769 research outputs found

    U.S. SDG Data Revolution Roadmap

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    One year after adopting the SDGs, in an addendum to its Open Government National Action Plan, the U.S. Government committed to develop an SDG Data Revolution Roadmap that "charts the future course of efforts to fill data gaps and build capacity to use data for decision-making and innovation to advance sustainable development." The U.S. Government's SDG Data Revolution Roadmap will outline the government's commitments-to-action from 2017-2018. With a deadline of June 2017, it will be developed by the U.S. Government "through an open and inclusive process that engages the full range of citizen, non-governmental, and private sector stakeholders."This report represents the beginning of that engagement process. On December 14, 2016, the Center for Open Data Enterprise and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data convened a Roundtable to develop recommended priorities for the U.S. Government's SDG Data Revolution Roadmap The Roundtable brought together more than 40 stakeholders from government, civil society, and the private sector with expertise in achieving and promoting sustainable development

    Tissue expansion as an aesthetic alternative for facial resurfacing: a single centre series of 92 patients

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    Background: The visibility, vulnerability and social stigmata of facial scars whether by burn, nevi or trauma can be compelling for the patient as well as challenging for the surgeon. Restoration to normal form and aesthetics require tissue replacement which has good colour and texture match and produce minimal visible scarring.  Although many other options are available for a given defect, tissue expansion offers the best alternative which meets almost all the criteria of an ideal procedure.Methods: Among 92 patients with deformities over various facial subunits were operated and expanders 50 ml to 300 ml inserted subcutaneously adjacent to the scar. Prior planning, accurate measurement and choice of ideal expander is extremely important. A precise and practical method of calculation for determination of amount and duration of expander was used. Any secondary deformity to adjoining vital structures was avoided.Results: Results were meticulously and critically analyzed. Different shapes, dimensions and volume of expanders were used depending on the anatomical site which was to be expanded. A total of 118 expanders were inserted in 92 patients. The average volume of tissue expanders used was 170.33 ml. Majority of the expanders used had volume of 200 ml (62.71%). Post-expansion volume was 240.67 ml and the over expansion done was 41.3% over the pre-expansion volume of 170.33 ml. Surgical outcome and cosmesis was assessed by the patient’s perspective and was considered fair by 57.61% patients.Conclusions: The study underlines the clinical application, reasons for overexpansion as well as shortcomings and complications of tissue expansion

    Unipolar pedicled latissimus dorsi transfer for elbow reanimation in traumatic brachial plexus injuries

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    Background: Brachial plexus injuries are troubling for the patients socially, economically and emotionally. Elbow joint being a large and vital joint needs to be reanimated so that the patient can carry out his routine work and bring the hand to the mouth. Number of procedures have been defined but latissimus dorsi being a large muscle is the muscle of choice for transfer in cases who present late. Bipolar latissimus dorsi transfers have often been reported but unipolar latissimus dorsi transfer has also been described. Authors have studied the unipolar muscle transfer, it’s surgical technique and results.Methods: In this study 18 patients were studied for demographic data, pre- and post-operative flexion of the elbow and the MRC grade of the corresponding movements. Diagnostic work up in the form of nerve conduction velocity, electromyography and magnetic resonance imaging were carried out and evaluated for their significance in traumatic brachial plexus injuries.Results: In this study 13 patients had avulsion of the C5-6 roots on magnetic resonance imaging. The patients presented after a period of 128.83±56.76 days. Substantial time elapsed and ruled out primary brachial plexus reconstruction or nerve transfers. The average elbow flexion improved from 6.67±5.69 degrees (range: 0-20 degrees) to 86.94±12.38 degrees (range: 65-110 degrees) following unipolar latissimus dorsi transfer. 12 patients (66.67%) developed M4 or M4+ power.Conclusions: Unipolar latissimus dorsi muscle transfer is a reliable method and most of the patients develop adequate strength and satisfactory function at the elbow joint

    ERP-ORE: A Framework to Measure Organizational Risk during ERP Systems Evolution in a Distribution Business

