Search

Two rival records management models emerged during the 1990s. Duranti’s model involved moving records out of business applications into a repository which has a structure/schema optimised for recordkeeping. Bearman’s model involved intervening in business applications to ensure that their functionality and structure/schema are optimised for record keeping. In 2013 the US National Archives and Records Administration began asking Federal agencies to schedule important email accounts for permanent preservation. This approach cannot be mapped to either Duranti or Bearman’s model. A third records management model has therefore emerged, a model in which records are managed in place within business applications even where those applications have a sub-optimal structure/schema. This model can also be seen in the records retention features of the Microsoft 365 cloud suite. This paper asks whether there are any circumstances in which the in-place model could be preferable to Duranti and Bearman’s models. It explores the question by examining the evolution of archival theory on the organisation of records. The main perspectives deployed are those of realism and of records continuum theory. The paper characterises the first two decades of this century as an era of partial automation, during which organisations have had a general capability to automate the assignment of business correspondence to a sub-optimal structure/schema (that of their email system and/or other messaging system) but not to an optimal structure/schema. In such an era any insistence on optimising the structure/schema within which correspondence is managed may paradoxically result in a reduction in recordkeeping efficiency and reliability.

Background Evaluating blood ordering and subsequent development of a blood ordering schedule can decrease over-ordering of blood among pediatric surgical patients. The objective is to assess our practice of blood utilization using various blood utilization indices and calculate the Maximal Surgical Blood Order Schedule (MSBOS). This is a cross-sectional study for 3 years that included patients (≤ 18 years old) who underwent major surgical procedures in the Philippine Children’s Medical Center. Data included type of surgery, age and sex, number of units crossmatched, number of units transfused, and timing of transfusion. Indices were calculated. Results This study revealed that the utilization rate was only 39.1% of blood among a total of 5314 cases done. The indices were analyzed according to different procedures among different age groups. Procedures for head and neck, colorectal, ostomy, solid tumors, genitourinary abnormalities, upper gastrointestinal, and appendectomy had CT (crossmatched to transfusion) ratio exceeding 2.0, indicating inappropriate blood ordering. Major abdominal, major thoracic, and hepatobiliary surgery all have CT ratio Conclusions The MSBOS is largely utilized to the adult population but its creation can also be utilized among pediatric patients. Our data shows that in majority of elective pediatric surgical procedures, routine crossmatch is not necessary which is proven by our high underutilization of requested blood products.

This article presents a modular approach that reduces the labor costs for the technological preparation of small-scale metalworking production. Its idea is to formalize the technological processes, allowing generating them and their documentation from pre-prepared parameterized templates stored in the special database. Details to be processed are represented as the structures of their basic geometric components. For the template of machining operations for each component, symbolic parameters are fixed, defining the workpiece used, cutting tools options, machining modes, etc. The result of formalization is an automatically generated technological route in the form of an MSC diagram encoding it as a sequence of macro-operations for the machinery. This symbolic model is adapted to a specific instance of the detail being manufactured by replacing the symbolic variables with specific values set by the technologist. The MSC diagram is supplemented with the results of time and cost calculations of technological routes, which allows selection of the most efficient one. The correctness of the technological routes is ensured in the process of symbolic verification by checking the permissible ranges of parameters of the MSC diagram, as well as checking the correctness of order and compatibility of operations in the sequence. The results of the whole process obtained from the MSC diagram are the set of technological documentation of preproduction, which, in particular, includes a set of operating cards, and the fine-tuned schedule of production after its digital modeling with the real resources of the workshop taken into account. According to technologists, by applying the described automation, the time to prepare documentation for details of medium complexity is reduced from several weeks to 1-2 days.

This research was designed for the purpose of patients with eye defects who have difficulty visiting their doctors due to age, distance, or the manual processes involved in the existing system. We designed an approach to assist people get attended to by building a system that allows users register and log into the system, book appointments, view doctors and equipment used or available in the existing system. Joint Application Development (JAD) was the system methodology used, this is because it involves continuous interaction with the users and different designers of the system in development. Quantitative and qualitative research methodology were employed, and method of data collection used were questionnaire, interview, and internet. The resultant website developed using JavaScript, CSS, PHP, HTML, and MySQL allows users register and log in, schedule doctor’s appointment, and book surgery.

In the current world, time is considered an immense treasure. People never want to waste the time and schedule their day with prioritized works. The thing people fail to understand is trying to balance the time they forget to balance their mental states. For a healthy run of the body, we not only require a healthy exterior but also a fruitful interior. When our mind runs smoothly then the body reflects the same. Failing to understand this concept the people ignore their mental balance, resulting in effects such as stress, sensation to commit extreme measures, etc. This type of behavior is always dangerous to them and also to the society around them. To contain this type of sociopathic behavior, psychologists and other professionals were trying to develop a system which detects such type of behaviors. But in this paper, we propose a system that intends to cut the problem in its roots than identifying it later. The system proposed is a semi-robotic interface that interacts with the user in toil and solves their cause of distress and maintains a mental equilibrium of that particular user. The introduction of this system brings a drastic change in the society which always struggles to maintain peace and equilibrium with itself.

House prices have increased faster than average income in many countries over the last decade, raising concerns on the affordability of housing. We study the impact of transaction taxes on the real estate market and the effectiveness of tax subsidies to make housing more affordable. We show how the demand and supply elasticities for housing determine the price impact of tax subsidies and the distribution of gains between buyers and sellers. We then use data on all real estate transactions in Luxembourg from 2007 to 2018 to estimate the elasticity of housing supply and demand. For identification, we exploit discontinuities in the transaction tax schedule as well as rules on tax subsidies for new constructions. Our estimates suggest that the elasticity of house prices to transaction taxes is 0.27, so buyers capture a large part of the surplus from the subsidies.

In this paper, we describe our system for the AAAI 2021 shared task of COVID-19 Fake News Detection in English, where we achieved the 3rd position with the weighted \(F_1\) score of 0.9859 on the test set. Specifically, we proposed an ensemble method of different pre-trained language models such as BERT, Roberta, Ernie, etc. with various training strategies including warm-up, learning rate schedule and k-fold cross-validation. We also conduct an extensive analysis of the samples that are not correctly classified. The code is available at: https://github.com/archersama/3rd-solution-COVID19-Fake-News-Detection-in-English.

