The Effects of Gamification on Nurse Work Motivation

A current concern in the medical field is that nurses leave their careers due to low work motivation. Intrinsic motivation is a key factor that influences satisfaction in the workplace. This study aimed to develop a gamification intervention for implementation in a hospital setting and evaluate its effects on nurses' work motivation. It was hypothesized that nurses' work motivation would improve by the end of the intervention. The study was conducted in a surgical ward at a hospital in Finland. The design was descriptive and quasi-experimental. The study found that continuous feedback from gamification interventions influenced nurses' work motivation. The gamified group offered more positive feedback than the non-gamified group. These findings add to our understanding of the effects of gamification interventions on nurses' work motivation in hospital settings. However, more research is needed to demonstrate the potential of gamification to increase the retention of much-needed human resources.

Agile Business Analysis for Digital Transformation

The use of cutting-edge digital technologies and the realization of right project, program, and portfolio (3P) initiatives can trigger the intended company-wide change and the digital transformation. Today, organizations need to increase their agility for managing their information technology (IT) projects and transforming their business models. The integration of agile perspective and business analysis (BA) approach has a great potential to increase the success of digital transformation. This study aims to provide an overview of state-of-the-art in agile business analysis in scope of digital transformation. In accordance with the well-known frameworks, general principles and promising techniques of Agile BA are highlighted and discussed. The regarding agile practices provide valuable guidelines for researchers and practitioners that how they can assist continuous feedback, continuous learning, continuous improvement, and continuous integration capabilities of organizations; and also how to maximize value to the stakeholders in agile project lifecycles and agile business transformations.

The Effectiveness of the Blended Learning in Enhancing EFL Learning and Collaboration

This descriptive-analytical study investigates undergraduates' perceptions and reflections toward adopting the Blended-Learning system in the university instructions. For this goal, the study employed two tools to collect data. Firstly, a) (n=38) pre-service teachers wrote reflection essays, and b) Google forms closed-ended five scales' questionnaire investigated the academic and interaction indicators, each consisting of thirty items, distributed among (n=110) pre-service teachers. The participants were majoring in English as a Foreign language at multi-stages, Saudi Arabia, 2020/2021. The study employed the content and the SPSS analysis. The questionnaire's results showed the undergraduates' positive perceptions toward combining online and face-to-face learning and how this environment improved their learning outcomes, created a collaborative community, fostered openness for sharing, asking, expressing, and getting talk-worthy ideas. The essays' content analysis reflected the undergraduates' experiences and how they enjoyed transitioning between online and face-to-face learning; they were satisfied by the ability to track their scores. These results created a continuous feedback loop correlated with their academic progress through various activities. However, they encountered a few challenges in online classes like a) missed face-to-face warm environment, b) lost attention, and c) missed instructors' nonverbal cues. Generalized, blended learning facilitated learners' knowledge by reducing education costs, distance, efforts, and time without reducing the students' benefits. The study recommends that the BL instructors have to show some enthusiasm and inspiration. The study proposes future research.

An investigation of the thermo-mechanical fusing process of innovative textile materials

The process of thermo-mechanical fusing (TMF) is one of the major technological processes in the sewing industry. The quality of the sewing article as a whole depends largely on the effective implementation of this process. The good appearance of the finished product and the preservation of the shapes given during the operation of the product depend on the proper choice of the parameters for the TMF. It is therefore important to carry out research to optimize this process. On the other hand, new and different textile materials (TM) with more complex structure and multicomponent composition have appeared in recent years. This determines the different properties of each TM. Therefore, it is extremely important to conduct numerous preliminary studies and analyses to determine the specific effective values for defining the TMF process for a particular type of TM. This is especially important namely for large-scale companies. In the context of the above, it is of particular interest to study the TMF process for an innovative TM (with complex structure and multicomponent composition) registered with a patent for an invention in recent years. The purpose of the present work is to investigate and analyse the nature of the change in temperature between basic and adhesive TM in TMF of innovative /complex in composition and structure/TM. As a result of the performed research and analysis, a method for establishing continuous feedback with the processed textile materials at TMF has been proposed. The nature of the temperature change of the treated innovative TM has been defined. The relationship between the time for conducting the TMF process and the temperature of the pressing plate for the respective innovative TM has been established.

Voluntary suppression of neck reflexes during passive head-on-trunk rotations - reflex gain control vs. proprioceptive feedback

Normal subjects can completely eliminate resistance upon imposed head-on-trunk rotations when they are asked to relax. It is not, however, clear how neck reflexes to stretch can be voluntarily suppressed. Reflexive responses might be modified by adjusting the gain of the reflex loop through descending control. Theoretically, necessary corrections upon interfering disturbances during coordinated motor performace requiring the interplay of relaxation/activation may be missing if muscle relaxation is taking place exclusively by this mechanism. It has been alternatively proposed, that sensory information from the periphery may be allowed to "neutralize" neck reflexes if it is fed back with opposite sign to the structures driving the reflexes. Six healthy subjects were asked to relax while subjected to head-on-trunk rotations generated by a head motor. After any initial resistance had completely subsided, the head was unexpectedly exposed to "ramp-and-hold" perturbations of up to 2○ amplitude and 0.7 s duration. Resistance to stretch consistently reappeared thereupon suggesting that stretch reflex gain had not been set to zero during the previously achieved complete relaxation. Resistance to perturbations under these circumstaces was compared to the forces generated when the same "ramp-and-hold" displacements were delivered unpredictably to the head held stationary. A quantitative model of neck proprioceptive reflexes suppression has been thus constructed. Gain scheduling or "motor set" cannot sufficiently account for the voluntary reflex suppression during slow passive head rotations. Instead, we propose as underlying mechanism the "neutralization" of the controlling servo by means of continuous feedback tracking displacement and force signals from the periphery.

