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The rapid expansion of the burgeoning middle classes has transformed the dynamics of Chinese and Indian consumer society. It has also been declared that despite an increasingly challenging environment, China and India remain strategically important retail investment destinations for international luxury brands. The objective of this chapter is to identify factors within a broad strategic framework that will guide international luxury brands to develop a brand footprint in China and India. If luxury brands operating in China and India are to realize their true potential, luxury brand executives will need to ensure that a coherent and robust strategy has the flexibility to create long-term market success.

The real-time strategy game StarCraft has proven to be a challenging environment for artificial intelligence techniques, and as a result, current state-of-the-art solutions consist of numerous hand-crafted modules. In this paper, we show how macromanagement decisions in StarCraft can be learned directly from game replays using deep learning. Neural networks are trained on 789,571 state-action pairs extracted from 2,005 replays of highly skilled players, achieving top-1 and top-3 error rates of 54.6% and 22.9% in predicting the next build action. By integrating the trained network into UAlbertaBot, an open source StarCraft bot, the system can significantly outperform the game's built-in Terran bot, and play competitively against UAlbertaBot with a fixed rush strategy. To our knowledge, this is the first time macromanagement tasks are learned directly from replays in StarCraft. While the best hand-crafted strategies are still the state-of-the-art, the deep network approach is able to express a wide range of different strategies and thus improving the network's performance further with deep reinforcement learning is an immediately promising avenue for future research. Ultimately this approach could lead to strong StarCraft bots that are less reliant on hard-coded strategies., Comment: 8 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2017)

Developing societies failed to create their own technological base for progress. How did this affect the prospects for democracy? This volume examines the conflicting relations between technology and development as they unfold in a new and ever more challenging environment.

Many official and private commentators, particularly in Australia and in the Asian region, argue that the world is heading inexorably towards an ‘Asian Century’. They foresee a fundamental shift of economic and political power away from the West that will transform the world economy and global politics. I argue that, notwithstanding emerging Asia's undoubted economic achievements, this claim is premature and potentially misleading for three main reasons: implicit in many of these claims are implausible historical analogies with earlier eras of European and American dominance; linear projections of continued Asian growth outperformance may not be realised in practice; and even if rapid growth were to be sustained, the domestic and external obstacles to the collective global influence of Asia will probably remain profound. The implication is that businesses, citizens and policy-makers, especially those operating in the Asian region, will face a much more uncertain and challenging environment than is sometimes acknowledged.

Many African literary critics seem to have some preconceived notions about female writers. Consequently, there has been indiscriminate branding of some female writers either as feminists or female chauvinists. This portrays them as incapable of addressing other topical issues of national interest other than those that affect the women directly. In this paper therefore, we have undertaken an appraisal of Zainab Alkali’s The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman to buttress our position that the issues in her novels transcend gender imbalance. The paper examines Alkal’s treatment of the clash of westernisation, tradition and city life, political mal-administration, poor infrastructure as well as the challenging environment of the emerging cities. These are issues, which we believe, affect both male and female. The paper advocates a broader look at texts rather than the emphasis on the feminist angle in the interpretation of works by female authors at the expense of probably more important issues.

The responsibility of protecting food crops from diseases and pests in the challenging environment is rising with increase in human population and its needs. The crop losses due to pests are assessed to be ranging approximately between 10 to 30% of crop productions. Status and importance of various diseases have changed over the years in India. Awareness is needed to know the status of these problems and to develop management modules to protect these in eco-friendly manner. IDM is a multidisciplinary approach that seems promising to manage diseases effectively by integration of cultural, physical, biological and chemical strategies. Of the diverse components in IDM, biocontrol is important, but notwithstanding their known efficacy, biocontrol formulations have only a inadequate share in the national pesticide scenario. How to make biocontrol more effective, feasible and popular needs to be reviewed thoroughly. Development and use of molecular techniques for pathogen detection, resistance identification and cloning of genes for resistance seems very promising to realize the goal. So, further research thrust is needed in India to develop and utilize new novel technologies and strategies like gene cloning, recombinant DNA technology and other biotechnological and molecular modules to minimize the crop losses due to existing and new emerging diseases in the light of climate changes. Plant pathologists have a crucial role to play in this scenario. We have to be more proactive in our approach. Some of the current advances and emerging challenges in crop disease management in India are briefly discussed in this review. Key word: Integrated disease management, biocontrol, India.

Vascular stenting has received great attention from the medical community since its introduction. The endovascular self-expanding stent is used to treat peripheral artery diseases; however, after implantation, these stents suffer from various cyclic motions caused by pulsatile blood pressure and daily body activities. Due to this challenging environment, fatigue performance has become a major issue for stent design. In this paper, a simple and interesting concept of stent design aimed at enhancing pulsatile fatigue life is investigated. The concept of this design is to shift the highly concentrated stresses/strains away from the crown and re-distribute them along the stress-free bar arm by tapering its strut width. Two types of design approaches were applied in attempts to quantize the degrees of such fatigue enhancement for the first time. Finite element models were developed to evaluate the mechanical integrity and pulsatile fatigue resistance of the stent to various loading conditions. Simulation results show that the fatigue safety factor jumped to a whopping 5.4 times that of the standard stent with constant strut width. The findings of this paper provide an excellent guide to the optimization of future stent design to greatly improve stent fatigue performance.

