Spotify tailoring for promoting effectiveness in cross-functional autonomous squads

Organisations tend to tailor agile methods to scale employed practices to have cross-functional autonomous teams while promoting sustainable creative and productive development at a constant pace. Thus, it is important to investigate how organisations tailor agile practices to get the balance right between teams' autonomy and alignment. Spotify model is originally introduced to facilitate the development of music streaming services in a very large-scale project with a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) model. However, developing a large-scale mission-critical project with a Business-to-Business (B2B) model is not essentially supported by the Spotify model. Thus, embracing Spotify model for such projects should be concerned about the question of how Spotify practices are adjusted to promote the effectiveness of cross-functional autonomous squads in a mission-critical project with B2B model? In this paper, we conduct a longitudinal embedded case study, which lasted 21 months during which 14 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The Grounded Theory (GT) is adopted to analyse the collected data. As a result, we identify practices and processes that promote effectiveness in cross-functional autonomous squads, which have never been discussed in terms of Spotify model before. We also present Spotify Tailoring by highlighting modified and newly introduced practices by the organisation in which the case study was conducted

Universal dielectric loss in amorphous solids from simultaneous bias and microwave field

We derive the ac dielectric loss in glasses due to resonant processes created by two-level systems and a swept electric field bias. It is shown that at sufficiently large ac fields and bias sweep rates the nonequilibrium loss tangent created by the two fields approaches a universal maximum determined by the bare linear dielectric permittivity. In addition this nonequilibrium loss tangent is derived for a range of bias sweep rates and ac amplitudes and show that the loss tangent creates a predicted loss function that can be understood in a Landau-Zener theory and which can be used to extract the TLS density, dipole moment, and relaxation rate.Comment: To appear in Physical Review Letters, 4 pages, 3 figure

Symptom Burden in Geriatric Hospitalized ESRD Patients: Quantifying symptoms to increase Nephrologist Awareness and use of Palliative Care Consultation

poster abstractBackground: End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) patients have significant symptom burden. Reduced provider awareness of symptoms contributes to underutilization of symptom management resources. Hypothesis: We hypothesize that improved nephrologist awareness of symptoms will lead to symptom improvement. Methods: In this prospective, multicenter intervention study, 27 geriatric ESRD inpatients underwent symptom assessment using the modified Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) at admission and 1 week post-discharge. Enrollees were sequentially randomized into 2 groups. In group 1, the nephrologist of each individual was provided baseline symptom assessment and not in group 2. Severity ratings were compared between in-hospital and post discharge scores as well as between the 2 groups. Results: 26 patients completed the study; 1 died. There were no significant differences in baseline characteristics and scores, except increased diabetes in Group 2(P = 0.03). For 70% of the total cohort physicians reported not being surprised if the patient died within a year. Among the total cohort, total ESAS scores improved between initial and follow-up assessments except for depression, anxiety, lack of appetite and nausea. The absolute change in total ESAS scores was 10.9 in group1 and 6.8 in group2 (NS). Among individual symptoms significant improvement was found in pain and itching in group 1 only. Drowsiness and dyspnea improved in both groups. There was one palliative care consult. Conclusions: Our findings reinforce the high symptom burden in geriatric ESRD patients. Residual symptoms post hospitalization and low utilization of palliative care resources is suggestive of a missed opportunity by nephrologists to address the high symptom burden at the inpatient encounter which is selective for sicker patients and/or inadequacy of dialysis to control these symptoms. The trend in improvement in pain and itching in group 1 may indicate better achievable symptom control if physician awareness is increased and simple pharmacological interventions are available

Double beta decay of 48^{48}Ca

$^{48}$Ca, the lightest double beta decay candidate, is the only one simple enough to be treated exactly in the nuclear shell model. Thus, the $\beta\beta(2\nu)$ half-life measurement, reported here, provides a unique test of the nuclear physics involved in the $\beta\beta$ matrix element calculation. Enriched $^{48}$Ca sources of two different thicknesses have been exposed in a time projection chamber, and yield T$_{1/2}^{2\nu} = (4.3^{+2.4}_{-1.1} [{\rm stat.}] \pm 1.4 [{\rm syst.}]) \times 10^{19}$ years, compatible with the shell model calculations.Comment: 4 pages, LaTex, 3 figures imbedded, PRL forma

Structured Near-Optimal Channel-Adapted Quantum Error Correction

We present a class of numerical algorithms which adapt a quantum error correction scheme to a channel model. Given an encoding and a channel model, it was previously shown that the quantum operation that maximizes the average entanglement fidelity may be calculated by a semidefinite program (SDP), which is a convex optimization. While optimal, this recovery operation is computationally difficult for long codes. Furthermore, the optimal recovery operation has no structure beyond the completely positive trace preserving (CPTP) constraint. We derive methods to generate structured channel-adapted error recovery operations. Specifically, each recovery operation begins with a projective error syndrome measurement. The algorithms to compute the structured recovery operations are more scalable than the SDP and yield recovery operations with an intuitive physical form. Using Lagrange duality, we derive performance bounds to certify near-optimality.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures Update: typos corrected in Appendi