Advent of modern means of living and busy schedule, a person generally forget to look after the health and thereby prone to some of severe health disorders. From various researches it is clear that Parkinson Disease (PD) basically occur due to negligence of an individual. It is a disorderliness that affects a small part of the brain that manages the gesture and mental order. The syndrome vary from person. Generally PD is identified from a certain age level but recent studies shown that people of any age group can suffer from PD. Considering the extremity, if there is an system to identify the major factors of PD then it would be of great importance. Thus an expert system named Transparent Decision Rules for Parkinson Disease (TD-Rules-PD) is proposed in this paper which finds out the high risk factor of PD. TD-Rules-PD consist of four phases: Rule Production, Rule selection, Rule pruning and Merging and Identify High Risk Factor. Rule Production stage uses Decision tree to produce rules. Rule selection step choose the most efficient rules, from the so collected rules Rule Pruning and Merging step drops the confusing and insignificant rules and then combines the flittered rule set to a single rule and finally Identify High Risk Factor stage finds out the most prevailing factor of PD.

In this paper, we present GraphTM, an efficient and scalable framework for processing transactions in a distributed environment. The distributed environment is modeled as a graph where each node of the graph is a processing node that issues transactions. The objects that transactions use to execute are also on the graph nodes (the initial placement may be arbitrary). The transactions execute on the nodes which issue them after collecting all the objects that they need following the data-flow model of computation. This collection is done by issuing the requests for the objects as soon as transaction starts and wait until all required objects for the transaction come to the requesting node. The challenge is on how to schedule the transactions so that two crucial performance metrics, namely (i) total execution time to commit all the transactions, and (ii) total communication cost involved in moving the objects to the requesting nodes, are minimized. We implemented GraphTM in Java and assessed its performance through 3 micro-benchmarks and 5 complex benchmarks from STAMP benchmark suite on 5 different network topologies, namely, clique, line, grid, cluster, and star, that make an underlying communication network for a representative set of distributed systems commonly used in practice. The results show the efficiency and scalability of our approach.

Voice interaction is becoming one of the major methods of human interaction with computers. Several mobile service providers have introduced various types of voice assistant systems such as Bixby from Samsung, Siri from Apple, and Google Assistant from Google that provide information including the schedule for a day, the weather, or methods to control the device to perform a task such as playing music. Although the voice assistant system provides various types of functions, generally, the users do not understand what functions the system can support. We conducted a control task analysis based on expert interviews and found that the main bottleneck of using a voice assistant system is that the user cannot know all the commands. Thus, we believe that presenting recommendable commands is an effective way to increase user engagement. Through buzz data analysis, we discovered what functions could be used and determined the relevant usage context. Subsequently, we performed context modelling and designed the user interface (UI) of a voice assistant system and conducted a case study. Through this case study, we proved that presenting commands on a UI induced more user engagement and usability.

It's the time of technology; individuals are extremely keen about concluding their business (money) transactions and virtually each task through internet-based services. A system is created to integrate all applications in one system by using Universal System victimization RF-ID (Radio Frequency Identification) card. A universal system strictly designed to require entire advantage of the facilities provided by the institute, that helps students to avoid wasting time exceedingly in during their busy schedule. This is achieved by automating the many services by the institute. This also includes automation of trip management of field to field bus services, all controlled through an applicable controller like Arduino, Raspberry-pi. An internet page access to administrator is provided to manage student wallet where students are connected to the system through a client- server system which stores the database of the student information.

Concurrency bugs are difficult to diagnose and fix, due to the nature of the bugs and how they manifest themselves during execution. Traditional approaches for diagnosing concurrency bugs attempt to reproduce the exact execution schedule which reveals the bug, resulting in high runtime overhead. In this paper, we present our work in identifying concurrency bugs using resource consumption footprints. This is based on the observation that resource access and consumption patterns are critical indications of the run-time behavior of concurrent software, and can be used as a powerful mechanism to guide the software debugging process. We demonstrate that monitoring resource footprints at runtime can effectively help detect software bugs. Specifically, for MPI programs, a simple SVM classifier can detect deadlocks with high accuracy using only the CPU usage patterns.

A security control system is the key element at an airport because each passenger must undergo security check before boarding. Security control must be performed efficiently while maintaining a high level of safety. This article presents a security control model that is applied at a given airport. A set of variable input data describing the model and data received by the user as a result of its use is presented. The security control model is developed using the FlexSim software and based on security control model implementation, for which algorithm for managing the security checkpoint operation schedule are used. The algorithm allows a capacity lack margin to be established in the security control system in order to lower the system operation cost and maintain an acceptable passenger service quality. We describe two basic patterns of implementing the security control process: single- and double-lane counters. The security control counter has been divided into specific areas (queues). The developed model was implemented into the management system of the security checkpoint at Wroclaw Airport. Measures of the system's capacity are determined for the following sample input data (system characteristics and the stream of passenger reports): the average duration of a passenger's stay in the security control system and the number of operator work hours depending on the adopted management strategy. The developed model can be used in existing security control systems and also to evaluate the operation of a system at its design stage.

Widespread agreement that a political reform is necessary is no guarantee that it is actually undertaken in a timely manner. There is often a delay before action is taken and reform packages that would be most efficient to implement all at once are often done only gradually. We propose a theoretical model explaining this behavior and show that when voters have present-biased, time-inconsistent preferences, gradualism can arise in equilibrium and be welfare-enhancing. This is because without the possibility for gradualism, time-inconsistent voters would delay implementing the reform even more. Using a citizen candidate model, we allow the agenda setter, who decides which reform schedule to put to vote, to be endogenously determined. We show that voters who are aware of their own time inconsistency use the election of the agenda setter as a commitment device and appoint an agent who is more patient than the median voter in order to avoid full procrastination and to achieve efficiency-maximizing gradualism.

Localizing concurrency faults that occur in production is hard because, (1) detailed field data, such as user input, file content and interleaving schedule, may not be available to developers to reproduce the failure; (2) it is often impractical to assume the availability of multiple failing executions to localize the faults using existing techniques; (3) it is challenging to search for buggy locations in an application given limited runtime data; and, (4) concurrency failures at the system level often involve multiple processes or event handlers (e.g., software signals), which can not be handled by existing tools for diagnosing intra-process(thread-level) failures. To address these problems, we present SCMiner, a practical online bug diagnosis tool to help developers understand how a system-level concurrency fault happens based on the logs collected by the default system audit tools. SCMiner achieves online bug diagnosis to obviate the need for offline bug reproduction. SCMiner does not require code instrumentation on the production system or rely on the assumption of the availability of multiple failing executions. Specifically, after the system call traces are collected, SCMiner uses data mining and statistical anomaly detection techniques to identify the failure-inducing system call sequences. It then maps each abnormal sequence to specific application functions. We have conducted an empirical study on 19 real-world benchmarks. The results show that SCMiner is both effective and efficient at localizing system-level concurrency faults.

