Mercedes-Benz USA Labor Planning Dashboard

Mercedes-Benz USA specializes in producing high-quality vehicles that exceed customer expectations at a cost-effective rate. The company utilizes a labor planning dashboard that predicts the daily use of their lines at their part distribution centers by allocating their employees to different zones in inbound, outbound, or both. The supervisors manually input all the data to designate employees to various sections within those zones. Our team was tasked with improving and proposing an updated version of the labor planning dashboard by meeting their requirements while making it effective, responsive, and user-friendly. Through trial and error, the new labor planning dashboard combats these issues by eliminating an excessive amount of manual input and creates an automated dashboard by implementing a linear program solver known as an Assignment Problem

Selector’s Guide for Resources in the Humanities: An Open Access Student Publication

Students in the Master of Library and Information Science degree program at Valdosta State University who completed the elective course in Humanities Information Services in 2014 produced bibliographies on sub-disciplines of the humanities. These example bibliographies are compiled into the document titled Selector’s Guide for Resources in the Humanities: An Open Access Student Publication. The student authored sections of the Selector’s Guide focus on narrowly defined humanities areas and contain resources representative of professional organizations, major serials, online indexes and databases, primary sources, classic and contemporary monographs, standard reference works, vetted websites, media, and open access resources. The compilers of this guide offer it as a companion to the document entitled Teaching Guide for Resources in the Humanities: An Open Access Publication. The Teaching Guide references two tutorials, one on WorldCat and one on the Gale Literary Index. Copies of both tutorials are found in here. The authors of these materials invite professors seeking a guide to the providers and formats of information in the humanities to use the bibliographies therein as a starting point for creating assignments and to use materials from the teaching guide as class exercises, if appropriate

Future Weapons, Past Laws

The laws governing armed conflicts—both those attempting to regulate the legality of going to war (jus ad bellum) and the rules pertaining to the conduct of warfare (jus in bello)—have seen changes and modifications in reaction to shifts in the nature of warfare, in general, and the introduction of new technologies of communication, transportation, manufacturing and destruction, in particular. Yet, all too often such changes and adaptations, to the extent they emerge, are backward rather than forward looking. Nowhere is this discrepancy more glaring than in the virtual lack of legal attention and discussion, not to say regulation, of emerging technologies of warfare. Whereas technological innovations have been a continuous feature of war-making, we are now witnessing what may be described as a potential game-changing, paradigm shift in the ways wars are fought. Such dramatic changes must be reckoned with and thought about. To give but one example, much proverbial ink has been spilled in the last couple of years to discuss the legality of drone attacks by the United States in combat zones such as Afghanistan as well as in areas outside the zone of operations, most notably Pakistan. Drones attract much attention because of the fact that they are \u27unmanned\u27 aerial vehicles. Yet to a significant extent, even drones involve a significant human input in the decision-making process leading to the taking out of an identified target. Indeed, drones are \u27remotely piloted.\u27 At the same time, it is obvious that in the near future technology will reach a stage of advancement which will no longer require any sort of human input once the weapon is introduced into the battlefield. Indeed, this is arguably already the case with respect to certain weapons systems. In this paper Professor Gross will begin to explore some of the legal ramifications that the \u27robotics revolution\u27 present to the international law of armed conflict

Modern techniques and technologies applied to training and performance monitoring

Athlete preparation and performance continues to increase in complexity and costs. Modern coaches are shifting from reliance on personal memory, experience, and opinion to evidence from collected training load data. Training load monitoring may hold vital information for developing systems of monitoring that follow the training process with such precision that both performance prediction and day-to-day management of training become an adjunct to preparation and performance. Time series data collection and analyses in sport are still in their infancy with considerable efforts being applied in "big-data" analytics and models of the appropriate variables to monitor and methods for doing so. Training monitoring has already garnered important applications, but lacks a theoretical framework from which to develop further. As such, we propose a framework involving the following: analyses of individuals, trend analyses, rules-based analysis, and statistical process control

Rotavirus Reassortant–Induced Murine Model of Liver Fibrosis Parallels Human Biliary Atresia

Background and Aims: Biliary atresia (BA) is a devastating neonatal cholangiopathy that progresses to fibrosis and end-stage liver disease by 2 years of age. Portoenterostomy may reestablish biliary drainage, but, despite drainage, virtually all afflicted patients develop fibrosis and progress to end-stage liver disease requiring liver transplantation for survival. Approach and Results: In the murine model of BA, rhesus rotavirus (RRV) infection of newborn pups results in a cholangiopathy paralleling human BA and has been used to study mechanistic aspects of the disease. Unfortunately, nearly all RRV-infected pups succumb by day of life 14. Thus, in this study we generated an RRV-TUCH rotavirus reassortant (designated as TR(VP2,VP4)) that when injected into newborn mice causes an obstructive jaundice phenotype with lower mortality rates. Of the mice that survived, 63% developed Ishak stage 3-5 fibrosis with histopathological signs of inflammation/fibrosis and bile duct obstruction. Conclusions: This model of rotavirus-induced neonatal fibrosis will provide an opportunity to study disease pathogenesis and has potential to be used in preclinical studies with an objective to identify therapeutic targets that may alter the course of BA

Quantification of IFN-α protein in primary cholangiocytes after RRV infection.

<p>Supernatants collected at 16 and 24 hours from DOL 2 and 9 primary cholangiocyte after RRV infection demonstrates greater quantities of IFN-α protein at 16 hr PI with a significantly higher quantity at 24 hours in the DOL 9 cholangiocytes compared to the DOL 2 cholangiocytes *p<0.05. Arrows indicate undetectable levels of interferon alpha.</p