Search results for: disease management

Authors: S. Youthao, M. Jaroensutasinee, K. Jaroensutasinee

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This study investigated the pattern and seasonal index of influenza cases in Thailand. Our results showed that southern Thailand had the highest influenza incidence among the four regions of Thailand (i.e. north, northeast, central and southern Thailand). The influenza pattern in southern Thailand was similar to that of northeastern Thailand. Seasonal index values of influenza cases in Thailand were higher in the hot season than in the wet season. Influenza cases started to increase at the beginning of the hot season (April), reached a maximum in August, rapidly declined in the middle of the wet season and reached the lowest value in December. Seasonal index values for northern Thailand differed from other regions of Thailand.

Keywords: Influenza, disease index, seasonal index, Thailand.

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Authors: I. Nassiri, B. Goliaei, M. Tavassoli

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The ability to distinguish missense nucleotide substitutions that contribute to harmful effect from those that do not is a difficult problem usually accomplished through functional in vivo analyses. In this study, instead current biochemical methods, the effects of missense mutations upon protein structure and function were assayed by means of computational methods and information from the databases. For this order, the effects of new missense mutations in exon 5 of PTEN gene upon protein structure and function were examined. The gene coding for PTEN was identified and localized on chromosome region 10q23.3 as the tumor suppressor gene. The utilization of these methods were shown that c.319G>A and c.341T>G missense mutations that were recognized in patients with breast cancer and Cowden disease, could be pathogenic. This method could be use for analysis of missense mutation in others genes.

Keywords: Bioinformatics, missense mutations, PTEN tumorsuppressor gene.

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Authors: Kumar Padmanabh, Rajarshi Roy

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In this paper a special kind of buffer management policy is studied where the packet are preempted even when sufficient space is available in the buffer for incoming packets. This is done to congestion for future incoming packets to improve QoS for certain type of packets. This type of study has been done in past for ATM type of scenario. We extend the same for heterogeneous traffic where data rate and size of the packets are very versatile in nature. Typical example of this scenario is the buffer management in Differentiated Service Router. There are two aspects that are of interest. First is the packet size: whether all packets have same or different sizes. Second aspect is the value or space priority of the packets, do all packets have the same space priority or different packets have different space priorities. We present two types of policies to achieve QoS goals for packets with different priorities: the push out scheme and the expelling scheme. For this work the scenario of packets of variable length is considered with two space priorities and main goal is to minimize the total weighted packet loss. Simulation and analytical studies show that, expelling policies can outperform the push out policies when it comes to offering variable QoS for packets of two different priorities and expelling policies also help improve the amount of admissible load. Some other comparisons of push out and expelling policies are also presented using simulations.

Keywords: Buffer Management Policy, Diffserv, ATM, Pushout Policy, Expeling Policy.

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Authors: Izaz Ahmad, Farhatullah, Shahbaz Ali, Farhad Ali, Faiza, Hazrat Junaid, Farhan Zaid

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Current trends in remote health monitoring to monetize on the Internet of Things applications have been raised in efficient and interference free communications in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) scenario. Co-existence interference in WBANs have aggravates the over-congested radio bands, thereby requiring efficient Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) strategies and improve interference management. Existing solutions utilize simplistic heuristics to approach interference problems. The scope of this research article is to investigate reinforcement learning for efficient interference management under co-existing scenarios with an emphasis on homogenous interferences. The aim of this paper is to suggest a smart CSMA/CA mechanism based on reinforcement learning called QIM-MAC that effectively uses sense slots with minimal interference. Simulation results are analyzed based on scenarios which show that the proposed approach maximized Average Network Throughput and Packet Delivery Ratio and minimized Packet Loss Ratio, Energy Consumption and Average Delay.

Keywords: WBAN, IEEE 802.15.4 Standard, CAP Super-frame, Q-Learning.

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Authors: A. Bencsik, 1V. Lıre, 2, I. Marosi

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Intensive changes of environment and strong market competition have raised management of information and knowledge to the strategic level of companies. In a knowledge based economy only those organizations are capable of living which have up-to-date, special knowledge and they are able to exploit and develop it. Companies have to know what knowledge they have by taking a survey of organizational knowledge and they have to fix actual and additional knowledge in organizational memory. The question is how to identify, acquire, fix and use knowledge effectively. The paper will show that over and above the tools of information technology supporting acquisition, storage and use of information and organizational learning as well as knowledge coming into being as a result of it, fixing and storage of knowledge in the memory of a company play an important role in the intelligence of organizations and competitiveness of a company.