Bluetooth detectors are becoming increasingly popular as a technology for acquiring travel time data. However, these data include outliers that are caused by several factors, and a robust outlier detection algorithm is needed for filtering out the outliers. Arterial roadways present a particularly challenging environment because the traffic control devices introduce a large amount of variability to the measured individual travel times and because of the prevalence of other sources of error (e.g., en route stops, Bluetooth-enabled devices not in vehicles). This paper presents a new adaptive outlier detection algorithm that is proactive rather than reactive. Unlike conventional reactive algorithms that rely solely on recent data, the proposed algorithm uses both historical data and current data to predict the validity window. The performance characteristics of the proposed algorithm are illustrated, and field data from a signalized arterial are used to compare the proposed algorithm and a benchmark algorithm. The results show that the proposed model is superior to the benchmark model and that the model performs well across a wide range of traffic conditions.

Defense is resisting an attack; there are numerous protective mechanisms that work in the oral cavity against various insults. Gingiva is constantly subjected to a wide array of mechanical, chemical and antigenic challenges — some of which are transient and others permanent. This review will discuss how the gingiva prepares and safeguards itself via diverse defense mechanisms in the face of this challenging environment.

Corruption is at the core of weak governance. In the education sector, corruption is a threat to the quality of and access to education. Although the diagnosis is straightforward, effective reforms are more difficult to implement. The principles of good governance (transparency, participation, accountability, and integrity) provide us guidance, but innovative ways need to be found to fill these principles with life and create dynamics of change. We present a simple, efficient experience of introducing transparency and fostering participation and therefore accountability at the school level in Honduras. The transparency bulletin boards (murales de transparencia) are a homegrown response to the call for improving governance in a challenging environment.

Home care agencies are tasked with finding increasingly cost-efficient care processes to improve the quality of patient care outcomes. Hiring and retaining nurses who are well suited for home care are important factors that can influence the cost and provision of quality care in the home. The purpose of this article is to identify characteristics of home healthcare nurses that enable them to be successful home healthcare team members and leaders. A search of the literature was conducted to compile a list of questions with which to screen home healthcare nurse applicants for the required knowledge and skills as well as to improve retention rates of nurses hired. The nature of home healthcare practice makes nurse qualification screening and interviewing a challenge. To assist hiring managers in the screening and interviewing of nurse applicants in this challenging environment, we identified targeted interview questions that will help discern those nurses who are most likely to succeed and be productive, long-term members of the home healthcare agency.

Photosynthetic pigment-protein complexes (PPCs) accomplish light-energy capture and photochemistry in natural photosynthesis. In this review, we examine three pigment protein complexes in oxygenic photosynthesis: light-harvesting antenna complexes and two reaction centers: Photosystem II (PSII), and Photosystem I (PSI). Recent technological developments promise unprecedented insights into how these multi-component protein complexes are assembled into higher order structures and thereby execute their function. Furthermore, the interfacial domain between light-harvesting antenna complexes and PSII, especially the potential roles of the structural loops from CP29 and the PB-loop of ApcE in higher plant and cyanobacteria, respectively, are discussed. It is emphasized that the structural nuances are required for the structural dynamics and consequently for functional regulation in response to an ever-changing and challenging environment.

Deep-sea natural products have been created by unique marine organisms that thrive in a challenging environment of extreme conditions for its inhabitants. In this study, 179 deep-sea natural products isolated from 2009 to 2013 were investigated by analysing their physicochemical properties that are important indicators of the ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion and Toxicity) profile of a compound. The study and analysis of these molecular descriptors and characteristics enabled the defining of these compounds in various chemical spaces, particularly as an indication of their drug-likeness and position in chemical space and is the first to be conducted to analyse deep-sea derived natural products. It was found that ~40% of all deep-sea natural products were drug-like and 2/3 were within Known Drug Space (KDS), highlighting the high drug-likeness of a significant proportion of deep-sea natural products, most of which have already been shown to have notable biological activities, that should be further investigated as potential therapeutics. Furthermore, this study was able to reveal the general structural differences between compounds from Animalia, Bacteria and Fungi organisms where it was observed that natural products from members of the Animalia kingdom are structurally more varied than compounds from bacteria and fungi. It was also noted that, in general, fungi-derived compounds occupy a more favourable position in drug-like chemical space and are a rich and promising source of biologically-active natural products for the purposes of drug development and therapeutic application.

Background: Pharmacology is perceived as a difficult course by nursing students who find it difficult to retain drug names and complex pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics processes. Team-based learning is a student-centered instructional design associated with improved academic outcomes. Purpose: To explore experiences of postgraduate nursing students with team-based learning in clinical pharmacology course. Methods: A descriptive qualitative design comprising of in-depth interviews was used. Study sample comprised of post graduate midwifery nursing students enrolled in clinical pharmacology course conducted with team-based learning. Content analysis following Graneheimian inductive approach was used to yield themes and subthemes. Results: Two themes emerged as 'Learning environment' and 'Intellectual process', comprising of 3-4 subthemes. Students absorbed concepts in a relaxed yet challenging environment. Intellectual process showcased improvements in knowledge retention, grasping concepts, confidence and thinking. Conclusion: Postgraduate midwifery nursing students had positive learning experiences in clinical pharmacology course conducted with team-based learning.

