Natal site and offshore swimming influence fitness and long-distance ocean transport in young sea turtles

Although long-distance transport of marine organisms is constrained by numerous oceanic and biological factors, some species have evolved life-histories reliant on such movements. We examine the factors that promote long-distance transport in a transoceanic migrant, young loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta), from the southeastern U.S. Empirical data from near-surface buoys and simulations in two ocean circulation models indicated that passive drifters are often retained for long periods shoreward of oceanic fronts that delineate coastal and offshore waters. Further simulations revealed that offshore swimming aided newly hatched turtles in moving past fronts and increased turtles’ probability of survival, reaching distant foraging grounds, and encountering favorable temperatures. Swimming was most beneficial in regions that were more favorable under scenarios assuming passive drift. These results have broad implications for understanding the movement processes of many marine species, highlighting likely retention of more planktonic species and potential for dispersal in more nektonic species.

Mothers After Gestational Diabetes in Australia Diabetes Prevention Program (MAGDA-DPP) post-natal intervention: an update to the study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Background
The Mothers After Gestational Diabetes in Australia Diabetes Prevention Program (MAGDA-DPP) is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that aims to assess the effectiveness of a structured diabetes prevention intervention for women who had gestational diabetes.

Methods/Design
The original protocol was published in Trial s (http://www.trialsjournal.com/content/14/1/339). This update reports on an additional exclusion criterion and change in first eligibility screening to provide greater clarity. The new exclusion criterion “surgical or medical intervention to treat obesity” has been added to the original protocol. The risks of developing diabetes will be affected by any medical or surgical intervention as its impact on obesity will alter the outcomes being assessed by MAGDA-DPP. The screening procedures have also been updated to reflect the current recruitment operation. The first eligibility screening is now taking place either during or after pregnancy, depending on recruitment strategy.

Type-aware task placement in geo-distributed data centers with low OPEX using data center resizing

With the rising demands on cloud services, the electricity consumption has been increasing drastically as the main operational expenditure (OPEX) to data center providers. The geographical heterogeneity of electricity prices motivates us to study the type-aware task placement problem over geo-distributed data centers. With the consideration of the diversity of user requests and server clusters in modern data centers, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes OPEX while guaranteeing the quality-of-service, i.e., the expected response time of tasks. Furthermore, an efficient solution is designed for this formulated problem. The experimental results show that our proposal achieves much higher cost-efficiency than the greedy algorithm and much approaches the optimal results. © 2014 IEEE.

Consuming postcolonial shopping malls

Through a naturalistic inquiry, we interpret shopping malls in India as post-colonial sites in which young consumers deploy the West in an attempt to transform their Third World identities. Shopping malls in former colonies represent a post-colonial hybridity that offers consumers the illusion of being Western, modern, and developed. Moreover, consumption of post-colonial retail arenas is characterised as a masquerade through which young consumers attempt to disguise or temporarily transcend their Third World realities. This interpretation helps us to offer insights into transitioning retail servicescapes of the Third World, which in turn helps to improve extant understanding of consumer identity and global consumer culture.

It’s not all about language ability: motivational cultural intelligence matters in call center performance

his study focuses on the role of motivational cultural intelligence (CQ) in call center performance. Call centers mainly rely on verbal communication with language ability playing a significant role in delivery of tasks. This study argues that motivational CQ, or the interest and efficacy when interacting with individuals from culturally diverse backgrounds, plays a significant role in call center performance. This study was conducted in the Philippines, one of the top destinations for offshore services like call centers. Studies were conducted at two time points to determine the relationship between language ability, motivational CQ, and task performance. At Time 1, the language ability of 125 call center agent applicants was determined and assessed. At Time 2 which was conducted six months later, performance data were obtained and the level of the motivational CQ of the respondents measured. Results show that language ability is positively and significantly related to task performance. However, when motivational CQ was included, the relationship between language ability and task performance became non-significant, which conveys the full mediating role of motivational CQ in that relationship.

K-Center: an approach on the multi-source identification of information diffusion

The global diffusion of epidemics, computer viruses, and rumors causes great damage to our society. It is critical to identify the diffusion sources and timely quarantine them. However, most methods proposed so far are unsuitable for diffusion with multiple sources because of the high computational cost and the complex spatiotemporal diffusion processes. In this paper, based on the knowledge of infected nodes and their connections, we propose a novel method to identify multiple diffusion sources, which can address three main issues in this area: 1) how many sources are there? 2) where did the diffusion emerge? and 3) when did the diffusion break out? We first derive an optimization formulation for multi-source identification problem. This is based on altering the original network into a new network concerning two key elements: 1) propagation probability and 2) the number of hops between nodes. Experiments demonstrate that the altered network can accurately reflect the complex diffusion processes with multiple sources. Second, we derive a fast method to optimize the formulation. It has been proved that the proposed method is convergent and the computational complexity is O(mn log α) , where α = α (m,n) is the slowly growing inverse-Ackermann function, n is the number of infected nodes, and m is the number of edges connecting them. Finally, we introduce an efficient algorithm to estimate the spreading time and the number of diffusion sources. To evaluate the proposed method, we compare the proposed method with many competing methods in various real-world network topologies. Our method shows significant advantages in the estimation of multiple sources and the prediction of spreading time.