Keywords: Individual memory, organizational memory, knowledge management, organizational intelligence.

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Authors: M. Mydlárová Blaščáková, J. Poráčová, Z. Tomková, Ľ. Blaščáková, M. Nagy, M. Konečná, E. Petrejčíková, Z. Gogaľová, V. Sedlák, J. Mydlár, M. Zahatňanská, K. Hricová

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Osteoporosis is a multifactorial disease that results in reduced quality of life, causes decreased bone strength, and changes in their microarchitecture. Mostly postmenopausal women are at risk. In our study, we measured anthropometric parameters of postmenopausal women (104 women of control group – CG and 105 women of osteoporotic group - OG) and determined TSH hormone levels and PTH as well as mineral elements - Ca, P, Mg and enzyme alkaline phosphatase. Through the correlation analysis in CG, we have found association based on age and BMI, P and Ca, as well as Mg and Ca; in OG we determined interdependence based on an association of age and BMI, age and Ca. Using the Student's t test, we found significantly important differences in biochemical parameters of Mg (p ˂ 0,001) and TSH (p ˂ 0,05) between CG and OG.

Keywords: Factors, bone mass density, Central Europe, biomarkers.

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Authors: Nargess Mottaghi Golshan, Siti Zaleha Abdul Rasid

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Purpose:This paper aims to gain insights to the influential factors of ERM adoptions by public listed firms in Malaysia. Findings:The two factors of financial leverage and auditor type were found to be significant influential factors for ERM adoption. In other words the findings indicated that firms with higher financial leverage and with a Big Four auditor are more likely to have a form of ERM framework in place. Originality/Value:Since there are relatively few studies conducted in this area and specially in developing economies like Malaysia, this study will broaden the scope of literature by providing novel empirical evidence.

Keywords: Enterprise risk management, risk, public listed company.

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Authors: N. Ahmed, A.J. Day, J.L. Victory L. Zeall, B. Young

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The manufacture of large-scale precision aerospace components using CNC requires a highly effective maintenance strategy to ensure that the required accuracy can be achieved over many hours of production. This paper reviews a strategy for a maintenance management system based on Failure Mode Avoidance, which uses advanced techniques and technologies to underpin a predictive maintenance strategy. It is shown how condition monitoring (CM) is important to predict potential failures in high precision machining facilities and achieve intelligent and integrated maintenance management. There are two distinct ways in which CM can be applied. One is to monitor key process parameters and observe trends which may indicate a gradual deterioration of accuracy in the product. The other is the use of CM techniques to monitor high status machine parameters enables trends to be observed which can be corrected before machine failure and downtime occurs. It is concluded that the key to developing a flexible and intelligent maintenance framework in any precision manufacturing operation is the ability to evaluate reliably and routinely machine tool condition using condition monitoring techniques within a framework of Failure Mode Avoidance.

Keywords: Maintenance, Condition Monitoring, CNC, Machining, Accuracy, Capability, Key Process Parameters, Critical Parameters

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Authors: Sharan Badiger, Prema T. Akkasaligar, Deepak Kadeli

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Human Immunodeficiency Virus is known to affect almost all organ systems in the body. In addition to central nervous system it also affects the autonomic nervous system. Autonomic nervous dysfunction has been known to severely affect the quality of life in human immunodeficiency virus positive patients. It is known to have caused fatal consequences in late stages of the disease in patients who go in for invasive diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. The aim of this review is to determine the incidence, clinical significance and frequency of cardiac autonomic neuropathy in patients human immunodeficiency virus infection.

Keywords: Autonomic nervous system, autonomic nervous dysfunction, cardiac autonomic dysfunction, human immunodeficiency virus.

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Authors: Ion Baş, Claudiu Zoicaş, Angela Ioniţâ

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In most of the cases, natural disasters lead to the necessity of evacuating people. The quality of evacuation management is dramatically improved by the use of information provided by decision support systems, which become indispensable in case of large scale evacuation operations. This paper presents a best practice case study. In November 2007, officers from the Emergency Situations Inspectorate “Crisana" of Bihor County from Romania participated to a cross-border evacuation exercise, when 700 people have been evacuated from Netherlands to Belgium. One of the main objectives of the exercise was the test of four different decision support systems. Afterwards, based on that experience, software system called TEVAC (Trans Border Evacuation) has been developed “in house" by the experts of this institution. This original software system was successfully tested in September 2008, during the deployment of the international exercise EU-HUROMEX 2008, the scenario involving real evacuation of 200 persons from Hungary to Romania. Based on the lessons learned and results, starting from April 2009, the TEVAC software is used by all Emergency Situations Inspectorates all over Romania.

