Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are healthcare middle management jobs extreme jobs?

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to explore the incidence of "extreme jobs" among middle managers in acute hospitals, and to identify individual and organizational implications. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The paper is based on interviews and focus groups with managers at six hospitals, a "proof of concept" pilot with an operations management team, and a survey administered at five hospitals. FINDINGS Six of the original dimensions of extreme jobs, identified in commercial settings, apply to hospital management: long hours, unpredictable work patterns, tight deadlines with fast pace, broad responsibility, "24/7 availability", mentoring and coaching. Six healthcare-specific dimensions were identified: making life or death decisions, conflicting priorities, being required to do more with fewer resources, responding to regulatory bodies, the need to involve many people before introducing improvements, fighting a negative climate. Around 75 per cent of hospital middle managers have extreme jobs. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS This extreme healthcare management job model was derived inductively from a qualitative study involving a small number of respondents. While the evidence suggests that extreme jobs are common, further research is required to assess the antecedents, incidence, and implications of these working practices. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS A varied, intense, fast-paced role with responsibility and long hours can be rewarding, for some. However, multi-tasking across complex roles can lead to fatigue, burnout, and mistakes, patient care may be compromised, and family life may be adversely affected. ORIGINALITY/VALUE As far as the authors can ascertain, there are no other studies exploring acute sector management roles through an extreme jobs lens.
Noise in 3D laser range scanner data

This paper discusses noise in range data measured by a Konica Minolta Vivid 910 scanner. Previous papers considering denoising 3D mesh data have often used artificial data comprising Gaussian noise, which is independently distributed at each mesh point. Measurements of an accurately machined, almost planar test surface indicate that real scanner data does not have such properties. An initial characterisation of real scanner noise for this test surface shows that the errors are not quite Gaussian, and more importantly, exhibit significant short range correlation. This analysis yields a simple model for generating noise with similar characteristics. We also examine the effect of two typical mesh denoising algorithms on the real noise present in the test data. The results show that new denoising algorithms are required to effectively remove real scanner noise.
Molecular insight into lignocellulose digestion by a marine isopod in the absence of gut microbes

The digestion of lignocellulose is attracting attention both in terms of basic research into its metabolism by microorganisms and animals, and also as a means of converting plant biomass into biofuels. Limnoriid wood borers are unusual because, unlike other wood-feeding animals, they do not rely on symbiotic microbes to help digest lignocellulose. The absence of microbes in the digestive tract suggests that limnoriid wood borers produce all the enzymes necessary for lignocellulose digestion themselves. In this study we report that analysis of ESTs from the digestive system of Limnoria quadripunctata reveals a transcriptome dominated by glycosyl hydrolase genes. Indeed, > 20% of all ESTs represent genes encoding putative cellulases, including glycosyl hydrolase family 7 (GH7) cellobiohydrolases. These have not previously been reported in animal genomes, but are key digestive enzymes produced by wood-degrading fungi and symbiotic protists in termite guts. We propose that limnoriid GH7 genes are important for the efficient digestion of lignocellulose in the absence of gut microbes. Hemocyanin transcripts were highly abundant in the hepatopancreas transcriptome. Based on recent studies indicating that these proteins may function as phenoloxidases in isopods, we discuss a possible role for hemocyanins in lignin decomposition.
Improving Quality of Care in Primary Health-Care Facilities in Rural Nigeria

Background: Nigeria has a high population density but a weak health-care system. To improve the quality of care, 3 organizations carried out a quality improvement pilot intervention at the primary health-care level in selected rural areas. Objective: To assess the change in quality of care in primary health-care facilities in rural Nigeria following the provision of technical governance support and to document the successes and challenges encountered. Method: A total of 6 states were selected across the 6 geopolitical zones of the country. However, assessments were carried out in 40 facilities in only 5 states. Selection was based on location, coverage, and minimum services offered. The facilities were divided randomly into 2 groups. The treatment group received quality-of-care assessment, continuous feedback, and improvement support, whereas the control group received quality assessment and no other support. Data were collected using the SafeCare Healthcare Standards and managed on the SafeCare Data Management System—AfriDB. Eight core areas were assessed at baseline and end line, and compliance to quality health-care standards was compared. Result: Outcomes from 40 facilities were accepted and analyzed. Overall scores increased in the treatment facilities compared to the control facilities, with strong evidence of improvement (t = 5.28, P = .0004) and 11% average improvement, but no clear pattern of improvement emerged in the control group. Conclusion: The study demonstrated governance support and active community involvement offered potential for quality improvement in primary health-care facilities.
Using unconventional awareness mechanisms to support mobile work

