264 research outputs found
A Pilot Study of High-Stakes Decision-Making for Crisis Leadership
High-stakes decision-making represents a critical component of crisis leadership. This study examined the decision-making processes practiced by global, national, and local crisis leaders to identify common decision-making process traits and propose a useful model to guide crisis leaders high-stakes decision-making. This research suggested the hypothesis is correct and inexperienced crisis leaders may benefit from a potential new decision-making model better aligned with the experiences of a panel of national and global crisis decision-making experts. Crises have distinct factors: they are time sensitive, pose significant risks, and require consequential decisions. A sample group of fifteen national and international expert crisis leaders from national security, law enforcement, and government sectors was selected for participation in this study. Seven popular decision-making models were deconstructed into individual process traits and turned in a survey. The experts were asked to identify process traits from the survey that they felt best reflected their approach to decision-making. The results were analyzed and a new model assembled based on their expertise. These findings identified a pattern of practice across the spectrum of crisis leaders and demonstrate the usefulness of a new decision-making model that captures the decision-making process traits of expert crisis leaders. This research suggests the hypothesis is correct and will provide inexperienced crisis leaders a potential new decision-making model drawn from the experiences of a panel of global crisis decision-making experts
An Early Warning System for Hospital Acquired Pneumonia
Pneumonia is a dangerous, often fatal secondary disease acquired by patients during their stay at Intensive Care Units. ICU patients have scores of data collected on a real time basis. Based on two years of data for a large ICU, we develop an early warning system for the onset of pneumonia that is based on Alternating Decision Trees for supervised learning, Sequential Pattern Mining, and the stacking paradigm to combine the two. Mainly due to decreased stay, the system will save € 180000 in this hospital alone while at the same time increasing the quality and consistent standard of health care. The ultimate system relies on a rather small numeric data base alone and is thus amenable to integration in a treatment protocol and a newly conceived ICU workflow system
Light Sailboats: Laser driven autonomous microrobots
We introduce a system of light driven microscopic autonomous moving particles
that move on a flat surface. The design is simple, yet effective: Micrometer
sized objects with wedge shape are produced by photopolymerization, they are
covered with a reflective surface. When the area of motion is illuminated
perpendicularly from above, the light is deflected to the side by the wedge
shaped objects, in the direction determined by the position and orientation of
the particles. The momentum change during reflection provides the driving force
for an effectively autonomous motion. The system is an efficient tool to study
self propelled microscopic robots
Dimensionality constraints of light induced rotation
We have studied the conditions of rotation induced by collimated light
carrying no angular momentum. Objects of different shapes and optical
properties were examined in the nontrivial case where the rotation axis is
perpendicular to the direction of light propagation. This geometry offers
important advantages for application as it fundamentally broadens the possible
practical arrangements to be realised. We found that collimated light cannot
drive permanent rotation of 2D or prism-like 3D objects (i.e. fixed
cross-sectional profile along the rotation axis) in the case of fully
reflective or fully transparent materials. Based on both geometrical optics
simulations and theoretical analysis, we derived a general condition for
rotation induced by collimated light carrying no angular momentum valid for any
arrangement: Permanent rotation is not possible if the scattering interaction
is two-dimensional and lossless. In contrast, light induced rotation can be
sustained if partial absorption is present or the object has specific true 3D
geometry. We designed, simulated, fabricated, and experimentally tested a
microscopic rotor capable of rotation around an axis perpendicular to the
illuminating light.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
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