Clarity 2.0: Improved Assessment of Product Competitiveness from Online Content

Competitive analysis is a critical part of any business. Product managers, sellers, and marketers spend time and resources scouring through an immense amount of online and offline content, aiming to discover what their competitors are doing in the marketplace to understand what type of threat they pose to their business’ financial well-being. Currently, this process is time and labor-intensive, slow and costly. This paper presents Clarity, a data-driven unsupervised system for assessment of products, which is currently in deployment in the global technology company, IBM. Clarity has been running for more than a year and is used by over 4,500 people to perform over 200 competitive analyses involving over 1000 products. The system considers multiple factors from a collection of online content: numeric ratings by online users, sentiment of user generated online content for key product performance dimensions, content volume, and topic analysis of content. The results and explanations of factors leading to the results are visualized in an interactive dashboard that allows users to track their product’s performance as well as understand main contributing factors. Its efficacy has been tested in a series of cases across IBM’s portfolio which spans software, hardware, and services. After initial release and first year of use, improvements to the methodology were implemented to ensure it was relevant to and served the highest impact needs of target users. Moreover, new use cases leveraging the initial ideas and approaches continue to be explored.

295 Effects of Live Yeast and Ruminal Environment on Beef Cattle Diet Digestibility: An in vitro Approach

The effects of live yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and ruminal environment on in vitro true digestibility of dry matter, organic matter, and fiber components were evaluated. Ruminally-cannulated beef steers (n = 4; BW = 520 ± 30 kg) were used in a cross-over design to serve as donors of ruminal content. In vitro substrates (6 grower and 6 finisher diets) and individual ingredients (steam-flaked corn, wet corn gluten feed, and old-world bluestem hay) were dehydrated (55o C), ground (1 mm), and incubated using a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments: a) the presence or not of yeast (8×109 CFU/animal-daily adjusted to a 70 L ruminal content volume), and b) two ruminal inoculums collected from donors fed a grower (50:50) or a finisher (92:08) diet (concentrate:forage). Four incubation batches (experimental unit) were performed, in which the initial two batches were performed followed by another two after animals switched diets and were adapted again during 21d. A Daisy in vitro incubation system was used, and samples incubated for 48h (39°C). The GLIMMIX procedure of SAS was used for the statistical analysis. No 3-way interactions (P ≥ 0.71) or 2-way interactions with substrate were observed (P ≥ 0.25). The in vitro true digestibility of DM, OM, NDF, and hemicellulose increased when yeast was added to the incubator containing a 50:50 ruminal content (Rumen × Yeast; P ≤ 0.02). The ADF digestibility increased (P = 0.02) with yeast addition regardless of ruminal content type (50:50 or 92:08). As expected, finisher substrate diets were more (P < 0.01) digestible than grower diets. The combination of live yeast and a specific ruminal environment seemed to be more important than substrate type, in which live yeast improved in vitro digestion within a 50:50 ruminal inoculum more evidently.

Correcting eating disorders in obese adolescents

The relevance of the study is conditioned by the need to study the way of eating as a method of correct in geating disorders in adolescents.Objective. To evaluate the correction potential of the nutrition method in adolescents with eating disorders by alimentary obesity type. Characteristic of children and research methods. At the first stage of the study the research sampling was based on the criteria for body mass index assessing in adolescents. The total size of the research sample was 69 adolescents aged13–16 years with alimentary obesity. The group was equalized by gender. At the second stage, the adolescents were surveyed to assess the rules for the use and content of food consumed, including energy value. At the third stage, all patients were divided into three research groups, two groups had a separate program for the correction of eating disorders, taking in to account the measured parameters.Results. The study confirmed the effectiveness of the nutritional disorders method by changing the eating rules and using object-mediated consumption of food (using cutlery – forks, knives, sticks). At the same time, the content, volume and frequency of food intake were preserved. The average weight loss with an indirect way of eating was up to 2 kg per week. In addition, they recorded a decrease in body mass index. The time of food intake significantly increased, which affects the control of the amount of food consumed, transferring eating actions from an involuntary level with a lack of fixation on taste sensations to an arbitrary one.Conclusion. The technique is recommended for use as part of the eating disorders correction, since it can be easily integrated into any methodological complex and has no contraindications.

