The program implications of administrative relationships between local health departments and state and local government.

A typology of organizational arrangements between state and local public health agencies was used as a framework within which the organizational environment of the local health department was studied for its effects on progam development and implementation by local public health departments. Data collected in a national sample of local health officers were used in measuring the effect of four different patterns of administrative relationships on the selected characteristics of local health department programs. Important differences were observed among the four organizational types with regard to constraints on programs and program priorities, and health officers' perceptions of the primary functions of local health departments and sources of local health department funding. These findings were then used as a baseline from which to consider the possible impact of recent federal health budgetary proposals (specifically, block grants) both on existing patterns of intergovernmental relations and on the funding and operation of local health department programs. It was determined that the most likely general development arising from these proposed changes in federal budgetary policy is that the administrative control of state health agencies over those at local level is likely to be enhanced. Other likely developments include changes in the programs and priorities of local health departments related to reductions in overall funding levels for human services and forced competition for fewer dollars by an enlarged constituency

Measuring the Impact of Youth Voluntary Service Programs

Summary and Conclusions of a meeting of international experts hosted by the World Bank and Innovations in Civic Participation to discuss evaluation of the impact of youth civic engagement on development

Measuring quality in social care services: theory and practice

Measuring and assessing service quality in the social care sector presents distinct challenges. The 'experience' good properties of social care, for instance, and the large influence played by subjective judgements about the quality of personal relationships between carer and user and of process-related service characteristics make it difficult to develop indicators of service quality, including those of service impact on final outcomes. Using some of the key features of the 'Production of Welfare' approach, the paper discusses recent developments in the UK of the theoretical and practical frameworks used for assessing quality in social care and for understanding the final impact of services on the wellbeing of their recipients. Key current and future challenges to the development of such frameworks include difficulties in disentangling the impact of social care services on final outcomes from the often dominating effects of other, non-service related factors, and the generalization of consumer-directed care models and of the 'personalization' of care services. These challenges are discussed in the context of the different possible applications of quality indicators, including their role as supporting the service commissioning process and their use for assessing the performance of service providers

Neuromorphic perception for greenhouse technology using event-based sensors

Event-Based Cameras (EBCs), unlike conventional cameras, feature independent pixels that asynchronously generate outputs upon detecting changes in their field of view. Short calculations are performed on each event to mimic the brain. The output is a sparse sequence of events with high temporal precision. Conventional computer vision algorithms do not leverage these properties. Thus a new paradigm has been devised. While event cameras are very efficient in representing sparse sequences of events with high temporal precision, many approaches are challenged in applications where a large amount of spatially-temporally rich information must be processed in real-time. In reality, most tasks in everyday life take place in complex and uncontrollable environments, which require sophisticated models and intelligent reasoning. Typical hard problems in real-world scenes are detecting various non-uniform objects or navigation in an unknown and complex environment. In addition, colour perception is an essential fundamental property in distinguishing objects in natural scenes. Colour is a new aspect of event-based sensors, which work fundamentally differently from standard cameras, measuring per-pixel brightness changes per colour filter asynchronously rather than measuring “absolute” brightness at a constant rate. This thesis explores neuromorphic event-based processing methods for high-noise and cluttered environments with imbalanced classes. A fully event-driven processing pipeline was developed for agricultural applications to perform fruits detection and classification to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. The nature of features in such data was explored, and methods to represent and detect features were demonstrated. A framework for detecting and classifying features was developed and evaluated on the N-MNIST and Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) gesture datasets. The same network was evaluated on laboratory recorded and real-world data with various internal variations for fruits detection such as overlap, variation in size and appearance. In addition, a method to handle highly imbalanced data was developed. We examined the characteristics of spatio-temporal patterns for each colour filter to help expand our understanding of this novel data and explored their applications in classification tasks where colours were more relevant features than shapes and appearances. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate the potential and efficacy of event- based systems by demonstrating the applicability of colour event data and the viability of event-driven classification

A framework to review performance measurement systems.

This paper describes a structured review framework for managing business performance. The framework entails the review of both business performance, including thestrategic relevance of the measures, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the performance measurement system itself. A range of approaches and tools are employed in the framework which features a review card providing a high level view of the review process, showing the different types of review perspectives and their interactions

Publishing LO(D)D: Linked Open (Dynamic) Data for Smart Sensing and Measuring Environments

The paper proposes a distributed framework that provides a systematic way to publish environment data which is being updated continuously; such updates might be issued at specific time intervals or bound to some environment- specific event. The framework targets smart environments having networks of devices and sensors which are interacting with each other and with their respective environments to gather and generate data and willing to publish this data. This paper addresses the issues of supporting the data publishers to maintain up-to-date and machine understandable representations, separation of views (static or dynamic data) and delivering up-to-date information to data consumers in real time, helping data consumers to keep track of changes triggered from diverse environments and keeping track of evolution of the smart environment. The paper also describes a prototype implementation of the proposed architecture. A preliminary use case implementation over a real energy metering infrastructure is also provided in the paper to prove the feasibility of the architectur