FernUniversität in Hagen

Many techniques for detecting duplicated source code (software clones) have been proposed in the past. However, it is not yet clear how these techniques compare in terms of recall and precision as well as space and time requirements. This paper presents an experiment that evaluates six clone detectors based on eight large C and Java programs (altogether almost 850 KLOC). Their clone candidates were evaluated by one of the authors as independent third party. The selected techniques cover the whole spectrum of the state-of-the-art in clone detection. The techniques work on text, lexical and syntactic information, software metrics, and program dependency graphs.

Spatio-temporal databases deal with geometries changing over time. The goal of our work is to provide a DBMS data model and query language capable of handling such time-dependent geometries, including those changing continuously that describe moving objects . Two fundamental abstractions are moving point and moving region , describing objects for which only the time-dependent position, or position and extent, respectively, are of interest. We propose to present such time-dependent geometries as attribute data types with suitable operations, that is, to provide an abstract data type extension to a DBMS data model and query language. This paper presents a design of such a system of abstract data types. It turns out that besides the main types of interest, moving point and moving region, a relatively large number of auxiliary data types are needed. For example, one needs a line type to represent the projection of a moving point into the plane, or a “moving real” to represent the time-dependent distance of two points. It then becomes crucial to achieve (i) orthogonality in the design of the system, i.e., type constructors can be applied unifomly; (ii) genericity and consistency of operations, i.e., operations range over as many types as possible and behave consistently; and (iii) closure and consistency between structure and operations of nontemporal and related temporal types. Satisfying these goal leads to a simple and expressive system of abstract data types that may be integrated into a query language to yield a powerful language for querying spatio-temporal data, including moving objects. The paper formally defines the types and operations, offers detailed insight into the considerations that went into the design, and exemplifies the use of the abstract data types using SQL. The paper offers a precise and conceptually clean foundation for implementing a spatio-temporal DBMS extension.

Cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone, given every 3 weeks (CHOP-21), is standard chemotherapy for aggressive lymphomas. To determine whether biweekly CHOP (CHOP-14) with or without etoposide is more effective than CHOP-21, 689 patients ages 61 to 75 years were randomized to 6 cycles of CHOP-21, CHOP-14, CHOEP-21 (CHOP plus etoposide 100 mg/m2 days 1-3), or CHOEP-14. Patients in the 2-weekly regimens received granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) starting from day 4. Patients received radiotherapy (36 Gy) to sites of initial bulky disease and extranodal disease. Complete remission rates were 60.1% (CHOP-21), 70.0% (CHOEP-21), 76.1% (CHOP-14), and 71.6% (CHOEP-14). Five-year event-free and overall survival rates were 32.5% and 40.6%, respectively, for CHOP-21 and 43.8% and 53.3%, respectively, for CHOP-14. In a multivariate analysis, the relative risk reduction was 0.66 (P =.003) for event-free and 0.58 (P <.001) for overall survival after CHOP-14 compared with CHOP-21. Toxicity of CHOP-14 and CHOP-21 was similar, but CHOEP-21 and in particular CHOEP-14 were more toxic. Due to its favorable efficacy and toxicity profile, CHOP-14 should be considered the new standard chemotherapy regimen for patients ages 60 or older with aggressive lymphoma.

peer reviewed

A 16-nation study involving 8,360 participants revealed that hostile and benevolent attitudes toward men, assessed by the Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory (P. Click & S.T. Fiske, 1999), were (a) reliably measured across cultures, (b) positively correlated (for men and women, within samples and across nations) with each other and with hostile and benevolent sexism toward women (Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, P. Click & S.T. Fiske, 1996), and (c) negatively correlated with gender equality in cross-national comparisons. Stereotype measures indicated that men were viewed as having less positively valenced but more powerful traits than women. The authors argue that hostile as well as benevolent attitudes toward men reflect and support gender inequality by characterizing men as being designed for dominance.

