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PurposeThis research aims at understanding the routes public e-marketplaces take, in the motor carrier spot market, to generate trust among participants.Design/methodology/approachThis work borrows cue signaling theory and an e-marketplace content analysis instrument from information systems literature. Our primary data captures differences in usage of a broad spectrum of cues between motor carrier spot e-marketplaces and a control sample.FindingsTransportation e-marketplaces use graphical cues more frequently than the control sample, display these cues on their “operational path” (where users click to conduct transactions) and try to generate beliefs in participants' integrity and competence.Research limitations/implicationsThe motor carrier online spot market constitutes a relevant test bed for trust-related theories. Several levels of trust-building conceptualizations are tested; the cue level shows the most potential. This paper extends cue signaling theory in the transportation e-marketplace context and calls for further work on operational path cues to enrich swift trust theories.Practical implicationsThis study helps e-marketplace designers by identifying essential and facultative cues for the motor carrier spot market.Originality/valueResearch on public spot e-marketplaces in the motor carrier context is scant. The context is described in detail to show its specificities in structures and behaviors. This helps to contribute to both practice and research. By evolving an existing research instrument from information systems literature, this study ensures replicability (problematic in academic research) .

The information age has increased our dependency on data, and consequently the economic value of information retrieval services (IRS) companies. While mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are a popular means to sustain growth for these companies, they often fail to fulfill the promise of shareholder value creation. This makes the inquiry into market valuation of M&As in the IRS industry timely and important. Using the concept of strategic complementarity that is relatively new in the M&A literature, we study industry and geographic complementarities between acquirers and targets as well as acquirer- and market-specific contingency factors to better understand market valuation of M&As. In an empirical study of 821 M&As by 150 firms in the US IRS industry between 1993 and 2006, we show that the two types of complementarities have contrasting effects on market valuation of M&As. While the effect is positive for geographic complementarity at both state and division levels, the effect of industry complementarity is found to be negative except for acquirers in the Internet software and services mid-industry. Additionally, our findings provide insights on the role of three contingent factors—acquirers’ age, size and stock market growth—that can help better understand diverging effects of industry and geographic complementarities.

Classification is often a critical task for business managers in their decision‐making processes. It is generally more difficult for a classification scheme to produce accurate results when the input domains of the various output classes coincide, to some degree, with one another. In an attempt to address this issue, this article discusses a data‐driven algorithm that identifies the region of coincidence, or overlap, for two‐group classification problems by empirically determining the convex boundary for each group. The results are extendable to multigroup classification. The class membership of a new observation is then determined by its relative position with respect to each of these boundaries. Due to minimal data storage requirements, this boundary‐point classification technique can adapt to changing conditions far more easily than other approaches. Test results demonstrate that the new classification technique has similar performance to a back‐propagation neural network under static conditions and significantly outperforms a back‐propagation neural network under dynamic conditions.

Techniques for data visualization can often provide important information and insight to forest products manufacturing process managers and operators as these techniques can be used to identify important relationships between various process parameters or significant properties of monitored characteristics. Many of the currently available visualization tools, however, tend to be fairly expensive and require significant programming expertise and are thus not easily accessible to some individuals or organizations. This paper describes data visualization and the potential for development of data visualization techniques that address the accessibility issue by using Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic for Applications to generate plots for monitoring or analyzing a data set or stream. Example data from a particleboard manufacturing process are used to illustrate the use of such an Excel-based visualization tool for process monitoring and analysis, and to discuss its impact on the decision-making process. The visualization tool is also applied to data from a study of the mechanical and physical properties of oriented strandboard panels, in order to illustrate its functionality for the quick display and initial analysis of experiment results.

