Traditional Mail Research Articles

Evaluation of self-sampling-based cervical cancer screening strategy using HPV Selfy CE-IVD test coupled with home-collection kit: a clinical study in Italy

BackgroundPrimary human papillomaviruses (HPV) cervical cancer screening can be strengthened by offering home-collection of biological specimen as a valuable option to increase screening coverage. As recommended by World Health Organization (WHO), screening programs should consider whether the inclusion of HPV self-sampling as a complementary option within their existing screening algorithms could address the gaps in current coverage. However, few HPV screening tests are validated for self-sampling according to international guidelines. This study aimed to test a self-sampling-based screening strategy, complementary to the main screening program based on clinician-collected cervical samples. The study took place in Trieste, Italy, and it aimed to evaluate the feasibility of self-testing at home under an opt-in system during COVID-19 pandemic in order to exploit self-sampling to reduce the screening delay generated by the lockdown.Methods500 women, who should have received the screening call in 2020, were asked, via phone call, to participate in the study. To whom agreed, a home-collection kit, including a vaginal dry swab for specimen collection, was sent. The recipients performed the sample self-collection and sent back the swab through traditional mail using a prepaid envelope. Once received by the hospital, the samples were analyzed with HPV Selfy (Ulisse BioMed, Italy), a CE-IVD HPV screening test specifically validated for self-collection. Results were further compared using cobas® 4800 HPV (Roche, Switzerland).Results80% women sent back their swab, showing one of the highest return rate obtained in comparable studies. 34 HPV-positive women were followed up and underwent the Pap test, that revealed 8 low squamous intraepithelial lesions (LSIL) cases, later triaged to colposcopy. HPV Selfy was confirmed to be an adequate test for self-sampling-based screening.ConclusionsThis study further confirmed the feasibility of self-test at home screening strategy based on self-sampling with an opt-in system as a support method to enhance cervical cancer screening coverage in Italy. Enrolled women showed a high appreciation for this approach. HPV Selfy test demonstrated to be a valuable assay for cervical cancer screening based on home self-collection.Trial registration: ASUGI Trieste n. 16008/2018 and amendment 02-11/09/2020.

Conservation fundraising: Evidence from social media and traditional mail field experiments

AbstractFunding shortages limit conservation impact, making it vital to find effective fundraising methods. To explore how traditional and digital conservation fundraising methods perform, we conducted real‐world field experiments by using direct‐mail and Facebook advertisements. We compared three types of message frames (simple, seed money, and ecological). We found that the seed money frame, which emphasizes the amount already donated, increased the number of donors, whereas the ecological frame, which focuses on the fact that the fundraiser benefits threatened species, led to a relative reduction in the number of donors. We also found that while Facebook advertising costs exceeded donations, while the opposite was true for the traditional mail experiment. This highlights the importance of identifying appropriate donor pools for online and offline fundraising before implementing campaigns. Our findings illustrate some challenges associated with online fundraising and the importance of behavioral evidence to enhance effective fundraising in conservation.

The issue of transport documentation circulation between logistic processes participants

The performance of freight transport with the use of means of transport of various modes requires the completion of several documents accompanying the shipment. The documentation accompanying the load is often completed in paper form, which causes many errors and, as a result, problems with the effective implementation of transport processes. In the era of progressive digitization of information flow, the possibility of filling in documentation in electronic form and sending it between the IT systems seems necessary to increase the competitiveness of enterprises. The article aims to identify the problems and needs of participants in transport processes in terms of completing transport documentation, accessing this documentation during and after the transport, and sending this documentation between these participants. The analysis of the problems mentioned above and needs was made based on studies of industry literature, expert knowledge, and a survey conducted by participants in transport processes. Additionally, for the analysis, participants in the transport processes in all modes of transport were identified. The literature research and the survey of participants of transport processes in various modes of transport showed many problems they encounter daily in the circulation of transport documentation. The common denominator for these problems and needs is the necessity to fill in the transport documentation manually in many cases and also to send it between process participants using traditional mail. The literature review and the survey results indicate that maximizing digitization in terms of filling in and circulation of transport documentation would improve logistics processes. The measurable effects of digitization of selected elements of transport processes can already be observed thanks to the electronic exchange of EDI data between IT systems of participants in logistics processes.