Keywords: Emergency evacuation, Searching Features, TEVAC(Trans Border Evacuation) software system, User Interface Design.

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Authors: Abimbola O. Aniki, Esther T. Akinlabi

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This paper proposes an effective maintenance method by considering the implementation of the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) software to plan a maintenance activity in a manufacturing industry. Globally, maintenance is a very important activity in the manufacturing sector to prolong the life span of equipment and machinery; it is also applicable to all household items. It is obvious and well known that apart from giving long life to equipment, it reduces the substantial financial losses for repairs and save the production downtime. In some cases, appropriate maintenance of plant equipment and machinery reduces the tendencies of injuries to personnel in the job floor. But before the maintenance process can be carried out, proper and effective work order planning and scheduling must be in place in other to achieve the set goals and objectives of a maintenance shop. Brief reviews of common planning tools which include the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) are presented. An interesting outline of analyses on planning and scheduling for effective job planning in a typical manufacturing industry using the CMMS is also presented and discussed. Finally, the steps to adhere to in making job planning effective in a manufacturing industry are also highlighted.

Keywords: Advanced Downtime Analysis Programme (ADAP), Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), Corrective Maintenance (CM), Executing Department (ED), Maintenance Department (MD), Preventive Maintenance (PM).

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Authors: Omid F. Valilai, Mahmoud Houshmand

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Nowadays companies strive to survive in a competitive global environment. To speed up product development/modifications, it is suggested to adopt a collaborative product development approach. However, despite the advantages of new IT improvements still many CAx systems work separately and locally. Collaborative design and manufacture requires a product information model that supports related CAx product data models. To solve this problem many solutions are proposed, which the most successful one is adopting the STEP standard as a product data model to develop a collaborative CAx platform. However, the improvement of the STEP-s Application Protocols (APs) over the time, huge number of STEP AP-s and cc-s, the high costs of implementation, costly process for conversion of older CAx software files to the STEP neutral file format; and lack of STEP knowledge, that usually slows down the implementation of the STEP standard in collaborative data exchange, management and integration should be considered. In this paper the requirements for a successful collaborative CAx system is discussed. The STEP standard capability for product data integration and its shortcomings as well as the dominant platforms for supporting CAx collaboration management and product data integration are reviewed. Finally a platform named LAYMOD to fulfil the requirements of CAx collaborative environment and integrating the product data is proposed. The platform is a layered platform to enable global collaboration among different CAx software packages/developers. It also adopts the STEP modular architecture and the XML data structures to enable collaboration between CAx software packages as well as overcoming the STEP standard limitations. The architecture and procedures of LAYMOD platform to manage collaboration and avoid contradicts in product data integration are introduced.

Keywords: CAx, Collaboration management, STEP applicationmodules, STEP standard, XML data structures

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Authors: Noemy Witt Ferreira, Flávio de São Paulo Filho

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Innovation, technology and knowledge are the trilogy of impact to support the challenges arising from uncertainty. Evidence showed an opportunity to ask how to manage in this environment under constant innovation. In an attempt to get a response from the field of Management Sciences, based in the Contingency Theory, a research was conducted, with phenomenological and descriptive approaches, using the Case Study Method and the usual procedures for this task involving a focus group composed of managers and employees working in the pharmaceutical field. The problem situation was raised; the state of the art was interpreted and dissected the facts. In this tasks were involved four establishments. The result indicates that these focused ventures have been managed by its founder empirically and is experimenting agility described in this work. The expectation of this study is to improve concepts for stakeholders on creativity in business.

Keywords: Administration. Innovation. Knowledge, Management Technology

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Authors: Phanu Waraporn

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This paper discusses the designing of knowledge integration of clinical information extracted from distributed medical ontologies in order to ameliorate a machine learning-based multilabel coding assignment system. The proposed approach is implemented using a decision tree technique of the machine learning on the university hospital data for patients with Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). The preliminary results obtained show a satisfactory finding that the use of medical ontologies improves the overall system performance.