Ballroom dance in the education system: past and present

The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of ballroom choreographic education in the dynamics of historical development and to characterize promising directions for optimizing the educational process in the context of the professional training of the future choreographer. Methodology. The method of theoretical analysis was applied, which contributed to the study of published scientific sources devoted to the problems of professional choreographic education and related problems in accordance with the topic of the article; the method of systems analysis to identify the goal, task, content, volume and rational methods of teaching ballroom choreography, as well as assess the effectiveness of training industry specialists; methodological analysis of the leading pedagogical directions of teaching ballroom dance in the education system, etc. Scientific novelty. The dynamics of the development of ballroom choreographic education in a historical retrospective is investigated and its features are revealed in the context of the artistic culture of the 20th century; analyzed the theoretical and practical foundations of teaching ballroom dance in the context of transformational processes of pedagogical practice; considered the problems of promoting ballroom choreographic education in the development of art, aesthetic and cultural education in Ukraine; the criteria used for an objective academic assessment of ballroom choreographic education in professional educational institutions of Ukraine at the present stage are considered; identified and characterized promising ways of further development of ballroom dance as a performing art and a separate academic discipline. Conclusions. Socio-cultural changes and transformations in the system of training ballroom choreography specialists require optimization of the educational process, in particular in the following aspects: orientation to practical requests; complication and expansion of the structure of professional training of coaches, teachers, and ballet masters of ballroom dance; democratization of the system of choreographic education; integration and adaptation of leading methods of European education; strengthening of structural social and functional interaction within the framework of the system of choreographic education. The study has shown that the development of ballroom dance in Ukraine at the present stage requires the creation and provision of an appropriate level of a specific professionally-oriented education system, the basis of which would be the integrated use of the best traditional and innovative technologies in the field of pedagogy of choreographic art, developed by Ukrainian and foreign theorists and practitioners of dance education. as a backbone element of training specialists.

Concrete Pavement Mixtures with High Supplementary Cementitious Materials Content: Volume 3

Fly ash is a by-product of coal combustion, made up of particles that are collected through various methods. This by-product has been used successfully as a partial Portland cement replacement in concrete, but the performance predictions of fly ash in concrete have been difficult to predict, especially at high fly ash replacement rates. This study focuses on comparing the performance of concrete with a variety of fly ash mixtures as well as the particle distribution and chemical makeup of fly ash. The slump, unit weight, compressive strength, and isothermal calorimetry tests were used to measure the performance of concrete at 0%, 20%, and 40% fly ash replacement levels. The particle distribution of fly ash was measured with an automated scanning electron microscope. Additionally, the major and minor oxides from the chemical makeup of fly ash were measured for each mixture and inputted into a table. The particle distribution and chemical makeup of fly ash were compared to the performance of slump, unit weight, compressive strength, isothermal calorimetry, and surface electrical resistivity.

Dynamical attribution of North Atlantic interdecadal predictability to oceanic and atmospheric turbulence under diagnosed and optimal stochastic forcing

Unpredictable variations in the ocean originate from both external atmospheric forcing and chaotic processes internal to the ocean itself, and are a crucial sink of predictability on interdecadal timescales. In a global ocean model, we present i.) an optimization framework to compute the most efficient noise patterns to generate uncertainty and ii.) a computationally inexpensive, dynamical method for attributing sources of ocean uncertainty to internal (mesoscale eddy-driven) and external (atmospherically driven) origins, sidestepping the more typical ensemble approach. These two methods are then applied to a range of metrics (heat content, volume transport, and heat transport) and time averages (monthly, yearly, and decadal) in the subtropical and subpolar North Atlantic. The optimal noise patterns create variability in integrated quantities of interest through features of the underlying circulation such as the North Atlantic Current and deep water formation regions. Meanwhile, noise forcing diagnosed from model representations of the actual climate system stimulates these theoretical patterns with various degrees of efficiency, ultimately leading to the growth of error. We reaffirm that higher frequency variations in meridional transports are primarily wind driven, while surface buoyancy forcing is the ultimately dominant source of uncertainty at lower frequencies. For year-averaged quantities in the subtropics, it is mesoscale eddies which contribute the most to oceanic uncertainty, accounting for up to 60% after 60 years of growth for volume transport at 25°N. The impact of eddies is greatly reduced in the subpolar region, which we suggest may be explained by overall lower sensitivity to small-scale noise there.