Yet Another Graph Partitioning Problem is NP-Hard

Recently a large number of graph separator problems have been proven to be \textsc{NP-Hard}. Amazingly we have found that $\alpha$-Subgraph-Balanced-Vertex-Separator, an important variant, has been overlooked. In this work ``Yet Another Graph Partitioning Problem is NP-Hard" we present the surprising result that $\alpha$-Subgraph-Balanced-Vertex-Separator is $NP$-Hard. This is despite the fact that the constraints of our new problem are harder to satisfy than the original problem

Business Process Redesign in the Perioperative Process: A Case Perspective for Digital Transformation

This case study investigates business process redesign within the perioperative process as a method to achieve digital transformation. Specific perioperative sub-processes are targeted for re-design and digitalization, which yield improvement. Based on a 184-month longitudinal study of a large 1,157 registered-bed academic medical center, the observed effects are viewed through a lens of information technology (IT) impact on core capabilities and core strategy to yield a digital transformation framework that supports patient-centric improvement across perioperative sub-processes. This research identifies existing limitations, potential capabilities, and subsequent contextual understanding to minimize perioperative process complexity, target opportunity for improvement, and ultimately yield improved capabilities. Dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis applied to specific perioperative patient-centric data collected within integrated hospital information systems yield the organizational resource for process management and control. Conclusions include theoretical and practical implications as well as study limitations

Large employers and apprenticeship training in Britain

We consider two aspects of the link between apprenticeship and large employers in Britain: the contributions of apprenticeship to employers supplies of intermediate skills and of employers to the Advanced Apprenticeship programme. Evidence is taken from interviews with managers in twenty-nine organisations. We find that apprenticeship does function outside Advanced Apprenticeship, primarily because of trainee ineligibility. Employers use of apprenticeship depends on its cost-effectiveness relative to recruitment and upgrade training within HRM practice. Some employers value apprenticeship as a source of long-term employment and career progression. The intensity of training depends on ownership attributes, with family firms operating larger programmes. Employers participate in Advanced Apprenticeship, in terms of contractual role and programme delivery, in diverse ways. The implications of their choices for training quality are not unambiguous. -- In dem Papier werden zwei Aspekte zum Zusammenhang von betrieblichen Ausbildungen und Großunternehmen in Großbritannien analysiert: Einmal der Beitrag betrieblicher Erstausbildungen zur Bereitstellung von Facharbeiter-Qualifikationen und zum anderen der Beitrag der Arbeitgeber für das Programm Advanced Apprenticeship. Die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse stützen sich auf Interviews mit Managern in 29 Organisationen. Es wurde deutlich, dass betriebliche Ausbildungen außerhalb des Advanced Apprenticeship-Programms funktionieren, vor allem wegen Nichtzulassung zu dem Advanced Apprenticeship Programm auf Grund fehlender Erfüllung der Zulassungskriterien. Der Umfang, in dem Arbeitgeber die Möglichkeiten betrieblicher Erstausbildungen nutzen, hängt ab von dem Vergleich der Ausbildungskosten zu den Kosten von Neueinstellungen und von betrieblichen Weiterbildungen im Rahmen betrieblicher Personalentwicklungsmaßnahmen. Einige Arbeitgeber schätzen betriebliche Erstausbildungen vor allem insofern, als sie förderlich sind für eine lange Betriebszugehörigkeit und eine positive berufliche Entwicklung. Es gibt einen Zusammenhang von Ausbildungsqualität und Eigentumsstruktur: familiengeführte Unternehmen bieten umfangreichere Ausbildungsprogramme an. Unternehmen nehmen in unterschiedlicher Weise an dem Advanced Apprenticeship- Programm teil, bezogen auf ihre vertraglich vereinbarte Rolle und der Art ihres Angebots. Die Auswirkungen und Folgen ihrer Entscheidungen hinsichtlich der Qualität der von ihnen angebotenen Ausbildung sind nicht eindeutig.

What Happens in Delaware Need Not Stay in Delaware: How Trulia Can Strengthen Private Enforcement of the Federal Securities Laws