Awareness mechanisms are normally used to deliver context information to computer systems users. These mechanisms have been extensively studied as part of collaborative solutions designed for stationary scenarios, and recently on mobile and pervasive applications. The conventional awareness mechanisms through audio or visual messages have proved to be frequently unsuitable to deliver context information to people performing mobile activities, since the user's attention is not focused on the device he/she is using. This article presents two studies exploring the use of unconventional awareness mechanisms as a way to provide context information to firefighters during urban emergencies. In particular, the effectiveness of using the haptic and smell channels is evaluated as a way to implement direct and indirect capturers of the mobile workers' attention. The obtained results hint that both channels could be used to improve the information delivery. However, the awareness mechanisms that use the haptic channel are much more effective and allow implementing a more diverse set of messages. These awareness mechanisms can be used not only during emergency responses but also in other similar mobile work scenarios.
Towards Generation of Software Development Tasks

The presence of well defined fine-grained sub-tasks is important to the development process: having a fine-grained task context has been shown to allow developers to more efficiently resume work. However, determining how to break a high level task down into sub-tasks is not always straightforward. Sometimes developers lack experience, and at other times, the task definition is not clear enough to afford confident decomposition. In my research I intend to show that by using syntactic mining of past task descriptions and their decomposition, I can provide automatically derived sub-task suggestions to afford more confident task decomposition by developers.
Self-Affirmations Provide a Broader Perspective on Self-Threat

We present an “affirmation as perspective” model of how self-affirmations alleviate threat and defensiveness. Self-threats dominate the working self-concept, leading to a constricted self disproportionately influenced by the threat. Self-affirmations expand the size of the working self-concept, offering a broader perspective in which the threat appears more narrow and self-worth realigns with broader dispositional self-views (Experiment 1). Self-affirmed participants, relative to those not affirmed, indicated that threatened self-aspects were less all-defining of the self (although just as important), and this broader perspective on the threat mediated self-affirmation’s reduction of defensiveness (Experiment 2). Finally, having participants complete a simple perspective exercise, which offered a broader perspective on the self without prompting affirmational thinking (Experiment 3a), reduced defensiveness in a manner equivalent to and redundant with a standard self-affirmation manipulation (Experiment 3b). The present model offers a unifying account for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated findings and mysteries in the self-affirmation literature.
Machining process classification using PCA reduced histogram features and the Support Vector Machine

Being able to identify machining processes that produce specific machined surfaces is crucial in modern manufacturing production. Image processing and computer vision technologies have become indispensable tools for automated identification with benefits such as reduction in inspection time and avoidance of human errors due to inconsistency and fatigue. In this paper, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with various kernels is investigated for the categorization of machined surfaces into the six machining processes of Turning, Grinding, Horizontal Milling, Vertical Milling, Lapping, and Shaping. The effectiveness of the gray-level histogram as the discriminating feature is explored. Experimental results suggest that the SVM with the linear kernel provides superior performance for a dataset consisting of 72 workpiece images.
A Fault Tolerance Technique for Combinational Circuits Based on Selective-Transistor Redundancy

With fabrication technology reaching nanolevels, systems are becoming more prone to manufacturing defects with higher susceptibility to soft errors. This paper is focused on designing combinational circuits for soft error tolerance with minimal area overhead. The idea is based on analyzing random pattern testability of faults in a circuit and protecting sensitive transistors, whose soft error detection probability is relatively high, until desired circuit reliability is achieved or a given area overhead constraint is met. Transistors are protected based on duplicating and sizing a subset of transistors necessary for providing the protection. In addition to that, a novel gate-level reliability evaluation technique is proposed that provides similar results to reliability evaluation at the transistor level (using SPICE) with the orders of magnitude reduction in CPU time. LGSynth'91 benchmark circuits are used to evaluate the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better reliability than other transistor sizing-based techniques and the triple modular redundancy technique with significantly lower area overhead for 130-nm process technology at a ground level.
Fountain codes with multiplicatively repeated non-binary LDPC codes

We study fountain codes transmitted over the binary-input symmetric-output channel. For channels with small capacity, receivers needs to collects many channel outputs to recover information bits. Since a collected channel output yields a check node in the decoding Tanner graph, the channel with small capacity leads to large decoding complexity. In this paper, we introduce a novel fountain coding scheme with non-binary LDPC codes. The decoding complexity of the proposed fountain code does not depend on the channel. Numerical experiments show that the proposed codes exhibit better performance than conventional fountain codes, especially for small number of information bits.
Burial Structures and Societal Ranking in Vava'u, Tonga

