Situative Managementunterstützungssysteme

Digital natives increasingly populate organizations?? management. These new-generation managers more naturally accept management support systems (MSS), but also have higher expectations about how they should accommodate their individual user preferences. As a result, managers question MSS that have been developed without configuration mechanisms to accommodate their working style, relevant MSS use cases, and different MSS access modes. The objective of this article is to reveal managers?? different MSS use situations and propose levers for tailoring (conceptual) MSS design to them. Use situations generalize classes of similar user-group preferences. We first apply findings from a literature review to cluster managers?? user-group preferences into 36 MSS use situations. Second, we propose that the selection of end-user devices can serve as a main lever for MSS configuration. Third, we complete the configuration with a MSS user-interface design. Finally, we demonstrate utility of our configuration model by presenting and evaluating a prototype.     

Investigations of ferritic/martensitic super heat resistant 11‐12 %Cr steels for 650 °C power plants

The investigations of advanced ferritic/martensitic 11–12 %Cr steels for 650 °C power plant components focus on the improvement of high‐temperature creep properties with respect to chemical composition. The claim of the DFG research work was the development of new heat‐resistant 12 %Cr ferritic‐martensitic steels with sufficient creep and oxidation resistance for a 650 °C application by using basic principles and concepts of physical metallurgy on the basis of the state of art and to overcome the usual trial and error industrial alloy development. Efforts are focussed on a 100,000h creep strength of 100MPa at 650 °C in combination with a sufficient corrosion resistance by a Cr content of 12 % with contents 4‐5 %W, 3.4‐5,5 %Co, V, B and 1 %Cu as well as the choice of Ta or Ti instead of Nb. The results demonstrate that the aim is not to realize with the used alloying concept. In the long term range all 12 %Cr melts have a lower creep rupture strength than the advanced 9 %Cr piping steel P92. A high creep strength could be reached with a 0.06 % Ta alloyed 11 %Cr melt, which is in addition alloyed with a higher C and B content and as well as with lower W and Co portions. The results indicate in accordance with the finding of other steel researcher that a lower Cr content allows more effectiveness for the alloying partners respectively for the generation of more stable precipitates.     

A Discrepancy in Analyses of the MSCEIT--Resolving the Mystery and Understanding Its Implications: A Reply to Gignac (2005).

Replies to comments made by G. E. Gignac (see record 2005-06671-010) on the current authors' original article (see record 2003-02341-015). Gignac reanalyzed the factor structure of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) and found results that differed from those the authors obtained initially. The authors tracked down the surprising sources of those discrepancies. G. E. Gignac's hierarchical model of emotional intelligence appears promising, and the authors anticipate that further investigations of the MSCEIT factor structure may yield additional information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adherence to antiretroviral therapy and its impact on clinical outcome in HIV-infected patients.

We analyse data on patient adherence to prescribed regimens and surrogate markers of clinical outcome for 168 human immunodeficiency virus infected patients treated with antiretroviral therapy. Data on patient adherence consisted of dose-timing measurements collected for an average of 12 months per patient via electronic monitoring of bottle opening events. We first discuss how such data can be presented to highlight suboptimal adherence patterns and between-patient differences, before introducing two novel methods by which such data can be statistically modelled. Correlations between adherence and subsequent measures of viral load and CD4+T-cell counts are then evaluated. We show that summary measures of short-term adherence, which incorporate pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data on the monitored regimen, predict suboptimal trends in viral load and CD4+T-cell counts better than measures based on adherence data alone.     