The paired mail carrier problem

Often traditional mail carrier models assume that one carrier is assigned to each truck. This carrier drives the truck according to a delivery route, gets out of the truck at a stop, and services customers using a walking loop. We introduce the Paired Mail Carrier Problem (PMCP), which allows for two mail carriers per truck. If at least one carrier is in the truck, the truck may move forward. Given two mail carriers per truck, the objective is to minimize the time from the start to the end of the route while ensuring that each service stop is fully serviced and obeys all feasibility constraints. We develop a mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation and two fast heuristics for the PMCP. The MIP formulation obtains optimal solutions for smaller instances within reasonable running times. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in addition to being very efficient (running time is on the order of milliseconds, even for large instances), our heuristics are near-optimal (within 5% of optimality) on instances up to 80 stops. More importantly, we evaluate the impact of the paired mail carrier (PMC) setting on both a one-truck situation and a fleet (multiple trucks) situation, relative to the single mail carrier (SMC) setting. Overall, the PMC setting not only can accomplish over 50% extra work within the same shift hours but also can lead to 22% cost savings. Finally, we discuss an extension where we can have three or more mail carriers per truck.

Dizziness, Falls, and Hearing Loss in Adults Living With Sickle Cell Disease.

The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of reported dizziness/imbalance, frequency of falls, and hearing loss in adults with sickle cell disease (SCD) and determine the relationship of these self-reported problems both during and in the absence of an SCD crisis. Also, the impact of educational level and health insurance on seeking treatment services, as well as the relationship of falls to stroke, legal blindness, and other orthopedic problems, was assessed. Interrupted blood flow to shared vestibular and auditory arteries supports the notion of increased likelihood of balance deficits and increased falls in this population. A cross-sectional survey study design was used. Adults living with SCD responded to a questionnaire that was distributed online and through traditional mail. Adults living with SCD (N = 135) participated in the study. Responses revealed 70% of participants with SCD experienced dizziness/imbalance and 23% reported hearing loss. Furthermore, 33% of participants reported falling one or more times in the last year. The prevalence of dizziness/imbalance, falling, and hearing loss in the respondents with SCD was much higher than that of the general population of the United States. Additionally, for dizziness and falling, the prevalence was higher not only than the national average but also for persons over 65 years of age. A significant association was demonstrated between dizziness/imbalance and hearing loss as well as dizziness/imbalance and falls for adults living with SCD. In fact, participants with self-reported hearing loss were 5.2 times more likely to also report dizziness/imbalance. They were 4.9 times more likely to fall if they also reported dizziness/imbalance. Numbness of the feet was revealed to significantly impact the likelihood of falling in this disease population and should be further studied. Regarding SCD crisis status, dizziness/imbalance and falls were more likely to occur outside of SCD crisis than during a crisis. Furthermore, pain levels were significantly associated with dizziness/imbalance only when respondents were in crisis and not in the absence of a crisis. In crisis, higher pain levels were reported from respondents who also reported dizziness/imbalance than from those who did not report dizziness. No significant relationship was revealed between hearing loss and falls. These results provide justification for patient and health care provider education regarding appropriate referrals for vestibular/balance assessments and provision of fall prevention strategies. Future studies on balance and SCD are encouraged.

