Contextual factors and contingent reward leadership: employer adoption of telecommuting

Using a contingency perspective, this paper examines the conditions under which telecommuting is most likely to be adopted with data obtained from a sample of 122 CEOs. We hypothesized that telecommuting fits better in younger organizations, firms with a higher proportion of women and international employees in workforce, and companies that offer variable pay. We found evidence that confirm the prediction that telecommuting, a high proportion of international employees, and the use of variable compensation as an internal control mechanism tend to go hand in hand.

Spreading of sexually transmitted diseases in heterosexual populations

The spread of sexually transmitted diseases (e.g. Chlamydia, Syphilis, Gonorrhea, HIV) across populations is a major concern for scientists and health agencies. In this context, both data collection on sexual contact networks and the modeling of disease spreading, are intensively contributing to the search for effective immunization policies. Here, the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases on bipartite scale-free graphs, representing heterosexual contact networks, is considered. We analytically derive the expression for the epidemic threshold and its dependence with the system size in finite populations. We show that the epidemic outbreak in bipartite populations, with number of sexual partners distributed as in empirical observations from national sex surveys, takes place for larger spreading rates than for the case in which the bipartite nature of the network is not taken into account. Numerical simulations confirm the validity of the theoretical results. Our findings indicate that the restriction to crossed infections between the two classes of individuals (males and females) has to be taken into account in the design of efficient immunization strategies for sexually transmitted diseases.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures and 2 table

Mudança organizacional : uma aplicação da análise fatorial

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Departamento de Estatística, Estágio Supervisionado 2, 2013.O objetivo desse trabalho é analisar um instrumento da teoria organizacional aplicado para uma amostra de 651 entrevistados que busca compreender a percepção da mudança organizacional em empresas. Foi testada a validade do constructo a partir de uma Análise Fatorial, com parâmetros estimados pelo método de Componentes Principais e a rotação Promax. Testes iniciais dos dados sugerem estimação por três fatores, porém a teoria da mudança organizacional indica dois fatores. Sendo assim apresentamos ambos os resultados e analisamos a consistência interna dos fatores com a medida Alfa de Cronback. A comparação entre as estimações com dois e três fatores indicam uma melhor adequação ao modelo teórico os resultados encontrados com três fatores, entretanto sugerimos a revisão de alguns itens

Influence of the adequacy of data collection, during two years, in the management of communityacquired pneumonia in emergency departments

Objective. The aim of this study was to analyze whether structured data collection of patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) in the Emergency Department (ED) improves compliance with clinical guidelines regarding inpatient and outpatient treatment and prescription of antibiotics at discharge. Material and methods. We performed a quasi experimental, multicenter, pre/postintervention study. The intervention consisted of basic training for the participating physicians and the incorporation of a data collection sheet in the clinical history chart, including the information necessary for adequate decision making regarding patient admission and treatment, in the case of discharge. We analyzed the adequacy of the final destination of patients classified as Fine I-II and antibiotic treatment in patients receiving outpatient treatment, with each participating physician including 8 consecutive patients (4 pre-intervention and 4 post-intervention). Results. A total of 738 patients were included: 378 pre-intervention and 360 post-intervention. In the pre-intervention group, Fine V was more frequent and patients were older, had more ischemic heart disease, active neoplasms and fewer risk factors for atypical pneumonia. Of the patients with Fine I-II, 23.7% were inadequately admitted and 19.6% of those discharged received treatment not recommended by guidelines. No differences were observed in the target variables between the two groups. Conclusion. The adequacy of the decision to admit patients with Fine I-II CAP and outpatient antibiotic treatment can be improved in the ED. Structured data collection does not improve patient outcome

The effect of the forget-remember mechanism on spreading

We introduce a new mechanism---the forget-remember mechanism into the spreading process. Equipped with such a mechanism an individual is prone to forget the "message" received and remember the one forgotten, namely switching his state between active (with message) and inactive (without message). The probability of state switch is governed by linear or exponential forget-remember functions of history time which is measured by the time elapsed since the most recent state change. Our extensive simulations reveal that the forget-remember mechanism has significant effects on the saturation of message spreading, and may even lead to a termination of spreading under certain conditions. This finding may shed some light on how to control the spreading of epidemics. It is found that percolation-like phase transitions can occur. By investigating the properties of clusters, formed by connected, active individuals, we may be able to justify the existence of such phase transitions.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figure

