Computer controlled vent and pressurization system

The Centaur space launch vehicle airborne computer, which was primarily used to perform guidance, navigation, and sequencing tasks, was further used to monitor and control inflight pressurization and venting of the cryogenic propellant tanks. Computer software flexibility also provided a failure detection and correction capability necessary to adopt and operate redundant hardware techniques and enhance the overall vehicle reliability

Accident Rate as a Measure of Safety Assessment in Polish Civil Engineering

Civil engineering is characterised by high volatility with respect to working conditions, which are the source of many threats to worker life and health and contribute to high accident rates. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and evaluate the phenomenon of accidents in Polish civil engineering and define the direction of changes that should occur in the safety area. The studies included in this research covered the years 2004–2018. The following indicators were used to assess the accident rates: (1) The total number of persons injured in workplace accidents and this total divided into fatal, severe, and minor accidents; (2) indicators of frequency of accidents in total and this total divided into minor, severe, and fatal accidents; (3) and an indicator of the severity of accidents. From the analysis of statistical data for the years 200–2018, the changes in accident rate parameters demonstrate the continuous improvement of workplace safety in the Polish civil engineering sector. From the analysed data from the 15 years, a clear decrease in the value of the applied indicators is apparent, including both the number of people involved in accidents and the frequency and severity of accidents

Optimal Splitters for Database Partitioning with Size Bounds

Partitioning is an important step in several database algorithms, including sorting, aggregation, and joins. Partitioning is also fundamental for dividing work into equal-sized (or balanced) parallel subtasks. In this paper, we aim to find, materialize and maintain a set of partitioning elements (splitters) for a data set. Unlike traditional partitioning elements, our splitters define both inequality and equality partitions, which allows us to bound the size of the inequality partitions. We provide an algorithm for determining an optimal set of splitters from a sorted data set and show that it has time complexity O(k lg_2 N), where k is the number of splitters requested and N is the size of the data set. We show how the algorithm can be extended to pairs of tables, so that joins can be partitioned into work units that have balanced cost. We demonstrate experimentally (a) that finding the optimal set of splitters can be done efficiently, and (b) that using the precomputed splitters can improve the time to sort a data set by up to 76%, with particular benefits in the presence of a few heavy hitters

Relationships between the Institutional Environment and Corporate Governance Practices: Implications for Emerging and Developed Countries

Changing corporate governance practices requires both formal adoption of best practices as well as changing the supporting institutional environment. We identify which elements of the institutional environment are most closely related to changes in corporate governance practices. We examine the influence of changes in institutional environments on changes in corporate governance practices by examining data from 37 countries. For emerging countries, we find that changes in rule of law are followed by changes in corporate governance practices. When changes in control of corruption are combined with changes in government effectiveness, significant changes in corporate governance practices are also realized. This differs from the pathway to improved corporate governance practices for developed nations. Developed nations require a combination of changes in rule of law and changes in regulatory quality

The Effect of Organizational Commitment on Collusive Supervision Over Reporting

We apply the Theory of Planned Behavior framework and find that attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (PBC) influence supervisor intentions to involve subordinates in aggressive reporting practices to the supervisor’s advantage. We refer to this behavior as collusive supervision over reporting (CSOR). Using PLS Path Modeling, we find stronger materialism leads to stronger attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (PBC) to engage in CSOR. We find that organizational commitment counters this influence. Stronger organizational commitment is associated with reduced attitudes and subjective norms to engage in CSOR. We also consider the collision of these two variables, materialism and organizational commitment, and explain interaction effects. Our findings suggest that subordinates navigating situations wherein they are pressured to engage in aggressive reporting practices can make petitions to the supervisor’s sense of organizational commitment. Organizational commitment favorably dampens the effect of materialism on attitude towards CSOR. However, the interaction effect of organizational commitment and materialism on subjective norms towards CSOR is more complicated. Through social projection supervisors project their own materialism levels onto their supervisors, and then increasing organizational commitment causes them to want to fit in even more with these supervisors. When materialism is low for a supervisor, increasing organizational commitment results in further dampening the effect of materialism, leading to improved subjective norms and lower intentions to engage in CSOR. When materialism is high, however, increasing organizational commitment amplifies the effect of materialism on subjective norms, leading to increased CSOR