Barriers in Implementing Life Cycle Costing in Malaysia’s Green Construction Projects

Life cycle costing (LCC) is a tool used worldwide to assess the expected economic performance of a building throughout its life cycle. The application of LCC within the construction industry is still lacking, especially in the development of green construction projects despite the many benefits it has been linked to. This paper aims to identify the main barriers in implementing LCC in green construction projects. The research adopted a quantitative method by conducting questionnaires survey distributed through traditional mail and e-mail as well as online platforms to 700 respondents from various backgrounds, namely architects, quantity surveyors, engineers, and other professionals. A total of one hundred and eighty-seven (187) completed and usable questionnaires were collected and analyzed by using frequency descriptive analysis and by mean value using IBM SPSS Statistic 26. The findings indicate that barriers relevant to project clients and the government were the main barriers to LCC implementation in green construction projects. It gives an understanding that both clients and the government play significant roles in promoting the use of LCC. The findings are beneficial to industry practitioners of green developments as a reference to enhance the LCC process and to devise more effective strategies to promote acceptance of LCC in Malaysia’s green construction projects.

Administracja w dobie pandemii

The sudden and dynamic development of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 had a negative impact on the functioning of public administration in Poland. It was associated with the need to take appropriate actions, solutions and procedures whose main goal was to prevent infections. One of the forms was to work remotely, which was to protect officials and applicants from the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Due to this situation, most public administration offices in Poland changed the system of work and contacts with applicants. Many organizational units closed their stationary branches and transferred their functioning to the virtual sphere, which directly resulted in an increased interest of citizens in e-services. As a result, it resulted in limited access to public administration buildings and the need for applicants to submit documentation necessary to settle official matters to inboxes. Contact with the office took place via e-mail, telephone, ePUAP platform and traditional mail. In the text, the Author synthetically presents and analyzes the situations that took place in the sphere of administration activities during the pandemic, indicates the normative acts and procedures that had an impact on the operation of these entities.

A Physician-Led Communication Initiative to Inform OAB Patients of Dementia Risk Associated With Anticholinergic Medications.

Anticholinergic medications are a core treatment strategy for overactive bladder (OAB). There is evidence that exposure to anticholinergic medications is associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. We launched an initiative to inform our patients of this risk and give them an opportunity to engage in shared decision-making about their treatment. This quality improvement initiative encompassed 3 aims: (1) to evaluate the feasibility of 2 different routes to deliver the written outreach; (2) to evaluate if and how patients changed their OAB treatment; and (3) to assess satisfaction with the outreach initiative. A query was performed via the electronic medical record for all patients who had been prescribed an anticholinergic for treatment of OAB. We sent either electronic messages or traditional mail to patients. We contacted patients by telephone to assess if they received the message, were satisfied with their respective method of communication, and decided for ongoing treatment. Health care provider satisfaction was also measured. Of the 231 patients sent the outreach, 32 were still taking the anticholinergic at the time they received the communication. The majority of patients, 84.38%, were satisfied with the initiative and elected to change therapy after learning about the increased risk of dementia. The physicians also uniformly reported satisfaction with the initiative. Overall, this outreach initiative resulted in an increase in patient counseling that led to a change in treatment for most patients. This initiative was received favorably by patients and health care providers.

Identification of the Challenges of Life Cycle Costing in Green Construction Projects in Malaysia

Concerns on the effect of construction industry to the environment has driven an increase in sustainable construction activities as well as green initiatives. Life cycle costing (LCC) which is a method of assessing the total cost of ownership of an asset or project has been commonly associated with sustainable-related studies and are used around the world for the last few decades. Even though many benefits have been associated with LCC, its implementation in construction industry is still limited, particularly in green construction projects. This paper aimed to identify the main challenges in implementing LCC in Malaysia’s green construction projects. A quantitative approach via questionnaires survey was conducted on 200 respondents from various backgrounds, namely architects, quantity surveyors, engineers and other professionals typically would be involved in LCC preparation for green construction projects in Malaysia. The questionnaires were distributed to the respondents via traditional mail followed by e-mail as well as online platforms in order to increase the response rate. A total of fifty (50) completed and usable questionnaires were collected and analysed based on mean scores and ranking method. It was discovered that the main challenges of LCC in green construction projects were insufficient project or context specific data and difficulties in carrying out LCC calculations due to absent of proper LCC guidelines or framework. The findings serve as a valid point of reference for industry participants concerned with green developments to improve the LCC process and its adoption in Malaysia’s green construction projects. Efforts must be taken to minimize or ease these challenges perhaps by formulating a framework or guideline specifically designed to address the challenges, thus improving the LCC process and encouraging its adoption in Malaysia which will ultimately contribute towards achieving the world’s green construction agenda.

