Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America

Review of: "Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II & Postwar America," by Robert F. Jefferson

Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality

Review of: Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Arnesen, Eric

Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America

Review of: "Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II & Postwar America," by Robert F. Jefferson

eNegotiations: Towards Engineering of Technology Based Social Processes

Traditionally, negotiation support was based on normative and prescriptive research; its users were analysts and experts. The purpose of the recently developed e-negotiation systems is to provide negotiators with services and to satisfy their requirements rather than direct their activities so that they conform to rationality and optimality principles. This orientation is typical to software engineering. Due to the difficulties in reconciling results of prescriptive and descriptive studies the e-negotiation design specifications are often based on selected descriptive approaches at the expense of the prescriptive support. This paper presents selected results from negotiation and e-negotiation research and discusses methodological foundations for e-negotiation system design and development. Based on review of methodological foundations and the scientific and engineering perspectives on negotiations, an e-negotiation view integration model is proposed. The purpose of the model is to allow for the integration of behavioural, scientific and engineering views on e-negotiations

Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality

Review of: Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Arnesen, Eric

Experimental investigation of criteria for thermal roughening

The morphology of single domain Si(001)2 × 1 surfaces has been investigated with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Using the model of Villain, Grempel and Lapujoulade, which is based on the microscopic properties of the surface, this vicinal surface is found to be thermally rough. On macroscopic scale, however, we did not observe any indication for the expected characteristic logarithmic divergence of the surface height-height correlation function. Possible causes for this discrepancy are discussed briefly

DataCell: Exploiting the Power of Relational Databases for Efficient Stream Processing

Designed for complex event processing, DataCell is a research prototype database system in the area of sensor stream systems. Under development at CWI, it belongs to the MonetDB database system family. CWI researchers innovatively built a stream engine directly on top of a database kernel, thus exploiting and merging technologies from the stream world and the rich area of database literature. The results are very promising

Column Imprints: A Secondary Index Structure

Large scale data warehouses rely heavily on secondary indexes, such as bitmaps and b-trees, to limit access to slow IO devices. However, with the advent of large main memory systems, cache conscious secondary indexes are needed to improve also the transfer bandwidth between memory and cpu. In this paper, we introduce column imprint, a simple but efficient cache conscious secondary index. A column imprint is a collection of many small bit vectors, each indexing the data points of a single cacheline. An imprint is used during query evaluation to limit data access and thus minimize memory traffic. The compression for imprints is cpu friendly and exploits the empirical observation that data often exhibits local clustering or partial ordering as a side-effect of the construction process. Most importantly, column imprint compression remains effective and robust even in the case of unclustered data, while other state-of-the-art solutions fail. We conducted an extensive experimental evaluation to assess the applicability and the performance impact of the column imprints. The storage overhead, when experimenting with real world datasets, is just a few percent over the size of the columns being indexed. The evaluation time for over 40000 range queries of varying selectivity revealed the efficiency of the proposed index compar

SMEs entry mode decision making process: Rational or cybernetic?

Entry mode choice is a critical decision when a firm expends its business to foreign markets. By applying rational and cybernetic strategies to international strategic decision-making process, this paper investigates how small and medium sized firms (SMEs) decision makers decide their entry mode choices. By focusing on the entry decision making process, this research distinguishes the prior entry mode studies that emphasize the relationship between influencing factors and their impacts on entry mode choices. The results of this study show that SME managers normally adapt a combination of rational and cybernetic strategies in their international entry decision making process. This highlights that SMEs’ international entry decision making process is dynamic and complex

Cluster-randomised Controlled Trial of an Occupational Therapy Group Intervention for Children Designed to Promote Emotional Wellbeing: Study Protocol

Background Symptoms of anxiety and depression are common in childhood, as are risk factors that undermine wellbeing: low self-esteem and limited participation in daily occupations. Current treatments focus primarily on modifying internal cognitions with insufficient effect on functional outcomes. Occupational therapists have a role in measuring and enabling children’s functional abilities to promote health and wellbeing. To-date there is no evidence for the use of occupational therapy as an intervention to promote mental health or increase self-esteem, participation and wellbeing in a preventative context. The aim of this cluster-randomised controlled study is to investigate the effectiveness of an 8-week occupational therapy group intervention (Kia Piki te Hauora) at reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression and improving self-esteem, participation and wellbeing in children aged 11–13 years. Methods/design In this two-arm, pragmatic, cluster-randomised controlled trial, 154 children will be recruited from 14 schools. All mainstream schools in the region will be eligible and a convenience sample of 14 schools, stratified by decile ranking (i.e. low, medium, and high) will be recruited. Eight to twelve students aged 11–13 years from each school will be recruited by senior school personnel. Following consent, schools will be randomised to either the intervention or waitlist control arm of the trial. The study will employ a parallel and one-way waitlist-to-intervention crossover design. Each cluster’s involvement will last up to 19 or 31 weeks depending on allocation to the intervention or waitlist respectively. The primary outcome is symptoms of anxiety and secondary outcomes are symptoms of depression, self-esteem, participation in daily occupations and wellbeing. Outcome measurement will be repeated at baseline, post-intervention and again at 8–9 weeks follow-up. Planned statistical analyses will utilise repeated measures analysis of covariance. The primary analysis will be based on an intention-to-treat analysis set and include only parallel data. The crossover data will only be used in secondary analyses. Discussion This is the first cluster-randomised controlled trial to investigate an occupational therapy intervention promoting emotional wellbeing in a non-clinical sample of children. Results will contribute to the limited evidence base for occupational therapists in this field and potentially support investment in these services. Trial registration Australia/New Zealand Clinical Trials Register: ACTRN12614000453684