Through in-depth interviews, the study explored fashion industry professionals’ viewpoints, on creativity, focusing on traits of creative people and how creativity can be developed. Four creative, traits were identified, including different thought processes, determination, having an open mind, and, risk taking. About one-third of participants believed that creativity is innate, and therefore, some, people were born creative whereas others were not. Another third of participants maintained that, everyone has some creative potential that can be further developed. The remaining fashion, professionals distinguished artistic creativity from creative problem solving. Suggested strategies for, creativity enhancement and development included (1) practicing creative thinking strategies, (2), formal training, (3) diverse experiences and exposure to the world; and (4) creating a safe, yet, challenging environment.

Paramedics work in a challenging environment which can affect the health and safety of both paramedics and their patients. Our objectives in this study were to work with the paramedics on changing one of the essential tools they use on a daily bases, and to make it safer to use both for them and for their patients. Our intervention started by providing the paramedics with basic human factors knowledge, which made a revolution in the way they look at their working environment. The work with the paramedics throughout the process also assist in implementing the changes to the field, since the paramedic were involve in the change from the beginning and knew the reason for change.

This paper is a part of a research whose objective is to analyze the role of the teacher trainer in a teacher training action experienced by a group of ten mathematics teachers from sixth to ninth grade of elementary school. This training was organized to discuss the use of educational laptops, focusing on the use of the software klogo, which was distributed in schools covered by the project Um Computador por Aluno/UCA (One Computer per Student), in the city of Terenos, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The training action was guided by studies by Papert (2008), about the constructionist approach. Studies by Brousseau (2008), about the Theory of Didactical Situations, contributed to defining the role of the teacher trainer during the training of the teachers involved, and studies developed by Valente (2005) about the Cycle Action and Learning Spiral made it possible to understand some of the roles of teacher trainers in the construction of knowledge with computers. The analysis reveals some of the characteristics of the role of teacher trainers, such as to propose and create significant problems, not directly intervene in the knowledge in the proposed situations; create a challenging environment, constantly questioning teachers about their certainties, leading them to think about thinking and consequently favoring the process of knowledge construction. Keywords: Continuing Education; teacher trainer; Constructionist approach; Educational laptops. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/19827199726

Bioactive glass (BAG) is known to possess antimicrobial properties and release ions needed for remineralization of tooth tissue, and therefore may be a strategic additive for dental restorative materials. The objective of this study was to develop BAG containing dental restorative composites with adequate mechanical properties comparable to successful commercially available composites, and to confirm the stability of these materials when exposed to a biologically challenging environment.Composites with 72 wt% total filler content were prepared while substituting 0-15% of the filler with ground BAG. Flexural strength, fracture toughness, and fatigue crack growth tests were performed after several different soaking treatments: 24h in DI water (all experiments), two months in brain-heart infusion (BHI) media+Streptococcus mutans bacteria (all experiments) and two months in BHI media (only for flexural strength). Mechanical properties of new BAG composites were compared along with the commercial composite Heliomolar by two-way ANOVA and Tukey's multiple comparison test (p≤0.05).Flexural strength, fracture toughness, and fatigue crack growth resistance for the BAG containing composites were unaffected by increasing BAG content up to 15% and were superior to Heliomolar after all post cure treatments. The flexural strength of the BAG composites was unaffected by two months exposure to aqueous media and a bacterial challenge, while some decreases in fracture toughness and fatigue resistance were observed. The favorable mechanical properties compared to Heliomolar were attributed to higher filler content and a microstructure morphology that better promoted the toughening mechanisms of crack deflection and bridging.Overall, the BAG containing composites developed in this study demonstrated adequate and stable mechanical properties relative to three successful commercial composites.

Intravascular stenting has emerged as the primary treatment for vascular diseases and has received great attention from the medical community since its introduction two decades ago. The endovascular self-expanding stent is used to treat peripheral artery diseases; however, once implanted, these stents suffer from various cyclic motions caused by pulsatile blood pressure and daily activities. Due to this challenging environment, fatigue performance has become a critical issue for stent design. In this paper, a simple yet intriguing concept of stent design aimed at enhancing pulsatile fatigue life is investigated. The concept of this design is to shift the highly concentrated stresses/strains away from the crown and re-distribute them along the stress-free bar arm by tapering its strut width. Finite element models were developed to evaluate the mechanical integrity and pulsatile fatigue resistance of the stent to various loading conditions. Results show that the fatigue safety factor jumped to 2.5-3.0 times that of the standard stent with constant strut width. This is astonishing considering that the stent profile and scaffolding were not compromised. The findings of this paper provide an excellent approach to the optimization of future stent design to greatly improve stent fatigue performance.