Class-action lawsuits have been used by private plaintiffs to enforce the federal securities laws since those laws were enacted in the 1930s. With the SEC retaining concurrent authority to enforce federal securities laws, a debate has emerged as to whether the private right of action helps or hinders public enforcement. The primary criticism of private securities litigation is that rent-seeking attorneys abuse the system by bringing frivolous litigation aimed at achieving a settlement and a fee. In the public merger context, the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to close an announced deal on time make corporations eager to settle potentially troublesome litigation. The government responded to the overabundance of securities lawsuits in the 1990s by tightening the reigns on class-action securities litigation, making what was once low-hanging fruit for plaintiffs’ attorneys more difficult to grasp. At the same time, there was a marked uptick in the number of class-action corporate lawsuits brought in state courts, in particular, in Delaware. These suits claim breach of fiduciary duty on the grounds that securities filings accompanying public merger announcements provided shareholders with insufficient or inadequate information. This Comment claims that the wave of merger objection class-action suits arising in the mid-2000s should be properly viewed as federal securities law claims masquerading as corporate law claims, thus avoiding the heightened securities class-action requirements of the 1990s. In a recent case from the Delaware Court of Chancery, In re Trulia, Inc. Shareholder Litigation, Chancellor Bouchard established a new “plainly material” standard for approving class-action settlements where deficient federal securities filings are at issue. Because Trulia is properly viewed as a state court’s response to deficient enforcement of the federal securities laws, it has the potential to serve as a bellwether for the state of health of private enforcement of the federal securities laws

Exposure Science Issues Concerning 60 Hz Magnetic Fields.

Several recent epidemiology studies suggest that exposure to magnetic fields may be one of the etiologic factors involved in adverse reproductive health outcomes, but these studies potentially had several important design limitations that undermine the validity of their findings and subsequent conclusions. This research examined these limitations in detail using hypothesis-driven data collection and statistical analyses with the underlying goal of informing the design of future epidemiology studies concerning exposure to magnetic fields and adverse reproductive health. The study design and other related exposure science issues examined by this research included: 1) the adequacy of using a single day’s worth of personal magnetic field exposure data to characterize longer periods of exposure; 2) the potential influence of physical activity on personal magnetic field exposure; and 3) the comparison of personal magnetic field exposures between women and men and within female-male couples. These issues were assessed with data from two longitudinal cohorts of men and/or women recruited from prenatal care clinics in North Carolina and an infertility center in Massachusetts. We observed that measures of central tendency associated with daily personal magnetic field exposures were more stable over time compared with measures of peak, and the stability of these metrics was greater over short- relative to long-term durations. The findings suggest that if there is interest in peak exposure metrics, more than one day of measurement is needed over the window of disease susceptibility to reduce measurement error. We also observed a positive relationship between physical activity and peak magnetic field exposure metrics, suggesting physical activity could be an important confounder in the relationship with any outcome independently associated with activity, such as miscarriage, and, as a result, should be adjusted for in statistical models to reduce bias. In addition, we demonstrated that distributions of personal exposures among women and men are similar, and that there is promise that one partner’s exposure data could be used as a surrogate for the other’s in the absence of such data. Future reproductive health epidemiology studies that concern exposure to magnetic fields should consider this research in the design and interpretation of their findings.PhDEnvironmental Health SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111468/1/rclewis_1.pd

Much More Than Ragtime: The Musical Life of George Hamilton Green (1893-1970)

This document preserves and synthesizes the unpublished information within the Green Family scrapbooks and miscellaneous archival materials with existing source materials to construct an accurate and documented account of the musical life of George Hamilton Green (1893-1970) hitherto deficient. The stereotype of Green as a novelty ragtime xylophonist diminishes as the many facets of Green’s diverse musical career are revealed: talented musician, versatile performer, recording and radio artist, pedagogue and author, composer-arranger, and influential instrument designer, as well as formidable athlete, talented artist-cartoonist, and devoted family man. George Hamilton Green is a significant twentieth-century American musician who lived an extraordinarily diverse musical life that was much more than ragtime. Bibliography and discography are included.https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/mono/1052/thumbnail.jp

Topological & network theoretic approaches in hyperspectral remote sensing

Hyperspectral remote sensing is a valuable new technology that has numerous com- mercial and scientific applications. For example, it has been used to study crop health, mineral and soil composition, and pollution levels. Hyperspectral imaging also has im- portant military and intelligence applications such as the identification of man-made materials, and detection of chemical and biological plumes. The key mathematical challenges of hyperspectral imaging include image classification, anomaly detection, and target detection. Image classification is the process of grouping pixels into spec- trally similar clusters. This thesis describes a new topological and network-theoretic approach for classifying pixels in hyperspectral image data. Pixels in hyperspectral image data sets are thought of as constituting a point cloud in a high dimensional topological space, and a network structure is imposed on the data by considering the spectral distance between pairs of pixels. We use the tools of persistent homology to argue that the resulting network effectively models the com- plex nonlinear structures in the data. We then perform data clustering by applying a network based community detection algorithm called the method of maximum modu- larity. The method of maximum modularity is an unsupervised, deterministic method for detecting communities in networks where neither the number of communities nor their sizes needs to be specified in advance. Examples of real hyperspectral images that have been classified using the method of maximum modularity are provided in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach