A randomized controlled trial of a nurse-administered educational intervention for improving cancer pain management in ambulatory settings

The persistence of negative attitudes towards cancer pain and its treatment suggests there is scope for identifying more effective pain education strategies. This randomized controlled trial involving 189 ambulatory cancer patients evaluated an educational intervention that aimed to optimize patients' ability to manage pain. One week post-intervention, patients receiving the pain management intervention (PMI) had a significantly greater increase in self-reported pain knowledge, perceived control over pain, and number of pain treatments recommended. Intervention group patients also demonstrated a greater reduction in willingness to tolerate pain, concerns about addiction and side effects, being a "good" patient, and tolerance to pain relieving medication. The results suggest that targeted educational interventions that utilize individualized instructional techniques may alter cancer patient attitudes, which can potentially act as barriers to effective pain management. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Self-assessment benchmarking as a quality management tool in primary healthcare

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Management of Information on Program Flow Analysis

The article proposes the model of management of information about program flow analysis for conducting computer experiments with program transformations. It considers the architecture and context of the flow analysis subsystem within the framework of Specialized Knowledge Bank on Program Transformations and describes the language for presenting flow analysis methods in the knowledge bank.

Self-organising zooms for decentralised redundancy management in visual sensor networks

When visual sensor networks are composed of cameras which can adjust the zoom factor of their own lens, one must determine the optimal zoom levels for the cameras, for a given task. This gives rise to an important trade-off between the overlap of the different cameras’ fields of view, providing redundancy, and image quality. In an object tracking task, having multiple cameras observe the same area allows for quicker recovery, when a camera fails. In contrast having narrow zooms allow for a higher pixel count on regions of interest, leading to increased tracking confidence. In this paper we propose an approach for the self-organisation of redundancy in a distributed visual sensor network, based on decentralised multi-objective online learning using only local information to approximate the global state. We explore the impact of different zoom levels on these trade-offs, when tasking omnidirectional cameras, having perfect 360-degree view, with keeping track of a varying number of moving objects. We further show how employing decentralised reinforcement learning enables zoom configurations to be achieved dynamically at runtime according to an operator’s preference for maximising either the proportion of objects tracked, confidence associated with tracking, or redundancy in expectation of camera failure. We show that explicitly taking account of the level of overlap, even based only on local knowledge, improves resilience when cameras fail. Our results illustrate the trade-off between maintaining high confidence and object coverage, and maintaining redundancy, in anticipation of future failure. Our approach provides a fully tunable decentralised method for the self-organisation of redundancy in a changing environment, according to an operator’s preferences.

Készpénz optimalizálás GLPK program használatával (Cash flow management with GLPK software)

A készpénz-optimalizálás az operációkutatás régóta kutatott területe. Ebben a cikkben valós adatokon mutatok be egy banki készpénz-optimalizálást, melyet lineáris programozási feladatok segítségével végeztem el. A cikkben összehasonlítottam a determinisztikus és a sztochasztikus megközelítéseket is. A hagyományos készpénz-optimalizáción két területen léptem túl: egyrészt vizsgáltam a bankfiók valutagazdálkodását is, másrészről a bankfiókok közötti készpénzszállítás lehetőségét is. A vegyes egészértékű lineáris programozási feladatok megoldására a glpk nevű szabad hozzáférésű szoftvert használtam, így a cikkből képet kaphatunk a megoldó (solver) felhasználhatóságáról és korlátairól is. ___________ In recent years both operational research and quantitative ¯nance have paid much attention to cash management issues. In this paper we present a cash management study which is based on real world data and uses a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model as the main tool. In the paper we compare deterministic and stochastic approaches. The classical cash management problem is extended in two ways: we considered the possibility of bank offices keeping more than one currency and also investigated the opportunity of cash transports between bank offices. The MILP problem was solved with glpk (GNU Linear Programming Kit), a free software. The reader can also get a feel of how to use this solver.