Sinan Al-Sheikh describes how IEEEXtreme not only identifies the best programmers around the world, but it also creates a challenging environment for brilliant minds to challenge each other, innovate, and reach out to unique solutions for reallife problems. IEEEXtreme works hard to take its questions from real-life scenarios, which helps to map academic studies into real-life problems. The nature of the competition is quite tough; only great minds can stand the pressure and reach the top of the ranking list. The speed in solving the problem is no longer a factor in rankings. It doesn?t matter how fast you solve the problem, what matters is the logic used in solving it and how many other teams could reach the same answer. All of the teams from around the world share their pictures and videos during the competition. You get to see other people with same interests going through the same experience. Almost all participants receive something to remember this event. The top three teams receive items equivalent to US$20,000.

[1] Due, in part, to the challenging environment of Earth's high-latitude regions, available information on cold climate effects on aeolian processes in these areas remains limited. Data from these areas, however, provide insight into the physics of sediment transport by wind and the controls on erosive winds in proximity to ice caps and topographic influences. This study presents a 2 year record of meteorological, saltation activity, horizontal saltation flux, and particle size distribution data from four sites in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, 2008 to 2010. Saltation measurements revealed daily and seasonal patterns with spring and summer sediment transport events occurring between 09:00 and 24:00 hours due to thermally generated winds. Fall and winter events occur at any time of day with the strongest associated with foehn winds. Threshold wind speed at 4.2 m in all seasons for all locations was ≈10 m s−1. Saltation occurred in the temperature range −40°C to +5°C. Westerly winds in the fall/winter and easterly winds in spring/summer are associated with the majority of transport events. The sand in transport is mainly 250 to 500 µm in diameter and poorly sorted. The integrated saltation flux varies over three orders of magnitude among the sites, with the lowest mean flux recorded in the Taylor Valley (2.9 kg m−1 day−1) and the highest in the eastern Victoria Valley (2271 kg m−1 day−1) for 24 hours of continuous saltation. The percentage of time saltation active at these locations annually is ≈2%, ≈4%, and ≈13%, respectively, for the Victoria, Taylor, and Wright Valleys.

This study explored job satisfaction among 753 cancer-experienced volunteers from hospital, palliative care, and community-based oncology settings in nine provinces across Canada. Based on a conceptual framework including three components of volunteering—antecedents, experiences, and consequences—a mixed-methods design to explore job satisfaction was used. Findings from the quantitative and qualitative inquiries indicated that the level of job satisfaction was high and stress was not reported as a major concern. The four themes related to job satisfaction from the volunteers’ responses included learning, personal growth, challenge, and giving back related to their own experience with cancer. Future research should further investigate the important role of job satisfaction for social service professionals for training, marketing, and recruiting, plus the need to explore supports to sustain oncology volunteers in this most challenging environment.

BACKGROUND: Intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration remains a clinically important condition for which treatment is costly and relatively ineffective. The molecular basis of degenerative disc disease has been an intense focus of research recently, which has greatly increased our understanding of the biology underlying this process. PURPOSE: To review the current understanding of the molecular basis of disc degeneration. STUDY DESIGN: Review article. METHODS: A literature review was performed to identify recent investigations and current knowledge regarding the molecular basis of IVD degeneration. RESULTS: The unique structural requirements and biochemical properties of the disc contribute to its propensity toward degeneration. Mounting evidence suggests that genetic factors account for up to 75% of individual susceptibility to IVD degeneration, far more than the environmental factors such as occupational exposure or smoking that were previously suspected to figure prominently in this process. Decreased extracellular matrix production, increased production of degradative enzymes, and increased expression of inflammatory cytokines contribute to the loss of structural integrity and accelerate IVD degeneration. Neurovascular ingrowth occurs, in part, because of the changing degenerative phenotype. CONCLUSIONS: A detailed understanding of the biology of IVD degeneration is essential to the design of therapeutic solutions to treat degenerative discs. Although significant advances have been made in explaining the biologic mediators of disc degeneration, the inhospitable biochemical environment of the IVD remains a challenging environment for biological therapies. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Moult entails costs related to the acquisition of energy and nutrients necessary for feather synthesis, as well as the impact of reduced flight performance induced by gaps in the wing plumage. Variation in moult strategies within and between populations may convey valuable information on energetic trade-offs and other responses to differing environmental constraints. We studied the moult strategies of two populations of a pelagic seabird, the black-browed albatross Thalassarche melanophris, nesting in contrasting environments. According to conventional wisdom, it is exceptional for albatrosses (Diomedeidae) to moult while breeding. Here we show that black-browed albatrosses breeding on the Falklands regularly moult primaries, tail and body feathers during chick-rearing, and the majority of those at South Georgia show some body feather moult in late chick-rearing. The greater moult-breeding overlap at the Falklands allows the birds to annually renew more primary feathers than their counterparts at South Georgia. The results of the present paper, pooled with other evidence, suggest that black-browed albatrosses from South Georgia face a more challenging environment during reproduction. They also serve to warn against the uncritical acceptance of conventional ideas about moult patterns when using feathers to study the ecology of seabirds and other migrants for which there is scant information at particular stages of the annual cycle.

