Career Anchors, National Culture and Leave Intent of MIS Professionals in Taiwan

This study focuses on the career anchors of MIS professionals and adopts the well-established career theory, Schein\u27s Career Anchors, as the fundamental theory in this study. The present paper attempts to investigate the relationship between career anchors and leave intent of MIS professionals in Taiwan. The study adds the cultural construct, Chinese Relationalism, into its research model, in order to comprehend the role of Chinese Relationalism in the context of the career anchor model. Three career anchors: technical competence, autonomy, and entrepreneurship, have direct (negative or positive) and significant impacts on the intents of MIS professionals to leave their employment. This study establishes that Chinese Relationalism impacts on the technical competence, geographical security, identity, lifestyle, and various career anchors of MIS professionals and also moderates the relationships between autonomy, entrepreneurship and the leave intent of MIS professionals in Taiwan

Application of geographic weighted regression to establish flood-damage functions reflecting spatial variation

Flood damage functions are necessary to ensure comprehensive flood-risk management. This study attempts to establish a residential flood-damage function through interviewing the residents living in the region where flood disasters occur frequently. Keelung River basin, near Taipei Metropolitan in Taiwan was selected as study area. Flood damages are related to the flood depths, which are the most commonly considered factor in previously published work. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to construct the flood-damage function at the beginning. Analytical results indicate that flood depth is the significant variable, but the spatial pattern of the residuals shows that residuals exhibit spatial autocorrelation. The Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) Model was then applied to modify the traditional regression model, which cannot capture spatial variations, and to reduce the problem of spatial autocorrelation. The R-square value was found to increase from 0.15 to 0.24, and the spatial autocorrelation in the residuals was no longer evident. A modified OLS model with a dummy variable to capture the spatial autocorrelation pattern was also proposed for future applications. In conclusion, the residential flood damage is determined by flood depth and zone, and the GWR model not only captures the spatial variations of the affecting factors, but also helps to discover the independent variable to modify the traditional regression model.Keywords: flood damage, flood depth, OLS, GWR, spatial autocorrelatio

Bis(2,2′-bipyridine-κ2 N,N′)(thio­cyanato-κN)copper(II) perchlorate

The asymmetric unit of title compound, [Cu(NCS)(C10H8N2)2]ClO4, contains a bis­(2,2′-bipyridine)(isothio­cyanato)copper(II) cation and a perchlorate anion. In the cation, the Cu2+ ion is coordinated by four N atoms from two bidentate 2,2′-bipyridine mol­ecules and an N atom from an isothio­cyanate anion, resulting in a distorted CuN5 pyramidal configuration. The crystal structure is stabilized by weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O and C—H⋯S hydrogen bonds, and weak π–π inter­actions between 2,2′-bipyridine rings [centroid–centroid distance = 3.908 (4) Å]. The perchlorate counteranion is disordered over two positions in a 0.66:0.34 ratio

Tetra­kis[tris­(2,2′-bi-1H-benzimidazole)nickel(II)] bis­(phosphate) sulfate

The title compound, [Ni(C14H10N4)3]4(PO4)2(SO4), consists of [Ni(C14H10N4)3]2+ complex cations (.3. symmetry) and disordered anions ( symmetry) with occupancy factors of two-thirds for PO4 3− and one-third for SO4 2−. The Ni2+ centre is chelated by three bidentate 2,2′-bi-1H-benzimidazole mol­ecules in a distorted octa­hedral coordination. N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds consolidate the building units into a framework structure

Comparison of domiciliary oxygen using liquid oxygen and concentrator in northern Taiwan

Background/PurposeLong-term oxygen therapy has become standard treatment for patients with chronic respiratory insufficiency. However, patterns of long-term home oxygen therapy have not been well studied in Taiwan. Oxygen concentrator systems are commonly used in Taiwan, but liquid oxygen delivery systems are portable and may provide advantages over the concentrator system. This study compared oxygen usage between patients from a liquid oxygen group (LOG) and an oxygen concentrator group (OCG). The authors also assessed the physiologic responses of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to ambulatory oxygen use at home.MethodsThe study used a retrospective, cross-sectional, observational survey design. The LOG comprised 42 patients, and the OCG comprised 102 patients. We recruited participants in northern Taiwan from July 2009 to April 2010. The questionnaire instruments that were used to collect data consisted of three parts: demographic characteristics, devices used in respiratory care, and activity status with portable oxygen. Two-minute walking tests were performed on COPD patients in their homes.ResultsCOPD was the most common diagnosis in our study, with more than 50% of patients who received oxygen long term in both groups having received this diagnosis. The LOG used oxygen for an average of 21.7 hours per day, whereas OCG averaged 15.2 hours per day (p<0.001). In the OCG, 92.2% of patients used a concentrator alone, whereas 23.8% of the LOG used liquid oxygen alone (p<0.001). The LOG patients were involved in significantly more outdoors activities (p=0.002) and reported traveling with oxygen more often (p<0.001) than the OCG patients. For patients with the same dyspnea level of COPD severity, those using liquid oxygen had a lower increase in pulse rate after the walking test, in comparison with the concentrator users.ConclusionPatients in the LOG used oxygen for longer hours, went on more outings, and were more likely to travel with oxygen than patients in the OCG. Being ambulatory with liquid oxygen might enable patients with COPD to walk more effectively

General anesthesia with local infiltration reduces urine retention rate and prolongs analgesic effect than spinal anesthesia for hemorrhoidectomy

