organizational efficiency initiatives. Often connected to downsizing, organizational change and uncertainty, these initiatives can have a negative effect on commitment (De Cuyper, 2009). Strong commitment ensures remote employees’ motivation, productivity and reliability (Connaughton and Daly, 2004). Studies indicate an enhanced need for fostering remote employees’ commitment to their organization, but the very nature of their work situation potentially raises the bar for achieving it (Depickere, 1999; Hoeffing, 2001). This thesis is an exploratory case study of the Drilling Services product line in Baker Hughes Norway. The purpose of the thesis was to create a framework for evaluating efficiency initiatives in onshore management in terms of effect on remote field personnel’s commitment level. To investigate this issue, a problem statement and two corresponding research questions was defined. Problem Statement: How can efficiency initiatives in onshore management increase remote filed personnel’s commitment level? Data was collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed based on a theoretical framework constructed by existing research on commitment and operational efficiency. First, the current commitment level was analyzed, revealing that it was high, but to offshore teams rather than to the organization. Next, organizational factors influencing commitment level was identified and sorted into categories and themes, before evaluating efficiency initiatives based on lean principles. The efficiency initiatives were then linked to the organizational factors that effected commitment level. For Drilling Services in Baker Hughes Norway, breaking the departments into smaller groups, implementing software for onshore management and improve communication systems internally in onshore management and externally to offshore employees were identified as the efficiency initiatives that would have the strongest effect on remote employees commitment level

News House - A Sublime Horizontal Portal

Ensuring web services for smart phones is the recent important topic, this initiated because of the multiple uses of smart phone, today’s modern day user uses it for mobile banking, email, searching location and data. Smart phones are sophisticated in terms of processing speed, memory, an embedded camera, sensors and same time parallel state of art in wireless network and software web technologies. This project will guide our work in the current generation platform technologies and standards such as Android OS and REST for News Portal. It is an accomplished news portal displaying multiple news from across the nation in a collaborating manner at a single location. It focuses in bringing more ease for gathering news about any topic from across the nation. Each newspaper and news channel displays the news on their websites. So an individual needs to visit multiple websites if the individual requires knowledge about any particular news in any language the user wants. So this portal focuses in bringing multiple news of multiple languages grouped together under one platform by providing web services. Multiple types of news right from breaking news to sports news are roofed over here. Knowledge about daily horoscope along with updated stock prices is gained in this single portal. Mobile equipments (Smart phones, PDA, Tablets), Mobile web services and wireless communications, by the year 2020 will play a major role in all conditions of our lives. It is used to develop access to meaningful and required data and content through mobile web services. Most of the issues of mobile web services can be resolved by concentrating on the dispersed nature and remote disposition of mobile applications. One of the most likely way to develop viable web services for mobile devices is to add more intelligence to the web services

Breaking the Barriers to Specialty Care: Practical Ideas to Improve Health Equity and Reduce Cost - Increasing Specialty Care Availability

Tremendous health outcome inequities remain in the U.S. across race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and geography—particularly for those with serious conditions such as lung or skin cancer, HIV/AIDS, or cardiovascular disease.These inequities are driven by a complex set of factors—including distance to a specialist, insurance coverage, provider bias, and a patient's housing and healthy food access. These inequities not only harm patients, resulting in avoidable illness and death, they also drive unnecessary health systems costs.This 5-part series highlights the urgent need to address these issues, providing resources such as case studies, data, and recommendations to help the health care sector make meaningful strides toward achieving equity in specialty care.Top TakeawaysThere are vast inequalities in access to and outcomes from specialty health care in the U.S. These inequalities are worst for minority patients, low-income patients, patients with limited English language proficiency, and patients in rural areas.A number of solutions have emerged to improve health outcomes for minority and medically underserved patients. These solutions fall into three main categories: increasing specialty care availability, ensuring high-quality care, and helping patients engage in care.As these inequities are also significant drivers of health costs, payers, health care provider organizations, and policy makers have a strong incentive to invest in solutions that will both improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary costs. These actors play a critical role in ensuring that equity is embedded into core care delivery at scale.Part 2: "Increasing Specialty Care Availability"Solutions such as telemedicine, innovative partnerships between specialists and primary care physicians, and centralized local referral networks improve access to specialty care

Cybersecurity and the Digital Health: An Investigation on the State of the Art and the Position of the Actors

Cybercrime is increasingly exposing the health domain to growing risk. The push towards a strong connection of citizens to health services, through digitalization, has undisputed advantages. Digital health allows remote care, the use of medical devices with a high mechatronic and IT content with strong automation, and a large interconnection of hospital networks with an increasingly effective exchange of data. However, all this requires a great cybersecurity commitment—a commitment that must start with scholars in research and then reach the stakeholders. New devices and technological solutions are increasingly breaking into healthcare, and are able to change the processes of interaction in the health domain. This requires cybersecurity to become a vital part of patient safety through changes in human behaviour, technology, and processes, as part of a complete solution. All professionals involved in cybersecurity in the health domain were invited to contribute with their experiences. This book contains contributions from various experts and different fields. Aspects of cybersecurity in healthcare relating to technological advance and emerging risks were addressed. The new boundaries of this field and the impact of COVID-19 on some sectors, such as mhealth, have also been addressed. We dedicate the book to all those with different roles involved in cybersecurity in the health domain

Introduction to Microservice API Patterns (MAP)

The Microservice API Patterns (MAP) language and supporting website premiered under this name at Microservices 2019. MAP distills proven, platform- and technology-independent solutions to recurring (micro-)service design and interface specification problems such as finding well-fitting service granularities, rightsizing message representations, and managing the evolution of APIs and their implementations. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a pattern language, outline the language organization and present two exemplary patterns describing alternative options for representing nested data. We also identify future research and development directions

Remote fieldwork: using portable wireless networks and backhaul links to participate remotely in fieldwork

Fieldwork is an important means of contextualising knowledge and developing subject-specific and generic transferable skills. However, field locations are not always accessible. To address this problem we present a remote fieldwork approach that makes use of a portable wireless network and other mobile technologies to support fieldwork at a distance. As well as improving access to fieldwork, this approach can also be used to provide communication tools to fieldworkers, enabling them to share their findings and talk to their colleagues while in the field. This paper presents the portable communications toolkit we have developed and reports on three recent trials