Frequency of spontaneous ventricular tachycardia in a pediatric population

Few data exist on the incidence of spontaneously occurring ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an unselected pediatric population. The aim of this study was to define the incidence and outcomes of VT in a general pediatric population. A retrospective analysis was performed of all documented episodes of VT in children referred to a single center during a 10-year study period ending in December 2005. The study center drains a stable referral area with 252,000 children aged <16 years, with no other pediatric cardiologic or pediatric intensive care services available. Twenty-seven patients with spontaneously occurring episodes of VT were observed, accounting for a VT incidence of 1.1 episodes/100,000 childhood years. Thirteen patients had VT in the absence of structural heart disease, and 14 had VT in the presence of a wide range of underlying cardiac disease. Overall mortality was 5 of 27 patients (19%), but mortality was seen exclusively in patients with underlying heart disease; for this subgroup of patients, mortality was 36%. Idiopathic VT in children with structurally normal hearts carried a good prognosis, and treatment was required in a minority (20%) of these patients. In conclusion, this study highlights that VT in childhood is rare, and outcomes are highly dependent on the underlying pathologic substrate.

Luxembourgish farmers lack information about grain legume cultivation

Grain legume production in Europe has decreased in recent years, while legume demand has rapidly increased due to growth of meat production. Therefore, Europe imports grain legumes, principally soybeans, to meet feed protein requirements. Various investigations have identified problems and benefits of local grain legume cultivation. Nevertheless, grain legume cultivation has still not increased in the last years. Studies investigating why farmers do not cultivate grain legumes are missing. Here, we surveyed the knowledge of farmers about grain legume cultivation, problems and constraints of grain legume cultivation and the barriers faced by and incentives needed by farmers. We sent a questionnaire to 1373 farmers in Luxembourg, with a response rate of 29 %. Results show that only 17 % of all the responding farmers cultivated grain legumes; 88 % of the conventional farmers did not cultivate grain legumes, while 85 % of the organic farmers did. We observed that Luxembourgish farmers feel badly informed about grain legume cultivation; organic farmers generally feel better informed than their conventional colleagues. The main barrier, named by Luxemburgish farmers to not cultivate grain legumes, is not economic issues but a lack of knowledge and extension services for these crops. Main incentives needed to start grain legume cultivation in the future are economic issues. Even though grain legume producers mentioned several negative experiences with grain legume cultivation, they are not discouraged by the poor economic conditions and appreciate the benefits of grain legume cultivation. Overall, our findings show that research results on grain legume should be better disseminated to extension services and farmers.

Integration of WSNs into enterprise systems based on semantic physical business entities

Internet of Things based systems are anticipated to gain widespread use in industrial applications. Standardization efforts, like 6L0WPAN and the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) have made the integration of wireless sensor nodes possible using Internet technology and web-like access to data (RESTful service access). While there are still some open issues, the interoperability problem in the lower layers can now be considered solved from an enterprise software vendors' point of view. One possible next step towards integration of real-world objects into enterprise systems and solving the corresponding interoperability problems at higher levels is to use semantic web technologies. We introduce an abstraction of real-world objects, called Semantic Physical Business Entities (SPBE), using Linked Data principles. We show that this abstraction nicely fits into enterprise systems, as SPBEs allow a business object centric view on real-world objects, instead of a pure device centric view. The interdependencies between how currently services in an enterprise system are used and how this can be done in a semantic real-world aware enterprise system are outlined, arguing for the need of semantic services and semantic knowledge repositories. We introduce a lightweight query language, which we use to perform a quantitative analysis of our approach to demonstrate its feasibility.

Linked services for M2M communication with Enterprise IT systems

Linking the physical world to the Internet, also known as the Internet of Things, has increased available information and services in everyday life and in the Enterprise world. In Enterprise IT an increasing number of communication is done between IT backend systems and small IoT devices, for example sensor networks or RFID readers. This introduces some challenges in terms of complexity and integration. We are working on the integration of IoT devices into Enterprise IT by leveraging SOA techniques and Semantic Web technologies. We present a SOA based integration platform for connecting WSNs and large enterprise business processes. For ensuring interoperability our platform is based on Linked Services. These are thoroughly described, machine-readable, machine-reasonable service descriptions.

Linked Services for Enabling Interoperability in the Sensing Enterprise

In future, the so called “sensing enterprise”, as part of the Future Internet, will play a crucial role in the success or the failure of an enterprise. We present our vision of an enterprise interacting with the physical world based on a retail scenario. One of the main challenges is the interoperability not only between the enterprise IT systems themselves, but also between these systems and the sensing devices. We will argue that semantically enriched service descriptions, the so called linked services will ease interoperability between two or more enterprises IT systems, and between enterprise systems and the physical environment.