If you engage any group of executive nurse leaders in a conversation about today's healthcare system, they are likely to tell you that it is the most challenging environment that they have experienced in their careers. The business of caring has become exceedingly complex. During the past decade, the cost of care in the United States has skyrocketed to an average cost of over $8,000 per year per person. Left unchecked, we could spend over $13,000 per person by 2018. 1 It is not surprising that the recent debates on healthcare reform have focused on how costs can be reduced. Payment incentives are quickly moving away from volume-based incentives toward a greater focus on value of services and health outcomes, including fewer hospitalizations. 2

Faced with an increasingly challenging environment, nonprofit organizations (NPOs) must behave innovatively and act in a result- or performance-oriented manner. In this article, we explore the extent to which NPOs behave innovatively (in their management and service delivery), and the factors that determine this innovative behaviour. We conducted our research in the main subsectors of the Flemish nonprofit sector (education, welfare, health and the socio-cultural sector). The results presented here are based on a survey of 170 NPO managers. We found that the organizations within our sample claim that innovations occur to a fairly large extent. We have, however, discovered differences in innovative behaviour between subsectors. In addition, we found that there are many forces at work when trying to explain innovative behaviour in NPOs and different forms of innovative behaviour also seem to have different explanations.

This paper presents an autonomous control and stabilization system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), e.g. quadrotor. The main points of the research are: designing stabilization board, creating the pattern recognition program and providing an autonomous flight of the quad in challenging environment using depth camera and ultrasonic sensors for self-positioning.

Most of high-tech industries are facing unpredictable demand, short product lifecycles, and globally-spreading logistics. To surmount such a challenging environment, semiconductor industry practices have found the “push-pull strategy”, which is a hybrid approach of make-to-stock and make-to-order, as an effective solution. The position of a “decoupling point”, which is the boundary between make-to-stock and make-to-order, is one of the critical elements that influence a successful implementation of the push-pull strategy. This research addresses this issue by investigating the positioning of a decoupling point in a semiconductor supply chain based on the qualitative framework and simulation analysis. Several guidelines on how the decoupling point should be positioned under demand and lead time uncertainty are presented.

BACKGROUND Quay crane operators are specialized in moving containers to and from vessels while adopting constrained sitting postures for prolonged periods (4-6 consecutive hours) in a very challenging environment. Thus, they are exposed to discomfort or pain that may result in deterioration of their performance with consequent reduction of operational safety levels. Such discomfort can be indirectly and partially assessed by measuring contact pressure at the body-seat interface. OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to assess the feasibility, usefulness, and effectiveness of monitoring the variations in seat-body interface pressure during a regular work shift of 4 hours performed in a simulated environment. METHODS Eight professional operators performed a four-hour shift in a realistic control station set inside a quay crane simulator. Seat-body contact pressures were measured at 10 Hz using two pressure-sensitive mats placed on the seat pan and the backrest. Raw pressure data were processed to extract pressure vs. time curves related to the whole seat surface and, for the seat pan only, values associated with four anatomical regions (i.e. left and right thighs and buttocks). RESULTS During the work shift, the mean backrest pressure was low and fairly constant. Seat pan pressure increased by 10%, rising from 7.4 (1.5) to 8.2 (2.3) kPa over the simulated shift. Detailed analysis of the four sub-regions revealed that as the trial progressed the mean contact pressure on buttocks decreased (-6% at the end of the trial) while thigh pressures increased (by 10 and 20% for right and left sides, respectively). CONCLUSIONS Although further studies with larger samples are needed, long-term monitoring of the body-seat contact pressures of crane operators in a simulated environment appears to be a useful tool to identify specific postural strategies to reduce discomfort originated by prolonged sitting posture.

Integra dermal regeneration template is commonly used in the developed world. This case history documents the application of Integra for the first time in Gaza, Palestine. This single case history illustrates how a tried and tested technique can be imported to a more challenging environment. The emphasis in this case history is not to recount a well-known technique of Integra application but to outline how the environment has to be prepared and the surgeon adapt to minimise risk and maximise the chances of success. This first application of Integra in Gaza illustrates the importance of starting with simple cases when a technique is being piloted in an austere environment. Patient selection, local theatre set up, staff and surgical technique, as well as patient follow-up facilities, all need consideration before doing the first trial of even this most established of products in a new environment., Lay Summary Integra dermal regeneration template is a material that can be applied to resurface areas of scarring and burns contracture. The template consists of two layers: the upper layer is a Silone sheet that acts to protect the deeper layer that consists of a protein matrix. Once an area of troublesome scar has been surgically removed, it leaves a gap, or defect. The Integra can be applied to the defect and, providing the areas has a good blood supply, is free of bacteria and immobilised, a new blood supply enters the protein matrix. This allows the migration of cells, called fibroblasts, into the matrix. The fibroblasts will use the matrix as scaffolding to lay down new protein and eventually replace the matrix. The resultant structure is called a ‘neodermis’. The protective silicone sheet can then be removed and replaced by a conventional, very thin skin graft. The advantage to applying this Integra two-stage reconstruction technique to a scarred area is that the reconstruction will be elastic and expand. In children, this allows for growth without recurrence of contractures across joints. The application of Integra is a tried and tested technique. This case explains how, and with due care, it can be used for severe scarred cases in a challenging environment provided careful technique and follow-up are respected.

