Can Unhappy Pictures Enhance the Effect of Personas? A User Experiment

There has been little research into whether a persona's picture should portray a happy or unhappy individual. We report a user experiment with 235 participants, testing the effects of happy and unhappy image styles on user perceptions, engagement, and personality traits attributed to personas using a mixed-methods analysis. Results indicate that the participant's perceptions of the persona's realism and pain point severity increase with the use of unhappy pictures. In contrast, personas with happy pictures are perceived as more extroverted, agreeable, open, conscientious, and emotionally stable. The participants’ proposed design ideas for the personas scored more lexical empathy scores for happy personas. There were also significant perception changes along with the gender and ethnic lines regarding both empathy and perceptions of pain points. Implications are the facial expression in the persona profile can affect the perceptions of those employing the personas. Therefore, persona designers should align facial expressions with the task for which the personas will be employed. Generally, unhappy images emphasize realism and pain point severity, and happy images invoke positive perceptions.

Educational Pain Points for Pediatric Brain Tumor Survivors: Review of Risks and Remedies

Evolving treatment paradigms have led to increased survival rates for children diagnosed with a brain tumor, and this has increasingly shifted clinical and research focus to morbidity and quality of life among survivors. Among unfavorable outcomes, survivors of pediatric brain tumors are at risk for academic failure and low educational attainment, which may then contribute to lower health related quality of life, lower income and vocational status, and a greater likelihood of dependence on others in adulthood. Several specific risk factors for lower educational performance and attainment have been investigated. These are typically examined in isolation from one another which clouds understanding of the full range and potential interplay of contributors to educational difficulties. This review integrates and summarizes what is known about the direct and indirect barriers to educational success and performance (i.e., educational pain points) to enhance clinician knowledge of factors to consider when working with pediatric brain tumor survivors. Specific barriers to educational success include neurocognitive difficulties, school absences, psychosocial challenges, challenges to knowledge and communication, and physical and sensory difficulties. Finally, we discuss the current state of educational interventions and supports and offer recommendations for future research to improve educational outcomes for pediatric brain tumor survivors.

Professional services companies need to practise what they preach: the need to fast-track digital transformation in the industry

Purpose This paper aims to clarify the relationship between professional services companies and changing customer expectations. It proposes following the digital transformation process and outlines how companies can adopt agile, digital-first ways of doing business to tackle major long-term pain points. Design/methodology/approach This paper’s author draws on the author’s deep domain expertise on delivering digital transformation projects to businesses and organisations in a variety of industries, including professional services. The author explains the crucial applications for technology to help industry leaders address key business pain points. Findings This paper provides insights into how companies have an opportune moment to build long-term digital foundations for greater management, process efficiency and collaboration – with data-driven reporting, end-to-end business management solutions, dedicated HR modules and greater connectivity capabilities. This paper demonstrates that a digital-first approach can help companies achieve higher levels of customer engagement and secure their place in a highly competitive market. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to explain how professional services companies can embark on digital transformation journeys to tackle outdated and manual ways of doing business.

“Oh, Where are You, My Russia?”: The Image of Russia in the Camp Poems of A. Solzhenitsyn

The article deals with A. Solzhenitsyn camp poems, pertaining to the early and underresearched part of his oeuvre. The analysis is centered around the image of Russia. In his poetry, Solzhenitsyn formulates the basic artistic characteristics of this image, that are further developed and deepened in his prose. The image of Russia consists of two toposes: “the visceral Russia”, that embodies the author’s ideal, as well as “the orphaned Russia”, that reflects the country’s “pain points” or its most acute problems. The image of “the visceral Russia” is created under the influence of Christian traditions and the early lyrics of S. Yesenin. Its key elements are landscapes, pantheistic dissolvment in the world of nature, hesychasm and related to it notions of silence and color symbolism. The image of “orphaned Russia” is divided into “the free Russia” and “the Gulag Russia”. It echoes A. Blok’s poetry and demonstrates the historically ambivalent and dramatic sides of Russian history. Despite the spatial categorizations, the lyrical hero’s perception of his motherland is not fragmented, but objective and multi-sided. Like the author himself, he views Russia as a whole in all of its struggles and contradictions.

Creation and Operation Management of New Campus E-commerce "Girls Cloud Thinking Dressing Small Shop"

The survey shows that the common problems in China's clothing wholesale market are incomplete product grade, low product quality, poor sanitary conditions and so on. These problems are urgent to be solved in the garment market. The new campus e-commerce we created adheres to the concept of "every girl can have her own different beauty". Girls with different styles such as handsome, natural and unrestrained, bright and lively, Japanese and Korean can be found in the shop. Firstly, we analyze the pain points of China's campus clothing market. Secondly, introduce the company's philosophy, creative practices and main products. Thirdly, analyze the operation mode and financial data of the company. Finally, we analyze the risks and countermeasures faced by the company's development.

Front End Work Process Digital Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities

Digital transformation is shifting the structure of work in nearly every industry and fundamentally changing the value proposition for customers. As part of PETRONAS’ overall digital transformation, Front End Engineering (FEE) has embarked on an ambitious program to digitalize and integrate the company's Front End project realization processes and applications into a single digital tool, referred to as Concept Factory. This paper reviews the journey to initiate, frame and deliver the Front End work process digitalization. The Concept Factory digital transformation program first focused on a strategy to identify the pain points within the traditional project realization work process and how this is impacting both quality and speed of delivery. Once the pain points were identified, assessment of how digitalization may eliminate the pain points and enhance the project realization process value was completed. This assessment also included an end-to-end review of where the current Front End work processes to identify barriers that challenged the ease of digitalization; these included highly manual and siloed work processes, data management and tools; insufficient leveraging off the extensive Company knowledge databases and analogue projects; and inefficient technical and cost benchmarking to assure robustness of Front End work. This resulted in a more significant Front End process transformation being needed to increase the potential value creation through the digital transformation. A stepwise, iterative approach using Agile project management techniques has been used to harness the full capabilities of digital integration and analytics to FEL-2 rather than merely digitalizing the existing manual workflow. This will be done by first automating and upgrading databases and discrete data hand-offs to be "digital ready", independently developing and digitalizing the full suite of Front End technical and cost analysis tools, then integrating these tools within a common Concept Factory analytics platform for both stand-alone Front End analysis and as a domain tool within the broader Field Development Planning digital framework. Several technical and organizational challenges were identified that need to be overcome from business case syndication to adoption. As the daily work routines of employees are being radically changed to adapt to the rapid change of digital technology, ongoing alignment was done to engage the Front End team and broader stakeholder groups in the process through demonstrations and feedback sessions. In addition, cascading technical needs through the digital team execution required ongoing alignment through daily Scrums, Sprint Planning and demonstration sessions. Fully integrated Front End process digitalization has rarely been attempted within E&P companies. However, this has the potential to disrupt the Front End work process from a manual, siloed generation of deliverables to an automated and integrated techno-commercial process focused on replication, speed and accuracy, a re-focus the Front End team on Value Creation, Assurance and Risk Management initiatives.

Brain concussion in young athletes: major pain points

Numerous studies conducted in recent decades have generated vast amounts of knowledge on sport-related concussions. This review analyzes international data on pediatric and adolescent sport-related concussions. Drawing on the most recent research into the pathophysiology of brain concussions, the authors identify and discuss “pain points” associated with SRC, i.e. unsolved problems of diagnostic criteria, the use of modern neuroimaging modalities and promising biomarkers. Special attention is paid to the physiology of children and adolescents and predisposing factors important for developing adequate diagnostic and management strategies. The authors formulate problems that need to be solved in order to improve care for young athletes with brain concussions.