Search results for "Making"

Multi-Criteria Decision Making support system for pancreatic islet transplantation

2011

Pancreatic islet transplantation consists of replacing insulin-producing cells to restore normal glycemia in diabetic patients. This is a minimal invasive procedure that has been proved successful. Unfortunately unpredictability of islet transplant outcome remains a frustrating and costly issue limiting the clinical implementation of this procedure. Multiple variables are involved in the procedure and assessment is subjective to individual operators. The aim of this study was to generate a system expressing the probability of transplant success in relation to four classes of identified variables (donor, organ, isolation and recipient). We have proposed the utilization of Multi-Criteria Deci…

Polyphenol Characterization and Antioxidant Activity of Grape Seeds and Skins from Sicily: A Preliminary Study

2022

The interest in the consumption of health-promoting foods has led to identifying derivatives of the wine industry as products to increase the functional properties of different foods or to design new functional foods. The main goal of this study is to characterize and valorize byproducts and wastes of Sicilian grapes as new sources of bioactive components, from the perspective of a circular economy and a biorefinery approach. In particular, this research investigated: 1. the total phenolic content and antioxidant activities and 2. the phenolic profiles of free and bound fractions of defatted grape seeds and red grape skins from Sicily. Defatted grape seeds (DGS) and red grape skins (RGSK) a…

Towards resilient cities: Advancements allowed by a multi-criteria optimization tool to face the new challenges of European Union’s climate and energ…

2019

Abstract The United Nations as well as the European Union are strongly committed in promoting a transition towards more sustainable and resilient cities. Indeed, they are increasingly affected by different types of threats, among which the natural ones such as earthquakes, fires, and floods (shocks) and climate variability (stresses). Cities are quite often unable to cope with the adverse effects of such natural hazards. This circumstance leads to the need of introducing resilience-related criteria (besides commonly used sustainability indicators) in decision-making processes. This paper investigates at which extent the inclusion of such new indicators, within multi-criteria assessment tool…

Designing knowledge construction in pre-service teachers’ collaborative planning talk

2022

In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of student teachers’ collaboration in planning and implementing a course that integrated physics and the Finnish language. Audio-recorded planning sessions and interviews were examined using qualitative content analysis, first, to discover what kind of space for knowledge construction student teachers designed for learners and, second, to identify the characteristics of their collaboration in developing a new cross-disciplinary pedagogical practice. The analysis revealed challenges in integrating meaning-making resources for knowledge construction; especially the role of language remained mostly invisible. This indicates a need to develop teac…

On conditions of decision making : a study of the conceptual foundations of administration

2014

Threat Appraisal, Resilience, and Health Behaviors in Recovered COVID-19 Patients: The Serial Mediation of Coping and Meaning-Making

2023

Research indicates that both cognitive appraisal and personal resources can noticeably influence health behaviors, as individuals modify their health convictions and practices on the basis of threat appraisal, personality, and meaning. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether coping strategies and meaning-making can serially mediate the relationship of threat appraisal and resilience with health behaviors in recovered COVID-19 patients. Self-report measures of threat appraisal, resilience, coping, meaning-making, and health behaviors were completed by 266 participants (aged 17 to 78, 51.5% female) who had recovered from COVID-19. The serial mediation analysis showed that the …

Breaking off the engagement : A case study about the decision to stand alone in a time of mergers in the Higher Education sector

2019

Master's thesis Innovative governance and public management ME523 - University of Agder 2019 The development in the Higher Education (HE) sector hasfor the past decade been characterized by structural changes in form of government-initiated mergers. The aim of such structural changes was to enhance the quality by concentrating the resources in fewer but stronger institutions. The signals from the Ministry of Education and Research about such changes was the start of a wave of mergers in the sector, whichover a few years resulted in a decrease in the number of Higher Education Institutions (HEI)from 33 to 21. However, not all of the negotiation processes about potential mergers turned out to…

Work-life Balance Decision-making of Norwegian Students: Implications for Human Resources Management

2016

Objective : The paper aims at identifying and assessing the significance of work-life balance determinants between the Youth of highly developed societies and its implications for human resources management on the example of Norway. Research Design & Methods : The research target group consists of 236 respondents recruited among Norwegian tertiary education students. It employed literature analysis, two-stage exploratory research: direct individual in-depth interviews, survey based on a self-administered, web-based questionnaire with single-answer, limited choice qualitative & quantitative, as well as explanatory research (informal moderated group discussions). Findings: The research on per…

Toward Self-Aware Robots

2018

Despite major progress in Robotics and AI, robots are still basically “zombies” repeatedly achieving actions and tasks without understanding what they are doing. Deep-Learning AI programs classify tremendous amounts of data without grasping the meaning of their inputs or outputs. We still lack a genuine theory of the underlying principles and methods that would enable robots to understand their environment, to be cognizant of what they do, to take appropriate and timely initiatives, to learn from their own experience and to show that they know that they have learned and how. The rationale of this paper is that the understanding of its environment by an agent (the agent itself and its effect…

A Systematic Way of Structuring Real-World Multiobjective Optimization Problems

2023

In recent decades, the benefits of applying multiobjective optimization (MOO) methods in real-world applications have rapidly increased. The MOO literature mostly focuses on problem-solving, typically assuming the problem has already been correctly formulated. The necessity of verifying the MOO problem and the potential impacts of having an incorrect problem formulation on the optimization results are not emphasized enough in the literature. However, verification is crucial since the optimization results will not be meaningful without an accurate problem formulation, not to mention the resources spent in the optimization process being wasted. In this paper, we focus on the MOO problem struc…