Improving Database Performance on Simultaneous Multithreading Processors

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) allows multiple threads to supply instructions to the instruction pipeline of a superscalar processor. Because threads share processor resources, an SMT system is inherently different from a multiprocessor system and, therefore, utilizing multiple threads on an SMT processor creates new challenges for database implementers. We investigate three thread-based techniques to exploit SMT architectures on memory-resident data. First, we consider running independent operations in separate threads, a technique applied to conventional multiprocessor systems. Second, we describe a novel implementation strategy in which individual operators are implemented in a multi-threaded fashion. Finally, we introduce a new data-structure called a work-ahead set that allows us to use one of the threads to aggressively preload data into the cache for use by the other thread. We evaluate each method with respect to its performance, implementation complexity, and other measures. We also provide guidance regarding when and how to best utilize the various threading techniques. Our experimental results show that by taking advantage of SMT technology we achieve a 30\% to 70\% improvement in throughput over single threaded implementations on in-memory database operations

Effect of using an exercise and nutrition secure email message on the implementation of health promotion in a large health care system

Background and Program: Secure email messaging is used to provide timely communication between healthcare providers and patients with medical information and education. There have been increasing rates of overweight and obesity among military healthcare patients. To address this issue, we utilized a secure email messaging system that is primarily used for medication refills. This commentary demonstrates the extent to which the message was viewed and how much the message was liked. Preliminary Results: Of the 16,020 individuals emailed, 7,011 participants (43.8%) opened the email, and 1,023 patients (14.6% of those who opened it) completed the survey. Satisfaction rate for the health promotion message was 77.2%. Participants reported an intent to eat more fruit and vegetables (49.6%), decrease portion sizes (38.8%), and increase physical activity (51.1%), while 33.6% reported having no intent to change. Conclusion: The majority were satisfied with the health promotion message. This email method enables a single provider to have increased contact with patients. It is unknown if this message reached higher risk or harder to reach participants, a patient subset that could benefit most from this type of communication. This study is unique in that to our knowledge it is the first one to use secure email messaging in the military healthcare system for health promotion

Dual Targeted Immunotherapy via In Vivo Delivery of Biohybrid RNAi-Peptide Nanoparticles to Tumor-Associated Macrophages and Cancer Cells

This work was funded in part by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. 11/PI/08, the National Key Basic Research Program (973 Project) (Nos. 2011CB933101 and 2015CB931802), National Natural Scientific Fund (Nos. 81225010 and 81327002), 863 project of China (Nos. 2012AA022703 and 2014AA020700), Shanghai Science and Technology Fund (No. 13NM1401500). E.R.E. was supported in part by NIH R01 GM49039. J.C. acknowledges Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF, Project No. 626386) and F.T. for Marie Curie grant agreement (PIEF-GA-2012-332-332462

Breaking new ground in mapping human settlements from space -The Global Urban Footprint-

Today 7.2 billion people inhabit the Earth and by 2050 this number will have risen to around nine billion, of which about 70 percent will be living in cities. Hence, it is essential to understand drivers, dynamics, and impacts of the human settlements development. A key component in this context is the availability of an up-to-date and spatially consistent map of the location and distribution of human settlements. It is here that the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) raster map can make a valuable contribution. The new global GUF binary settlement mask shows a so far unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.4 arcsec ($\sim12 m$) that provides - for the first time - a complete picture of the entirety of urban and rural settlements. The GUF has been derived by means of a fully automated processing framework - the Urban Footprint Processor (UFP) - that was used to analyze a global coverage of more than 180,000 TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X radar images with 3m ground resolution collected in 2011-2012. Various quality assessment studies to determine the absolute GUF accuracy based on ground truth data on the one hand and the relative accuracies compared to established settlements maps on the other hand, clearly indicate the added value of the new global GUF layer, in particular with respect to the representation of rural settlement patterns. Generally, the GUF layer achieves an overall absolute accuracy of about 85\%, with observed minima around 65\% and maxima around 98 \%. The GUF will be provided open and free for any scientific use in the full resolution and for any non-profit (but also non-scientific) use in a generalized version of 2.8 arcsec ($\sim84m$). Therewith, the new GUF layer can be expected to break new ground with respect to the analysis of global urbanization and peri-urbanization patterns, population estimation or vulnerability assessment