Foreword

Reliable Computing -     

Effects of User Request Patterns on a Multimedia Delivery System

Because of their size, service times, and drain on server resources, multimedia objects require specialized replication systems in order to meet demand and ensure content availability. We present a novel method for creating replication systems where the replicated objects' sizes and/or per-object service times are large. Such replication systems are well-suited to delivering multimedia objects on the Internet. Assuming that user request patterns to the system are known, we show how to create replication systems that distribute read load to servers in proportion to their contribution to system capacity and experimentally show the positive load distribution properties of such systems. However, when user request patterns differ from what the system was designed for, system performance will be affected. Therefore, we also report on results that reveal (i) how server loads are affected and (ii) the impact two system design parameters (indicators of a system's load distribution qualities) have on server load when request patterns differ from that for which a system was designed.     

The Effects of Auditory and Visual Linguistic Distractors on Target Localization.

In this experiment, a Stroop-like paradigm was used to investigate the ability to attend to visuospatial cues while ignoring distracting stimuli in the auditory or visual modality. In Part 1, the authors investigated whether linguistic cue words (i.e., RIGHT, LEFT, DOWN, and UP) would induce endogenous shifts of attention to visual targets. In Part 2, a relevant distractor stimulus was introduced in a different modality from the endogenous cues to investigate effects of interference. Twenty-five right-handed students served as participants. Auditory and visual linguistic cues were effective in inducing shifts of visual attention when cues were presented alone. Furthermore, introducing a distractor stimulus decreased the efficacy of these cues differently depending on modality, suggesting that language processing and visuospatial attention may share neuronal resources. Implications for unimodal and supramodal mechanisms of selective attention and relevant neuronal networks are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?

The author's thesis is that there is sufficient research evidence to make any reasonable person skeptical about the benefits of discovery learning--practiced under the guise of cognitive constructivism or social constructivism--as a preferred instructional method. The author reviews research on discovery of problem-solving rules culminating in the 1960s, discovery of conservation strategies culminating in the 1970s, and discovery of LOGO programming strategies culminating in the 1980s. In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer. Overall, the constructivist view of learning may be best supported by methods of instruction that involve cognitive activity rather than behavioral activity, instructional guidance rather than pure discovery, and curricular focus rather than unstructured exploration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

TEM Investigations of Fine Niobium Precipitates in HSLA Steel

Commercially produced 0.03 % C, 0.08 % Nb, 0.01 % Ti high strength low alloyed (HSLA) steel in the form of 20 mm thick plates was investigated. The steel was thermomechanically processed and the mechanical properties of the steel were evaluated by tensile testing. Using analytical and high resolution transmission electron microscopy the distribution, morphology, composition, crystal structure and particle size of niobium and titanium carbonitrides were observed and identified in these steels. The distribution of the precipitates was found to be nearly random, with occasional occurrence of precipitation free zones. Complex agglomerates with a cubic TiN seed crystal overgrown by a cubic NbC particle were the most commonly observed precipitates. Further TEM analysis in the accelerated cooled and tempered specimens in 1/4 plate thickness did not reveal any evidence that additional precipitation in the ferrite occurred. Precipitation in ferrite was only detected after subsequent cold deformation and tempering of the same samples. By a combination of EFTEM, STEM, HRTEM in addition to EDX spectroscopy, a large population of strain induced NbC precipitates with fcc crystal structure ranging in size down to 2 nm were identified in the ferrite matrix.     

Pattern identification in dynamical systems via symbolic time series analysis

This paper presents symbolic time series analysis (STSA) of multi-dimensional measurement data for pattern identification in dynamical systems. The proposed methodology is built upon concepts derived from Information Theory and Automata Theory. The objective is not merely to classify the time series patterns but also to identify the variations therein. To achieve this goal, a symbol alphabet is constructed from raw data through partitioning of the data space. The maximum entropy method of partitioning is extended to multi-dimensional space. The resulting symbol sequences, generated from time series data, are used to model the dynamical information as finite state automata and the patterns are represented by the stationary state probability distributions. A novel procedure for determining the structure of the finite state automata, based on entropy rate, is introduced. The diversity among the observed patterns is quantified by a suitable measure. The efficacy of the STSA technique for pattern identification is demonstrated via laboratory experimentation on nonlinear systems.