Background: After a neurological event (e.g. stroke) people are often restricted to a sedentary lifestyle due to chronic impairment. Their need for assistance to perform any form of physical activity (PA) is one factor that limits their PA and results in a negative impact on health. Rehabilitation technology, designed for gait rehabilitation during sub-acute rehabilitation, may be used to achieve the recommended levels of PA in people with gait impairments. However, it is unknown if there are effects on the quality of life resulting from such exercise regimen. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the effect of technology-supported exercise (TSE) on self reported health status. Methods: Twelve people with severe residual gait impairment after a neurological event participated in the study. They performed TSE (with Lokomat, Andago or C-Mill) for three months (M3) with a minimum of 10 trainings per month. At baseline and M3, the following questionnaires were answered: ...

Dieser Beitrag greift die beiden konkurrierenden Thesen Equalization vs. Normalization in Bezug auf die Sichtbarkeit von Argumenten verschiedener politischer Akteure im Internet auf. Diese beiden diametralen Thesen werden in diesem Beitrag erstmalig an einer Abstimmung in der Schweiz überprüft. Als Fallbeispiel dient die im Jahr 2020 zur Abstimmung vorgelegte Volksinitiative der Schweizerischen Volkspartei (SVP) „Für eine massvolle Zuwanderung (Begrenzungsinitiative)“, die das Ziel verfolgt, die Einwanderung in die Schweiz neu zu regeln. Während dem Abstimmungskampf standen sich die SVP und die politische Bewegung „Operation Libero“ gegenüber. Der Beitrag untersucht mittels einer Umfrage im Vorfeld der Abstimmung, wie Kampagnen zivilgesellschaftlicher Akteure im Internet im Vergleich zu Kampagnen etablierter politischer Akteure wahrgenommen werden. Damit soll überprüft werden, inwiefern die bestehenden Machtverhältnisse der analogen Welt sich auch in der Sichtbarkeit der Online-Kamp...

Test smells aim to capture design issues in test code that reduces its maintainability. These have been extensively studied and generally found quite prevalent in both human-written and automatically generated test-cases. However, most evidence of prevalence is based on specific static detection rules. Although those are based on the original, conceptual definitions of the various test smells, recent empirical studies indicate that developers perceive warnings raised by detection tools as overly strict and non-representative of the maintainability and quality of test suites. This leads us to re-assess test smell detection tools’ detection accuracy and investigate the prevalence and detectability of test smells more broadly. Specifically, we construct a hand-annotated dataset spanning hundreds of test suites both written by developers and generated by two test generation tools (EvoSuite and JTExpert) and performed a multistage, cross-validated manual analysis to identify the presence...

Taking a longitudinal process view, the study investigates the dynamic evolution of knowledge transfer (KT) between a Chinese multinational enterprise and its acquired European subsidiary. Different from the common view held in the existing studies that reverse knowledge transfer (RKT) from western subsidiaries to Chinse parent is the only possible way, our findings reveal a gradual KT process with four distinctive phases - from the no-KT phase to RKT phase, to the bi-directional KT phase, and ultimately to the knowledge co-creation phase. Each step forward represents a managers’ breaking of old mindset. Our study sheds light on the high potential of bi-directional KT and knowledge co-creation that has not been well identified and enough discussed in current literature. Furthermore, another interesting phenomenon is discovered - the whole KT process is initialized by the subsidiary whereby its strategic knowledge-creation role in whole group and the light-touch integration approach ...

Bitcoin miners compete to validate users’ transactions via a proof-of-work mechanism using computing power. Thanks to their efforts, miners are compensated with a predetermined number of newly minted Bitcoins plus transaction fees whenever the verified users’ transactions are successfully added to the blockchain. One of the main concerns about Bitcoin mining is its electricity consumption. Many researchers have reported that nowadays, the electricity consumed annually by Bitcoin mining is even higher than that of medium-sized countries. The trend of electricity consumption is even more worrisome. As we have witnessed a tremendous increase in Bitcoin price and mining revenue in terms of the US dollar in the past decade, substantial new miners are lured into joining the mining business. Consequently, both the electricity consumption and the Bitcoin computing power measured by hashrate have grown up rapidly. There is relatively little literature on the economic modeling of computing ...