Education is an essential element in our life in order to build a better future for young generations. A school must have a better communication platform between teachers and parents to ensure collaboration in monitoring the children’s education. Due to time confinement and restrictive schedule, parents nowadays are not able to monitor their children’s progress accordingly in terms of school activities and student’s performance. Furthermore, instruction from the teachers toward the parents were not delivered properly. These are caused by multiple factors such as the inability to deliver messages correctly due to young age. Therefore, this paper proposes online Parent-Teacher Assisting Monitoring Application (PTAMA) system. The PTAMA system will be built in web based and mobile application system. There are five features in PTAMA system involve attendance, announcements, homework, feedback and letters. In this system, student’s attendance is recorded using Quick Response (QR) Code that is printed into student matric card. This system is specifically designed for primary school students. Rapid Application Development (RAD) cycle is chosen as a methodology to develop this PTAMA system. By having this PTAMA system, parents and teachers can collaborate to monitor the students’ performance.

Background Healthcare delivery organizations face increasing pressure to manage the use of medications in terms of safety, waste reduction, and cost containment. Objective To describe a computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system intervention to optimize use of a commonly ordered, high‐cost therapeutic: intravenous immune globulin (IVIG). Design Description of IVIG order configuration, medication use patterns, and subsequent order set configuration development in a CPOE system. Measurements IVIG orders were extracted from the CPOE system before and after the implementation of a specialty orderset to determine the indications for use, dosing, and duration of therapy. Orders were compared to a theoretical dosing schedule created from published evidence and data from a prior medication use evaluation. Results During 36 months before the implementation of the IVIG order set, 1965 IVIG orders were reviewed. The prescribed IVIG dose varied considerably from the expected dose (mean = −1.8, range = −4.9‐1.5). In the 27 months after order set implementation, 848 IVIG orders were reviewed. The prescribed IVIG dose was closer to the expected dose (mean = −1.2, range = −3.9‐2.6, P

Cats, with latin names felis catus, has been cared by many people. Consequently, by pet owners, they need to pay attention to caring their cats. However, cat owners cannot be always together with their cat, so cat care cannot be carried out optimally. Thus, there's so many risks encountered by leaving the cat alone such as obesity, stress, negative interaction with other cat, etc. At the same time, cat daycare may not suitable with our cat behavior and that places are usually fully booked in holiday time. For that, a solution to the problems is needed. Solutions to the problems are defined by using internet of things technology. Hardware, software, and communication, as an aspect of internet of things, are considered to build the entire system. The system is divided into several sub-system that is cat feeder, cat playmate, automatic cat door, cat monitor, and mobile apps. Each of them representing certain problem which has been analyzed. The system is built to fulfill cat care needs to feed, play, keep them save, and monitor them. The features for caring the cats can be executed through a mobile phone with internet access or by schedule defined by users. This system is implemented by making four hardware prototypes, mobile apps, and communication processing through third party services and through own-built platform. The tests conducted in the prototypes showed good results with communication delay below 1.5 second, food amount measurement tolerance below 2 grams, working door functionality, and 15 fps video streaming with latency below 3 second.

A block replacement schedule can be optimized simultaneously with a spare parts ordering schedule, since all items are replaced at a constant interval. The solution of joint optimization for spare parts ordering time and block replacement gives lower costs compared to separate optimization of ordering time and replacement time. The spare parts for replacement can be classified as stochastic demand for failure replacement and deterministic demand for block replacement. In this paper, we propose a simulation model for a separate spare parts ordering schedule. The solution was compared to the solution for a model with common spare parts for both failure and block replacement. The system has N identical components, each with a Weibull lifetime distribution. The costs of failure and block replacements, and also the costs of ordering, holding and shortage of spare parts are given. The proposed model was shown to perform better than the common order model. Also, compared to the age replacement model, the solution of the proposed model is relatively similar, yet the economies of scale would be an advantage for the block replacement over age replacement.

Context: Inconsistency detection and resolution is critical for context-aware applications to ensure their normal execution. Contexts, which refer to pieces of environmental information used by applications, are checked against consistency constraints for potential errors. However, not all detected inconsistencies are caused by real context problems. Instead, they might be triggered by improper checking timing. Such inconsistencies are ephemeral and usually harmless. Their detection and resolution is unnecessary, and may even be detrimental. We name them inconsistency hazards.Objective: Inconsistency hazards should be prevented from being detected or resolved, but it is not straightforward since their occurrences resemble real inconsistencies. In this article, we present SHAP, a pattern-learning based approach to suppressing the detection of such hazards automatically.Method: Our key insight is that detection of inconsistency hazards is subject to certain patterns of context changes. Although such patterns can be difficult to specify manually, they may be learned effectively with data mining techniques. With these patterns, we can reasonably schedule inconsistency detections.Results: The experimental results show that SHAP can effectively suppress the detection of most inconsistency hazards (over 90%) with negligible overhead.Conclusions: Comparing with other approaches, our approach can effectively suppress the detection of inconsistency hazards, and at the same time allow real inconsistencies to be detected and resolved timely.

