Emergency department status boards: user-evolved artefacts for inter- and intra-group coordination

Large, easily viewed status boards are commonly used in some healthcare settings such as emergency departments, operating theaters, intensive care units, and inpatient wards. Because these artefacts were developed by front-line users, and have little to no supervisory or regulatory control, they offer valuable insights into the theories of work and hazard held by those users. Although the status boards case were locally developed over many years for within-group coordination, they have also become useful for between-group coordination across organizational boundaries. In this paper, we compare and contrast the use of such status boards in two disparate settings: a US emergency department, and a UK pediatric ward, and note striking similarities in their form and usage, despite the large differences in setting.     

An Information Security Strategy for Networkable Devices

Networkable Windows-based operating system devices present information security challenges to both vendors and users of such devices. This article highlights some of those threats and offers measures to improve the link between a firm's business strategy, its operational activities, and its information security strategy.     

AssetCollector: a system for managing collections of cultural assets

In this paper, AssetCollector is presented, which is a system for managing collections of cultural assets. AssetCollector covers the needs of collection curators towards defining, populating and searching a collection in a flexible way, while supporting them in generating reports based on the collection’s assets and reusing them in order to build web sites and CD-ROMs. In order to support the above functionality, the system provides the content structuring subsystem, the content input subsystem, the search subsystem and the report subsystem. The use of the subsystems is straightforward and requires no technical skills from the curators. AssetCollector has been successfully applied for organizing various collections of cultural assets in Greece, such as archaeological sites, museums and published books. In the future, an evaluation procedure is planned in order to further refine the use of the system according to the targeted users’ needs. Furthermore, more import and export facilities will be provided, which will make the system compliant with widely accepted standards.     

Ab<Emphasis Type="Italic"> initio</Emphasis> investigation of boron diffusion paths in germanium

Boron is observed to diffuse very slowly in germanium, as opposed to its behaviour in silicon where it exhibits Transient Enhanced Diffusion effects in implanted samples. As a result of this slow diffusion, boron is a very stable dopant, allowing devices to be created with very well-defined doping regions. To understand this superior performance, calculations were performed on a variety of boron diffusion paths, within vacancy and interstitial mediated methods. It was found that the vacancy mediated diffusion which is associated with the fast diffusion of many other species in germanium exhibits a total barrier of 5.8 eV. Interstitial-mediated diffusion had a total barrier for migration of 3.4 eV in the neutral and singly negative charge states, 3.2 eV for the positive charge state, but a formation barrier of 4.1 eV. Thus the barrier for interstitial-mediated diffusion is dominated by the formation energy of the self-interstitial.     

Perceptual Temporal Quality Metric for Compressed Video

This paper presents a metric to quantify frame loss according to the impact on perceived temporal quality. This metric particularly aims at measuring the temporal quality degradation caused by both regular and irregular frame loss. Experimental results with subjective viewing demonstrate high performance on prediction of perceptual temporal quality.     

Plagiarism, Graduate Education, and Information Security

Plagiarism in the classroom has changed since the period of 1997 to 2002, during which the author saw predominately word-for-word plagiarism in papers in his classes. Some came from single sources, but more often they came from two or more. With that kind of plagiarism, it was fairly easy, although time-consuming, to detect copying. Most students engaging in such behaviors believed their professors knew little about the World Wide Web, and many believed that few, if any, professors spent the time needed to check for plagiarism. The development of widely available plagiarism-detection tools also helped raise awareness and make it easier to check papers against online sources.