IntroductionPostoperative pain and complications pose significant challenges following a hemorrhoidectomy. Attaining effective anesthesia with minimal complications is crucial. The ideal anesthesia method for ambulatory hemorrhoidectomy remains uncertain. This study aimed to investigate whether the combination of general anesthesia plus local infiltration (GAL) is associated with lower complications and reduced pain compared to spinal anesthesia (SA) in the context of hemorrhoidectomy.MethodsThis retrospective single-center cohort study, conducted in a tertiary medical center in East Asia, evaluated excisional hemorrhoidectomies performed between January 1, 2017, and March 31, 2023, utilizing GAL or SA. Data on the six most common complications-pain, constipation, acute urine retention (AUR), bleeding, nausea, and headache-were extracted from medical records. A total of 550 hemorrhoidectomies were included: 220 in the GAL group and 330 in the SA group. Patient characteristics were comparable between the two groups.ResultsThe AUR rate was significantly lower in the GAL group compared to the SA group (15.5% vs. 32.1%, P &lt; 0.001). Although the proportion of pain scores ≥4 did not differ significantly between the GAL and SA groups (36.2% vs. 39.8%, P = 0.429), the pain score curve indicated a stable trend. Overall, the GAL group exhibited a lower rate of adverse effects (56.9% vs. 67.4%, P = 0.023). There were no significant differences in the rates of other complications and emergency department readmission between the GAL and SA groups.DiscussionGAL emerges as a favorable choice for anesthesia in hemorrhoidectomy, demonstrating a lower incidence of urine retention and a prolonged analgesic effect in multiple hemorrhoidectomies. These findings support the conclusion that GAL represents an optimal anesthetic method for enhancing the postoperative experience in patients undergoing hemorrhoidectomy

Carbon Future Price Return, Oil Future Price Return and Stock Index Future Price Return in the U.S.

The European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) has established a pricing system for carbon emissions. As the new commodity may increase the diversification of a financial portfolio and reduce the overall investment risk, a deeper investigation of its properties is needed. Investigating the link between carbon and other asset classes, such oil and stock markets, is important to understand how carbon market interacts with other financial markets. Empirical results indicate that carbon futures returns do respond positively to oil returns shock. A shock in oil price initially has a positive impact on stock market. The multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) of the BEKK model indicate that oil market has an effect on the volatility of the other two markets but it is much less affect by them. These results should be useful for policy makers, portfolio managers and others interested in this rapidly developing field of finance. Keywords: Carbon future return, MGARCH-BEKK, Volatility. JEL Classifications: C58, G13, Q43

BIOADI: a machine learning approach to identifying abbreviations and definitions in biological literature

BACKGROUND: To automatically process large quantities of biological literature for knowledge discovery and information curation, text mining tools are becoming essential. Abbreviation recognition is related to NER and can be considered as a pair recognition task of a terminology and its corresponding abbreviation from free text. The successful identification of abbreviation and its corresponding definition is not only a prerequisite to index terms of text databases to produce articles of related interests, but also a building block to improve existing gene mention tagging and gene normalization tools. RESULTS: Our approach to abbreviation recognition (AR) is based on machine-learning, which exploits a novel set of rich features to learn rules from training data. Tested on the AB3P corpus, our system demonstrated a F-score of 89.90% with 95.86% precision at 84.64% recall, higher than the result achieved by the existing best AR performance system. We also annotated a new corpus of 1200 PubMed abstracts which was derived from BioCreative II gene normalization corpus. On our annotated corpus, our system achieved a F-score of 86.20% with 93.52% precision at 79.95% recall, which also outperforms all tested systems. CONCLUSION: By applying our system to extract all short form-long form pairs from all available PubMed abstracts, we have constructed BIOADI. Mining BIOADI reveals many interesting trends of bio-medical research. Besides, we also provide an off-line AR software in the download section on http://bioagent.iis.sinica.edu.tw/BIOADI/

Stateless Two-Stage Multiple Criteria Scheduling in Nuclear Medicine

Examination in nuclear medicine exhibits scheduling difficulties due to its intricate clinical issues, such as varied radiopharmaceuticals for different diseases, machine preparation and length of scan, and patients’ and hospital’s criteria and/or limitations. Many scheduling methods exist but are limited for nuclear medicine. In this paper, we present stateless two-stage scheduling to cope with multiple criteria decision making. The first stage mostly deals with patients’ conditions. The second stage concerns more the clinical condition and its correlations with patients’ preference which presents more complicated intertwined configurations. A greedy algorithm is proposed in the second stage to determine the (time slot and patient) pair in linear time. The result shows practical and efficient scheduling for nuclear medicine

An Integrated Web-based System for MEDLINE Analysis: A Case Study of Chronic Kidney Disease

In the era of big data, medical researchers attempt to utilize some analysis techniques like machine learning and text mining on their large-scale corpora to save valuable labor work and time. Consequently, many data analysis platforms are built to support medical professionals such as Pubtator, GeneWays, BioContext, etc. These platforms are helpful to medical entities recognition and relation extraction, but there is not an integrated platform to support researchers’ various needs, and medical projects are isolated from each other, which is hard to be shared and reused. As a result, we present an integrated system containing ‘name entity recognition’, ‘document categorization’ and ‘association extraction’. Besides, we add the concept of ‘socialization’ making projects reusable for further analyses. A case study of chronic kidney disease was adopted to indicate the effectiveness of the proposed system