Among the *'law-like propositions" advanced by proponents of the New Archaeology is the hypothesis that attributes of size, complexity, or formality of a burial structure reflect the societal rank or status of the interred person (see Binford 1971; Saxe 1970; Brown 1971). Of critical importance to archaeologists wishing to reconstruct hierarchical systems of social ranking, this proposition has been validated on the basis of cross-cultural correlations from the ethnographic literature (e.g., Gold stein 1976). The present paper is a further test of this proposition based on an in-depth analysis of several protohistoric funerary monuments in Vava'u, Tonga (Western Polynesia), for which there exist abundant and unique ethnohistorical and ethnographic data concerning the societal rank1 of the interred chiefs. Traditional Tongan society (Gifford 1929) was among the three most highly stratified chiefdoms of Polynesia and as such is admirably suited to a study of the proposed linkage between societal rank and burial structure. In Polynesia, and especially in the larger chiefdoms of the Society, Hawaiian, and Tongan archipelagoes, social stratification and structural complexity were reflected in specialised architecture. Such constructions as the Tahitian marae and the Hawaiian heiau (temples), or the Tongan langi (burial mounds) were closely associated with high-ranking social strata, and are well documented in the ethnohistoric and archaeological records for these societies. Furthermore, despite a recently expressed opinion to the contrary (Tainter and Cordy 1977), Pacific Basin archae ologists have not neglected the implications of these field monuments for the reconstruction of prehistoric social and political organisation (see, for example, Bellwood 1972; Davidson 1969; Gerard 1974; Green 1970; Green et al. 1967; Kellum-Ottino 1971; McCoy 1976). With regard to Polynesian burial facilities, Tainter (1973; 1976; Tainter and Cordy 1977) has suggested that the societal rank of a person should be reflected in either the size, or complexity, or both, of his burial structure. Tainter thus proposes a causal chain: "higher social rank -* larger array of status
Cycling Induced by Electrical Stimulation Improves Motor Recovery in Postacute Hemiparetic Patients: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background and Purpose— This study assessed whether cycling induced by functional electrical stimulation (FES) was more effective than passive cycling with placebo stimulation in promoting motor recovery and walking ability in postacute hemiparetic patients. Methods— In a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial, 35 patients were included and randomized to receive FES-induced cycling training or placebo FES cycling. The 4-week treatment consisted of 20 sessions lasting 25 minutes each. Primary outcome measures included the leg subscale of the Motricity Index and gait speed during a 50-meter walking test. Secondary outcomes were the Trunk Control Test, the Upright Motor Control Test, the mean work produced by the paretic leg, and the unbalance in mechanical work between paretic and nonparetic legs during voluntary pedaling. Participants were evaluated before training, after training, and at 3- to 5-month follow-up visits. Results— No significant differences were found between groups at baseline. Repeated-measures ANOVA (P<0.05) revealed significant increases in Motricity Index, Trunk Control Test, Upright Motor Control Test, gait speed, and mean work of the paretic leg after training and at follow-up assessments for FES-treated patients. No outcome measures demonstrated significant improvements after training in the placebo group. Both groups showed no significant differences between assessments after training and at follow-up. A main effect favoring FES-treated patients was demonstrated by repeated-measures ANCOVA for Motricity Index (P<0.001), Trunk Control Test (P=0.001), Upright Motor Control Test (P=0.005), and pedaling unbalance (P=0.038). Conclusions— The study demonstrated that 20 sessions of FES cycling training significantly improved lower extremity motor functions and accelerated the recovery of overground locomotion in postacute hemiparetic patients. Improvements were maintained at follow-up.
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions Interactive comment on “ High variability of the heterogeneous ice nucleation potential of oxalic acid dihydrate and sodium oxalate ”

The authors present a comprehensive set of experimental data on heterogeneous ice nucleation performed at the AIDA facility in Karlsruhe, Germany. The use oxalic acid dihydrate and sodium oxalate as ice nuclei (IN) to investigate heterogeneous ice nucleation in the deposition and condensation mode. The results are convincing and it is a vey well written and structured paper which contributes to the present discussion on the ice nucleation process. They applied different techniques to produce IN, which leads to different results in the freezing ability. This clearly highlights that the structure and morphology of the ice nucleus is important for the ice nucleation ability. Future in-
Performance Analysis of Spatial Smoothing Schemes in the Context of Large Arrays

This paper addresses the statistical behavior of spatial smoothing subspace DoA estimation schemes using a sensor array in the case where the number of observations N is significantly smaller than the number of sensors M, and that the smoothing parameter L is such that M and NL are of the same order of magnitude. This context is modeled by an asymptotic regime in which NL and M both tend to ∞ at the same rate. As in recent works devoted to the study of (unsmoothed) subspace methods in the case where M and N are of the same order of magnitude, it is shown that it is still possible to derive improved DoA estimators termed as Generalized-MUSIC with spatial smoothing (G-MUSIC SS). The key ingredient of this work is a technical result showing that the largest singular values and corresponding singular vectors of low rank deterministic perturbation of certain Gaussian block-Hankel large random matrices behave as if the entries of the latter random matrices were independent identically distributed. This allows to conclude that when the number of sources and their DoA do not scale with M,N,L, a situation modeling widely spaced DoA scenarios, then both traditional and Generalized spatial smoothing subspace methods provide consistent DoA estimators whose convergence speed is faster than 1/M. The case of DoA that are spaced of the order of a beamwidth, which models closely spaced sources, is also considered. It is shown that the convergence speed of G-MUSIC SS estimates is unchanged, but that it is no longer the case for MUSIC SS ones.
Assessing the quality of patient handoffs at care transitions