The aim of the study is to implement bar coding system as mechanism for the PUP ECE Laboratory Transaction recording and monitoring. The study was concerned on proper documenting and managing the daily transaction of the ECE Laboratory particularly to automate the existing manual mechanism procedure with the proposed AutoLab System. The study used QuasiExperimental method as it included both experimental and descriptive method to gather data for the study. Experimental in a way that the system was subjected to series of experiments to test its accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness and reliability using the singlegroup design. Two main experiments have been conducted the test for accuracy of the system in transaction recording and the equipment inventory monitoring. Test for accuracy was divided into four parts namely (1) Borrowing of Key; (2) Borrowing of Equipment; (3) Returning of Keys; and, (4) Returning of Equipment. On the other hand, the equipment inventory monitoring incorporates the analysis of the equipment utilization; from such as what equipments are usually borrowed, in what subjects a certain equipment is being used and the history of usage for a given equipment. The descriptive part was used to evaluate the system in three variables the Graphical User Interface, the Accuracy of Information displayed and the Transaction Recording duly rated from scales 1 to 5; 5 being the highest through survey among the ECE students and faculty members. The ECE Room Utilization Log Book, ECE Transaction Log Book and the Borrower’s Slips have been analyzed to assess the existing transaction recording and inventory monitoring. Results showed that the AutoLab System effectively automated the recording of transactions merging the existing manual method into one recording mechanism. Manual transaction recording cannot provide a 100% effectivity since there were percentages of 9.39% of the 2300 ECE Room Utilization Log Book transactions, 41.38% of the 742 Borrower’s Slip transactions and 45.94% of the 603 ECE Transactions Log Book entries that were analyzed. A 100% complete data being filled-out on the ECE Borrower’s Slip and the ECE Transactions Log Book permits a more comprehensive study of equipment inventory monitoring which gives a detailed room utilization for the ECE Room Utilization Log Book. The Automated Laboratory coined as AutoLab merged the ECE Room Utilization Log Book, ECE Borrower’s Slip and the ECE Transaction Log Book into one complete package in terms of transaction recording and equipment inventory monitoring incorporating four databases– the class list, the room utilization, the class schedule and the equipments. As PUP Student Identification Cards have bar codes that embed the student number, the system utilized the information to extract details regarding the identity of the student necessary for transaction and equipment inventory monitoring. Two hundred sixty seven (267) ECE students from the 1142 ECE student population and 19 ECE Faculty Members served as respondents for the study. The respondents assessed the system in three areas – the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the Accuracy of Information Displayed and the Transaction Recording. Respondents rated the GUI in terms of design, user friendliness, minimal amount of time to perform its function and reliability. Overall rating of the system in terms of design was 4.22 (Effective); user friendliness was 4.50 (Effective); minimal amount of time to perform function was 4.51 (Highly Effective) and reliability to be 4.50(Effective). In terms of the Accuracy of Information Displayed, the overall assessment for accuracy of reading of student Identification card was 4.72 (Highly Effective), accuracy of information being displayed was 4.71 (Highly Effective), accuracy of reading for room key to be 4.74 (Highly Effective) and equipment with 4.75 (Highly Effective). Overall rating of the system in terms of recording of borrower’s information as 4.72 (Highly Effective), recording of key 4.71(Highly Effective), recording of equipment 4.68(Highly Effective) and updating of record to be 4.70 (Highly Effective). The result from the faculty and student respondents were subjected to T-test analysis to determine whether there is a significant difference between their assessments. Result have shown that there was no significant difference between student and faculty assessment.

Software transactional memory (STM) is a transactional mechanism of controlling access to shared resources in memory. This transactional mechanism is similar to the abort-and-restart execution model in a functional reactive system (FRS). Due to its abort-and-restart nature, the execution semantics of STM are different from the classic preemptive or nonpreemptive model. Some research has strong constraints for its worst case response time (WCRT) analysis. In this paper, we research on worst case response time and schedulability analysis for real-time software transactional memory-lazy conflict detection (STM-LCD). Specifically, we introduce a parameter the remainder factor m , formally derive an exact WCRT for a 2-task set on STM systems using lazy conflict detection (LCD), propose an exact schedulability test for a 2-task set. Also, we present a near-exact WCRT for an n -task set on STM-LCD, and propose a new necessary condition and a new sufficient condition to schedule an n -task set. Finally, we show that experimental results are accordant with the aforementioned analysis.

BACKGROUND As part of ongoing perioperative surgical home implantation process, we applied a previously published algorithm for creation of a maximum surgical blood order schedule (MSBOS) to our operating rooms. We hypothesized that using the MSBOS we could show a reduction in unnecessary preoperative blood testing and associated costs. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Data regarding all surgical cases done at UC Irvine Health's operating rooms from January 1, 2011, to January 1, 2014 were extracted from the anesthesia information management systems (AIMS). After the data were organized into surgical specialties and operative sites, blood order recommendations were generated based on five specific case characteristics of the group. Next, we assessed current ordering practices in comparison to actual blood utilization to identify potential areas of wastage and performed a cost analysis comparing the annual hospital costs from preoperative blood orders if the blood order schedule were to be followed to historical practices. RESULTS Of the 19,138 patients who were categorized by the MSBOS as needing no blood sample, 2694 (14.0%) had a type and screen (T/S) ordered and 1116 (5.8%) had a type and crossmatch ordered. Of the 6073 procedures where MSBOS recommended only a T/S, 2355 (38.8%) had blood crossmatched. The cost analysis demonstrated an annual reduction in actual hospital costs of $57,335 with the MSBOS compared to historical blood ordering practices. CONCLUSION We showed that the algorithm for development of a multispecialty blood order schedule is transferable and yielded reductions in preoperative blood product screening at our institution.

Time pressure is not usually seen as an advantage in front end innovation (subsequently referred to as “FEI”), but rather it is believed that ideas should be left to develop freely without a tight schedule. Instead of strictly formalized operations, creating ideas generally necessitates a certain level of freedom. The starting point for this research was to challenge this general view by imposing severe time pressure in FEI. The FEI process was reviewed from recognizing problems/creating ideas up until the selection of the best concept for further development. The research was executed as a qualitative in-depth investigation of a case. In the case, FEI took place over a three-week period, and the target for the FEI was to generate concepts of digital jewelry with business potential. The time pressure was seen as appropriate – with certain conditions – in FEI. The results also present the advantages and disadvantages of time pressure, combining it to the stress theory.

Background Fewer than 25 simultaneous heart-liver-kidney transplants (SHLKTxs) have been performed in the U.S. This highly complex operation was performed nine times by only four centers from 2018 to 2019. However, one institution, the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC), is responsible for two-thirds of all SHLKTxs performed in that period. There is a paucity of literature regarding the logistics and infrastructure of performing SHKLTxs. The development of a standardized, effective protocol would improve outcomes in the high-risk patients who undergo this operation. We assessed the unique strategies that this center employs to successfully perform a high volume of SHLKTxs to understand possible programmatic procedures. Methods We reviewed the logistical methods and infrastructure of the UCMC concerning the process of SHLKTx, spanning the stages from patient selection to operating room (OR) management. Additionally, we attempted to identify areas of future improvement. Results The UCMC employs strict patient selection criteria, as potential candidates must meet the listing criteria for each organ independently. The severity of illness, however, must also indicate the potential for a successful outcome, and the age limit for candidates is typically 60 years. Donor selection and organ allocation are critical to ensure that all organs are received from the same donor, which can require negotiation when the procurement is not in a local area. The technically challenging surgery requires the transplant teams to move quickly in order to minimize ischemic time for the heart and prevent reperfusion injury in the liver, while the kidney is perfused. Due to the risk of these events, the transplant team recommends the use of mechanical support, such as extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). The key element of the UCMC's success was found to be the team's ability to procure and achieve success with organs that many other centers would turn down. The team is willing to accept undersized hearts, travel further distances, use DCD organs, and transplant Hepatitis C seropositive non-viremic (HCV Ab+/NAT-) livers to an HCV seronegative recipient in pursuit of an expeditious and successful SHLKTx. The combined efforts of a skilled, multidisciplinary team are also essential. The various teams see the patients together in a structured rounding schedule, and the operation itself consists of three distinct phases with choreographed and planned handoffs. Areas identified for future improvement included standardizing the approach used in the OR, particularly team transfer and timing. Conclusion The UCMC owes its established track record of successful SHLKTxs to the internal infrastructure of its program. In particular, its willingness to accept organs that other centers refuse allows it to perform a high volume of expeditious and successful SHLKTxs. Future steps include protocolizing OR management along with identifying parameters that allow for a structured system of team transfer.

