Adaptive Enterprise Resilience Management: Adaptive Action Design Research in Financial Services Case Study

© 2016 IEEE. Resilience is the ability of an enterprise to absorb, recover and adapt from a disruption. Being resilient is a complex undertaking for enterprises operating in a highly dynamic environment and striving for continuous efficiency and innovation. The challenge for enterprises is to offer and run a customer-centric and interdependent large portfolio of resilient services. The fundamental research question is: how to enable service resilience in the practical enterprise resilience context? This paper addresses this important research question, and reports findings from on-going (2014-2016) research on adaptive enterprise resilience management in an Australian financial services organization (FSO). This research is being conducted using the adaptive action-design research (ADR) method to iteratively research, develop and deliver the desired resilience framework in short increments. This paper presents the overall evolved adaptive enterprise resilience management framework and its 'service resilience' element details as one of the key outcomes from the second adaptive ADR increment

Comparison of risk patterns in carcinoma and melanoma of the skin in men: a multi-centre case–case–control study

We directly compared risk factors between 214 histologically confirmed melanomas (CMM), 215 basal-cell carcinomas (BCC) and 139 squamous-cell carcinomas (SCC) in a multiple case–case–control study with 349 controls from patients without dermatological disease admitted to the same hospitals. Subjects with fair hair had a significant risk increase for all types of tumours at a comparable level (ORadj for blonde hair: CMM 2.3; SCC 2.4; BCC 2.3). The effect of pale eyes was significant and similar for CMM and BCC (ORadj 2.6). Intermittent sun exposure measured in hours spent at beach during holidays was significant for both CMM (ORadj 2.6 for more than 7000 lifelong hours) and BCC (ORadj 2.1 for more than 7000 lifelong hours), while SCC exhibited a significant risk increase for chronic exposure to sunlight measured in hours of outdoor work (ORadj 2.2 for more than 6000 lifelong hours). In the case–case comparison using a multinomial logistic regression model, we found a statistically significant risk difference for pale eyes, and number of naevi in the CMM group, compared to other skin cancers. For intermittent sun exposure, there was a significant risk difference of BCC when compared to the risk of SCC. Factors influencing risk of SCC are different, with chronic exposure to sun playing a major role in causing this type of carcinoma

Sunscreens - Which and what for?

It is well established that sun exposure is the main cause for the development of skin cancer. Chronic continuous UV radiation is believed to induce malignant melanoma, whereas intermittent high-dose UV exposure contributes to the occurrence of actinic keratosis as precursor lesions of squamous cell carcinoma as well as basal cell carcinoma. Not only photocarcinogenesis but also the mechanisms of photoaging have recently become apparent. In this respect the use of sunscreens seemed to prove to be more and more important and popular within the last decades. However, there is still inconsistency about the usefulness of sunscreens. Several studies show that inadequate use and incomplete UV spectrum efficacy may compromise protection more than previously expected. The sunscreen market is crowded by numerous products. Inorganic sunscreens such as zinc oxide and titanium oxide have a wide spectral range of activity compared to most of the organic sunscreen products. It is not uncommon for organic sunscreens to cause photocontact allergy, but their cosmetic acceptability is still superior to the one given by inorganic sunscreens. Recently, modern galenic approaches such as micronization and encapsulation allow the development of high-quality inorganic sunscreens. The potential systemic toxicity of organic sunscreens has lately primarily been discussed controversially in public, and several studies show contradictory results. Although a matter of debate, at present the sun protection factor (SPF) is the most reliable information for the consumer as a measure of sunscreen filter efficacy. In this context additional tests have been introduced for the evaluation of not only the protective effect against erythema but also protection against UV-induced immunological and mutational effects. Recently, combinations of UV filters with agents active in DNA repair have been introduced in order to improve photoprotection. This article reviews the efficacy of sunscreens in the prevention of epithelial and nonepithelial skin cancer, the effect on immunosuppression and the value of the SPF as well as new developments on the sunscreen market. Copyright (C) 2005 S. Karger AG, Basel

A design for cancer case–control studies using only incident cases: experience with the GEM study of melanoma

BACKGROUND: The population-based case-control study is not suited to the evaluation of rare genetic (or environmental) factors. The use of a novel case-control design in which cases have second primaries and controls are cancer survivors has been proposed for this purpose. METHODS: We report results from an international study of melanoma that involved population-based ascertainment of incident cases of second or subsequent primary melanoma as the 'case' group and incident cases of first primary melanoma as the 'control' group. We evaluate the validity of the study design by comparing the results obtained for phenotypic factors that have been shown consistently to be associated with melanoma in previous conventional studies with the results from a conventional case-control study conducted in Connecticut and from literature reviews. RESULTS: All but one of the known risk factors for melanoma were shown to be significantly associated with melanoma in our study, though the individual odds ratios appear to be somewhat attenuated relative to the magnitudes typically observed in the literature. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with a second or subsequent primary cancer of a single type represent a potentially valuable and under-utilized resource for the study of cancer aetiology

A unified Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariant for integral homology spheres

We construct an invariant J_M of integral homology spheres M with values in a completion \hat{Z[q]} of the polynomial ring Z[q] such that the evaluation at each root of unity \zeta gives the the SU(2) Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariant \tau_\zeta(M) of M at \zeta. Thus J_M unifies all the SU(2) Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants of M. As a consequence, \tau_\zeta(M) is an algebraic integer. Moreover, it follows that \tau_\zeta(M) as a function on \zeta behaves like an ``analytic function'' defined on the set of roots of unity. That is, the \tau_\zeta(M) for all roots of unity are determined by a "Taylor expansion" at any root of unity, and also by the values at infinitely many roots of unity of prime power orders. In particular, \tau_\zeta(M) for all roots of unity are determined by the Ohtsuki series, which can be regarded as the Taylor expansion at q=1.Comment: 66 pages, 8 figure

Site-specific occurrence of nonmelanoma skin cancers in patients with cutaneous melanoma

In a registry-based case–control study, we compared the site-specific occurrence of nonmelanoma (keratinocytic) skin cancers among patients with cutaneous melanoma cases (cases, n=3774) and solid tumours (controls, n=349 923), respectively. Overall, patients with melanoma were almost five-fold more likely to develop keratinocytic cancers compared with solid tumour controls (adjusted OR 4.7, 95% CI 4.1–5.3), but the risks varied depending upon the site of melanoma. Whereas patients with melanoma of the head and neck had similarly increased risks of keratinocytic cancers across all body sites, patients with melanoma of the trunk were significantly more likely to develop keratinocyte cancer diagnosed on the trunk (adjusted OR 12.5, 95% CI 7.2–20.2) than on the head and neck (adjusted OR 3.0, 95% CI 2.2–4.3). Similar colocalisation of skin tumours was observed for patients with melanomas of the lower limb. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that skin cancers at different anatomical sites may arise through different causal pathways