11,574 research outputs found
Governing Sustainable Waste Management: Designing sustainable waste management into the housing sector
In seeking to shift municipal waste policy towards sustainability, policy-makers at European, national and local levels are facing the challenge of how to engage householders in reducing, reusing and recycling their waste. This in turn means engaging with the arena within which day to day waste management activities are practiced – the home. In view of this critical relationship between waste policy and household practices, this research project1 has sought to examine:
• the ways in which new infrastructures for managing waste are being ‘designed in’ to new housing developments and renovated kitchens in the UK and Europe;
• the barriers identified by key actors in the as impending the pursuit of a more integrated approach to housing design and waste management and how these might be overcome;
• examples of best practice currently being developed in the UK and their applicability in the context of the North-East of England
A Logic-based Approach for Recognizing Textual Entailment Supported by Ontological Background Knowledge
We present the architecture and the evaluation of a new system for
recognizing textual entailment (RTE). In RTE we want to identify automatically
the type of a logical relation between two input texts. In particular, we are
interested in proving the existence of an entailment between them. We conceive
our system as a modular environment allowing for a high-coverage syntactic and
semantic text analysis combined with logical inference. For the syntactic and
semantic analysis we combine a deep semantic analysis with a shallow one
supported by statistical models in order to increase the quality and the
accuracy of results. For RTE we use logical inference of first-order employing
model-theoretic techniques and automated reasoning tools. The inference is
supported with problem-relevant background knowledge extracted automatically
and on demand from external sources like, e.g., WordNet, YAGO, and OpenCyc, or
other, more experimental sources with, e.g., manually defined presupposition
resolutions, or with axiomatized general and common sense knowledge. The
results show that fine-grained and consistent knowledge coming from diverse
sources is a necessary condition determining the correctness and traceability
of results.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure
CRIBs (Climate Relevant Innovation-system Builders): an effective way forward for international climate technology policy
National systems of innovation (NSIs) provide the context
within which all processes of technology development,
transfer and uptake occur - they refer to the network of actors (e.g. firms, universities, research institutes, government departments, NGOs) within which innovation occurs, and the strength and nature of the relationships between them. Nurturing NSIs in relation to climate technologies provides a powerful new focus for international policy with potential to underpin more sustained and widespread development and transfer of climate technologies. This working paper builds on
an invited presentation by one of the authors at a workshop on NSIs convened by the Technology Executive Committee (TEC) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It identifies policy recommendations for consideration of the TEC. The intention is both to inform possible recommendations by the TEC to the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) and to highlight potential areas for future work that the TEC could undertake on this issue
Bridging the Divide: Using UTAUT to predict multigenerational tablet adoption practices
This study examined the “Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology” (UTAUT) in the context of tablet devices across multiple generations. We tested the four UTAUT determinants, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, to determine their contributions for predicting behavioral intention to use tablets with age, gender, and user experience as moderators. 899 respondents aged 19-99 completed the survey. We found consistent generational differences in UTAUT determinants, most frequently between the oldest and youngest generations. Effort expectancy and facilitating conditions were the only determinants that positively predicted tablet use intentions after controlling for age, gender, and tablet use. We also discuss the implications of ageism and gender discrimination of technology adoption. Finally, we argue that our findings can be extended to create effective training programs for the teaching, learning, and adoption of new technologies in a variety of organizational settings
Implementation Plan for EMR and Beyond
Change is never easy for anyone, but how we implement change can make the difference in how an innovation is accepted. Over the last two years, a small community hospital in California has introduced a new electronic medical record (EMR) to meet the requirements of meaningful use mandated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) for all hospitals across the United States. EMRs are expected to improve quality in many areas, especially to improve outcomes, while safely reducing costs (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2012). Adoption of EMR’s is not optional, if facilities want to avoid penalties and continue operating. As a result, EMR’s have been implemented in numerous healthcare facilities over the last decade.
However, implementation does not guarantee acceptance. Many organizations have tried to implement something new and failed. Healthcare facilities need to build implementation plans into their development of any new innovations. In particular, end users need to buy in and accept new system usability in order to improve compliance and employee satisfaction. Our EMR is being developed in stages, so our processes are constantly changing with requires fast transitions in the end user learning. We have moved through the first two stages and are moving into the third stage in the next few months.
This project describes an implementation plan for an electronic medical record development that we have used during our first two stages. The project plan has a strategic focus on end user acceptance of meaningful use guidelines that is sustainable for continued growth. The elements of this plan can be applied to other types of innovative change in healthcare
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