The act of retrieval yields benefits for memory. However, according to the reconsolidation account, reactivation could render a memory amenable to modifications. The present study investigated how the retrieval frequency of a previously learned vocabulary list and the temporal distance of a subsequently encoded list affected retention of the prior list. Recruited from six intact sessions of a college intensive English course, participants learned two unrelated lists of novel words and took cued-recall tests. The results revealed an interaction between the retrieval of list 1 (single vs. repeated) and the encoding of list 2 (close vs. far vs. no). Noteworthy, the repeated-retrievals groups outperformed single-retrieval groups only when list 2 encoding was spaced far apart (i.e., 3-day interval). The memory impairment effect emerged in the presence of list 2 whereas the memory strengthening effect occurred in the absence of list 2. These results suggest that the interplay between repeated retrievals and an extended temporal distance functions in a way that may attenuate memory’s susceptibility to new learning rather than abolish it. Situated in the naturalistic classroom setting, these findings have pedagogical significance for instructors to schedule testing and learning sessions to help learners optimize vocabulary retention.

Currently, The unprecedented increasing of mobile data traffic challenges the performance of current cellular networks. To meet this explosive demands of mobile traffic, the mobile data offloading technology has been proposed to alleviate the traffic load by moving traffic load of cellular networks to other wireless networks provided by infrastructures such as small-cell base stations. In this work, an infrastructure-free offloading method is proposed, which realizes the data transaction among mobile users by applying the hotspot function of smartphones. In this transaction, mobile users with redundant data perform as accessible Wi-Fi hotspots, and sell their mobile data to users with data requirements. Considering the scenarios with multiple data sellers, a networked auction model is introduced to model the process of data transaction. Additionally, high efficient data allocation mechanisms are designed in this work, which decide how to schedule the data transaction in different time slots, based on the establish edauction model. Simulation results indicate that introducing the prediction information of user behaviors can effectively improve the performance of data allocation, and achieve a high efficient data transaction operation.

Wedding Organizer is a service that works personally to help bride and groom in planning and supervision of the implementation of the wedding party in accordance with schedule and bugdet that have been set. Wedding organizer information system created using web-based information technology, with the aim to expand the area of promotion and sale of wedding packages and simplify the ordering process . System Design Information Ordering Wedding Organizer is UML modeling visualization (Unified Modeling Language) by using some object-oriented visualization diagram. The programming language used is the PHP programming language (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) based on the Laravel framework as well as Javascript, with MySQL as the Database Management System (DBMS), and Atom as an editor. Wedding organizer information system is very helpful for people who do not want to bother with their wedding planning issues. With the development of technology today, wedding Organizer has begun to move from the manual process into the online process of wedding information system-based organizer web. Keywords: Information System , booking Wedding Organizer , web, Laravel

In this paper, we present a very fast and simple protocol for polling tags in an RFID system formed by one or more readers, and a multitude of tags. Actually, the protocol is time-optimal for single reader systems, while being very fast for multiple readers systems. The main idea of the protocol described in this paper, is to associate a short and unique number (called “nickname” in the following) to each tag in the reader’s range, and by using such nicknames as the polling order. We first describe the single reader version of the protocol. For this version, the used nicknames are the integers 1 , 2 , … , n if the set of tags to be polled is formed by n tags. They can be seen as the time slot in which a tag has to communicate with the reader. We also provide a procedure to assign a nickname for a new tag, as well as a way to delete a tag from the polling order, while keeping the above consecutivity property about nicknames. When polled, the tags transmit a proper (usually short) message. Polling protocols, sometime with little changes, sometime with no change, can be efficiently used for solving several practical problems related to the use of RFID systems. Some of the most prominent ones, and those considered in this paper, are the problems of exactly determine missing tags, the collection of information associated to the tags, the probabilistic determination of missing tags (useful for raising a warning), and the determination of the presence of cloned tags, again for raising a proper warning. We formally show that the protocol is time-optimal. Besides, the protocol is privacy preserving since tags ID’s are never transmitted during the polling procedure. In the protocol version for large, multireader RFID systems, we take an approach completely different from that used so far for any multireader protocol. Up to now, in the proposed protocols for this and related problems, first readers are scheduled so that those with overlapping ranges never operate at the same time. Then, single reader protocol for each so scheduled reader are applied. Here, we schedule the tags instead of the readers so that tags whose transmission can be received by a common reader, never operate at the same time. Then, we show that our polling protocol for single reader systems can be effectively used along with such a tags scheduling strategy, in multireader systems. The time performance improvement of our protocol over the known ones for multireader systems is very large, going from two to seven times, as shown by a simulation experiment we set up, and whose results are also presented.

The various stages of the separation are carefully planned but despite this, variations which will change the schedule of the procedure may exist. In general the operation commences on the opposite side from the main procedure and then the twins are turned for the remainder of the operation. Each type of conjoined twin is different but basically thoracopagus involves the hearts, omphalopagus involves the liver and small intestine and ischiopagus involves the large intestine and genito-urinary system. Our results are presented together with interesting cases from which lessons have been learned.

Microfluidic-based biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis. The digital microfluidic biochips are based on the manipulation of liquids not as a continuous flow, but as discrete droplets. Several approaches have been proposed for the synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips, which, starting from a biochemical application and a given biochip architecture, determine the allocation, resource binding, scheduling, placement and routing of the operations in the application. Researchers have assumed that each biochemical operation in an application is characterized by a worst-case execution time (wcet). However, during the execution of the application, due to variability and randomness in biochemical reactions, operations may finish earlier than their wcetswcets, resulting in unexploited slack in the schedule. In this paper, we first propose an online synthesis strategy that re-synthesizes the application at runtime when operations experience variability in their execution time, exploiting thus the slack to obtain shorter application completion times. We also propose a quasi-static synthesis strategy that determines offline a database of alternative implementations. During the execution of the application, several implementations are selected based on the current execution scenario with operation execution time variability. The proposed strategies have been evaluated using several benchmarks and compared to related work.

