Strategic planning and decision-making require that a strategic plan and an action plan be established, while the establishment of an innovation strategy plays a major role in an enterprise’s continued operation over the longer term. In this study we will use the value-focused thinking model and will combine the random-word method, SWOT analysis, the TOWS matrix and AHP analysis to examine the ...

T o kick off the millennium, Kent Beck wrote eXtreme Programming eXplained, with all the appropriate capitalization designed to attract attention. 1 This book and the practices behind it have had, and continue to have, a significant impact on the industry,

A little known property of a pair of eigenvectors (column and row) of a real tridiagonal matrix is presented. With its help we can define necessary and sufficient conditions for the unique real tridiagonal matrix for which an approximate pair of complex eigenvectors are exact. Similarly we can designate the unique real tridiagonal matrix for which two approximate real eigenvectors, with differe...

Introduction. The lack of pediatric clinical trials (PCTs) leads to an off-label drug use (OLDU) in children. Our objective was to analyze the number and design of PCTs and OLDU in children in the past years. Population, material and methods. Observational and retrospective study on PCTs and OLDU in children, conducted from 2007 to 2012 in a 252-bed children's hospital. The number and design of...

What are the synaptic drives controlling the sleep-wake circuitry in the mammalian brain? In a new study it was found that GABAergic cells in posterior lateral hypothalamus inhibit sleep-promoting anterior hypothalamic cells to cause waking, whereas their inhibition augments sleep.

The computation of two Bayesian predictive distributions which are discrete mixtures of incomplete beta functions is considered. The number of iterations can easily become large for these distributions and thus, the accuracy of the result can be questionable. Therefore, existing algorithms for that class of mixtures are improved by introducing round-off error calculation into the stopping rule....

We present the problem of abusive, off-topic or repetitive postings on open publishing websites, and the difficulties associated with filtering them out. We propose a scheme that extracts enough information to allow for filtering, based on users being embedded in a social network. Our system maintains the privacy of the poster, and does not require full identification to work well. We present a...

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of a multiple element antenna system in an indoor environment based on the measurements taken in the Lucent Bell Labs building in Crawford Hill, NJ, with a system of 12 transmitters and 15 receivers. In particular, we investigate the capacity behavior with respect to the polarization of the transmitting/receiving elements and the distance between the trans...

In updating algorthms where orthogonal transformations are accumulated , it is important to preserve the orthogonality of the product in the presence of rounding error. Moonen, Van Dooren, and Vandewalle have pointed out that simply normalizing the columns of the product tends to preserve orthogonality | though not, as DeGroat points out, to working precision. In this note we give an analysis o...

This paper explores the feasibility of offering network management as a service. We describe availability and responsiveness as the two key factors that govern how functionality is moved off-site (to the cloud). Using common management tasks as examples, we describe the process and the challenges of designing their cloud-based equivalents. We also examine the costs of such off-site implementati...