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Covid-19 outbreak had a huge impact on the economy worldwide as businesses had to close or cease their activities due to the lockdown regulations. The “luckiest” firms were able to operate but under restricted conditions. In order to avoid what certain authors called “bankruptcy epidemic” European countries took economic and fiscal measures to help companies compensate their financial losses. In addition to Government Grants, emergency legislations have been adopted with the aim to adapt insolvency and restructuring procedures to the sanitary situation and specific rules relating to company Law have also been implemented. This paper deals with the measures taken by the state of Luxembourg and gives a brief overview of the legal amendments.
Background: In recent years, the volume of medical knowledge and health data has increased rapidly. For example, the increased availability of electronic health records (EHRs) provides accurate, up-to-date, and complete information about patients at the point of care and enables medical staff to have quick access to patient records for more coordinated and efficient care. With this increase in knowledge, the complexity of accurate, evidence-based medicine tends to grow all the time. Health care workers must deal with an increasing amount of data and documentation. Meanwhile, relevant patient data are frequently overshadowed by a layer of less relevant data, causing medical staff to often miss important values or abnormal trends and their importance to the progression of the patient’s case.
Objective: The goal of this work is to analyze the current laboratory results for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) and classify which of these lab values could be abnormal the next time the test is done. Detecting near-future abnormalities can be useful to support clinicians in their decision-making process in the ICU by drawing their attention to the important values and focus on future lab testing, saving them both time and money. Additionally, it will give doctors more time to spend with patients, rather than skimming through a long list of lab values.
Methods: We used Structured Query Language to extract 25 lab values for mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU from the MIMIC-III and eICU data sets. Additionally, we applied time-windowed sampling and holding, and a support vector machine to fill in the missing values in the sparse time series, as well as the Tukey range to detect and delete anomalies. Then, we used the data to train 4 deep learning models for time series classification, as well as a gradient boosting–based algorithm and compared their performance on both data sets.
Results: The models tested in this work (deep neural networks and gradient boosting), combined with the preprocessing pipeline, achieved an accuracy of at least 80% on the multilabel classification task. Moreover, the model based on the multiple convolutional neural network outperformed the other algorithms on both data sets, with the accuracy exceeding 89%.
Conclusions: In this work, we show that using machine learning and deep neural networks to predict near-future abnormalities in lab values can achieve satisfactory results. Our system was trained, validated, and tested on 2 well-known data sets to ensure that our system bridged the reality gap as much as possible. Finally, the model can be used in combination with our preprocessing pipeline on real-life EHRs to improve patients’ diagnosis and treatment.
The concept of Circular Economy (CE) is becoming increasingly important in the pursuit of more sustainable societies. CE strategies are being applied in the sustainable management of a plethora of areas, such as energy, water, food and eco-industrial parks. The present paper focuses on the question of how CE principles can support the sustainable management of water in the agricultural sector around the world, considering different legislative environments, water resources management guidelines, environmental stressors, and CE practices. Considering these practices and circumstances, seven countries were compared: Brazil, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Portugal, and Taiwan. Together, CE experts in the seven countries developed a set of 44 criteria to assess each of these areas. Broader establishment and respect of water resources legislation was found to be strongly correlated with lower agricultural water use. While the application of CE practices was found to not be correlated with lower consumption, this is still novel in most countries. Based on the studied countries, it can be concluded that a global CE agenda has not been reached for water resources. Further application and variety of practices is required to better represent the impact of CE on a national scale, but local success stories could support the wider application of CE in agriculture. The findings and the framework of the study can be applied to other countries in directing CE strategies for more sustainable water use in agriculture. Increasing CE implementation, motivated by legislation and better management can help ensure water security throughout nations.
The number of additive manufacturing methods and materials is growing rapidly, leaving gaps in the knowledge of specific material properties. A relatively recent addition is the metal-filled filament to be printed similarly to the fused filament fabrication (FFF) technology used for plastic materials, but with additional debinding and sintering steps. While tensile, bending, and shear properties of metals manufactured this way have been studied thoroughly, their fatigue properties remain unexplored. Thus, the paper aims to determine the tensile, fatigue, and impact strengths of Markforged 17-4 PH and BASF Ultrafuse 316L stainless steel to answer whether the metal FFF can be used for structural parts safely with the current state of technology. They are compared to two 316L variants manufactured via selective laser melting (SLM) and literature results. For extrusion-based additive manufacturing methods, a significant decrease in tensile and fatigue strength is observed compared to specimens manufactured via SLM. Defects created during the extrusion and by the pathing scheme, causing a rough surface and internal voids to act as local stress risers, handle the strength decrease. The findings cast doubt on whether the metal FFF technique can be safely used for structural components; therefore, further developments are needed to reduce internal material defects.
1. Recent reports on insect decline have highlighted the need for long-term data on insect communities towards identifying their trends and drivers.
2. With the launch of many new insect monitoring schemes to investigate insect communities over large spatial and temporal scales, Malaise traps have become one of the most important tools due to the broad spectrum of species collected and reduced capture bias through passive sampling of insects day and night. However, Malaise traps can vary in size, shape, and colour, and it is unknown how these differences affect biomass, species richness, and composition of trap catch, making it difficult to compare results between studies.