This study sets out to test the assumption that concepts of leadership differ as a function of cultural differences in Europe and to identify dimensions which describe differences in leadership concepts across European countries. Middle‐level managers ( N = 6052) from 22 European countries rated 112 questionnaire items containing descriptions of leadership traits and behaviours. For each attribute respondents rated how well it fits their concept of an outstanding business leader. The findings support the assumption that leadership concepts are culturally endorsed. Specifically, clusters of European countries which share similar cultural values according to prior cross‐cultural research (Ronen &amp; Shenkar, 1985), also share similar leadership concepts. The leadership prototypicality dimensions found are highly correlated with cultural dimensions reported in a comprehensive cross‐cultural study of contemporary Europe (Smith, Dugan, &amp; Trompenaars, 1996). The ordering of countries on the leadership dimensions is considered a useful tool with which to model differences between leadership concepts of different cultural origin in Europe. Practical implications for cross‐cultural management, both in European and non‐European settings, are discussed.

Abstract Summability is a mathematical topic with a long tradition and many applications in, for example, function theory, number theory, and stochastics. It was originally based on classical analytical methods, but was strongly influenced by modern functional analytical methods during the last seven decades. The present book aims to introduce the reader to the wide field of summability and its applications, and provides an overview of the most important classical and modern methods used. Part I contains a short general introduction to summability, the basic classical theory concerning mainly inclusion theorems and theorems of the Silverman-Toeplitz type, a presentation of the most important classes of summability methods, Tauberian theorems, and applications of matrix methods. The proofs in Part I are exclusively done by applying classical analytical methods. Part II is concerned with modern functional analytical methods in summability, and contains the essential functional analytical basis required in later parts of the book, topologization of sequence spaces as K- and KF-spaces, domains of matrix methods as FK-spaces and their topological structure. In this part the proofs are of functional analytical nature only. Part III of the present book deals with topics in summability and topological sequence spaces which require the combination of classical and modern methods. It covers investigations of the constistency of matrix methods and of the bounded domain of matrix methods via Saks space theory, and the presentation of some aspects in topological sequence spaces. Lecturers, graduate students, and researchers working in summability and related topics will find this book a useful introduction and reference work.

Background: This paper describes a systematic review and meta-analyses on effects of environmental noise on annoyance. The noise sources include aircraft, road, and rail transportation noise as well as wind turbines and noise source combinations. Objectives: Update knowledge about effects of environmental noise on people living in the vicinity of noise sources. Methods: Eligible were published studies (2000–2014) providing comparable acoustical and social survey data including exposure-response functions between standard indicators of noise exposure and standard annoyance responses. The systematic literature search in 20 data bases resulted in 62 studies, of which 57 were used for quantitative meta-analyses. By means of questionnaires sent to the study authors, additional study data were obtained. Risk of bias was assessed by means of study characteristics for individual studies and by funnel plots to assess the risk of publication bias. Main Results: Tentative exposure-response relations for percent highly annoyed residents (%HA) in relation to noise levels for aircraft, road, rail, wind turbine and noise source combinations are presented as well as meta-analyses of correlations between noise levels and annoyance raw scores, and the OR for increase of %HA with increasing noise levels. Quality of evidence was assessed using the GRADE terminology. The evidence of exposure-response relations between noise levels and %HA is moderate (aircraft and railway) or low (road traffic and wind turbines). The evidence of correlations between noise levels and annoyance raw scores is high (aircraft and railway) or moderate (road traffic and wind turbines). The evidence of ORs representing the %HA increase by a certain noise level increase is moderate (aircraft noise), moderate/high (road and railway traffic), and low (wind turbines). Strengths and Limitations: The strength of the evidence is seen in the large total sample size encompassing the included studies (e.g., 18,947 participants in aircraft noise studies). Main limitations are due to the variance in the definition of noise levels and %HA. Interpretation: The increase of %HA in newer studies of aircraft, road and railway noise at comparable Lden levels of earlier studies point to the necessity of adjusting noise limit recommendations. Funding: The review was funded by WHO Europe.

Experience economy is the last segment in the evolution of the market, and it is characterized by the fact that consumers do not acquire goods, products or services, but experiences that they integrate in their biography, and consequently in their identity. Customer Experience, possibly the latest revolution in business thinking along with the digital transformation, seeks the design and management of truly customer-centric experiences. This revolution is spreading across different sectors, among which the health sector should necessarily be considered. This talk covers the fundamental ideas within the concept of customer experience, as well as it provides information and suggestions about how to design and deliver an optimal patient experience.