Comparative interactomes of HSF1 in stress and disease reveal a role for CTCF in HSF1-mediated gene regulation

Heat shock transcription factor 1 (HSF1) orchestrates cellular stress protection by activating or repressing gene transcription in response to protein misfolding, oncogenic cell proliferation, and other environmental stresses. HSF1 is tightly regulated via intramolecular repressive interactions, post-ranslational modifications, and protein-protein interactions. How these HSF1 regulatory protein interactions are altered in response to acute and chronic stress is largely unknown. To elucidate the profile of HSF1 protein interactions under normal growth and chronic and acutely stressful conditions, quantitative proteomics studies identified interacting proteins in the response to heat shock or in the presence of a poly-glutamine aggregation protein cell-based model of Huntington's disease. These studies identified distinct protein interaction partners of HSF1 as well as changes in the magnitude of shared interactions as a function of each stressful condition. Several novel HSF1-interacting proteins were identified that encompass a wide variety of cellular functions, including roles in DNA repair, mRNA processing, and regulation of RNA polymerase II. One HSF1 partner, CTCF, interacted with HSF1 in a stress-inducible manner and functions in repression of specific HSF1 target genes. Understanding how HSF1 regulates gene repression is a crucial question, given the dysregulation of HSF1 target genes in both cancer and neurodegeneration. These studies expand our understanding of HSF1-mediated gene repression and provide key insights into HSF1 regulation via protein-protein interactions.Peer reviewe

ERMA : Un outil d'aide à la décision dans les situations d'urgence

National audienc

Uso de hardware reconfigurable a través de servicios Web en aplicaciones distribuidas

Este artículo propone una solución sencilla para la utilización de hardware reconfigurable en el contexto de aplicaciones distribuidas. Se ha elegido la tecnología de Servicios Web para proporcionar el acceso remoto a la plataforma reconfigurable. El objetivo es aprovechar las características propias de este tipo de servicios que facilitan el desarrollo de aplicaciones distribuidas junto con las ventajas de utilizar hadrware específico para acelerar el tiempo de ejecución de una tarea crítica. En particular, se ha desarrollado un servicio web para ofrecer, de forma remota, toda la funcionalidad de la plataforma RC1000PP a través de Intenet. Además de las funciones básicas se propone una metodología para el desarrollo de rutinas especializadas de alto nivel, que una vez publicadas, se ofertan para su integración como elemento de proceso en una aplicación distribuida. Con un ejemplo se comprueban las ventajas de esta metodología y se presentan los resultados preliminares del desarrollo de una aplicación.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid con el número de proyecto 07T/0052/2003-3, y parcialmente financiado por el Programa Europeo No: 100671-CP-1-2002-1-FR-MINERVA-M

El museo escolar de ciencia y tecnología

El departamento Científico-Tecnológico del Centro Mercè Rodoreda ha creado un modelo de proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje basado en el emprendimiento social: el Museo Escolar de Ciencia y Tecnología (MuCyT). Esta forma de aprender ha facilitado el desarrollo integral (personal, social, académico, laboral y emprendedor) del alumnado del Graduado en Educación Secundaria de dicho centro. El trabajo realizado por los alumnos en el proyecto del MuCyT durante los últimos cinco años ha dado lugar a un museo escolar único. El cual es una referencia a nivel de innovación docente tanto por la calidad como por la cantidad de sus piezas (65 en total) e instalaciones (nueve en total), así como por la gran cantidad de posibilidades docentes que permite desarrollar

Detection of encrypted cryptomining malware connections with machine and deep learning

Nowadays, malware has become an epidemic problem. Among the attacks exploiting the computer resources of victims, one that has become usual is related to the massive amounts of computational resources needed for digital currency cryptomining. Cybercriminals steal computer resources from victims, associating these resources to the crypto-currency mining pools they benefit from. This research work focuses on offering a solution for detecting such abusive cryptomining activity, just by means of passive network monitoring. To this end, we identify a new set of highly relevant network flow features to be used jointly with a rich set of machine and deep-learning models for real-time cryptomining flow detection. We deployed a complex and realistic cryptomining scenario for training and testing machine and deep learning models, in which clients interact with real servers across the Internet and use encrypted connections. A complete set of experiments were carried out to demonstrate that, using a combination of these highly informative features with complex machine learning models, cryptomining attacks can be detected on the wire with telco-grade precision and accuracy, even if the traffic is encrypted