The State of the Art of Nurse Rostering

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a more contented and thus more effective workforce.In this review, we discuss nurse rostering within the global personnel scheduling problem in healthcare. We begin by briefly discussing the review and overview papers that have appeared in the literature and by noting the role that nurse rostering plays within the wider context of longer term hospital personnel planning. The main body of the paper describes and critically evaluates solution approaches which span the interdisciplinary spectrum from operations research techniques to artificial intelligence methods. We conclude by drawing on the strengths and weaknesses of the literature to outline the key issues that need addressing in future nurse rostering research.     

Planning Rural-Urban Landscapes: Railways and Countryside Urbanisation in South-West Flanders,Belgium (1830–1930)

In the international literature on today’s urban condition, Flanders is presented as prime example of urban sprawl, generally described as unplanned incremental development induced by the quantum leap of private car ownership. The research on rural-urban landscapes in south-west Flanders qualifies and substantiates this assertion by analysing pre-war keystone processes of infrastructure planning in relation to land-use patterns and landscape transformations. The research reveals that not only the development of rural-urban landscapes reaches back far beyond the welfare state, fuelled by railways prior to highways, but also shows that the supposedly chaotic hybrid landscape has its roots in drawn-out landscape ideologies inscribed in public works policy. The analysis—which crosses the divides between disciplines (landscape and infrastructure planning), concepts (rural-urban, modern-traditional), and geographical scales (national, regional, local)—reveals consistently planned mechanisms of public works policy and landscape change underlying both the diffuse regional urbanisation patterns and local landscape transformations, which are generally perceived as spontaneous or vernacular developments. Infrastructure planning facilitated a spatial organisation that attributed centrality to the transport network rather than the metropolis, and that conceived a resilient infrastructure framework rather than a stylistic spatial constellation in order to steer and geographically root heterogeneous modernisation processes within the landscape.     

Iterated local search for the team orienteering problem with time windows

A personalised electronic tourist guide assists tourists in planning and enjoying their trip. The planning problem that needs to be solved, in real-time, can be modelled as a team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). In the TOPTW, a set of locations is given, each with a score, a service time and a time window. The goal is to maximise the sum of the collected scores by a fixed number of routes. The routes allow to visit locations at the right time and they are limited in length. The main contribution of this paper is a simple, fast and effective iterated local search meta-heuristic to solve the TOPTW. An insert step is combined with a shake step to escape from local optima. The specific shake step implementation and the fast evaluation of possible improvements, produces a heuristic that performs very well on a large and diverse set of instances. The average gap between the obtained results and the best-known solutions is only 1.8% and the average computation time is decreased with a factor of several hundreds. For 31 instances, new best solutions are computed.     

Tapping the grapevine: A closer look at word-of-mouth as a recruitment source.

To advance knowledge of word-of-mouth as a company-independent recruitment source, this study draws on conceptualizations of word-of-mouth in the marketing literature. The sample consisted of 612 potential applicants targeted by the Belgian Defense. Consistent with the recipient–source framework, time spent receiving positive word-of-mouth was determined by the traits of the recipient (extraversion and conscientiousness), the characteristics of the source (perceived expertise), and their mutual relationship (tie strength). Only conscientiousness and source expertise were determinants of receiving negative word-of-mouth. In line with the accessibility–diagnosticity model, receiving positive employment information through word-of-mouth early in the recruitment process was positively associated with perceptual (organizational attractiveness) and behavioral outcomes (actual application decisions), beyond potential applicants' exposure to other recruitment sources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It Takes Two to Tango: On Empathy With Fragile Processes.

This article elaborates on the problematic manner of experiencing and relating called fragile process. This fragile process, which is central with clients with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, is described from a client-centered/experiential theoretical point of view. From this line of approach, psychoanalytic views that make understandable how clients developed such a fragile style of processing are examined. D. N. Stern's (1985) view on the development of the sense of self and the interpersonal world of the infant is referred to in order to further differentiate the fragile process and to offer speculations as to the fragile process's developmental roots. Finally, empathic ways of intervening that are likely to be helpful with different kinds of fragile processes are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Continuous monitoring of EDTA extractable iron from mineral slurries using a microfluidic chip

In mineral processing, iron oxidation species formed on the mineral surface play a dominant role in depressing mineral flotation and must be monitored. Current analytical methods rely on off-line sample preparation followed by conventional analytical techniques, which are labour intensive and time delayed. This paper reports the successful application of an open microfluidic chip for real-time continuous monitoring of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) extractable iron (derived from iron oxidation species) in mineral slurries. A detailed mineralogical study of the mineral ore before and after leaching by EDTA has been undertaken to understand the leaching behaviour of the EDTA-slurry extraction system, showing good agreement with solution analysis.     

Effect of milling on colour and nutritional properties of rice

Brown rice (long-grain variety Puntal) was abrasively milled (0–100 s) to various degrees of milling (DOM, 0–25%). The non-linear relationship between milling time and DOM indicated a variability in hardness within the different rice fractions. The hardness of the bran layers increased from outer to inner bran layers, while the different endosperm fractions were of comparable hardness. The colour parameters L^*, a^* and b^* and extinction measurements of water-saturated butanol extracts of flour, from rice with different DOM, indicated that bran contained much more yellow and red pigment than endosperm. The levels of yellow and red pigment decreased from the surface of the brown rice to the middle endosperm (DOM = 15%). Once bran (DOM = 9%) and outer endosperm (additional DOM = 6%) were removed, the yellowness and redness of the middle endosperm of the raw rice remained constant, indicating that the pigments were uniformly distributed in the middle endosperm. Cooking of rice containing residual bran layers (DOM < 9%) increased rice brightness (L^*) and decreased its redness (a^*) and yellowness (b^*), as expected from a dilution effect resulting from the uptake of water, as well as from leaching of pigments in the cooking water and diffusion of bran pigments to the endosperm. Cooking of rices with DOM > 9% resulted in products of constant brightness and redness but with yellowness which decreased as a function of DOM. Proteins, minerals and starch were not uniformly distributed in the brown rice kernel. The endosperm (DOM > 9%), contained most of the rice kernel proteins (84.2%), and proteins were mostly concentrated in the outer endosperm (9% < DOM < 15%). Bran (0% < DOM < 9%) contained most of the minerals (61.0%), and starch (84.6%) was concentrated in the core endosperm fraction (DOM 25%).     

A Review of Ex Vivo X-ray Microfocus Computed Tomography-Based Characterization of the Cardiovascular System

Cardiovascular malformations and diseases are common but complex and often not yet fully understood. To better understand the effects of structural and microstructural changes of the heart and the vasculature on their proper functioning, a detailed characterization of the microstructure is crucial. In vivo imaging approaches are noninvasive and allow visualizing the heart and the vasculature in 3D. However, their spatial image resolution is often too limited for microstructural analyses, and hence, ex vivo imaging is preferred for this purpose. Ex vivo X-ray microfocus computed tomography (microCT) is a rapidly emerging high-resolution 3D structural imaging technique often used for the assessment of calcified tissues. Contrast-enhanced microCT (CE-CT) or phase-contrast microCT (PC-CT) improve this technique by additionally allowing the distinction of different low X-ray-absorbing soft tissues. In this review, we present the strengths of ex vivo microCT, CE-CT and PC-CT for quantitative 3D imaging of the structure and/or microstructure of the heart, the vasculature and their substructures in healthy and diseased state. We also discuss their current limitations, mainly with regard to the contrasting methods and the tissue preparation.