Context: Increased competitiveness in the market, coupled with other factors such as the lack of skilled labor and cost reduction, makes the distributed software development a common practice in nowadays. Aims: With the complex scenario involving DSD environment (distributed software development), we aim to research tools to supporting this challenging environment. Method: We use a systematic mapping, in order to select primary studies and later refine the search, in order to show solutions and tools that support this scenario. Result: As a result, we found 20 tools divided into areas, which greatly facilitated the understanding and study, it will substantially succeed in DSD environments. Conclusion: We conclude that there are several tools for DSD scenario, and that are of high relevance in supporting collective awareness, collaboration, knowledge and communication.

This paper introduces the revival of the popular Ms. Pac-Man Versus Ghost Team competition. We present an updated game engine with Partial Observability constraints, a new Multi-Agent Systems approach to developing Ghost agents, and several sample controllers to ease the development of entries. A restricted communication protocol is provided for the Ghosts, providing a more challenging environment than before. The competition will debut at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference 2016. Some preliminary results showing the effects of Partial Observability and the benefits of simple communication are also presented.

Cables for Deep Water, depths greater than 4km, require special consideration, especially for Electro-Opto-Mechanical (EOM) Cables. This paper describes the methodology to insure proper performance in this challenging environment. Special materials and constructions techniques have been developed to address this cable class. These include, but are not limited to, fiber-optic buffers, power conductors, signal conductors, and strength members. This paper will briefly outline the reasons and benefits to cables which operate in this challenging environment. We will touch on appropriate testing recommendations for each parameter, electrical, optical, and mechanical to properly qualify a cable for service. In addition, we will comment on termination and handling system considerations to enable the cable to provide the necessary functions at these depths.

Wearable passive UHF RFID tags have enormous potential in future body-centric wireless communication and sensing systems, which have countless applications for example in the welfare and health care sectors. Antenna-IC joints in these wireless components are usually the critical parts from the reliability point of view and they operate in an extremely challenging environment. In this study, we demonstrate the wireless performance and reliability of three types of textile RFID tags with the antennas patterned from commercial electro-textile materials and the ICs attached with two different electrically conductive adhesives. Based on our results, the major reliability challenge is to find a suitable conductive adhesive to be used with each different electro-textile material.

Lumen is an exciting way of explaining and demystifying energy and electricity. By modifying the popular computer game Minecraft, electric blocks can be used to create physically representative constructions. Minecraft is essentially turned into a real-time interactive grid simulator. Sources such as solar panels and combustion engines can be connected with cables to loads such as multicolored LEDs or light bulbs. Lumen can be played in a classroom, at home or online and is sure to enthuse teachers and students alike. With the provided tutorial world, Lumen explains itself and teachers have access to preprogrammed scenarios, such that a competitive, easy to understand and challenging environment is created. With plenty of features implemented, Lumen is sure to be a very compelling way to study.

Regulation of water flow in an interconnected xylem vessel network enables plants to survive despite challenging environment changes that can cause xylem embolism. In this study, vulnerability to embolisms of xylem vessels and their water-refilling patterns in vascular bundles of maize leaves were experimentally investigated by employing synchrotron X-ray micro-imaging technique. A vascular bundle in maize consisted of a protoxylem vessel with helical thickenings between two metaxylem vessels with single perforation plates and nonuniformly distributed pits. When embolism was artificially induced in excised maize leaves by exposing them to air, protoxylem vessels became less vulnerable to dehydration compared to metaxylem vessels. After supplying water into the embolized vascular bundles, when water-refilling process stopped at the perforation plates in metaxylem vessels, discontinuous radial water influx occurred surprisingly in the adjacent protoxylem vessels. Alternating water refilling pattern in protoxylem and metaxylem vessels exhibited probable correlation between the incidence location and time of water refilling and the structural properties of xylem vessels. These results imply that the maintenance of water transport and modulation of water refilling are affected by hydrodynamic roles of perforation plates and radial connectivity in a xylem vascular bundle network.

To improve the ability to determine a vehicle's movement information even in a challenging environment, a hybrid approach called non-Gaussian...

The successful transformation towards an advanced, sustainable safety culture within an organization requires a delicate balance of people, their behaviours and practices on one side and the physical and organisational infrastructure on the other side. The authors look at the implementation of a programme to enhance the safety culture and to improve safety performance implemented by OMV Petrom in 2014. The first step comprised the building of internal competencies for supporting cultural change. In a second step, joint teams of ERM and OMV Petrom Assessors performed a series of safety culture assessments at the headquarters and selected assets to understand the maturity of the safety culture within these organizational units. Based on this understanding of the current situation, the safety culture transformation was then initiated through engaging and coaching leaders at the selected assets. All elements of the programme showed rapidly noticeable changes in the safety culture. A shift change was noted from a "classical" niche-driven view of HSE towards a holistic perspective which looked at personal motivators as well as technical and systems' aspects and the role of leaders for a sustainable safety culture. In the pilot assessments, the newly emerged change agents were key multipliers for disseminating the new perspective on safety into the assets. And finally, in the leadership training sessions at the selected assets, senior managers and leaders gained new insights not only on their personal role and accountability, but also on individual opportunities for reducing accidents and at-risk behaviours. The programme demonstrated that effective change within organisations can be achieved even in challenging environments. Two essential requirements for this are acknowledging and building on the delicate balance between personal mindset and values on one side, and equipment, systems and processes on the other side, and overcoming the classical HSE "niche thinking" which is still encountered in many organisations.