Keywords: Medical Ontology, Knowledge Integration, Machine Learning, Medical Coding, Text Assignment.

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Authors: U. Kalay, O. Kalıpsız

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For a spatiotemporal database management system, I/O cost of queries and other operations is an important performance criterion. In order to optimize this cost, an intense research on designing robust index structures has been done in the past decade. With these major considerations, there are still other design issues that deserve addressing due to their direct impact on the I/O cost. Having said this, an efficient buffer management strategy plays a key role on reducing redundant disk access. In this paper, we proposed an efficient buffer strategy for a spatiotemporal database index structure, specifically indexing objects moving over a network of roads. The proposed strategy, namely MONPAR, is based on the data type (i.e. spatiotemporal data) and the structure of the index structure. For the purpose of an experimental evaluation, we set up a simulation environment that counts the number of disk accesses while executing a number of spatiotemporal range-queries over the index. We reiterated simulations with query sets with different distributions, such as uniform query distribution and skewed query distribution. Based on the comparison of our strategy with wellknown page-replacement techniques, like LRU-based and Prioritybased buffers, we conclude that MONPAR behaves better than its competitors for small and medium size buffers under all used query-distributions.

Keywords: Buffer Management, Spatiotemporal databases.

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Authors: Umber Iqbal, Shaleeza Sohail, Muhammad Younas Javed

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True integration of multimedia services over wired or wireless networks increase the productivity and effectiveness in today-s networks. IP Multimedia Subsystems are Next Generation Network architecture to provide the multimedia services over fixed or mobile networks. This paper proposes an extended SIP-based QoS Management architecture for IMS services over underlying IP access networks. To guarantee the end-to-end QoS for IMS services in interconnection backbone, SIP based proxy Modules are introduced to support the QoS provisioning and to reduce the handoff disruption time over IP access networks. In our approach these SIP Modules implement the combination of Diffserv and MPLS QoS mechanisms to assure the guaranteed QoS for real-time multimedia services. To guarantee QoS over access networks, SIP Modules make QoS resource reservations in advance to provide best QoS to IMS users over heterogeneous networks. To obtain more reliable multimedia services, our approach allows the use of SCTP protocol over SIP instead of UDP due to its multi-streaming feature. This architecture enables QoS provisioning for IMS roaming users to differentiate IMS network from other common IP networks for transmission of realtime multimedia services. To validate our approach simulation models are developed on short scale basis. The results show that our approach yields comparable performance for efficient delivery of IMS services over heterogeneous IP access networks.

Keywords: SIP-Based QoS Management Architecture, IPMultimedia Subsystems, IP Access Networks

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Authors: Meet Shah, Ankita Aditya, Dhruv Bindra, V. S. Omkar, Aashruti Seervi

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In today's world, we need documents everywhere for a smooth workflow in the identification process or any other security aspects. The current system and techniques which are used for identification need one thing, that is ‘proof of existence’, which involves valid documents, for example, educational, financial, etc. The main issue with the current identity access management system and digital identification process is that the system is centralized in their network, which makes it inefficient. The paper presents the system which resolves all these cited issues. It is based on ‘blockchain’ technology, which is a 'decentralized system'. It allows transactions in a decentralized and immutable manner. The primary notion of the model is to ‘have everything with nothing’. It involves inter-linking required documents of a person with a single identity card so that a person can go anywhere without having the required documents with him/her. The person just needs to be physically present at a place wherein documents are necessary, and using a fingerprint impression and an iris scan print, the rest of the verification will progress. Furthermore, some technical overheads and advancements are listed. This paper also aims to layout its far-vision scenario of blockchain and its impact on future trends.

Keywords: Blockchain, decentralized system, fingerprint impression, identity management, iris scan.

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Authors: Yusoff Y. S., Streftaris, G., Waters, H. R

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Death within 30 days is an important factor to be looked into, as there is a significant risk of deaths immediately following or soon after, myocardial infarction (MI) or stroke. In this paper, we will model the deaths within 30 days following a myocardial infarction (MI) or stroke in the UK. We will see how the probabilities of sudden deaths from MI or stroke have changed over the period 1981-2000. We will model the sudden deaths using a generalized linear model (GLM), fitted using the R statistical package, under a Binomial distribution for the number of sudden deaths. We parameterize our model using the extensive and detailed data from the Framingham Heart Study, adjusted to match UK rates. The results show that there is a reduction for the sudden deaths following a MI over time but no significant improvement for sudden deaths following a stroke.