Background: Recently, operation technology and health care environment are continuously improving and changing. An updated MSBOS using current blood usage data is necessary for efficient blood management in the hospital blood bank. Methods: This study was a retrospective analysis based on operation names according to the ICD-9-CM at Severance hospital in 2013. We calculated the average units of red blood cells according to each operation, as well as the total units of RBCs used per each operation and patient. Finally an average unit of RBCs was set for the MSBOS, which were ordered before surgical operation. These analyzed results were compared with the previous reports of our hospital and other hospitals. Results: Transfusion episodes occurred in 3,092 cases, which is only 8.6% of all patients. Total transfused units were 8,230 units, 27% of total RBCs (2,270 units) transfused were used in cardiovascular surgery. Compared with the previous data, the usage of RBCs during surgery was decreased. Conclusion: The MSBOS investigated in this study showed some differences in the indicators in 2007. Therefore, regular update of the MSBOS is necessary in each hospital to reflect the advancement of surgical technology. (Korean J Blood Transfus 2015;26:38-46)

Background. Excess ordering of blood products for surgical cases is expensive and wasteful. Evidence has shown that institution-specific versions of the Maximum Surgical Blood Order Schedule (MSBOS) lead to better ordering practices. Most MSBOSs recommend a crossmatch for a minimum of 2 units of packed red blood cells (PRBCs) for cardiac surgical cases; however, studies have shown that >50% of these patients receive no transfusions. Our aim was to create a blood order algorithm for cardiac surgical cases that would decrease unnecessary crossmatching. Methods. Retrospective data was collected for 264 patients from January 2011 through April 2012. The crossmatch-to-transfusion ratio (C:tx), transfusion probability (%T), and transfusion index (TI) were calculated for each type of procedure. Results. All 264 patients were crossmatched and 98 patients were transfused, resulting in an overall transfusion probability (%T) of 37.12% (95% confidence interval 31.52-43.09). A total of 1175 units of blood were crossmatched, but only 370 units of blood were transfused, resulting in a C:tx of 3.17 (95% confidence interval 2.61-4.03). The average number of units transfused per procedure (transfusion index) was 1.40. C:tx was highest and TI was lowest for CABG, where approximately 11 units of blood were ordered for every 1 unit transfused (C:tx =11.70 ± 3.04), and the TI was 0.32. Conclusions. Using the gold standard C:tx of >2:1 as an indicator of inappropriate blood utilization, our analysis confirmed that excessive crossmatching occurred for several procedures. Now a subset of cardiac surgical cases only requires a type and screen order prior to surgery.

The concept of incorporating “ilities” into systems seems a self-evidently good idea, as expressed by both written and spoken positions by technical and political leaders. Indeed, incorporating lifecycle properties such as flexibility, adaptability, and recently affordability and resilience, into systems is touted as the solution to modern day's ever increasing complexity, schedule and budget pressures, and the need for finding sustainable solutions. While expressing desires for ilities seems straightforward, tracing these desires to verifiable system instantiations remains ambiguous at best. This paper describes the semantic challenge underlying the concept of a coherent set of system properties, a sampling of various efforts to ascribe meaning to particular ilities, and proposes a prescriptive 20 category semantic basis for specifying a set of ilities, while avoiding the assertion of new definitions. The intention for this first pass prescriptive semantic basis is to begin a structured approach for exploring the existence of one or more semantic fields, which together form a coherent semantic framework for tracing desired ilities into verifiable system requirements and specifications. Preliminary results indicate that at least three semantic fields exist within the larger set of system lifecycle properties including change-type, architecture-type, and new ability-type ilities.

There is a trend in recent database research to pursue coordination avoidance and weaker transaction isolation under a long-standing assumption: concurrent serializable transactions under read-write or write-write conflicts require costly synchronization, and thus may incur a steep price in terms of performance. In particular, distributed transactions, which access multiple data items atomically, are considered inherently costly. They require concurrency control for transaction isolation since both read-write and write-write conflicts are possible, and they rely on distributed commitment protocols to ensure atomicity in the presence of failures. This paper presents serializable read-only and write-only distributed transactions as a counterexample to show that concurrent transactions can be processed in parallel with low-overhead despite conflicts. Inspired by the slotted ALOHA network protocol, we propose a simpler and leaner protocol for serializable read-only write-only transactions, which uses only one round trip to commit a transaction in the absence of failures irrespective of contention. Our design is centered around an epoch-based concurrency control (ECC) mechanism that minimizes synchronization conflicts and uses a small number of additional messages whose cost is amortized across many transactions. We integrate this protocol into ALOHA-KV, a scalable distributed key-value store for read-only write-only transactions, and demonstrate that the system can process close to 15 million read/write operations per second per server when each transaction batches together thousands of such operations.

Concurrent systems may fail in the field due to various elusive faults such as race conditions. Reproducing such failures is hard because (1) concurrency failures at the system level often involve multiple processes or event handlers (e.g., software signals), which cannot be handled by existing tools for reproducing intra-process (thread-level) failures; (2) detailed field data, such as user input, file content and interleaving schedule, may not be available to developers; and (3) the debugging environment may differ from the deployed environment, which further complicates failure reproduction. To address these problems, we present DESCRY, the first fully automated tool for reproducing system-level concurrency failures based only on default log messages collected from the field. DESCRY uses a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques, together with symbolic execution, to synthesize both the failure-inducing data input and the interleaving schedule, and leverages them to deterministically replay the failed execution using existing virtual platforms. We have evaluated DESCRY on 22 real-world multi-process Linux applications with a total of 236,875 lines of code to demonstrate both its effectiveness and its efficiency in reproducing failures that no other tool can reproduce.

Design and construction of projects is complex endeavor that requires the coordination of a multitude of human, physical, and natural resources. The technical design and construction complexities are frequently outweighed by the uncertainties and risks with the social, financial, and political aspects of the projects. To address these risks and uncertainties, project participants have turned to a series of cost and schedule risk management tools over the past 50 years. This paper summarizes the evolution of probabilistic cost estimating and scheduling tools. It also provides examples of applications on complex projects from the US Department of Energy, the US Federal Highway Administration/Washington State Department of Transportation, the Panama Canal Authority, and the international ITER fusion generator. The paper concludes with a discussion of the remaining cost and schedule risk management challenges, which inhibit project participants from achieving their project performance goals.

