Managers of service organizations seek to improve productivity without eroding service quality. We explore whether privately versus publicly disclosing relative performance feedback (RPF) about individual workers’ processing times can help achieve this goal. Using three years of patient encounter data from two emergency departments, one of which changed from privately to publicly disclosing RPF...

The massive and continuous development of renewable energy systems is making it possible to achieve the European goals regarding environment and sustainability. On the other hand, it leads to the progression of significant problems such as low renewable energy density (i), social acceptability (ii), and non-programmability of renewable energy sources (iii). The rural architecture, which is larg...

The prevalence of being overweight and of obesity is increasing worldwide, and is associated with a high risk to health. Therefore, the aim of our study was to investigate whether normal weight, overweight and obese subjects of low, middle or high socioeconomic status (SES) differ with regard to their health behavior, health, quality of life, and the use of medical care. Data from the Austrian ...

Introduction: Protein Energy Malnutrition is a leading nutritional problem in India. This causes mortality and morbidity among children and can impair physical and cognitive development of the children. The study aimed at assessing the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice (KAP) regarding dietary practices in prevention of malnutrition among mothers of under five children. Materials and Methods: A ...

This paper describes the practical results of an experiment created in order to analyze the software process improvement by the use of the practices and rules of Extreme Programming methodology. In the experiment a group of 40 students in the Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes took part to create a small system, to measure their productivity and to measure how much does this rules and pract...

Lamb meat is regarded as an important source of highly bioavailable iron (heme iron) in the Iranians diet. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of traditional cooking methods on the iron changes in lamb meat. Four published experimental methods for the determination of heme iron were assessed analytically and statistically. Samples were selected from lambs' loin. Standard ...

Using a validated sensitive assay, we found hepatitis E virus (HEV) IgG in 52.5% of voluntary blood donors in southwestern France. This finding suggests HEV is highly endemic to this region. The high HEV prevalence may reflect local dietary practices, such as eating uncooked pork and game products.

One of the common challenges of an Extreme Programming (XP) team is to find strategies so to reinforce practices and increase velocity. Most practices have found at least one optimal strategy tested and approved practically by the community, while ‘sustainable pace’ is core tenet missing a clear strategy. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique (PT) is exactly to fill this gap. The PT is a timeboxing...