Keywords: Sudden deaths, myocardial infarction, stroke, ischemic heart disease.

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Authors: Marilena Ianculescu, Adriana Alexandru

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Internet of Health Things (IoHT) has already proved to be a persuasive means to support a proper assessment of the living conditions by collecting a huge variety of data. For a customized health management of a senior patient, IoHT provides the capacity to build a dynamic solution for sustaining the shift inside the patient-physician relationship by allowing a real-time and continuous remote monitoring of the health status, well-being, safety and activities of the senior, especially in a non-clinical environment. Thus, is created a win-win solution in which both the patient and the physician enhance their involvement and shared decision-making, with significant outcomes. Health monitoring systems in smart environments are becoming a viable alternative to traditional healthcare solutions. The ongoing “Non-invasive monitoring and health assessment of the elderly in a smart environment (RO-SmartAgeing)” project aims to demonstrate that the existence of complete and accurate information is critical for assessing the health condition of the seniors, improving wellbeing and quality of life in relation to health. The researches performed inside the project aim to highlight how the management of IoHT devices connected to the RO-SmartAgeing platform in a secure way by using a role-based access control system, can allow the physicians to provide health services at a high level of efficiency and accessibility, which were previously only available in hospitals. The project aims to identify deficient aspects in the provision of health services tailored to a senior patient’s specificity and to offer a more comprehensive perspective of proactive and preventive medical acts.

Keywords: Health management, Internet of Health Things, remote monitoring, senior patient.

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Authors: Jorge Cardoso

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Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) alloworganizations to streamline and automate business processes and reengineer their structure. One important requirement for this type of system is the management and computation of the Quality of Service(QoS) of processes and workflows. Currently, a range of Web processes and workflow languages exist. Each language can be characterized by the set of patterns they support. Developing andimplementing a suitable and generic algorithm to compute the QoSof processes that have been designed using different languages is a difficult task. This is because some patterns are specific to particular process languages and new patterns may be introduced in future versions of a language. In this paper, we describe an adaptive algorithm implemented to cope with these two problems. The algorithm is called adaptive since it can be dynamically changed as the patterns of a process language also change.

Keywords: quality of service, web processes, workflows, web services

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Authors: Saidu Ibrahim, Winston M. W. Shakantu

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The problem of construction material waste remains unresolved, as a significant percentage of the materials delivered to some project sites end up as waste which might result in additional project cost. Cost overrun is a problem which affects 90% of the completed projects in the world. The argument on how to eliminate it has been on-going for the past 70 years, but there is neither substantial improvement nor significant solution for mitigating its detrimental effects. Research evidence has proposed various construction cost overruns and material-waste management approaches; nonetheless, these studies failed to give a clear indication on the framework and the equation for managing construction material waste and cost overruns. Hence, this research aims to develop a conceptual framework and a mathematical equation for managing material waste and cost overrun in the construction industry. The paper adopts the desktop methodological approach. This involves comparing the causes of material waste and those of cost overruns from the literature to determine the possible relationship. The review revealed a relationship between material waste and cost overrun that; increase in material waste would result to a corresponding increase in the amount of cost overrun at both the pre-contract and the post contract stages of a project. It was found from the equation that achieving an effective construction material waste management must ensure a “Good Quality-of-Planning, Estimating, and Design Management” and a “Good Quality- of-Construction, Procurement and Site Management”; a decrease in “Design Complexity” which would reduce “Material Waste” and subsequently reduce the amount of cost overrun by 86.74%. The conceptual framework and the mathematical equation developed in this study are recommended to the professionals of the construction industry.

Keywords: Conceptual framework, cost overrun, material waste, project stags.

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Authors: Feng-Chuan Pan, Fang-Yue Liu

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Hospitals in southern Hualien teamed with the Hypertension Joint Care Network. Working with the network, the team provided a special designed health education to the individual who had been identified as a hypertension patient in the outpatient department. Some metabolism improvements achieved. This is a retrospective study by purposively taking 106 patients from a hospital between 2008 and 2010. Records of before and after education intervention of the objects was collected and analyzed to see the how the intervention affected the patients- hypertension control via clinical parameter monitoring. The results showed that the clinical indicators, the LDL-C, the cholesterol and the systolic blood pressure were significantly improved. The study provides evidence for the effectiveness of the network in controlling hypertension.

