Bridge policies and welfare politics: how the preferences of voters feed into social policymaking

How do parties integrate the views of voters into their policy platforms? Drawing on a new study of social policy in seven European countries, Michael Pinggera explains that parties increasingly focus on ‘bridge policies’ – policies that are popular among both their support base and the general electorate

Integrating Case-Based Reasoning with Adaptive Process Management

The need for more flexiblity of process-aware information systems (PAIS) has been discussed for several years and different approaches for adaptive process management have emerged. Only few of them provide support for both changes of individual process instances and the propagation of process type changes to a collection of related process instances. The knowledge about changes has not yet been exploited by any of these systems. To overcome this practical limitation, PAIS must capture the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. They must allow users to deviate from the predefined process in exceptional situations, and assist them in retrieving and reusing knowledge about previously performed changes. In this report we present a proof-of concept implementation of a learning adaptive PAIS. The prototype combines the ADEPT2 framework for dynamic process changes with concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning(CBR) technology

Investigating the trade-off between the effectiveness and efficiency of process modeling

Despite recent efforts to improve the quality of process models, we still observe a significant dissimilarity in quality between models. This paper focuses on the syntactic condition of process models, and how it is achieved. To this end, a dataset of 121 modeling sessions was investigated. By going through each of these sessions step by step, a separate ‘revision’ phase was identified for 81 of them. Next, by cutting the modeling process off at the start of the revision phase, a partial process model was exported for these modeling sessions. Finally, each partial model was compared with its corresponding final model, in terms of time, effort, and the number of syntactic errors made or solved, in search for a possible trade-off between the effectiveness and efficiency of process modeling. Based on the findings, we give a provisional explanation for the difference in syntactic quality of process models

Acute Alteration of Plasma Renin Activity by Large Doses of Intravenous Prednisolone

Large doses of intravenous glucocorticoids have been used in an attempt to reverse homograft rejection. The intravenous administration of 1 g prednisolone over 1 hr resulted in a significant acute reduction of plasma renin activity in 5 normal subjects tested and in 11 out of 15 patients bearing renal homografts. No definite explanation for failure to respond nor the mechanism of this prednisolone effect is readily at hand. An acute decrease in renin activity could be salutary for the chronically or acutely rejecting patient in that it could reduce vasopressor and salt-retaining effects. However, several of the non-responders had an increase in renin activity which could have been detrimental. © 1972, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved

Cheetah Experimental Platform Web 1.0: Cleaning Pupillary Data

Recently, researchers started using cognitive load in various settings, e.g., educational psychology, cognitive load theory, or human-computer interaction. Cognitive load characterizes a tasks' demand on the limited information processing capacity of the brain. The widespread adoption of eye-tracking devices led to increased attention for objectively measuring cognitive load via pupil dilation. However, this approach requires a standardized data processing routine to reliably measure cognitive load. This technical report presents CEP-Web, an open source platform to providing state of the art data processing routines for cleaning pupillary data combined with a graphical user interface, enabling the management of studies and subjects. Future developments will include the support for analyzing the cleaned data as well as support for Task-Evoked Pupillary Response (TEPR) studies

How Advanced Change Patterns Impact the Process of Process Modeling

Process model quality has been an area of considerable research efforts. In this context, correctness-by-construction as enabled by change patterns provides promising perspectives. While the process of process modeling (PPM) based on change primitives has been thoroughly investigated, only little is known about the PPM based on change patterns. In particular, it is unclear what set of change patterns should be provided and how the available change pattern set impacts the PPM. To obtain a better understanding of the latter as well as the (subjective) perceptions of process modelers, the arising challenges, and the pros and cons of different change pattern sets we conduct a controlled experiment. Our results indicate that process modelers face similar challenges irrespective of the used change pattern set (core pattern set versus extended pattern set, which adds two advanced change patterns to the core patterns set). An extended change pattern set, however, is perceived as more difficult to use, yielding a higher mental effort. Moreover, our results indicate that more advanced patterns were only used to a limited extent and frequently applied incorrectly, thus, lowering the potential benefits of an extended pattern set

Serum parathyroid hormone levels and renal handling of phosphorus in patients with chronic renal disease

In eight patients with advanced renal insufficiency (inulin clearance 1.4-9.1 ml/min), concentrations of serum calcium (S[Ca]) and phosphorus (S[P]) were maintained normal (S[Ca] > 9.0 mg/100 ml, (S[P] < 3.5 mg/100 ml) for at least 20 consecutive days with phosphate binding antacids and oral calcium carbonate. The initial serum levels of immunoreactive parathyroid hormone (S-PTH) were elevated in three (426-9230 pg/ml), normal in four (one after subtotal parathyroidectomy), and not available in one. The initial fractional excretion of filtered phosphorus was high in all and ranged from 0.45-1.05. Following sustained normo-calcemia and normo-phosphatemia, S-PTH was reduced below control levels in all patients; being normal in six and elevated in two. decreased below control levels in all patients; it remained high in six (of which five had normal S-PTH) and was normal in two (of which one had elevated S-PTH). The observed relationship between S-PTH and could either reflect the inability of the radioimmunoassay for PTH employed to measure a circulating molecular species of PTH which was present in which case the actual levels of S-PTH were higher than those measured, and/or it could be indicative of the presence of additional important factor(s) (other than S-PTH) which inhibit tubular reabsorption of phosphorus in advanced chronic renal failure. © 1972 by The Endocrine Society