Leveraging the Post Office Network to Foster Financial Inclusion

Financial inclusion has become a topic of discussion in emerging and developing nations since the majority of people continue to lack access to either formal or informal financial services. In many countries, the post office is seen as a vehicle for financial inclusion due to its extensive network. In addition, with the decline in sales of their core business, traditional mail has exacerbated the need for the post office to venture into financial services whilst simultaneously answering the call to bridge the gap in society, especially for the un-banked and under-banked communities. Moreover, there is a need for post-offices to protect their long-term vitality as a business. This paper provides a theoretical perspective of financial inclusion, the role that the post office can play and the challenges preventing an effective rollout of financial services. This review can help postal managers, governments and policy-makers to understand how they can effectively use the post office to serve the un-banked communities. In addition, the study has enriched the academic discourse by providing literature on postal financial services and financial inclusion.

How can family businesses survive disruptive industry changes? Insights from the traditional mail order industry

The present study investigates how family firms respond to disruptive industry changes. We aim to investigate which factors prevent or support family firms’ adoption of disruptive innovations in their industry and which mechanisms lead to more or less successful coping with disruptive change. Our analysis is based on 24 qualitative interviews with top executives and on secondary data from an industry in which disruptive innovations dramatically changed the way business was generated. The industry in question is the mail order industry, which, in its early days, disrupted the retail business. When the Internet and, with it, ecommerce started to disrupt the industry in the late 1990s, the industry was characterized by a high proportion of family firms and a low level of innovativeness. While incumbent firms had been very successful for decades, most of them were confronted with serious turbulence when new entrants started changing the face of the industry. Our findings show that different factors impact reactions to disruptive industry change in two different phases, namely, opportunity recognition and opportunity implementation. While some of the influencing factors are determined by industry factors, family influence may function for better or worse for incumbent firms. Specifically, we find that in firms with a family disruptor, a family member in a powerful position who drives the adoption of the new technology, hindrances can be overcome and firms tend to show more successful strategies when reacting to the disruptive industry change.

How low can we go? Declining survey response rates to new zealand electoral roll mail surveys over three decades

ABSTRACT Quality survey research relies on the willingness of the public to participate, but survey response rates are decreasing over time. This research note explores response rate data from several national probability sample mail surveys drawn from a consistent sampling frame (the New Zealand electoral roll) over the past 30 years. The aim of this work is to document the scale of the response rate decline problem in mail survey studies, predict future response rates, and track nonresponse bias through comparing self-reported voter turnout in surveys to official turnout. We use data from the New Zealand Election Study, the International Social Survey Programme, the New Zealand edition of the World Values Survey, and the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. Our findings demonstrate that there has been a consistent downward trend in response rates and an increase in nonresponse bias for self-reported voter turnout. Response rates in the early 1990s were as high as 72%, before dropping to the 60% range around the year 2000, with response rates effectively halving from their early 1990s rates by 2015. We comment on the implications for future surveys, voter enrolment, local government turnout, and political polling. Ultimately, these results leave us with the question of how long traditional mail survey research will be able to continue.

Linking School Nurses With Health Care Systems Using EHRs: An Integrative Review.

