An exploration into the practice of online service failure and recovery strategies in the Balkans

© 2018 To help managers better balance online service failures and recovery strategies, organisations are increasingly offering a variety of recovery programmes. Anecdotal reports suggest that organisations are experimenting with various recovery strategies, and particularly transitioning offline recovery strategies into the emerging technological tapestries. Drawing on data collected from two Balkan countries (Kosovo and Albania) with varying service failures, recovery strategies and levels of participation in online environments, this study examines how interactions between the customer and provider impact on recovery strategies. Unlike existing studies regarding online service failure and recovery strategies, we argue that rather than examining the subconscious of the customer as a stand-alone explanation for failure-recovery perceptions, interactions with the provider must also be taken into account. The current study extends the related construct of failure-recovery perceptions and it suggests that service failure generates different recovery strategies based on the contextual social world

Diagnostic and prognostic role of TFF3, Romo-1, NF-кB and SFRP4 as biomarkers for endometrial and ovarian cancers: a prospective observational translational study

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate trefoil factor 3 (TFF3), secreted frizzled-related protein 4 (sFRP4), reactive oxygen species modulator 1 (Romo1) and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) as diagnostic and prognostic markers of endometrial cancer (EC) and ovarian cancer (OC). Methods: Thirty-one patients with EC and 30 patients with OC undergone surgical treatment were enrolled together with 30 healthy controls in a prospective study. Commercial ELISA kits determined serum TFF-3, Romo-1, NF-кB and sFRP-4 concentrations. Results: Serum TFF-3, Romo-1 and NF-кB levels were significantly higher in patients with EC and OC than those without cancer. Regarding EC, none of the serum biomarkers differs significantly between endometrial and non-endometrioid endometrial carcinomas. Mean serum TFF-3 and NF-кB levels were significantly higher in advanced stages. Increased serum levels of TFF-3 and NF-кB were found in those with a higher grade of the disease. Regarding OC, none of the serum biomarkers differed significantly among histological subtypes. Significantly increased serum levels of NF-кB were observed in patients with advanced-stage OC than those with stage I and II diseases. No difference in serum biomarker levels was found between those who had a recurrence and those who had not. The sensibility and specificity of these four biomarkers in discriminating EC and OC from the control group showed encouraging values, although no one reached 70%. Conclusions: TFF-3, Romo-1, NF-кB and SFRP4 could represent new diagnostic and prognostic markers for OC and EC. Further studies are needed to validate our results

Host-specific genetic variation of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (H5N1)

The complete genome sequences of two isolates A/chicken/Egypt/CL6/07 (CL6/07) and A/duck/Egypt/D2br10/07 (D2br10/07) of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI) H5N1 isolated at the beginning of 2007 outbreak in Egypt were determined and compared with all Egyptian HPAI H5N1 sequences available in the GenBank. Sequence analysis utilizing the RNA from the original tissue homogenate showed amino acid substitutions in seven of the viral segments in both samples. Interestingly, these changes were different between the CL6/07 and D2br10/07 when compared to other Egyptian isolates. Moreover, phylogenetic analysis showed independent sub-clustering of the two viruses within the Egyptian sequences signifying a possible differential adaptation in the two hosts. Further, pre-amplification analysis of H5N1 might be necessary for accurate data interpretation and identification of distinct factor(s) influencing the evolution of the virus in different poultry species

A review of time-frequency matched filter design with application to seizure detection in multichannel newborn EEG

This paper presents a novel design of a time-frequency (t-f) matched filter as a solution to the problem of detecting a non-stationary signal in the presence of additive noise, for application to the detection of newborn seizure using multichannel EEG signals. The solution reduces to two possible t-f approaches that use a general formulation of t-f matched filters (TFMFs) based on the Wigner-Ville and cross Wigner-Ville distributions, and a third new approach based on the signal ambiguity domain representation; referred to as Radon-ambiguity detector. This contribution defines a general design formulation and then implements it for newborn seizure detection using multichannel EEG signals. Finally, the performance of different TFMFs is evaluated for different t-f kernels in terms of classification accuracy using real newborn EEG signals. Experimental results show that the detection method which uses TFMFs based on the cross Wigner-Ville distribution outperforms other approaches including the existing TFMF-based ones. The results also show that TFMFs which use high-resolution kernels such as the modified B-distribution, achieve higher detection accuracies compared to the ones which use other reduced-interference t-f kernels.Scopu

Estimating the velocity of mobile stations in macro-cellular systems using the ACF of the received signal IF

This paper presents a novel method for estimating the velocity of a mobile station (MS) in a typical macro-cell. The proposed estimator uses the auto-correlation function of the instantaneous frequency (IF) of the received signal at the MS antenna. The performance of the proposed estimator in the presence of shadowing, additive noise, and non-isotropic scattering is studied analytically. It is proved that, unlike existing velocity estimators, the IF-based estimator is robust to shadowing

Ricean K-factor estimation in mobile communication systems

We propose an estimator for the Ricean K-factor which has applications in mobile communication systems. The estimator is based on the statistics of the instantaneous frequency (IF) of the received signal. Using simulations, we show that the proposed estimator is robust to shadowing and its mean-square error (MSE) is significantly lower than that of the envelope-based estimators