The effect of time of day on injury patterns amongst adolescents in Australia

Labour force participation of adolescents in Australia is growing at an unprecedented rate. This increased participation is coupled with a growing realisation of the vulnerability of adolescents in the labour market in terms of occupational injury. Despite recent evidence that time of day may be an important determinant of adolescent injuries, the impact of non-standard and night work on adolescent injury rates has received scant attention to date. The current study addresses this shortcoming by examining injury patterns of 3201 working adolescents in Queensland. Results revealed that female adolescents are 2.5 times more likely to sustain an injury on day shift and 4.71 times more likely to sustain an injury on night shift than their adult counterparts when total work hours are taken into consideration. Similar results were found for male adolescents with an injury to work hours ratio of 2.19 on day shift and 3.05 on night shift. These findings point to the value of considering the temporal pattern of adolescent work in future research aimed at minimising injuries at work and improving the work experience of tomorrow's workforce.     

Interpretation time of serial chest CT examinations with stacked-metaphor workstation versus film alternator

PURPOSE: Interpretation time of serial staging chest CT cases, which each contained current and previous examinations, with a simple prototype workstation called filmstack was experimentally compared with interpretation time with a film alternator. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The filmstack displayed a "stack" of sections for each examination; user controls allowed rapid selection of preset attenuation windows and both synchronized and unsynchronized scrolling. Eight radiologists were timed as they used the filmstack and the film alternator to interpret four ergonomically complex serial CT cases. RESULTS: All reports dictated on the basis of findings with filmstack and film were of acceptable clinical accuracy. The time to examine a case with filmstack was significantly faster than the time with film, including the time to load and unload the alternator (99% confidence [P = .01]). There was no statistically significant difference in interpretation time between filmstack and prehung film. CONCLUSION: Use of a low-cost stacked CT workstation with a single 1,024 x 1,024 monitor is an effective means of interpreting cases that require comparison of multiple CT examinations.     

Quantifying the genericness of trademarks using natural language processing: an introduction with suggested metrics

If a trademark (“mark”) becomes a generic term, it may be cancelled under trademark law, a process known as genericide. Typically, in genericide cases, consumer surveys are brought into evidence to establish a mark’s semantic status as generic or distinctive. Some drawbacks of surveys are cost, delay, small sample size, lack of reproducibility, and observer bias. Today, however, much discourse involving marks is online. As a potential complement to consumer surveys, therefore, we explore an artificial intelligence approach based chiefly on word embeddings: mathematical models of meaning based on distributional semantics that can be trained on texts selected for jurisdictional and temporal relevance. After identifying two main factors in mark genericness, we first offer a simple screening metric based on the ngram frequency of uncapitalized variants of a mark. We then add two word embedding metrics: one addressing contextual similarity of uncapitalized variants, and one comparing the neighborhood density of marks and known generic terms in a category. For clarity and validation, we illustrate our metrics with examples of genericized, somewhat generic, and distinctive marks such as, respectively, DUMPSTER, DOBRO, and ROLEX.

     

The Road to Greener IT Pastures

Developing a green IT strategy for any organization, large or small, is critical to establishing a culture where the focus is on reducing cost and addressing both imminent regulatory pressure and increased scrutiny of carbon-neutral strategies. This paper discusses the "green practices" that can be used by organisations for energy efficiency improvements and also to avoid potential disruptions to existing infrastructure.     

A little Birdie told me: Social media,organizational legitimacy,and underpricing in initial public offerings

Drawing on the organizational legitimacy literature, we propose and test a set of hypotheses arguing that social media, an artifact of information technology, serves as a mechanism for conferring legitimacy in the market for initial public offerings (IPOs). The extant literature identifies third-party authorities, such as traditional media outlets and industry analysts, as a valuable source of organizational legitimacy. Social media and micro-blogging, however, remain outside current classifications of the phenomenon. This study theoretically develops and empirically tests a new mechanism in the legitimation process: the direct interaction with potential investors and society-at-large via social media. Our findings indicate broad support that having a Twitter account, and the extent to which a firm utilizes Twitter, is associated with systematically higher levels of IPO underpricing. Moreover, we find support that social media variables external to the firm, including number of followers and retweets, also impact the level of underpricing in an IPO. In conclusion, we highlight the emerging role of social media in processes of legitimation and invite additional research at the intersection of IS and management.     

High-accuracy product integration methods for the Abel equation,and their application to a problem in scattering theory

In this paper we present orsder three, four and five backward product integration methods for the generalized Abel equation We illustrate their use by silving the small angle deflection problem, and show computationally that these methods are convergent for all ? ?(0,1). The coefficients of order three and four methods are given in Applenidx I.     

A habituating blood glucose control strategy for the critically ill

In the intensive care unit patients benefit from being fed and from having well controlled glucose levels. Insulin and glucose infusion serves as manipulated inputs to regulate blood glucose, while glucose infusion serves as a sole nutritional input. In this paper, a model predictive control strategy, based on simultaneously manipulating glucose and insulin infusion, is developed to improve blood glucose regulation in intensive care unit patients. In the short term, glucose infusion is used for tighter glucose control, particularly for disturbance rejection, while, in the long-term (24 h period), glucose infusion is used to meet nutritional needs. The “habituating control” algorithm is proposed and tested against a model predictive control (MPC) strategy that only manipulates insulin. The simulation results indicate that the Habituating MPC strategy outperforms the single input–single output MPC by providing faster setpoint tracking and tighter glucose control for a patient population, and producing less glucose variability while rejecting disturbances in insulin infusion and insulin sensitivity.     

A Convergent-Divergent Approach to Context Processing, General Intellectual Functioning, and the Genetic Liability to Schizophrenia.

Convergent and divergent validity are critically important in developing psychological measures that reveal interpretable deficits in disordered populations. This article reports on 2 studies that evaluated the validity of context processing measures. In Experiment 1, a confirmatory factor analysis of data from 481 healthy adults established the convergent validity of 2 context processing measures and showed that context processing accounted for significant amounts of variance in standard IQ and working memory measures. In Experiment 2, 20 schizophrenia patients, 16 of their healthy siblings, and 28 controls were evaluated using a novel, short context processing measure, the dot pattern expectancy (DPX) task. The DPX was sensitive to specific deficits in schizophrenia patients and their healthy siblings. These findings support the construct validity of context processing measures, suggest context processing is a component of intellectual functioning, and demonstrate that brief context processing measures remain sensitive to psychopathological deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)