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    Enterprise Resource Planning systems evolution initiatives often represent the single largest investment (and therefore risk) for distribution corporations yet there exist few management frameworks in the literature to help decision makers measure risk during this organization-wide change process. We have customized our original ORE framework as a multi-criteria, relative risk, condition consequence management decision framework enabling executive decision makers in distribution businesses to calculate and compare risk evolution at fixed points of the ERP change cycle. The framework emphasizes the political and process dimensions of evolution and utilizes the Analytic Hierarchy Process to enable management to make structured and balanced risk mitigation decisions. This paper describes the development of ORE into ERP-ORE and illustrates the application of the framework through a case study description of a medical supplies distributor implementing an ERP system

    ExPT: Synthetic Pretraining for Few-Shot Experimental Design

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    Experimental design is a fundamental problem in many science and engineering fields. In this problem, sample efficiency is crucial due to the time, money, and safety costs of real-world design evaluations. Existing approaches either rely on active data collection or access to large, labeled datasets of past experiments, making them impractical in many real-world scenarios. In this work, we address the more challenging yet realistic setting of few-shot experimental design, where only a few labeled data points of input designs and their corresponding values are available. We approach this problem as a conditional generation task, where a model conditions on a few labeled examples and the desired output to generate an optimal input design. To this end, we introduce Experiment Pretrained Transformers (ExPT), a foundation model for few-shot experimental design that employs a novel combination of synthetic pretraining with in-context learning. In ExPT, we only assume knowledge of a finite collection of unlabelled data points from the input domain and pretrain a transformer neural network to optimize diverse synthetic functions defined over this domain. Unsupervised pretraining allows ExPT to adapt to any design task at test time in an in-context fashion by conditioning on a few labeled data points from the target task and generating the candidate optima. We evaluate ExPT on few-shot experimental design in challenging domains and demonstrate its superior generality and performance compared to existing methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/tung-nd/ExPT.git.Comment: 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS

    A Polynomial Kernel for Deletion to Ptolemaic Graphs

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    For a family of graphs F, given a graph G and an integer k, the F-Deletion problem asks whether we can delete at most k vertices from G to obtain a graph in the family F. The F-Deletion problems for all non-trivial families F that satisfy the hereditary property on induced subgraphs are known to be NP-hard by a result of Yannakakis (STOC\u2778). Ptolemaic graphs are the graphs that satisfy the Ptolemy inequality, and they are the intersection of chordal graphs and distance-hereditary graphs. Equivalently, they form the set of graphs that do not contain any chordless cycles or a gem as an induced subgraph. (A gem is the graph on 5 vertices, where four vertices form an induced path, and the fifth vertex is adjacent to all the vertices of this induced path.) The Ptolemaic Deletion problem is the F-Deletion problem, where F is the family of Ptolemaic graphs. In this paper we study Ptolemaic Deletion from the viewpoint of Kernelization Complexity, and obtain a kernel with ?(k?) vertices for the problem

    Investigating the Perceptions of Hispanic High School Students Towards Construction Managers

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    Since 1968 Americans have recognized September 15 to October 15 as Hispanic Heritage Month. Each year, we celebrate the history and culture of Hispanic and Latino Americans and their contributions to society. In 2014, Hispanics and Latinos accounted for 16.1 percent of the 146.3 million employed people in the United States. The Construction industry is the dominant employer of Hispanics. 90.5% of Construction managers are White, making that the most common race or ethnicity in the occupation, while about 29.8% of the workforce is made of Hispanic people. This creates a cultural and lingual gap among the managers and workers. One of the most common reasons for failure at a job site is miscommunication. This study focuses on investigating the perception of Hispanic Highschool students towards construction managers and creating awareness about what a construction manager does. This study follows a multidimensional surveying method with targeted groups of Hispanic Highschool students and parents. After analysis of the survey and sketches received from the participants, the study concludes that there is a significant misconception in the Hispanic community about what a construction manager profession looks like, where the construction manager is located and what does the construction manager does. The study also concluded that there is need to create awareness among students about the profession, to increase the likelihood of Hispanic students choosing construction management as their profession, thus decreasing the gap in the industry
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