The impact of corrosion on the oil, gas and geothermal industry is big and affects both capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX). There is a growing public awareness and rising concerns with well integrity and health, safety and the environment (HSE). One of the first steps for corrosion mitigation is to evaluate downhole tubular. The reduction of metal thickness leads to a loss of mechanical strength and structural failure. When metal pitting accelerates in localized zones, very considerable structural weakening may result from a relatively small amount of metal loss. Additionally, the alteration or loss of surface properties including erosion, increased fluid flow friction at the pipe surface, surface reflectivity or heat transfer across a surface, cause such weakness. Corrosion evaluation using electric-line logging is of growing importance in the industry. Technologies that can evaluate multiple barriers are vital for cost-effective evaluations as rig time is saved by not having to retrieve the completion to evaluate production casings. This is the case especially in the offshore environment where the casing design is generally more complicated and consists of extra number of casing strings. Current technologies available include magnetic flux leakage or eddy current, or to some extent ultrasonic which has some limited capability of multi-barrier evaluation. A multi-sensor electromagnetic corrosion tool (EM) has been developed especially for multi-barrier evaluations; the technology is based on pulsed eddy current physics. When combined with conventional multi-finger calipers and other tools such as radial cement bond logs or noise detection technologies, it offers a better understanding of well integrity.

In view of evolving the Internet infrastructure, ICN is promoting a communication model that is fundamentally different from the traditional IP address-centric model. The ICN approach consists of the retrieval of content by (unique) names, regardless of origin server location (i.e., IP address), application, and distribution channel, thus enabling in-network caching/replication and content-based security. The expected benefits in terms of improved data dissemination efficiency and robustness in challenging communication scenarios indicate the high potential of ICN as an innovative networking paradigm in the IoT domain. IoT is a challenging environment, mainly due to the high number of heterogeneous and potentially constrained networked devices, and unique and heavy traffic patterns. The application of ICN principles in such a context opens new opportunities, while requiring careful design choices. This article critically discusses potential ways toward this goal by surveying the current literature after presenting several possible motivations for the introduction of ICN in the context of IoT. Major challenges and opportunities are also highlighted, serving as guidelines for progress beyond the state of the art in this timely and increasingly relevant topic.

Urban areas are a challenging environment because of their ever changing structure and the different temporal behaviors and spatial patterns. In this chapter a detailed analysis of some of the questions arising from the use of remotely sensed data in urban area for change detection are addressed. Specifically, the role of very high resolution sensors and their relevance with respect to either fast or slow changes in human settlement is analyzed, with specific stress on rapid mapping in specific sites (hotspots), e.g. for post-disaster damage assessment. Similarly, the possibility to exploit long temporal sequences of coarser resolution data is also explored and discussed, since the availability of huge archives is nowadays a reality that may be used to look for interesting interrelationships between urban area pattern changes and environmental changes, at both the local (town), regional and global level. Examples related to a so-called “hypertemporal” sequences of EO data are offered, and show the great potentials of these data sets.

This case discusses how Raya Holding (Raya) has complied with the Egyptian code of corporate governance published in 2011 and the consequential improvement in organisational performance that has taken place over the last decade. The case uses the 2014 annual report and the company’s website to address Raya’s compliance with the code. The central theme of the case is that improvements in corporate governance could be correlated to organisational performance even though this relationship is a very complex one. Enhanced organisational performance might have taken place due to factors other than improvements in corporate governance. Considering the 2011 revolution where Egypt witnessed political unrest, Raya is a good example that is worthy of study since it was able to overcome the political unrest and the challenging environment that Egypt had in 2011 where it scored the fifth rank in the ESG index compared to the tenth rank in 2010. Moreover, Raya’s board attributed their success and good standing after the revolution to their continuous work on corporate governance throughout the previous years.

Technological advances over the past several decades have made it possible to develop increasingly cheap but also increasingly capable and autonomous unmanned marine vehicles. Additionally, this makes cooperative approaches to problem-solving a viable strategy in marine applications. This paper takes a look at a control scenario featuring a system consisting of a number of floating robotic platforms designed with long-term functioning in a challenging environment in mind. Decentralised consensus strategies for formation generation and formation keeping are described, with an introduction of modifications such as virtual forces that ensure collision avoidance. The group of vehicles is then placed in a simulated environment and subjected to environmental disturbances in the form of water current. An additional adaptive algorithm is proposed and implemented in the simulation, allowing the vehicles to assume a formation relative to the measured water current that ensures greater energy efficiency by having the vehicles physically shield each other from the current’s detrimental effects. Finally, the simulation results are discussed and some directions for further work are suggested.