A radial basis function (RBF) neural network was designed for time series forecasting using both an adaptive learning algorithm and response surface methodology (RSM). To improve the traditional RBF network's forecasting capability, the generalized delta rule learning method was employed to modify the radius of the kernel function. Then RSM was utilized to explore the mean square error response surface so that the appropriate combination of network parameters, such as the number of hidden nodes and the initial learning rates, could be found. Extensive studies were performed on the effect of the initial values of connection weights on the accuracy of the backpropagation learning method that was employed in the training of the RBF artificial neural network. The effectiveness of the neural network with the proposed radius-modification technique and the RSM method was demonstrated with an example of forecasting intensity pulsations of a laser. It was found that, by utilizing the proposed techniques, the neural network provided a more accurate prediction of the response.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL or kala azar) is the most serious form of human leishmaniasis, responsible for over 20,000 deaths annually, and post kala azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL) is a stigmatizing skin condition that often occurs in patients after successful treatment for VL. Lack of effective or appropriately targeted cell mediated immunity, including CD8+ T cell responses, underlies the progression of VL and progression to PKDL, and can limit the therapeutic efficacy of anti-leishmanial drugs. Hence, in addition to the need for prophylactic vaccines against leishmaniasis, the development of therapeutic vaccines for use alone or in combined immuno-chemotherapy has been identified as an unmet clinical need. Here, we report the first clinical trial of a third-generation leishmaniasis vaccine, developed intentionally to induce Leishmania-specific CD8+ T cells. We conducted a first-in-human dose escalation Phase I trial in 20 healthy volunteers to assess the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of a prime-only adenoviral vaccine for human VL and PKDL. ChAd63-KH is a replication defective simian adenovirus expressing a novel synthetic gene (KH) encoding two Leishmania proteins KMP-11 and HASPB. Uniquely, the latter was engineered to reflect repeat domain polymorphisms and arrangements identified from clinical isolates. We monitored innate immune responses by whole blood RNA-Seq and antigen specific CD8+ T cell responses by IFNγ ELISPOT and intracellular flow cytometry. ChAd63-KH was safe at intramuscular doses of 1x1010 and 7.5x1010 vp. Whole blood transcriptomic profiling indicated that ChAd63-KH induced innate immune responses characterized by an interferon signature and the presence of activated dendritic cells. Broad and quantitatively robust CD8+ T cell responses were induced by vaccination in 100% (20/20) of vaccinated subjects. The results of this study support the further development of ChAd63-KH as a novel third generation vaccine for VL and PKDL. This clinical trial (LEISH1) was registered at EudraCT (2012-005596-14) and ISRCTN (07766359).

In this trial, high-frequency oscillatory ventilation was compared with conventional ventilation with a lung-protective protocol. When the study was stopped early, hospital mortality was 47% with HFOV versus 35% with the control ventilation strategy. The acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a common complication of critical illness. 1 , 2 Mortality is high, and survivors often have long-term complications. 3 , 4 Although mechanical ventilation is life-sustaining for patients with ARDS, it can perpetuate lung injury. Basic research suggests that repetitive overstretching or collapse of lung units with each respiratory cycle can generate local and systemic inflammation, contributing to multiorgan failure and death. 5 Consistent with these findings are data from clinical trials that support the use of smaller tidal volumes (6 vs. 12 ml per kilogram of predicted body weight) 6 and higher levels of positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP). . . .

In a trial involving more than 2400 critically ill patients, 90-day mortality was similar among patients receiving blood donated on average 6 days earlier and those receiving blood donated 22 days earlier. The age of the transfused blood did not influence outcomes. Blood transfusions are administered frequently and may have unintended consequences in critically ill patients. 1 – 4 Current regulations permit the storage of red cells for up to 42 days, but prolonged storage has been associated with changes that may render red cells ineffective as oxygen carriers and that lead to the accumulation of substances that have untoward biologic effects. 5 – 8 A systematic review of 18 observational studies involving a total of 409,840 patients and three randomized, controlled trials involving a total of 126 patients suggested that the transfusion of older red cells, as compared with newer red cells, was associated with . . .

Objectives. We investigated the association between housing insecurity and the health of very young children. Methods. Between 1998 and 2007, we interviewed 22 069 low-income caregivers with children younger than 3 years who were seen in 7 US urban medical centers. We assessed food insecurity, child health status, developmental risk, weight, and housing insecurity for each child's household. Our indicators for housing insecurity were crowding (> 2 people/bedroom or > 1 family/residence) and multiple moves (≥ 2 moves within the previous year). Results. After adjusting for covariates, crowding was associated with household food insecurity compared with the securely housed (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.30; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.18, 1.43), as were multiple moves (AOR = 1.91; 95% CI = 1.59, 2.28). Crowding was also associated with child food insecurity (AOR = 1.47; 95% CI = 1.34, 1.63), and so were multiple moves (AOR = 2.56; 95% CI = 2.13, 3.08). Multiple moves were associated with fair or poor child health (AOR = 1.48; 95% CI = 1.25, 1.76), developmental risk (AOR 1.71; 95% CI = 1.33, 2.21), and lower weight-for-age z scores (–0.082 vs −0.013; P = .02). Conclusions. Housing insecurity is associated with poor health, lower weight, and developmental risk among young children. Policies that decrease housing insecurity can promote the health of young children and should be a priority.