School-aged children spend around 1,080 hr at school each year and many of them have chronic diseases; therefore, it is imperative to include school nurses as part of the health care team. Care coordination between health care providers and school nurses is currently hindered by communication that relies on an inadequate system of fax, phone, and traditional mail. Using electronic health records (EHRs) to link school nurses and health care systems is usually limited in scope despite EHRs advancement in these health care systems. No literature is currently available showing the number of hospitals and health care systems that provide EHR access to school nurses. The purpose of this article was to present a literature review on EHR access for school nurses nationally. This review along with the legal and logistical considerations for this type of implementation will be discussed.

Economic and Social Challenges of Disruptive Technologies in Conditions of Industries 4.0 and 5.0: the EU Experience

The paper analyses the economic and social challenges of disruptive technologies in conditions of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. The paper overviews research progress on Industry 4.0 and 5.0 and their influence on sustainable development. The research explains disruptive technologies trends for sustainable development. The paper examines the development process of “disruptive technologies”, which are numerous: telephone (replaced the telegraph), steamboats (replaced the sailing vessels), semiconductors (replaced the vacuum equipment), e-mail (instead of traditional mail), etc. The paper analyzes basic disruptive technologies for creating the Internet of Things. The paper shows potential economic characteristics of disruptive technologies for the nearest five-year perspective. It investigates the EU experience on the realization of Industries 4.0 and 5.0. The paper highlights the trends that positively impact business growth up to 2022 according to the EU Future of Jobs Report: increasing adoption of new technology and big data; advances in mobile internet; advances in artificial intelligence and cloud technology; shifts in national economic growth; expansion of education; advances in new energy supplies and technologies. The research demonstrates how disruptive technologies will accelerate by 2025 and how both positive and negative impacts on business will grow up. The article tackles the issues of the potential economic and social impact of disruptive technologies in the nearest future. It distinguishes possible consequences of the implementation of key disruptive technologies of our time: for example excessive psychological impact; the risk of creative potential reduction; increasing information dependence; reduced the privacy of personal life; risks of uncontrolled reduction of information security (for example, due to hackers); increased information vulnerability of civilization; risk of loss of human control over cyber systems, etc. Key words: economic challenges, social challenges, Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0, disruptive technology.

COLLECTING RESIDENT DATA FROM RESIDENTIAL CARE COMMUNITIES USING MAIL QUESTIONNAIRES: A NEW APPROACH

Researchers who collect resident-level data from RCCs face several challenges. Conducting face-to-face, on-site interviews with administrators is costly and presents scheduling difficulties. Contacting administrators by telephone requires multiple attempts. Even when they are reached, they have limited time and might not share resident-level data. To overcome these difficulties, the current survey of Oregon RCCs combines a mail questionnaire with a self-administered sampling tool that allowed communities to select a random sample of their residents (two from each community). Pilot interviews with administrators indicated they were able to select a random sample of their residents easily, quickly, and accurately using this method. The feasibility and validity of this method were further tested by comparing results to community-level aggregate data collected using traditional mail questionnaires from RCCs (n=392). The similarities and differences between resident- and community-level data are discussed within the context of sampling design and mode of data collection from RCCs.

Inflation and the Gig Economy: Have the Rise of Online Retailing and Self-Employment Disrupted the Phillips Curve?