Evidence that endpoint feedback facilitates intermanual transfer of visuomotor force learning by a cognitive strategy

Humans continuously adapt their movement to a novel environment by recalibrating their sensorimotor system. Recent evidence, however, shows that explicit planning to compensate for external changes, i.e. a cognitive strategy, can also aid performance. If such a strategy is indeed planned in external space, it should improve performance in an effector independent manner. We tested this hypothesis by examining whether promoting a cognitive strategy during a visual-force adaptation task performed in one hand can facilitate learning for the opposite hand. Participants rapidly adjusted the height of visual bar on screen to a target level by isometrically exerting force on a handle using their right hand. Visuomotor gain increased during the task and participants learned the increased gain. Visual feedback was continuously provided for one group, while for another group only the endpoint of the force trajectory was presented. The latter has been reported to promote cognitive strategy use. We found that endpoint feedback produced stronger intermanual transfer of learning and slower response times than continuous feedback. In a separate experiment, we found evidence that the aftereffect is indeed reduced when only endpoint feedback is provided, a finding that has been consistently observed when cognitive strategies are used. The results suggest that intermanual transfer can be facilitated by a cognitive strategy. This indicates that the behavioral observation of intermanual transfer can be achieved either by forming an effector-independent motor representation, or by sharing an effector-independent cognitive strategy between the hands.

Formative Evaluation and Learning of the Technique of the Auction of Soccer of the Students of the University Level

The present research sought to determine the relationship between formative evaluation and the learning of the finishing technique of the subject of soccer of the students of the sixth cycle of the Professional School of Physical Education of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2019. The research of quantitative type of correlational design. A questionnaire and test were applied to 46 students, whose results were processed by the SPSS program, in the same way following the statistical procedure of Spearman's Rho. The general hypothesis found a correlation of Rho = 0.818 which explains that the formative evaluation applied from time to time has a relational link with the learning of soccer finishing technique reaching a regular level. As for the five specific hypotheses, a relationship of Rho = 0.492; Rho = 0.722; Rho = 0.514; Rho = 0.582 and Rho = 0.640 was found, respectively, which is understood that the form of regulatory, procedural, continuous, feedback and innovative evaluation has an impact on learning in this course. The way in which the teacher applies his evaluation limits the grades of the course, since the students are not yet high.

A Dense Encoder–Decoder Network with Feedback Connections for Pan-Sharpening

To meet the need for multispectral images having high spatial resolution in practical applications, we propose a dense encoder–decoder network with feedback connections for pan-sharpening. Our network consists of four parts. The first part consists of two identical subnetworks, one each to extract features from PAN and MS images, respectively. The second part is an efficient feature-extraction block. We hope that the network can focus on features at different scales, so we propose innovative multiscale feature-extraction blocks that fully extract effective features from networks of various depths and widths by using three multiscale feature-extraction blocks and two long-jump connections. The third part is the feature fusion and recovery network. We are inspired by the work on U-Net network improvements to propose a brand new encoder network structure with dense connections that improves network performance through effective connections to encoders and decoders at different scales. The fourth part is a continuous feedback connection operation with overfeedback to refine shallow features, which enables the network to obtain better reconstruction capabilities earlier. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we performed several experiments. Experiments on various satellite datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods. Our results show significant improvements over those from other models in terms of the multiple-target index values used to measure the spectral quality and spatial details of the generated images.

Traffic Flow Online Prediction Based on a Generative Adversarial Network with Multi-Source Data

Traffic prediction is essential for advanced traffic planning, design, management, and network sustainability. Current prediction methods are mostly offline, which fail to capture the real-time variation of traffic flows. This paper establishes a sustainable online generative adversarial network (GAN) by combining bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) as the generative model and discriminative model, respectively, to keep learning with continuous feedback. BiLSTM constantly generates temporal candidate flows based on valuable memory units, and CNN screens out the best spatial prediction by returning the feedback gradient to BiLSTM. Multi-dimensional indicators are selected to map the multi-view fusion local trend for accurate prediction. To balance computing efficiency and accuracy, different batch sizes are pre-tested and allocated to different lanes. The models are trained with rectified adaptive moment estimation (RAdam) by dividing the dataset into the training and testing sets with a rolling time-domain scheme. In comparison with the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), BiLSTM, generating adversarial network for traffic flow (GAN-TF), and generating adversarial network for non-signal traffic (GAN-NST), the proposed improved generating adversarial network for traffic flow (IGAN-TF) successfully generates more accurate and stable flows and performs better.

Stability Analysis and Chaos Control of Electronic Throttle Dynamical System

This study addresses bifurcation analysis and controlling chaos in a vehicular electronic throttle. Using analysis techniques from nonlinear dynamics of an electronic throttle system based on bifurcation diagrams, we establish the existence of period-doubling and intermittency routes to chaos. The largest Lyapunov exponent is estimated from the synchronization to identify periodic and chaotic motions. Finally, the proposed continuous feedback control is employed to control chaos. To verify the effectiveness of the raised control strategy, we present a number of numerical simulations.