Управління міжнародним бізнесом: Agility Journey для високотехнологічних компаній

The purpose of the article is the development of recommendations for the business maturity determination and measurement in the implementation of the agile approach for high-tech companies. Methods of analysis of documents, observation, personal and in-depth interviews, case studies have been used in the research. The findings of the research: Business Agility Journey has been suggested for defining the state of the maturity of the company and conducting express diagnostics of agility. Agile Project Management Journey has been developed for the identification of weaknesses by the companies in the path to agility, as well as for the determination of events for the transition from the traditional to the agile approach. Personal Agility Checklist has been designed for testing the soft skills of employees for the presence of the agile mindset. Research limitations include the study of the maturity of companies in the IT industry. Practical implications are based on the use of suggested Agility Journeys in defining the state of maturity and main problems on the transition path. Also, Personal Agility Checklist will help to check the agility of the future employees. The originality of the article is based on the uniqueness of the Agility Journey that has been developed for the first time. Further research on this topic should be focused on the development of an agile mindset as a prerequisite for the provision of agility in the company.Метою статті є розробка рекомендацій щодо визначення та вимірювання зрілості бізнесу при впровадженні еджайл-підходу для високотехнологічних компаній. У дослідженні використовуються методи аналізу документів, спостереження, особистого та глибинного інтерв’ю та кейс-стаді. Розроблено Business Agility Journey для визначення стану зрілості компанії та проведення експрес-діагностики еджайльності. Agile Project Management Journey було розроблено для визначення компаніями своїх слабких сторін, а також заходів для переходу від традиційного до еджайльного підходу. Personal Agility Checklist був створений для перевірки «гнучких навичок» (soft skills) співробітників на наявність гнучкого мислення (agile mindset). Обмеження досліджень включають вивчення зрілості компаній ІТ-галузі. Практична значущість ґрунтується на використанні запропонованих Agility Journeys для визначення стану зрілості та основних проблем на шляху переходу. Також Personal Agility Checklist допоможе перевірити еджайльність майбутніх працівників. Оригінальність статті базується на унікальності Agility Journey, яка була розроблена вперше. Подальші дослідження на цю тему доцільно зосередити на розвитку гнучкого мислення як передумови забезпечення еджайльності в компанії

A Review of Best Practices for Monitoring and Improving Inpatient Pediatric Patient Experiences.

ContextAchieving high-quality patient-centered care requires assessing patient and family experiences to identify opportunities for improvement. With the Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey, hospitals can assess performance and make national comparisons of inpatient pediatric experiences. However, using patient and family experience data to improve care remains a challenge.ObjectiveWe reviewed the literature on best practices for monitoring performance and undertaking activities aimed at improving pediatric patient and family experiences of inpatient care.Data sourcesWe searched PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and PsychINFO.Study selectionWe included (1) English-language peer-reviewed articles published from January 2000 to April 2019; (2) articles based in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada; (3) articles focused on pediatric inpatient care; (4) articles describing pediatric patient and family experiences; and (5) articles including content on activities aimed at improving patient and family experiences. Our review included 25 articles.Data extractionTwo researchers reviewed the full article and abstracted specific information: country, study aims, setting, design, methods, results, Quality Improvement (QI) initiatives performed, internal reporting description, best practices, lessons learned, barriers, facilitators and study implications for clinical practice, patient-experience data collection, and QI activities. We noted themes across samples and care settings.ResultsWe identified 10 themes of best practice. The 4 most common were (1) use evidence-based approaches, (2) maintain an internal system that communicates information and performance on patient and family experiences to staff and hospital leadership, (3) use experience survey data to initiate and/or evaluate QI interventions, and (4) identify optimal times (eg, discharge) and modes (eg, print) for obtaining patient and family feedback. These correspond to adult inpatient best practices.ConclusionsBoth pediatric and adult inpatient best practices rely on common principles of culture change (such as evidence-based clinical practice), collaborative learning, multidisciplinary teamwork, and building and/or supporting a QI infrastructure that requires time, money, collaboration, data tracking, and monitoring. QI best practices in both pediatric and adult inpatient settings commonly rely on identifying drivers of overall ratings of care, rewarding staff for successful implementation, and creating easy-to-use and easy-to-access planning and QI tools for staff

Enhanced Acoustic Emission in Relation to the Acoustic Halo Surrounding Active Region 11429

The use of acoustic holography in the high-frequency $p$-mode spectrum can resolve the source distributions of enhanced acoustic emissions within halo structures surrounding active regions. In doing so, statistical methods can then be applied to ascertain relationships with the magnetic field. This is the focus of this study. The mechanism responsible for the detected enhancement of acoustic sources around solar active regions has not yet been explained. Furthermore the relationship between the magnetic field and enhanced acoustic emission has not yet been comprehensively examined. We have used vector magnetograms from the \Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on-board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to image the magnetic-field properties in the halo. We have studied the acoustic morphology of an active region, with a complex halo and "glories," and we have linked some acoustic properties to the magnetic-field configuration. In particular, we find that acoustic sources are significantly enhanced in regions of intermediate field strength with inclinations no different from the distributions found in the quiet Sun. Additionally we have identified a transition region between the active region and the halo, in which the acoustic source power is hindered by inclined fields of intermediate field strength. Finally, we have compared the results of acoustic emission maps, calculated from holography, and the commonly used local acoustic maps, finding that the two types of maps have similar properties with respect to the magnetic field but lack spatial correlation when examining the highest-powered regions.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, Accepted by Solar Physic