The German business and information technologies project

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project strives to reveal new insights into how modern IT impacts organizational structures and business practices using empirical methods. Due to its international scope, it allows for inter-country comparison of empirical results. Germany — represented by the European School of Management and Technologies (ESMT) and the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — joined the BIT project in 2006. This report presents the result of the first survey conducted in Germany during November–December 2006. The key results are as follows: • The most widely adopted technologies and systems in Germany are websites, wireless hardware and software, groupware/productivity tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The biggest potential for growth exists for collaboration and portal tools, content management systems, business process modelling, and business intelligence applications. A number of technological solutions have not yet been adopted by many organizations but also bear some potential, in particular identity management solutions, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), biometrics, and third-party authentication and verification. • IT security remains on the top of the agenda for most enterprises: budget spending was increasing in the last 3 years. • The workplace and work requirements are changing. IT is used to monitor employees' performance in Germany, but less heavily compared to the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007).1 The demand for IT skills is increasing at all corporate levels. Executives are asking for more and better structured information and this, in turn, triggers the appearance of new decision-making tools and online technologies on the market. • The internal organization of companies in Germany is underway: organizations are becoming flatter, even though the trend is not as pronounced as in the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007), and the geographical scope of their operations is increasing. Modern IT plays an important role in enabling this development, e.g. telecommuting, teleconferencing, and other web-based collaboration formats are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate context. • The degree to which outsourcing is being pursued is quite limited with little change expected. IT services, payroll, and market research are the most widely outsourced business functions. This corresponds to the results from other countries. • Up to now, the adoption of e-business technologies has had a rather limited effect on marketing functions. Companies tend to extract synergies from traditional printed media and on-line advertising. • The adoption of e-business has not had a major impact on marketing capabilities and strategy yet. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are still dominating. The corporate identity of most organizations does not change significantly when going online. • Online sales channel are mainly viewed as a complement to the traditional distribution means. • Technology adoption has caused production and organizational costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and maintenance as well as consultancy and internal communication costs have increased.

Design of SOA services: experiences from industry

Because of the unknown usage scenarios, designing the elementary services of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which form the basis for later composition, is rather difficult. Various design guide lines have been proposed by academia, tool vendors and consulting companies, but they differ in the rigor of validation and are often biased toward some technology. For that reason a multiple-case study was conducted in five large organizations that successfully introduced SOA in their daily business. The observed approaches are contrasted with the findings from a literature review to derive some recommendations for SOA service design.

Explaining Variations in Client Extra Costs between Software Projects Offshored to India

Gaining economic benefits from substantially lower labor costs has been reported as a major reason for offshoring labor-intensive information systems services to low-wage countries. However, if wage differences are so high, why is there such a high level of variation in the economic success between offshored IS projects? This study argues that offshore outsourcing involves a number of extra costs for the ^his paper was recommended for acceptance by Associate Guest Editor Erran Carmel. client organization that account for the economic failure of offshore projects. The objective is to disaggregate these extra costs into their constituent parts and to explain why they differ between offshored software projects. The focus is on software development and maintenance projects that are offshored to Indian vendors. A theoretical framework is developed a priori based on transaction cost economics (TCE) and the knowledge-based view of the firm, comple mented by factors that acknowledge the specific offshore context The framework is empirically explored using a multiple case study design including six offshored software projects in a large German financial service institution. The results of our analysis indicate that the client incurs post contractual extra costs for four types of activities: (1) re quirements specification and design, (2) knowledge transfer, (3) control, and (4) coordination. In projects that require a high level of client-specific knowledge about idiosyncratic business processes and software systems, these extra costs were found to be substantially higher than in projects where more general knowledge was needed. Notably, these costs most often arose independently from the threat of oppor tunistic behavior, challenging the predominant TCE logic of market failure. Rather, the client extra costs were parti cularly high in client-specific projects because the effort for managing the consequences of the knowledge asymmetries between client and vendor was particularly high in these projects. Prior experiences of the vendor with related client projects were found to reduce the level of extra costs but could not fully offset the increase in extra costs in highly client-specific projects. Moreover, cultural and geographic distance between client and vendor as well as personnel turnover were found to increase client extra costs. Slight evidence was found, however, that the cost-increasing impact of these factors was also leveraged in projects with a high level of required client-specific knowledge (moderator effect).