A “Novel” Approach to the Design of an IS Management Course

We report on the design and implementation of an unusual course in Information Systems (IS) management built around an extended case series: a fictitious but reality-based story about the trials and tribulations of a newly appointed but not-technically-trained Chief Information Officer (CIO) in his first year on the job. Together the cases constitute a true-to-life “novel” about IS management (published, in fact, as a novel, as well as individual cases). Four principles guided development of the series and its associated pedagogy: 1) Emphasis on integrative, soft-skill, and business-oriented aspects of IS, independent of underlying technologies; 2) Student derivation and ongoing refinement of cumulative theoretical frameworks arrived at via in-class discussion; 3) Identification of a set of core issues vital to practice that collectively approximate IS management as a business discipline; and 4) Design for student engagement, in particular by basing the case “story” on the monomyth, a literary pattern common to important narratives around the world. A supporting website facilitates sharing of teaching materials and experiences by faculty using the case series. We report results from using this curriculum with undergraduate and graduate students in two universities in different countries, and with executives at a multinational corporation and in an executive program at Harvard Business School. Our results suggest that a “novel-based” approach holds considerable promise for use at undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels, and that it might have advantages in addressing the so-called “enrollment crisis” in IS education, especially with the generation of “digital natives” who have come of age in an environment crowded with engaging approaches to communication and entertainment that compete for their attention

Remaking the IT Management Curriculum: A Novel Approach

We report on an experiment in redesign of curriculum for Information Technology (IT) management courses, a synthetic approach that attempts to combine the best features of explanation- and experience-based approaches. The IVK case series is a fictitious though realitybased story about the struggles of a newly appointed, not-technically-trained CIO in his first year on the job. The series constitutes a true-to-life novel, intended to involve students in an engaging story that simultaneously explores the nuances of major IT management issues. Three principles guided our development of this curriculum: 1) Emphasis on the business aspects of IT, independent of underlying technologies; 2) Student derivation of cumulative management frameworks arrived at via inductive in-class discussion; and 3) Identification of a set of core issues most vital in IT management practice, as a business discipline. We report results from using the curriculum with undergraduate and graduate students, and with executives at a multinational corporation

Make Research Data Public? -- Not Always so Simple: A Dialogue for Statisticians and Science Editors

Putting data into the public domain is not the same thing as making those data accessible for intelligent analysis. A distinguished group of editors and experts who were already engaged in one way or another with the issues inherent in making research data public came together with statisticians to initiate a dialogue about policies and practicalities of requiring published research to be accompanied by publication of the research data. This dialogue carried beyond the broad issues of the advisability, the intellectual integrity, the scientific exigencies to the relevance of these issues to statistics as a discipline and the relevance of statistics, from inference to modeling to data exploration, to science and social science policies on these issues.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-STS320 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Raising a Small Flock of Sheep in Ohio

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Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder

A pathfinder version of CHIME (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) is currently being commissioned at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC. The instrument is a hybrid cylindrical interferometer designed to measure the large scale neutral hydrogen power spectrum across the redshift range 0.8 to 2.5. The power spectrum will be used to measure the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale across this poorly probed redshift range where dark energy becomes a significant contributor to the evolution of the Universe. The instrument revives the cylinder design in radio astronomy with a wide field survey as a primary goal. Modern low-noise amplifiers and digital processing remove the necessity for the analog beamforming that characterized previous designs. The Pathfinder consists of two cylinders 37\,m long by 20\,m wide oriented north-south for a total collecting area of 1,500 square meters. The cylinders are stationary with no moving parts, and form a transit instrument with an instantaneous field of view of $\sim$100\,degrees by 1-2\,degrees. Each CHIME Pathfinder cylinder has a feedline with 64 dual polarization feeds placed every $\sim$30\,cm which Nyquist sample the north-south sky over much of the frequency band. The signals from each dual-polarization feed are independently amplified, filtered to 400-800\,MHz, and directly sampled at 800\,MSps using 8 bits. The correlator is an FX design, where the Fourier transform channelization is performed in FPGAs, which are interfaced to a set of GPUs that compute the correlation matrix. The CHIME Pathfinder is a 1/10th scale prototype version of CHIME and is designed to detect the BAO feature and constrain the distance-redshift relation.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. submitted to Proc. SPIE, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation (2014

Investigational chemotherapy and novel pharmacokinetic mechanisms for the treatment of breast cancer brain metastases

In women, breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosis and second most common cause of cancer death. More than half of breast cancer patients will develop metastases to the bone, liver, lung, or brain. Breast cancer brain metastases (BCBM) confers a poor prognosis, as current therapeutic options of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy rarely significantly extend life and are considered palliative. Within the realm of chemotherapy, the last decade has seen an explosion of novel chemotherapeutics involving targeting agents and unique dosage forms. We provide a historical overview of BCBM chemotherapy, review the mechanisms of new agents such as poly-ADP ribose polymerase inhibitors, cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitors, phosphatidyl inositol 3-kinaseinhibitors, estrogen pathway antagonists for hormone-receptor positive BCBM; tyrosine kinase inhibitors, antibodies, and conjugates for HER2+ BCBM; repurposed cytotoxic chemotherapy for triple negative BCBM; and the utilization of these new agents and formulations in ongoing clinical trials. The mechanisms of novel dosage formulations such as nanoparticles, liposomes, pegylation, the concepts of enhanced permeation and retention, and drugs utilizing these concepts involved in clinical trials are also discussed. These new treatments provide a promising outlook in the treatment of BCBM

Limits on the ultra-bright Fast Radio Burst population from the CHIME Pathfinder

We present results from a new incoherent-beam Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search on the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder. Its large instantaneous field of view (FoV) and relative thermal insensitivity allow us to probe the ultra-bright tail of the FRB distribution, and to test a recent claim that this distribution's slope, $\alpha\equiv-\frac{\partial \log N}{\partial \log S}$, is quite small. A 256-input incoherent beamformer was deployed on the CHIME Pathfinder for this purpose. If the FRB distribution were described by a single power-law with $\alpha=0.7$, we would expect an FRB detection every few days, making this the fastest survey on sky at present. We collected 1268 hours of data, amounting to one of the largest exposures of any FRB survey, with over 2.4\,$\times$\,10$^5$\,deg$^2$\,hrs. Having seen no bursts, we have constrained the rate of extremely bright events to $<\!13$\,sky$^{-1}$\,day$^{-1}$ above $\sim$\,220$\sqrt{(\tau/\rm ms)}$ Jy\,ms for $\tau$ between 1.3 and 100\,ms, at 400--800\,MHz. The non-detection also allows us to rule out $\alpha\lesssim0.9$ with 95$\%$ confidence, after marginalizing over uncertainties in the GBT rate at 700--900\,MHz, though we show that for a cosmological population and a large dynamic range in flux density, $\alpha$ is brightness-dependent. Since FRBs now extend to large enough distances that non-Euclidean effects are significant, there is still expected to be a dearth of faint events and relative excess of bright events. Nevertheless we have constrained the allowed number of ultra-intense FRBs. While this does not have significant implications for deeper, large-FoV surveys like full CHIME and APERTIF, it does have important consequences for other wide-field, small dish experiments