Models of industrial robots are characterized by highly nonlinear equations with nonlinear couplings between the variables of motion. In this paper, three nonlinear methods are presented, two of which are direct design procedures for industrial robots. These direct nonlinear methods are based on a suitable partition of the dynamic equation of the industrial robot and provide directly applicable, explicit control laws for each drive. The design procedures presented greatly simplify the derivation of the algorithm for computer-controlled industrial robots. The methods are applied to two different types of industrial robots.

Accurate modeling of photonic devices is essential for the development of new, higher performance optical components required by current and future high-bandwidth communications systems. This paper reviews several key techniques for such modeling, many of which are used in commercial design tools. These include several mode-solving techniques, the beam propagation method, the method of lines, and the finite-difference time-domain technique.

We assessed evidence for a contextual effect of positive intergroup contact, whereby the effect of intergroup contact between social contexts (the between-level effect) on outgroup prejudice is greater than the effect of individual-level contact within contexts (the within-level effect). Across seven large-scale surveys (five cross-sectional and two longitudinal), using multilevel analyses, we found a reliable contextual effect. This effect was found in multiple countries, operationalizing context at multiple levels (regions, districts, and neighborhoods), and with and without controlling for a range of demographic and context variables. In four studies (three cross-sectional and one longitudinal) we showed that the association between context-level contact and prejudice was largely mediated by more tolerant norms. In social contexts where positive contact with outgroups was more commonplace, norms supported such positive interactions between members of different groups. Thus, positive contact reduces prejudice on a macrolevel, whereby people are influenced by the behavior of others in their social context, not merely on a microscale, via individuals' direct experience of positive contact with outgroup members. These findings reinforce the view that contact has a significant role to play in prejudice reduction, and has great policy potential as a means to improve intergroup relations, because it can simultaneously impact large numbers of people.

We consider spatio-temporal databases supporting spatial objects with continuously changing position and extent, termed moving objects databases . We formally define a data model for such databases that includes complex evolving spatial structures such as line networks or multi-component regions with holes. The data model is given as a collection of data types and operations which can be plugged as attribute types into any DBMS data model (e.g. relational, or object-oriented) to obtain a complete model and query language. A particular novel concept is the sliced representation which represents a temporal development as a set of units , where unit types for spatial and other data types represent certain “simple” functions of time. We also show how the model can be mapped into concrete physical data structures in a DBMS environment.

White Americans who participate in the Black Lives Matter movement, men who attended the Women's March, and people from the Global North who work to reduce poverty in the Global South-advantaged group members (sometimes referred to as allies) often engage in action for disadvantaged groups. Tensions can arise, however, over the inclusion of advantaged group members in these movements, which we argue can partly be explained by their motivations to participate. We propose that advantaged group members can be motivated to participate in these movements (a) to improve the status of the disadvantaged group, (b) on the condition that the status of their own group is maintained, (c) to meet their own personal needs, and (d) because this behavior aligns with their moral beliefs. We identify potential antecedents and behavioral outcomes associated with these motivations before describing the theoretical contribution our article makes to the psychological literature.

The considerable investment in silicon technology has rarely addressed device use in harsh environments such as high temperatures, aggressive media, and radiation exposure. A clear future requirement is to save weight, volume, and reduce costs in "unfriendly" environments like high temperatures. This can be achieved either by cooling systems or by electronic microsystem components suited to withstand high temperatures. The current status of cooling systems, harsh-environment sensors, and microsystems in view of markets, realized devices, material, properties, process maturity, and packaging technologies are reviewed. Possible semiconductor candidates for high-temperature applications are discussed. The main obstacles for the future of high-temperature and harsh-environment microsystems is highlighted.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of different treatment strategies on enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli O104:H4 induced haemolytic uraemic syndrome. DESIGN: Multicentre retrospective case-control study. SETTING: 23 hospitals in northern Germany. PARTICIPANTS: 298 adults with enterohaemorrhagic E coli induced haemolytic uraemic syndrome. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Dialysis, seizures, mechanical ventilation, abdominal surgery owing to perforation of the bowel or bowel necrosis, and death. RESULTS: 160 of the 298 patients (54%) temporarily required dialysis, with only three needing treatment long term. 37 patients (12%) had seizures, 54 (18%) required mechanical ventilation, and 12 (4%) died. No clear benefit was found from use of plasmapheresis or plasmapheresis with glucocorticoids. 67 of the patients were treated with eculizumab, a monoclonal antibody directed against the complement cascade. No short term benefit was detected that could be attributed to this treatment. 52 patients in one centre that used a strategy of aggressive treatment with combined antibiotics had fewer seizures (2% v 15%, P = 0.03), fewer deaths (0% v 5%, p = 0.029), required no abdominal surgery, and excreted E coli for a shorter duration. CONCLUSIONS: Enterohaemorrhagic E coli induced haemolytic uraemic syndrome is a severe self limiting acute condition. Our findings question the benefit of eculizumab and of plasmapheresis with or without glucocorticoids. Patients with established haemolytic uraemic syndrome seemed to benefit from antibiotic treatment and this should be investigated in a controlled trial.