3. We compared five Malaise trap types (three variations of the Townes and two variations of the Bartak Malaise trap) to determine their effects on biomass and species richness as identified by metabarcoding.
4. Insect biomass varied by 20%–55%, not strictly following trap size but varying with trap type. Total species richness was 20%–38% higher in the three Townes trap models compared to the Bartak traps. Bartak traps captured lower richness of highly mobile taxa but increased richness of ground-dwelling taxa. The white roofed Townes trap captured a higher richness of pollinators.
5. We find that biomass, total richness, and taxa group specific richness are all sensitive to Malaise trap type. Trap type should be carefully considered and aligned to match monitoring and research questions. Additionally, our estimates of trap type effects can be used to adjust results to facilitate comparisons across studies.
The data presented here contain information on cheating behavior from experiments and general self-reported attitudes related to honesty-related social norms and trust, together with individual-level demographic variables. Our sample included 493 university students in five countries, namely, Germany, Vietnam, Taiwan, China, and Japan. The experiment was monetarily incentivized based on the performance on a matrix task. The participants also answered a survey questionnaire. The dataset is valuable for academic researchers in sociology, psychology, and economics who are interested in honesty, norms, and cultural differences.
The future of German pharmacy business models with retail clinics as USP against online pharmacies
(2022)
Purpose: This study aims to discuss the chances of in-store pharmacies through in-store health services, e. g. vaccinations or Covid-19 tests, in Germany. As a result, retail clinics could lead to a USP against online pharmacies. Additionally, the study will show how possible retail clinics could look like and how the acceptance in the population is.
Research Methodology: To conduct the survey, Google Forms was used together with MS Excel for the analysis. Various studies were reviewed, and care was taken to work as closely as possible to practice and its figures from e. g. associations, companies, or statista.
Results: The launch of retail clinics could give German stationary pharmacies a new boost and differentiate them from online pharmacies on the market. Pharmaceutical services are in great demand among the population, hopefully, the legal framework will soon be in place, and the proper services will have to be offered to be able to fully generate the large sales potential.
Discussion and Conclusion: The study only points to a general overview of how health services can help store pharmacies in the competition with online pharmacies in Germany. Yet there are also other possible USPs for store pharmacies, which are not concluded in that study. In addition, the legal framework under which pharmacies operate must be analyzed in detail by legal experts to obtain a precise overview of what is possible for pharmacies in the area of pharmaceutical services and retail clinics. The study is useful for pharmacists, business economists in general as well as in health care management.
Implementation strategies of a modern showroom concept for retailers with a wide range of products
(2022)
This paper suggests a new business model based on modern technology for retail. In the age of digitalization, stationary retail is losing market shares to online retail. Therefore, there is an obvious need for change in businesses. The concept developed in this paper combines the strengths of online and stationary retail to benefit stationary retail. In the approach taken in this paper, the basis for change is modern technology. Finding innovative ways to use technologies like NFC, AI, and robotics is regarded as the key factor to sustainable success. As the implementation of modern technologies entails a particular investment, the customers’ opinion on structural changes like these has been included in the consideration. Therefore, a survey has been conducted to find out which level of innovation current customers are willing to accept thus emphasizing the need for certain changes and dissuading specific others. The result of this paper is the modern showroom concept which takes the customers’ opinion into account while implementing the right amount of technology that should pave the way to a sustainable future for stationary retail.
The objective of this study is to allow a better understanding of the role of industry 4.0 technologies, especially filament extrusion technology in the reduction of costs, environmental impact, energy consumption, and the possibility to expand the range of printable materials. The study focuses on the desktop Filament Extruders available in the market now, where these machines are assessed and future possible modifications for these apparatuses are presented. The research leading to the publication of this study consists of a review of the existing literature, in addition, information from different extruders manufacturers’ websites has been used. The study has demonstrated that the extrusion of material at home is still not an exact science, and the process ends up costing the user large sums of money over time. However, there are still limitations to the use of this technology such as the lack of standardized extrusion settings, the necessity of pre-drying the pellets, and the complexity of the extruder cleaning process after each use.
In 2019 at IBM, it was found that there is a strong dependence on a few large banks in bank sales, and the growth targets of the sales division cannot be achieved due to the existing business with these same customers. To counteract this dependency, an NCA-specific sales team for the banking industry was established to support small and medium-sized banks with personal commitment and expertise and to develop them into long-term business partners of IBM. This research focuses on the development of a performance measurement system for NCA-Sales teams. It postulates the hypothesis that more effective and better-suited performance measurement systems can be developed for NCA-Sales of information technology towards financial institutions. Authors use the methodology of expert interviews and Mayrings qualitative content analysis to gain insights into the relevant factors that need to be considered when evaluating the performance of such sales teams. The paper identifies stakeholders, challenges, and goals that should be integrated into a performance measurement system as well as KPIs to measure them. The results are being consolidated into a conceptual sketch for an NCA-sales optimized PMS. The paper distinguishes itself from other research through an approach that gives detailed guidance for the practical implementation of its findings. The research was conducted with professionals in the IT sector; however, all of them were working for the same company, and the data was collected in the short span of one week as it was part of a research. The outcome can be used for further studies on how to effectively measure performance in NCA-Sales teams.