University of North Carolina at Charlotte

About: University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a education organization based out in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 8772 authors who have published 22239 publications receiving 562529 citations. The organization is also known as: UNC Charlotte & UNCC.

Meeting Design Characteristics and Attendee Perceptions of Staff/Team Meeting Quality

Abstract: University of Minnesota DuluthMeetings are a common tool in organizations and are used for a variety of purposes andimplemented in a variety of ways. Despite the prevalence of meetings, surveys suggestthat they are often unproductive and costly. The current study focused on how meetingsare designed in hopes of providing practically and theoretically meaningful recommen-dations for improving meeting quality. A total of 18 design characteristics associatedwith staff/team meetings were identiÞed and their relevance to perceptions of meetingquality was tested. Using an online panel-based respondent pool of working adults, 367individuals participated in a survey that they completed within 48 hr of their mostrecent staff/team meeting. The results demonstrated that 9 of the design characteristics,spanning all 4 categories of design characteristics (i.e., temporal, physical, procedural,and attendee), signiÞcantly predicted perceptions of meeting quality. Furthermore, thisstudy validated and greatly extended previous research showing that agenda use,meeting punctuality, facility quality, and meeting facilitator status relate to meetingquality. In addition, this study identiÞed speciÞc relationships to meeting quality forseveral facility quality characteristics, including lighting, meeting space, refreshments,and temperature, and expanded our knowledge of key characteristics by identifyingagreement use and the number of attendees as important. Taken together, these Þndingssuggest that effective meeting design warrants holistic attention to all meeting aspects.These results were robust across demographics, including organizational type, gender,and supervisory status. Implications for meeting design are discussed.Keywords: meeting, quality, satisfaction, design, facilitator

Multi-scale analysis of engineering surfaces

Abstract: Conventional surface characterization techniques involving random process analysis are limited in characterizing multi-scale surface features relevant to manufacturing processes and functions. This paper introduces a novel technique for multi-scale characterization of engineering surfaces by applying wavelet transform. The main advantages of wavelet transform over other existing signal processing techniques are its space-frequency localization and multi-scale view of the components of a signal. Utilizing these properties of wavelet transform, we can effectively apply multi-channel filter banks to the surface data and link the manufacturing and functional aspects of a surface with its multi-scale features. Surfaces produced by typical manufacturing processes are analyzed using wavelet transform, and the usefulness of wavelet transform in the multi-scale analysis of engineering surfaces is demonstrated.

The “Most Wanted” Taxa from the Human Microbiome for Whole Genome Sequencing

Abstract: The goal of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) is to generate a comprehensive catalog of human-associated microorganisms including reference genomes representing the most common species. Toward this goal, the HMP has characterized the microbial communities at 18 body habitats in a cohort of over 200 healthy volunteers using 16S rRNA gene (16S) sequencing and has generated nearly 1,000 reference genomes from human-associated microorganisms. To determine how well current reference genome collections capture the diversity observed among the healthy microbiome and to guide isolation and future sequencing of microbiome members, we compared the HMP’s 16S data sets to several reference 16S collections to create a ‘most wanted’ list of taxa for sequencing. Our analysis revealed that the diversity of commonly occurring taxa within the HMP cohort microbiome is relatively modest, few novel taxa are represented by these OTUs and many common taxa among HMP volunteers recur across different populations of healthy humans. Taken together, these results suggest that it should be possible to perform whole-genome sequencing on a large fraction of the human microbiome, including the ‘most wanted’, and that these sequences should serve to support microbiome studies across multiple cohorts. Also, in stark contrast to other taxa, the ‘most wanted’ organisms are poorly represented among culture collections suggesting that novel culture- and single-cell-based methods will be required to isolate these organisms for sequencing.