Keywords: hypertension, joint care management network, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome.

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Authors: Maria Inês Pinho

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Recent literature on issues of Cultural Management (also called Strategic Management for cultural organizations) systematically seeks for models that allow such equipment to adapt to the constant change that occurs in contemporary societies. In the last decade, the world, and in particular Europe has experienced a serious financial problem that has triggered defensive mechanisms, both in the direction of promoting the balance of public accounts and in the sense of the anonymous loss of the democratic and cultural values of each nation. If in the first case emerged the Troika that led to strong cuts in funding for Culture, deeply affecting those organizations; in the second case, the commonplace citizen is seen fighting for the non-closure of cultural equipment. Despite this, the cultural manager argues that there is no single formula capable of solving the need to adapt to change. In another way, it is up to this agent to know the existing scientific models and to adapt them in the best way to the reality of the institution he coordinates. These actions, as a rule, are concerned with the best performance vis-à-vis external audiences or with the financial sustainability of cultural organizations. They forget, therefore, that all this mechanics cannot function without its internal public, without its Human Resources. The employees of the cultural organization must then have an entrepreneurial posture - must be intrapreneurial. This paper intends to break this form of action and lead the cultural manager to understand that his role should be in the sense of creating value for society, through a good organizational performance. This is only possible with a posture of strategic entrepreneurship. In other words, with a link between: Cultural Management, Cultural Entrepreneurship and Cultural Intrapreneurship. In order to prove this assumption, the case study methodology was used with the symbol of the European Capital of Culture (Casa da Música) as well as qualitative and quantitative techniques. The qualitative techniques included the procedure of in-depth interviews to managers, founders and patrons and focus groups to public with and without experience in managing cultural facilities. The quantitative techniques involved the application of a questionnaire to middle management and employees of Casa da Música. After the triangulation of the data, it was proved that contemporary management of cultural organizations must implement among its practices, the concept of Strategic Entrepreneurship and its variables. Also, the topics which characterize the Cultural Intrapreneurship notion (job satisfaction, the quality in organizational performance, the leadership and the employee engagement and autonomy) emerged. The findings show then that to be sustainable, a cultural organization should meet the concerns of both external and internal forum. In other words, it should have an attitude of citizenship to the communities, visible on a social responsibility and a participatory management, only possible with the implementation of the concept of Strategic Entrepreneurship and its variable of Cultural Intrapreneurship.

Keywords: Cultural entrepreneurship, cultural intrapreneurship, cultural organizations, strategic management.

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Authors: Zahra Lashgari, Naghmeh Sadat MaghamiTekiyeh

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Recent evidences on liquidity and valuation of securities in the capital markets clearly show the importance of stock market liquidity and valuation of firms. In this paper, relationship between transparency, liquidity, and valuation is studied by using data obtained from 70 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during2003-2012. In this study, discriminatory earnings management, as a sign of lack of transparency and Tobin's Q, was used as the criteria of valuation. The results indicate that there is a significant and reversed relationship between earnings management and liquidity. On the other hand, there is a relationship between liquidity and transparency.The results also indicate a significant relationship between transparency and valuation. Transparency has an indirect effect on firm valuation alone or through the liquidity channel. Although the effect of transparency on the value of a firm was reduced by adding the variable of liquidity, the cumulative effect of transparency and liquidity increased.

Keywords: Firm valuation, Earnings management, Liquidity, Tobin's Q, Transparency.

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Authors: Edelyn Alicar-Cadorna

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This study assessed the productivity and performance of the barangays in the Heritage City of Vigan in terms of the barangays- resource requirements, management of resources, produced goods and services, and outcomes of service delivery. The descriptive research design was used in the study employing the input-process-output-outcomes model. Findings of this study showed that the barangays were strong in terms of resource requirements which enabled them to produce goods and services. The barangays were also strong in terms of management of resources in development planning. They also showed great potential along fiscal administration, and had a moderately high capability in organization and management. However, the barangays appeared to be most wanting in the area of barangay legislation, but they were strong in community mobilization and they had strong linkages with POs, NGOs and educational institutions. In the delivery of social services, the barangays favored the maintenance of day care centers. However, the barangays seem to be weak in the delivery of economic services. They fared well along providing protective services such as in establishing a Barangay Disaster Coordinating Council and organizing a group of Barangay Tanod. In terms of environmental services, the barangays performed garbage collection and disposal; however, garbage still found their way in the streets in some barangays. The services delivered had effected an improved status of the barangays. However, the barangays are still facing some problems.

