Context: Software Process Improvement initiatives have been around for many years with the growing globalisation of software development is making them increasingly important. Objective: The objective of this exploratory research is to gain an in-depth understanding of barriers that can undermine SPI, in the context of Global Software Development, from the perspective of software development pr...

This study aims at predicting the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) drought class transitions in Portugal, considering the influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) as one of the main large-scale atmospheric drivers of precipitation and drought fields across the Western European and Mediterranean areas. Log-linear modeling of the drought class transition probabilities on three temporal...

OBJECTIVE Commonly observed shifts in the utilization of medical care services to treat diseases may pose problems for official price indexes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that do not account for service shifts. We examine how these shifts may lead to different price estimates than those observed in official price statistics at the BLS. DATA SOURCES We use a convenience sample of en...

We examined the relationship between satellite measurements of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) and several meteorological drought indices, including the multi-time-scale standard precipitation index (SPI) and the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI), to evaluate the potential of using SIF to monitor and assess drought. We found significant positive relationships between SIF and dro...

When starting the software process improvement (SPI) journey, there are many SPI standards to select from. Selecting good SPI standards can be a technical problem, from a software engineering point of view, but it can also be a political problem, some standards fitting more with internal political agendas than others. As it is well-known that SPI without management commitment can have disastrou...

Overexpression of the transcription factor Spi-1/PU.1 in mice leads to acute erythroleukemia characterized by a differentiation block at the proerythroblastic stage. In this study, we made use of a new cellular system allowing us to reach graded expression of Spi-1 in preleukemic cells to dissect mechanisms of Spi-1/ PU-1 in erythroleukemogenesis. This system is based on conditional production ...

Previously it was shown that the Ets proteins, PU.1 and Spi-B, exhibit functional redundancy in B lymphocytes. To investigate the possibility that PU.1 or Spi-B or both share overlapping roles with Ets-1 or Elf-1, PU.1(+/-)Ets-1(-/-), PU.1(+/-)Elf-1(-/-), and Spi-B(-/-)Ets-1(-/-) animals were generated. No blood cell defects were observed in these animals except those previously reported for Et...

Acute leukemias are characterized by deregulation of transcriptional networks that control the lineage specificity of gene expression. The aberrant overexpression of the Spi-1/PU.1 transcription factor leads to erythroleukemia. To determine how Spi-1 mechanistically influences the transcriptional program, we combined a ChIP-seq analysis with transcriptional profiling in cells from an erythroleu...

the impact of meteorological and hydrological drought on groundwater resources in coastal deserts in the south of iran was investigated during 1991-2011, using standardized precipitation index (spi), standardized runoff index (sri), and groundwater resources index (gri). the results indicated that wet and drought spells governed the area in the first and second decades, respectively, which was ...

It is a good practice to follow common guidelines in the computation of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) data sets as part operational drought monitoring systems. In European Drought Observatory (https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/), reference statistics are computed following World Meteorological Organization Guidelines on Calculation Climate Normals, where definition period for applications i...