Background Effective handoff practices (ie, mechanisms for transferring information, responsibility and authority) are critical to ensure continuity of care and patient safety. Objective This study aimed to develop a rating tool (self-rating and external rating) for handoff quality that goes beyond mere information transfer. Methods The rating tool was piloted during 126 patient handoffs performed in three different clinical settings in a tertiary care hospital: (1) paramedic to emergency room staff, (2) anaesthesia care provider to postanaesthesia care unit (PACU) and (3) PACU nurse to ward nurse. Results We identified three factors (information transfer, shared understanding, working atmosphere) predicting handoff quality. Conclusions This study provides insights into the multidimensional concept of handoff quality. Our rating tool is feasible and comprehensive by including not only characteristics of the information process but also aspects of teamwork and, thus, provides an important tool for future research on patient handoff.
Design and Analysis of Low Flicker-Noise CMOS Mixers for Direct-Conversion Receivers

This paper presents the design and analysis of low flicker-noise RF mixers in a 0.18-mum CMOS process for C-band direct-conversion receivers. The low flicker-noise mixers are implemented by incorporating a double-balanced Gilbert-type configuration, the RF leakageless current bleeding technique, and the resonating technique for the tail capacitance. First, a double-balanced Gilbert-type mixer using the current bleeding technique has been fabricated and measured for lowering flicker corner frequency. Second, a double-balanced Gilbert-type mixer using the current bleeding technique with one resonating inductor has been designed to improve conversion gain and flicker-noise performance. Third, by using two separate inductors at the node between the current bleeding device and local oscillator switches, conversion gain and flicker-noise performance are significantly improved. A conventional Gilbert-type mixer without any technique has also been fabricated and measured for comparative purposes. The Gilbert-type mixer using the current bleeding technique with two resonating inductors has a measured conversion gain of 16.1 dB, a measured input third-order intercept point of -5 dBm, a measured noise figure of 9.8 dB at 1 MHz, and a flicker corner frequency of 125 kHz while consuming only 7 mW of dc power. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed mixer shows the lowest flicker corner frequency (125 kHz) with more than 15 dB of conversion gain in the CMOS process
Gasification: An alternative solution for energy recovery and utilization of vegetable market waste

Vegetables waste is generally utilized through a bioconversion process or disposed of at municipal landfills, dumping sites or dumped on open land, emitting a foul odor and causing health hazards. The presents study deals with an alternative way to utilize solid vegetable waste through a thermochemical route such as briquetting and gasification for its energy recovery and subsequent power generation. Briquettes of 50 mm diameter were produced from four different types of vegetable waste. The bulk density of briquettes produced was increased 10 to 15 times higher than the density of the dried vegetable waste in loose form. The lower heating value (LHV) of the briquettes ranged from 10.26 MJ kg−1 to 16.60 MJ kg−1 depending on the type of vegetable waste. The gasification of the briquettes was carried out in an open core downdraft gasifier, which resulted in syngas with a calorific value of 4.71 MJ Nm−3 at the gasification temperature between 889°C and 1011°C. A spark ignition, internal combustion engine was run on syngas and could generate a maximum load up to 10 kWe. The cold gas efficiency and the hot gas efficiency of the gasifier were measured at 74.11% and 79.87%, respectively. Energy recovery from the organic vegetable waste was possible through a thermochemical conversion route such as briquetting and subsequent gasification and recovery of the fuel for small-scale power generation.
Heart rate response and lactic acid concentration in squash players.

Abstract To determine whether the activity of playing squash is sufficiently intense to promote and/or maintain cardiovascular fitness, the heart rate response of ten male subjects (aged 20 to 53 years), was monitored continuously via radio telemetry for a 45-minute playing session. The mean heart rate for the total time of play was determined and intensity was calculated using the Karvonen method of potential heart rate. Maximum heart rate was determined with a continuous, graded bicycle ergometer test. Prior to and 5 minutes after squash play, fingertip blood samples were obtained for lactate analysis. The mean heart rate intensity of squash play was 77.2 ± 6.1 %. Intensities as high as 96% were recorded for 5-minute periods during the playing session. The average game heart rate was attained by the 10th minute of play. Thereafter, a heart rate fluctuation of only six beats was observed for the remaining 35 minutes. Postexercise lactate concentrations ranged from 11 to 57 mg% with a mean of 24.5 ± 13.8 .