Keywords: Barangays, Performance and Productivity.

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Authors: Teodora Bakardjieva, Galya Gercheva

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In this paper an open agent-based modular framework for personalized and adaptive curriculum generation in e-learning environment is proposed. Agent-based approaches offer several potential advantages over alternative approaches. Agent-based systems exhibit high levels of flexibility and robustness in dynamic or unpredictable environments by virtue of their intrinsic autonomy. The presented framework enables integration of different types of expert agents, various kinds of learning objects and user modeling techniques. It creates possibilities for adaptive e-learning process. The KM e-learning system is in a process of implementation in Varna Free University and will be used for supporting the educational process at the University.

Keywords: agents, e-Learning, knowledge management, knowledge sharing, artificial intelligence

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Authors: F. Habibi Tirtash, M. Keshavarzi, F. Fazeli

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The genus Fumaria L. (Papaveraceae) in Iran comprises 8 species with a vast medicinal use in Asian folk medicine. These herbs are considered to be useful in the treatment of gastrointestinal disease and skin disorders. Antioxidant activities of alkaloids and phenolic extracts of these species had been studied previously. These species are: F. officinalis, F. parviflora, F. asepala, F. densiflora, F. schleicheri, F. vaillantii and F. indica. More than 50 populations of Fumaria species were sampled from nature. In this study different fatty acids are extracted. Their picks were recorded by GC technique. This species contain some kind of fatty acids with antioxidant effects. A part of these lipids are phospholipids. As these are unsaturated fatty acids they may have industrial use as natural additive to cosmetics, dermal and oral medicines. The presences of different materials are discussed. Our studies for antioxidant effects of these substances are continued.

Keywords: Fumaria, Papaveraceae, fatty acid, antioxidant, Iran

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Authors: Andrus Pedai, Igor Astrov

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The focus of this paper is to compare common approaches for Systems of Innovation (SI) and identify proactive alternatives for driving the innovation. Proactive approaches will also consider short and medium term perspectives with developments in the field of Computer Technology and Artificial Intelligence. Concerning Computer Technology and Large Connected Information Systems, it is reasonable to predict that during current or the next century intelligence and innovation will be separated from the constraints of human driven management. After this happens, humans will be no longer driving the innovation and there is possibility that SI for new intelligent systems will set its own targets and exclude humans. Over long time scale these developments could result in scenario, which will lead to the development of larger, cross galactic (universal) proactive SI and Intelligence.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, DARPA, Moore’s law, proactive innovation, singularity, systems of innovation.

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Authors: Pei Lin Khoo, Yunli Lee

Abstract:

Weblogs are resource of social structure to discover and track the various type of information written by blogger. In this paper, we proposed to use mining weblogs technique for identifying the trends of influenza where blogger had disseminated their opinion for the anomaly disease. In order to identify the trends, web crawler is applied to perform a search and generated a list of visited links based on a set of influenza keywords. This information is used to implement the analytics report system for monitoring and analyzing the pattern and trends of influenza (H1N1). Statistical and graphical analysis reports are generated. Both types of the report have shown satisfactory reports that reflect the awareness of Malaysian on the issue of influenza outbreak through blogs.

Keywords: H1N1, Weblogs, Web Crawler, Analytics Report System.

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Authors: Benjamin Kuester, Bjoern Eilert, Malte Stonis, Ludger Overmeyer

Abstract:

Increasing quality requirements make reliable and effective quality management indispensable. This includes the complaint handling in which the 8D method is widely used. The 8D report as a written documentation of the 8D method is one of the key quality documents as it internally secures the quality standards and acts as a communication medium to the customer. In practice, however, the 8D report is mostly faulty and of poor quality. There is no quality control of 8D reports today. This paper describes the use of natural language processing for the automated evaluation of 8D reports. Based on semantic analysis and text-mining algorithms the presented system is able to uncover content and formal quality deficiencies and thus increases the quality of the complaint processing in the long term.

Keywords: 8D report, complaint management, evaluation system, text-mining.

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