Opinion dynamics with disagreement and modulated information

Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively acquiring relevance in many different domains. Existing approaches have mostly represented opinions through discrete binary or continuous variables by exploring a whole panoply of cases: e.g. independence, noise, external effects, multiple issues. In most of these cases the crucial ingredient is an attractive dynamics through which similar or similar enough agents get closer. Only rarely the possibility of explicit disagreement has been taken into account (i.e., the possibility for a repulsive interaction among individuals' opinions), and mostly for discrete or 1-dimensional opinions, through the introduction of additional model parameters. Here we introduce a new model of opinion formation, which focuses on the interplay between the possibility of explicit disagreement, modulated in a self-consistent way by the existing opinions' overlaps between the interacting individuals, and the effect of external information on the system. Opinions are modelled as a vector of continuous variables related to multiple possible choices for an issue. Information can be modulated to account for promoting multiple possible choices. Numerical results show that extreme information results in segregation and has a limited effect on the population, while milder messages have better success and a cohesion effect. Additionally, the initial condition plays an important role, with the population forming one or multiple clusters based on the initial average similarity between individuals, with a transition point depending on the number of opinion choices

New Insights into Molecular Mechanisms of Fludarabine

Nucleotide analogs (e.g. fludarabine) are antimetabolites used in the treatment of a wide variety of hematological malignancies and solid tumors. Upon being metabolized to their active triphosphate form, these agents are incorporated into DNA. Among other molecular targets, their incorporation may lead to activation of base excision repair (BER) pathway. The molecular mechanism of BER recognition and repair of the incorporated fludarabine has not yet been elucidated. The main focus of this research was to study the involvement of BER pathway in the response to fludarabine induced DNA damage. Also, the possibility of enhancing antineoplastic activity of fludarabine by inhibition of BER (e.g. methoxyamine) was investigated. Firstly, capacity of uracil DNA glycosylase to recognize and excise incorporated fludarabine was established. Secondly, the formation of abasic (AP) sites after fludarabine treatment was confirmed in different human cancer cell lines. These results demonstrated that incorporated fludarabine, acting as an abnormal base in DNA, initiates BER. The possibility to enhance fludarabine-induced damage by inhibiting BER was then considered. Exposure of cells to fludarabine and methoxyamine (MX) combined regimens caused increased apoptosis, clonogenic death, upregulation of some key BER proteins, enhanced DNA strand breaks. It also enhanced anti-tumor effects in human xenografts. This response of cells to fludarabine plus MX was due to MX binding to the ara-AP sites formed by fludarabine, thus turning the repairable DNA damage into lethal lesions. In addition, mitochondrial DNA was found to be targeted by fludarabine and fludarabine plus MX. Apoptotic signaling from nuclear and mitochondrial DNA damage triggered mitochondrial mediated cell death during BER disruption by MX. The modulation of fludarabine cytotoxicity by manipulating BER via MX was analyzed in a similar series of experiments using primary lymphocytes obtained from CLL patients. MX enhancement of activity of fludarabine was confirmed the

XTribe: a web-based social computation platform

In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line communities so to steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. Nowadays, while the number of on-line users has been steadily growing, there is still a need of systematization in the approach to the web as a laboratory. In this paper we present Experimental Tribe (XTribe in short), a novel general purpose web-based platform for web-gaming and social computation. Ready to use and already operational, XTribe aims at drastically reducing the effort required to develop and run web experiments. XTribe has been designed to speed up the implementation of those general aspects of web experiments that are independent of the specific experiment content. For example, XTribe takes care of user management by handling their registration and profiles and in case of multi-player games, it provides the necessary user grouping functionalities. XTribe also provides communication facilities to easily achieve both bidirectional and asynchronous communication. From a practical point of view, researchers are left with the only task of designing and implementing the game interface and logic of their experiment, on which they maintain full control. Moreover, XTribe acts as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users' curiosity, enhances their participation, and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 2013 Third International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), Sept. 30 2013-Oct. 2 2013, Karlsruhe, German

PCE: Piece-wise Convex Endmember Detection

DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2010.2041062 This item also falls under IEEE copyright. "© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works."A new hyperspectral endmember detection method that represents endmembers as distributions, autonomously partitions the input data set into several convex regions, and simultaneously determines endmember distributions and proportion values for each convex region is presented. Spectral unmixing methods that treat endmembers as distributions or hyperspectral images as piece-wise convex data sets have not been previously developed

Long-term magnetic field stability of Vega

We present new spectropolarimetric observations of the normal A-type star Vega, obtained during the summer of 2010 with NARVAL at T\'elescope Bernard Lyot (Pic du Midi Observatory). This new time-series is constituted of 615 spectra collected over 6 different nights. We use the Least-Square-Deconvolution technique to compute, from each spectrum, a mean line profile with a signal-to-noise ratio close to 20,000. After averaging all 615 polarized observations, we detect a circularly polarized Zeeman signature consistent in shape and amplitude with the signatures previously reported from our observations of 2008 and 2009. The surface magnetic geometry of the star, reconstructed using the technique of Zeeman-Doppler Imaging, agrees with the maps obtained in 2008 and 2009, showing that most recognizable features of the photospheric field of Vega are only weakly distorted by large-scale surface flows (differential rotation or meridional circulation).Comment: Proceedings of the conference "Stellar polarimetry: from birth to death", 2011 Jun 27-30, Madiso