The maximum surgical blood ordering schedule (MSBOS) provides guidelines for pre-operative pre-transfusion testing for elective surgical procedures. This study compared blood ordering and utilization during the period when the MSBOS was created by achieving consensus between the blood bank and the various surgical specialties, and after the introduction of an MSBOS created by using department-specific red blood cell (RBC) transfusion data (data driven MSBOS, dMSBOS).The dMSBOS was created by analyzing 12 months of RBC transfusion data for each procedure across a regional health system. Pre-transfusion testing and the RBC crossmatch:transfusion (C:T) ratios at 8 of the hospitals were compared between the 12 month period before the dMSBOS was introduced, and the 15 months after its introduction.There were significant reductions in the median monthly number of type and screens not associated with RBC crossmatches (10 714-10 061; p 0.0001) and the median number of type and screens associated with RBC crossmatches (10 127-9 349; p = 0.0014) on surgical patients after dMSBOS implementation. There were significant decreases in the median number of monthly RBC units crossmatched (2 981-2 444; p 0.0001) and transfused (890-791; p 0.0001) to surgical patients after implementing the dMSBOS. The overall system-wide C:T ratio trended down after dMSBOS implementation (from 3.34 to 3.17, p = 0.067).Crossmatching fewer RBC units facilitates more efficient management of the blood bank's inventory.The dMSBOS was effective in reducing the extent of unnecessary pre-transfusion testing before surgery and reduced the number of RBCs that were crossmatched for specific patients.

Six pigeons were studied in a token economy in which tokens could be produced and exchanged for food on one side of an experimental chamber and for water on the opposite side of the chamber. Responses on one key produced tokens according to a token-production fixed ratio (FR) schedule. Responses on a second key produced an exchange period during which tokens were exchanged for water or food. In Experiment 1a, food tokens could be earned and exchanged under restricted food budgets, and water tokens could be earned and exchanged under water restricted budgets. In Experiment 1b, a third (generalized) token type could be earned and exchanged for either food or water under water restricted budgets. Across Experiments 1a and 1b, the number of tokens accumulated prior to exchange increased as the exchange-production schedule was increased. In Experiment 1b, pigeons produced more generalized than specific tokens, suggesting enhanced reinforcing efficacy of generalized tokens. In Experiment 2, the FR token-production price was manipulated under water restriction and then under food restriction. Production of each token type generally declined as a function of its own price and increased as a function of the price of the alternate type, demonstrating own-price and cross-price elasticity. Production of food and water tokens often changed together, indicating complementarity. Production of specific and generalized tokens changed in opposite directions, indicating substitutability. This is the first demonstration of sustained generalized functions of tokens in nonhumans, and illustrates a promising method for exploring economic contingencies in a controlled environment.

Introduction: Blood transfusion is an essential part of perioperative care in surgeries in obstetrics and gynecology. A tendency of over ordering of blood imposes additional workload to the blood bank and extra cost to the laboratory and patients. Maximum surgical blood ordering schedule (MSBOS) is a guide which helps in the decision of ordering and transfusing blood which reduces blood wastage. This study was done with the aim of evaluating the blood ordering and utilization patterns in obstetric and gynecologic surgeries and formulation of MSBOS for these procedures for the institute. Methods : This is a cross-sectional, hospital based study conducted for the duration of three months. All patients undergoing major and minor surgeries at the department were included. Crossmatch to transfusion ratio (C/T), transfusion probability (%T), transfusion index (TI) and MSBOS were calculated for each procedure. Results: Total 309 surgeries were performed in the department during the study period of three months. Most common surgery was emergency cesarean section (n=164, 53.1%) followed by abdominal hysterectomy (n=43, 13.9%). Utilization of cross matched blood was 22.51%. Overall transfusion rate for all surgeries was 3.88%. Overall C/T ratio, %T, and TI were 4.44, 9.83 and 0.27 respectively which elicited indiscriminate ordering of blood. Conclusion: Over ordering and under utilization of blood were seen in this audit. Blood ordering patterns need to change in order to minimize over ordering of blood which may prevent abuse of the system. MSBOS maybe an useful tool in this institute as it allows optimum blood usage for surgeries. J. Lumbini. Med. Coll. Vol 4, No 2, July-Dec 2016, page: 99-103 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22502/jlmc.v4i2.100

Background: The maximum surgical blood order schedule (MSBOS) is used to determine preoperative blood orders for specific surgical procedures. Because the list was developed in the late 1970s, many new surgical procedures have been introduced and others improved upon, making the original MSBOS obsolete. The authors describe methods to create an updated, institution-specific MSBOS to guide preoperative blood ordering. Methods: Blood utilization data for 53,526 patients undergoing 1,632 different surgical procedures were gathered from an anesthesia information management system. A novel algorithm based on previously defined criteria was used to create an MSBOS for each surgical specialty. The economic implications were calculated based on the number of blood orders placed, but not indicated, according to the MSBOS. Results: Among 27,825 surgical cases that did not require preoperative blood orders as determined by the MSBOS, 9,099 (32.7%) had a type and screen, and 2,643 (9.5%) had a crossmatch ordered. Of 4,644 cases determined to require only a type and screen, 1,509 (32.5%) had a type and crossmatch ordered. By using the MSBOS to eliminate unnecessary blood orders, the authors calculated a potential reduction in hospital charges and actual costs of $211,448 and $43,135 per year, respectively, or $8.89 and $1.81 per surgical patient, respectively. Conclusions: An institution-specific MSBOS can be created, using blood utilization data extracted from an anesthesia information management system along with our proposed algorithm. Using these methods to optimize the process of preoperative blood ordering can potentially improve operating room efficiency, increase patient safety, and decrease costs.

Prior work shows western US forest wildfire activity increased abruptly in the mid-1980s. Large forest wildfires and areas burned in them have continued to increase over recent decades, with most of the increase in lightning-ignited fires. Northern US Rockies forests dominated early increases in wildfire activity, and still contributed 50% of the increase in large fires over the last decade. However, the percentage growth in wildfire activity in Pacific northwestern and southwestern US forests has rapidly increased over the last two decades. Wildfire numbers and burned area are also increasing in non-forest vegetation types. Wildfire activity appears strongly associated with warming and earlier spring snowmelt. Analysis of the drivers of forest wildfire sensitivity to changes in the timing of spring demonstrates that forests at elevations where the historical mean snow-free season ranged between two and four months, with relatively high cumulative warm-season actual evapotranspiration, have been most affected. Increases in large wildfires associated with earlier spring snowmelt scale exponentially with changes in moisture deficit, and moisture deficit changes can explain most of the spatial variability in forest wildfire regime response to the timing of spring.