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is an extension of the well-known vehicle routing problem with a central depot. The objective is to design an optimal set of routes that services all customers and satisfies the given constraints, especially the time window constraints. The objective function considered here combines the minimization of the number of vehicles (primary criterion) and the total travel distance minimization (secondary criterion). In this paper, two evolution strategies for solving the VRPTW are proposed. The evolution strategies were tested on 58 problems from the literature with sizes varying from 100 to 417 customers and 2 to 54 vehicles. The generated new best known solutions indicate that evolution strategies are effective in reducing both the number of vehicles and the total travel distance

Social shopping communities (SSCs) evolve from a linkage of social networking and online shopping. Apart from direct shopping features in shopbots (e.g., search fields), SSCs additionally offer user-generated social shopping features. These include recommendation lists, ratings, styles (i.e., assortments arranged by users), tags, and user profiles. Purchases can be made by following a link to a participating online shop (click-out). SSCs are experiencing high growth rates in consumer popularity (e.g., Polyvore attracts more than 6 million unique visitors per month). Thus, this business model has received considerable venture capital in recent years. By analyzing clickstream data, we investigate which factors, especially social shopping features, are significant for predicting purchasing behavior within SSCs. Our logit model includes about 2.73 million visiting sessions and shows that social shopping features exert a significant impact, both positive and negative. Tags and high ratings have a positive impact on a click-out. In contrast, the more lists and styles used, the less likely the user is to make a click-out. Yet, lists and styles seem to enhance site stickiness and browsing. Moreover, the more direct shopping features that are used, the less likely the user is to conduct a click-out. Increasing transaction costs and information overload could be potential reasons. We also found that community members are more likely to make a click-out than ordinary users. This implies that community members are more profitable.

We present a bit-vector algorithm for the optimal and economical placement of computations within flow graphs, which is as efficient as standard uni-directional analyses. The point of our algorithm is the decomposition of the bi-directional structure of the known placement algorithms into a sequence of a backward and a forward analysis, which directly implies the efficiency result. Moreover, the new compositional structure opens the algorithm for modification: two further uni-directional analysis components exclude any unnecessary code motion. This laziness of our algorithm minimizes the register pressure, which has drastic effects on the run-time behaviour of the optimized programs in practice, where an economical use of registers is essential.

Acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) are activated by extracellular protons and are involved in neurotransmission in the central nervous system, in pain perception, as well as in mechanotransduction. Six different ASIC subunits have been cloned to date, which are encoded by four genes (ASIC1-ASIC4). Proton-gated currents have been described in isolated neurons from sensory ganglia as well as from central nervous system. However, it is largely unclear which of the cloned ASIC subunits underlie these native proton-gated currents. Recently, a splice variant, ASIC-beta, has been described for ASIC1a. In this variant about one-third of the protein is exchanged at the N terminus. Here we show that ASIC-beta has a longer N terminus than previously reported, extending the sequence divergence between ASIC1a and this new variant (ASIC1b). We investigated in detail kinetic and selectivity properties of ASIC1b in comparison to ASIC1a. Kinetics is similar for ASIC1b and ASIC1a. Ca(2+) permeability of ASIC1a is low, whereas ASIC1b is impermeable to Ca(2+). Currents through ASIC1a resemble currents, which have been described in sensory and central neurons, whereas the significance of ASIC1b remains to be established. Moreover, we show that a pre-transmembrane 1 domain controls the permeability to divalent cations in ASIC1, contributing to our understanding of the pore structure of these channels.