The Business Process Management Game

The Business Process Management Game is a serious game that teaches various aspects of business process management. Students can play the game in groups. Acting as the 'management team' of a business unit, they have to design a business process for that unit that is optimal in terms of cost, customer satisfaction, and waiting and service times. Groups compete with each other to create the process that performs best. In doing so, they can practice their business process modeling, analysis, re-design, and mining skills. The game got much positive feedback from students in offcial student evaluations of a course in which it is used.</p

The Business Process Management Game

The Business Process Management Game is a serious game that teaches various aspects of business process management. Students can play the game in groups. Acting as the 'management team' of a business unit, they have to design a business process for that unit that is optimal in terms of cost, customer satisfaction, and waiting and service times. Groups compete with each other to create the process that performs best. In doing so, they can practice their business process modeling, analysis, re-design, and mining skills. The game got much positive feedback from students in offcial student evaluations of a course in which it is used.</p

Dexamethasone, prostaglandin A, and retinoic acid modulation of murine and human melanoma cells grown in soft agar.

The cloning efficiencies of a murine melanoma cell line (S91 CCL 53.1) and a human melanoma cell strain (C8146c) were inhibited by dexamethasone (DEX), prostaglandin A1 (PGA1), and beta-all-trans-retinoic acid (RA) in a dose-dependent manner. Murine melanoma tumor colony-forming units (MTCFU) were inhibited more than 99% by DEX (1 X 10(-7) M) and RA (1 X 10(-7) M) with a concentration needed to produce a 50% reduction in colony formation for both hormones of 5 X 10(-9) M. Combinations of DEX and RA effected a synergistic inhibition on colony formation, which was reflected by a 11/2 log reduction in the hormone concentration needed to produce a greater than 99% inhibition of colony formation. When PGA1 was added to DEX and RA, a greater than additive reduction in colony formation was observed. Human MTCFU from cell strain C8146c were inhibited more than 85% at an RA concentration of 1 X 10(-7) M, but they were reduced only to 40% of control at a DEX concentration of 1 X 10(-6) M. DEX-RA produced an additive inhibition of colony formation. Addition of submaximal amounts of PGA1 to DEX-RA combinations or to either hormone alone resulted in synergistic reduction of human MTCFU. These results demonstrated that the proliferative potential of human and murine melanomas can be simultaneously regulated by DEX, PGA1, and RA

BPMS-RA: a novel Reference Architecture for Business Process Management Systems

A growing number of business process management systems is under development both in academia and in practice. These systems typically are based on modern system engineering principles, such as service-oriented architecture. At the same time, the advent of big data analytics has changed the scope of these systems, including functionality such as data mining. However, existing reference architectures for business process management systems date back 20 years and, consequently, are not up-to-date with these modern developments. To fill the gap, this article proposes an up-to-date reference architecture, called BPMS-RA, for modern business process management systems. BPMS-RA is based on analysis of recent literature and of existing commercial implementations. This reference architecture aims to provide a guideline template for the development of modern-day business process management systems by specifying functions and interfaces that need to be provided by these systems as well as a set of quality criteria that they need to meet

An Integrated View on the Future of Logistics and Information Technology

In this position paper, we present our vision on the future of the logistics business domain and the use of information technology (IT) in this domain. The vision is based on extensive experience with Dutch and European logistics in various contexts and from various perspectives. We expect that the vision also holds for logistics outside Europe. We build our vision in a number of steps. First, we make an inventory of the most important trends in the logistics domain - we call these mega-trends. Next, we do the same for the information technology domain, restricted to technologies that have relevance for logistics. Then, we introduce logistics meta-concepts that we use to describe our vision and relate them to business engineering. We use these three ingredients to analyze leading concepts that we currently observe in the logistics domain. Next, we consolidate all elements into a model that represents our vision of the integrated future of logistics and IT. We elaborate on the role of data platforms and open standards in this integrated vision.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

Microbiological evaluation of a new growth-based approach for rapid detection of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

OBJECTIVES: Recently, a rapid screening tool for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been introduced that applies a novel detection technology allowing the rapid presence or absence of MRSA to be determined from an enrichment broth after only a few hours of incubation. To evaluate the reliability of this new assay to successfully detect MRSA strains of different origin and clonality, well-characterized S. aureus strains were tested in this study. METHODS: More than 700 methicillin-susceptible and methicillin-resistant strains covering >90% of all registered European MRSA spa types within the SeqNet network were studied. RESULTS: All 513 MRSA strains tested were recognized as methicillin-resistant: among these, 96 MRSA strains were from an institutional collection, each presenting a unique spa type. None of the 211 methicillin-susceptible strains were detected as positive. CONCLUSIONS: The new growth-based rapid MRSA assay was shown to detect without exception all MRSA strains of large collections of strains comprising highly diverse genetic backgrounds, indicating that such a phenotypic test might be potentially more likely to cope with new strains

Cnidaria: fast, reference-free clustering of raw and assembled genome and transcriptome NGS data

Background: Identification of biological specimens is a major requirement for a range of applications. Reference-free methods analyse unprocessed sequencing data without relying on prior knowledge, but generally do not scale to arbitrarily large genomes and arbitrarily large phylogenetic distances. Results: We present Cnidaria, a practical tool for clustering genomic and transcriptomic data with no limitation on genome size or phylogenetic distances. We successfully simultaneously clustered 169 genomic and transcriptomic datasets from 4 kingdoms, achieving 100% identification accuracy at supra-species level and 78% accuracy for species level. Discussion: CNIDARIA allows for fast, resource-efficient comparison and identification of both raw and assembled genome and transcriptome data. This can help answer both fundamental (e.g. in phylogeny, ecological diversity analysis) and practical questions (e.g. sequencing quality control, primer design).Comment: 47 pages, 13 figure

Local Councillors and Citizens. An exploratory study of the interaction between councillors and citizens in 4 municipalities in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion

The aim of this study is to look into into role behaviour of local councillors and their relation with citizens in their municipality. As little is known about the actual interaction between councillors and citizens in local government the nature of the study is mainly explorative. The research focuses on councillors in 4 different municipalities in the 3 countries of the Meuse-Rhine Euregion: Valkenburg (Netherlands), Riemst (Belgium-Flanders), Visé (Belgium-Wallonia) and Übach-Palenberg (Germany). The study reveals that there are many similarities between the councillors in the different countries. All councillors receive input from citizens, always about specific and often even individual issues of citizens, and surprisingly they leave the initiative mostly to the citizens, instead of actively looking for input. We also found significant differences. We noticed different patterns of contacts between citizens and councillors in the municipalities and it seems that input by citizens is valued differently on the different sides of the border. Several questions for further research were identified.