During the recovery from the Great Recession, inflation did not reach the central bank’s 2 percent objective as quickly as many models had predicted. This coincided with increases in online shopping, which arguably made retail markets more contestable and damped retail inflation. This hypothesis is tested using data on the online share of retail sales, which are incorporated into an econometric model. Results imply that the rise of online retail has flattened the Phillips Curve, reducing the sensitivity of inflation to unemployment rate changes. Improvement in fit from just including the online share is tiny—so far. Other results indicate that market-based price indexes are more sensitive to unemployment than measures such as core PCE, which puts a sizable weight on items with imputed prices that may slowly adjust to market conditions. Further, measures of online sales that internalize substitution between online and traditional mail order sales better help track the impact of online sales on inflation dynamics. {{p}} A complementary factor is the “gig� economy and the rise of self-employment, which by reducing the bargaining power of labor, could lower the natural rate of unemployment. Model performance and fits are improved using a hybrid approach in which the rise of online sales can flatten the slope of the Phillips Curve by reducing retail pricing power and the prevalence of gig or self-employment can lower the natural rate of unemployment. {{p}} By omitting important structural changes in both goods and labor markets, conventional Phillips Curve models have failed to track how the rise of online retailing has flattened the Phillips Curve and how the rise of the gig economy (self-employment) has lowered the natural rate of unemployment. One notable difference between the price-price and wage-price results is that the combined effects of online shopping and self-employment are more notable on wage inflation than on price inflation. This could plausibly reflect that improvements in information technology may have undermined the pricing power of workers in labor markets to a greater degree than they have affected the pricing power of producers in goods markets.

From Both Sides of the Atlantic: Black German Adoptee Searches in William Gage’s Geborener Deutscher (Born German)

William Gage’s Geborener Deutscher, a print newsletter distributed by traditional mail from the late 1980s until 2003, and the eponymous Internet forum Gage established in 2000 on Yahoo Groups, provide search resources and community support specifically for German born adoptees. The archived newsletters and conversations offer early insight into the search and reunion activities of many who were transnationally adopted to the United States as infants and small children in the wake of the Second World War. Among Gage’s mailing list and Yahoo Group subscribers are members of the post-war cohort of Black German Americans living in Germany and in the US. Gage’s archive provides a unique opportunity to begin to explore Black German adoptee search, reunion, and community development over nearly a two-decade span.

Email security level classification of imbalanced data using artificial neural network: The real case in a world-leading enterprise

Email is far more convenient than traditional mail in the delivery of messages. However, it is susceptible to information leakage in business. This problem can be alleviated by classifying emails into different security levels using text mining and machine learning technology. In this research, we developed a scheme in which a neural network is used to extract information from emails to enable its transformation into a multidimensional vector. Email text data is processed using bi-gram to train the document vector, which then undergoes under-sampling to deal with the problem of data imbalance. Finally, the security label of emails is classified using an artificial neural network. The proposed system was evaluated in an actual corporate setting. The results show that the proposed feature extraction approach is more effective than existing methods for the representations of email data in true positive rates and F1-scores.

STRIVING TO DELIVER: COMMERCIALIZATION AND PERFORMANCE IN IRELAND'S POSTAL SECTOR

ABSTRACTIn 1984 the Irish postal service was corporatized from the Civil Service as An Post – a new commercial state‐owned enterprise. Focusing on the period 1984–2014 we examine the performance of An Post in the context of changes to its capital market status, competitive environment and internal organisation. Our analysis finds that during an ongoing process of commercialization the company recorded steady improvements in economic performance measured by both labour and total factor productivity. This trend of improvement ended in 2007 mainly due to the wider economic recession and increased levels of indirect competition from sources including electronic substitution of traditional mail. Looking forward, the scope for further improvements in productivity appears limited due to indirect competition and the requirement to provide a universal service. The future financial viability of An Post looks uncertain given the scale of challenges around these issues.

Prepaid and promised incentives in web surveys: an experiment

Prepaid monetary incentives consistently exert the largest positive effect on response rates in mail surveys. For web-based surveys, it has not been possible to administer monetary incentives via the Internet in advance. Recently, several new web-based services have been introduced that can transfer money to people online. Does this really have the same positive effect on response rates as shown in traditional mail surveys? The authors investigated this question experimentally in the context of a web-based survey among members of a professional association in Virginia. The results indicate that prepaid incentives in web surveys seem to have no advantages concerning the willingness to participate, actual completion rates, and the share of incomplete response patterns when compared with postpaid incentives. Furthermore, postpaid incentives show no advantages over no incentives. Finally, compared to no incentives, prize draws increase completion rates and also reduce various incomplete participation patterns.