What to do after a data breach? Examining apology and compensation as response strategies for health service providers

Innovative IT-enabled health services promise tremendous benefits for customers and service providers alike. Simultaneously, health services by nature process sensitive customer information, and data breaches have become an everyday phenomenon. The challenge that health service providers face is to find effective recovery strategies after data breaches to retain customer trust and loyalty. We theorize and investigate how two widely applied recovery actions (namely apology and compensation) affect customer reactions after a data breach in the specific context of fitness trackers. Drawing on expectation confirmation theory, we argue that the recovery actions derived from practice, apology, and compensation address the assimilation-contrast model’s tolerance range and, thus, always lead to satisfaction with the recovery strategy, which positively influences customers’ behavior. We employ an experimental investigation and collect data from fitness tracker users during a running event. In the end, we found substantial support for our research model. Health service providers should determine specific customer expectations and align their data breach recovery strategies accordingly.

     

Low‐power quadrature generators for body area network applications

This paper presents different alternatives for the implementation of low‐power monolithic oscillators for wireless body area networks and describes the design of two quadrature generators operating in the 2.4‐GHz frequency range. Both implementations have been designed in a 90‐nm Complementary Metal‐Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology and operate at 1 V of supply voltage. The first architecture uses a voltage‐controlled oscillator (VCO) running at twice the desired output frequency followed by a divider‐by‐2 circuit. It experimentally consumes 335 μW and achieves a phase noise of ?110.2 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz. The second architecture is a quadrature VCO that uses reinforced concrete phase shifters in the coupling path for phase noise improvement. Its power consumption is only 210 μW, and it obtains a phase noise of ?111.9 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stopped flow apparatus for time-resolved Fourier transform infrared difference spectroscopy of biological macromolecules in 1H2O

Stopped flow spectroscopy is an established technique for acquiring kinetic data on dynamic processes in chemical and biochemical reactions, and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) techniques can provide particularly rich structural information on biological macromolecules. However, it is a considerable challenge to design an FT-IR stopped flow system with an optical path length low enough for work with aqueous (1H2O) solutions. The system presented here is designed for minimal sample volumes (approximately 5 microL) and allows simultaneous FT-IR rapid-scan and VIS measurements. The system employs a micro-structured diffusional mixer to achieve effective mixing on the millisecond time scale under moderate flow and pressure conditions, allowing measurements in a cell path length of less than 10 microns. This makes it possible to record spectra in 1H2O solutions over a wide spectral range. The system layout is also designed for a combination of kinetic and static measurements, in particular to obtain detailed information on the faster spectral changes occurring during the system dead time. A detailed characterization of the FT-IR stopped flow system is presented, including a demonstration of the alkaline conformational transition of cytochrome c as an example.     

Bücherschau

Ohne Zusammenfassung VDI     

The 3081/E Processor and Its on-Line Use

The 3081/E is a second generation emulator of a mainframe IBM. One of it's applications will be to form part of the data acquisition system of the upgraded Mark II detector for data taking at the SLAC linear collider. Since the processor does not have direct connections to I/O devices a FASTBUS interface will be provided to allow communication with both SLAC Scanner Processors (which are responsible for the accumulation of data at a crate level) and the experiment's VAX 8600 mainframe. The 3081/E's will supply a significant amount of on-line computing power to the experiment (a single 3081/E is equivalent to 4-5 VAX 11/780'S). A major advantage of the 3081/E is that program development can be done on an IBM mainframe (such as the one used for off-line analysis) which gives the programmer access to a full range of debugging tools. The processor's performance can be continually monitored by comparison of the results obtained using it to those given when the same program is run on an IBM computer.     

Walk-Through Illustrations: Frame-Coherent Pen-and-Ink Style in a Game Engine

In this paper we show how a game engine designed to generate photorealistic images can be extended to produce non-photorealistic and hybrid renditions. We introduce new hardware-based methods to accomplish pen-and-ink illustrations. The combination of the highly optimized processing of a game engine and the use of hardware for NPR algorithms yields real-time animation of pen-and-ink illustrations.
The particular advance of this method is that it yields the first real-time, frame-coherent pen-and-ink animations which maintain both tone and texture.