A vertex detector concept is under development for the proposed multi-TeV linear e + e − Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). To perform precision physics measurements in a challenging environment, the CLIC vertex detector pushes the technological requirements to the limits. This paper reviews the requirements for the CLIC vertex detector and gives an overview of recent R&D achievements in the domains of sensor, readout, powering and cooling.

The discovery and development of a new medicine is a long and complicated endeavour requiring the contribution of multiple teams of people over many years. This chapter considers the activities required to develop the synthesis of a small molecule active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) to support development through to regulatory submission. The changing nature and requirements of a synthetic route to API are discussed as well as the ideal criteria for a manufacturing route (SELECT) and their alignment with many of the 12 principles of green chemistry. Process development ensures that the manufacturing route provides consistent delivery of API of defined quality to ensure drug product efficacy and safety for the patient. The key quality requirements are discussed as well as an introduction to the concept of quality by design, which encourages greater scientific understanding of the chemistry and process control required to deliver API of acceptable quality. The chapter concludes by considering the potential sustainability impact of the responses to historic compound and the challenging environment in which the chemistry team must deliver the manufacturing route.

The technology using a garment image is applied to various researches and systems. The accuracy of the garment based technology depends on a result of a garment detection method. However, almost existing methods are executed in an environment of the person standing or appearing clearly as assumption. Therefore they may not detect a garment in a challenging environment. A flexible method is required for the reason. In this research, a garment detection method is proposed to detect it in that situation. The method iterates the Grabcut using the most reliable seed. By evaluating the areas detected by Grabcut repeatedly, it decides the seed and iterates the detection. From an examination, it is confirmed that it detects the garment in the challenging environment.

This article explores how public corporation leadership copes with a turbulent environment using political, managerial, and individual leadership elements. It is an in-depth case study of Lee Ji-Song, who effectively managed the politically and managerially challenging environment that resulted from the merger of two large public corporations into the Korea Land and Housing Corporation. Lee, an engineer, manager, and chief executive of a major construction company, took advantage of his political, managerial, and individual leadership capital to cope with political challenges from lawmakers and with managerial challenges such as postmerger integration management, organizational stabilization, and financial improvement. The authors suggest that an effective public corporation leader must be a skillful politician and businessperson, as public corporations often operate in an environment in which public and private values interact.

Error management is crucial in surgery and needs to be developed through appropriate training and education. Research suggests that perceptual errors may be more likely in laparoscopic environments. The objective of this work is to investigate error management by novices compared with experienced surgeons when performing a simple simulated incision in a visually challenging environment.Novices (n = 20) and experienced surgeons (n = 11) viewed pairs of horizontal lines on a laparoscopic monitor. Participants were asked to replicate the line lengths by making simulated incisions. The task was completed with or without online visual feedback of the incising hand. In a second phase of the study, the task was complicated by embedding the lines within a perceptual illusion (i.e., Ponzo illusion).Incision lengths generally were shorter than the actual lengths of the viewed lines for all participants. For the novices, however, this underestimation bias was exacerbated when visual feedback of the incising hand was unavailable (p0.001), whereas the surgeons were not affected by loss of vision of the incising hand (p = 0.864). Furthermore, novices were influenced by the perceptual illusion designed to alter perceptions of line length (p = 0.021), whereas the surgeons did not appear to be influenced by the illusion (p = 0.945).A perceptual bias towards incision length underestimation may be present when surgery involves a laparoscopic monitor; however, surgical experience may protect against accentuation of the underestimation bias when the task becomes more visually challenging. The bias is discussed using the framework of error management theory.

We performed a two-source capture-recapture analysis for estimating the true number of villages that experienced clinical cases of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in 2009 in Svay Rieng province, Cambodia, and assessing the completeness of the official case-reporting procedure. As a first source, we used the 2009 official dataset made up of the 15 FMDinfected villages that were reported to the provincial authorities, and enlarged this list by assuming that all the villages located at less than 4 km from one of these villages also experienced clinical cases in 2009. In addition, we created a retrospective detection protocol using participatory tools cross-checked against a serological survey that detected 13 infected villages. The capture-recapture analysis of these two detection sources led us to the conclusion that 315 (CI95% 117-514) villages experienced clinical cases of foot-and-mouth disease in Svay Rieng province in 2009, corresponding to a village-level annual prevalence rate of 0.46 (CI95% 0.17-0.74). The official reporting rate to provincial authorities could therefore be evaluated at 0.05 (CI95% 0.03-0.13). An analysis of the sensitivity of the estimation of the number of cases to the radius used for enlargement of Source 1 was performed, indicating its low influence. This study clearly highlights the highly enzootic situation of Cambodia regarding foot-and-mouth disease and the substantial underreporting of clinically affected villages to veterinary authorities. We propose explanations for this low notification rate, stress the importance of accurate reporting procedures and, finally, discuss the potential of capture-recapture techniques as a tool for the quantitative evaluation of animal disease surveillance systems. (Resume d'auteur)