The usage of systems has been increased rapidly; Due to the busy schedule of the people everyone doing transactions in internet. Authentication is playing a major role in the internet to do authorised transactions. When we are doing transactions in network hackers and intruders would like to hack our system. In this paper we implemented a new scheme which will provide the authentication for the users and resource providers through the registration server. We tried to provide an advanced authentication scheme for a multi-server environment with better security and efficiency. Our scheme not only resists potential attacks but also satisfies various additional requirements as well.

Email is a way of communication for the today’s internet world, private and government sector or public sector all are used email for communication with their clients. They can freely send number of mail to their client without disturbing them. Now a day email communication is also a way of advertising, some mail is also spam, lots of social mails are there. Categorization and handling lots of email is an important task for the researches, as they all are working in this field by using the Natural language processing and ontology extraction process. User get frustrated for handling lots of mails and reading those for finding there is any important mail, sometime user delete lots of mail without reading and in that case may be some important mail which contain the important information may be about meeting, seminar etc. is also deleted. For avoiding these scenarios here auto updation of schedule calendar procedure is proposed by the author. Concept extraction and clustering of concept is done based on fuzzy logic, similar mail pattern is grouped in a same cluster if similarity is less than threshold value a new cluster is defined for that. From the extracted concept author establish the relationship between them and generate the result. Computation overhead is also calculated for different set of mails and finds that it takes very less time in computing large email data set.

Completion of a nuclear medicine procedure involves many steps that are intertwinedwith one another.Areferring physician orders a nuclear medicine study for a patient after clinical examination. The patient reports to the nuclear medicine department for the study according to the schedule. The study is performed according to the established protocol using specific equipment. The data are processed and used to construct images which are then stored for display on monitors as needed. The nuclear physician retrieves the images from storage and interprets them to diagnose the patient’s diseases. The report on the diagnosis is dictated into a computer, which can be retrieved along with images by the referring physician for making a clinical decision for the patient. The entire sequence of operations in the procedure is depicted by the term workflow that represents each operation much like flow charts. Workflow software has been developed by various vendors to implement all sequential operations of a procedure in an integrated form. The advantage of workflow lies in the management of large imaging data in multiple formats along with the capability of interrelating among different operations. Below is given a description of storage and display of image data in nuclear medicine and the concept of workflow involving multiple operations to complete a study.

Main-memory database management systems (DBMS) can achieve excellent performance when processing massive volume of on-line transactions on modern multi-core machines. But existing durability schemes, namely, tuple-level and transaction-level logging-and-recovery mechanisms, either degrade the performance of transaction processing or slow down the process of failure recovery. In this paper, we show that, by exploiting application semantics, it is possible to achieve speedy failure recovery without introducing any costly logging overhead to the execution of concurrent transactions. We propose PACMAN, a parallel database recovery mechanism that is specifically designed for lightweight, coarse-grained transaction-level logging. PACMAN leverages a combination of static and dynamic analyses to parallelize the log recovery: at compile time, PACMAN decomposes stored procedures by carefully analyzing dependencies within and across programs; at recovery time, PACMAN exploits the availability of the runtime parameter values to attain an execution schedule with a high degree of parallelism. As such, recovery performance is remarkably increased. We evaluated PACMAN in a fully-fledged main-memory DBMS running on a 40-core machine. Compared to several state-of-the-art database recovery mechanisms, PACMAN can significantly reduce recovery time without compromising the efficiency of transaction processing., Comment: To appear in SIGMOD 2017

Highlights? To what extent people are sensitive or willing to response to the extraneous events. ? "If a set of conditions are satisfied, then a set of consequences can be produced." ? Rule 8: If UL is "high" and IL is "medium" then RL is "high". ? The similarity between user expectation level of reminder (UEL) and actual prompting level generated by the system (SPL). To date, several reminder systems for elders have been developed, but when and how to prompt the reminding message has not been fully explored yet. This paper presents a context-aware system that provides reminding messages for elders based on fuzzy linguistic model in order to properly deliver a reminder in an appropriate time and way. By separating the user activity contexts and contexts utilized to trigger a reminder, it is much easier for the elderly or their care givers to schedule and maintain reminders. We first adopt a fuzzy linguistic model to determine the prompting level based on the interrupt degree of user current activity and the urgent level of to-be-prompt reminder. An adaptive mapping strategy is then presented to transfer the prompting level into machine-readable parameters. Finally, the proposed approach is verified through our system prototype and experiments.

Given (a) the mandate to fully comply with “Interactive Data to Improve Financial Reporting,” (Rule 33-2009; SEC 2009b) which requires all SEC registered companies to include financial statements in XBRL format as exhibits with their quarterly or annual reports on a phased-in schedule, and (b) initiations to converge U.S. GAAP and IFRS, it is crucial for students to understand the methodological differences between XBRL financial reporting for these two standards. Therefore, the goal of this case is to expose students to the IFRS and U.S. GAAP XBRL taxonomies. We use the case of a hypothetical company to first illustrate some of the differences between IFRS and U.S. GAAP reporting at the financial statement level, then map its Income Statement line items into respective XBRL taxonomies, and finally create an XBRL instance document. The case provides two exercises to explain the steps in creating an XBRL instance document for different taxonomies, i.e., accessing and then mapping line items into the IFRS and U.S. GAAP taxonomies (Exercise 1) and creating the actual XBRL instance document for U.S. GAAP and IFRS (Exercise 2).

This is the third special issue of the IEEE Latin America Transactions of the year 2011. Special issues are published, out of regular issues schedule, according to the availability of extended best papers from recognized high level conferences that claim for a special issue. The current issue includes 5th WTA'2011 and 1st Specialization Course on Embedded Systems for Remote Data Acquisition events

The current electoral law for the Italian Parliament prescribes blocked, linearly ordered lists of candidates for each party within each constituency. The peculiarity of the Italian electoral system is that a party can present the same candidate in different constituencies. There are several seats at stake in each constituency; these seats are allocated to the parties proportionally to the total number of votes they get. If the blocked list mechanism–which assigns the seats obtained by a party in a constituency to the first candidates of the corresponding ordered list–causes some candidates to win in more than one constituency, they may retain only one of the seats, giving up all the remaining ones. Thus, the problem arises for a party to find a suitable “schedule of give-ups” that produces the final set of winners for that party. In order to do this, we assume that such decision is centralized and based on some models of global (inter-regional) preferences over the set of candidates. In this paper, we introduce two classes of models to formulate the “give-up problem”, i.e., utility and ordinal models, and we show that for both of them some natural formulations of the problem can be efficiently solved by network flows techniques.