Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses

Compiles peer-reviewed research and literature reviews on issues regarding patient safety and quality of care, ranging from evidence-based practice, patient-centered care, and nurses' working conditions to critical opportunities and tools for improvement

Consistency Algorithms and Protocols for Distributed Interactive Applications

The Internet has a major impact not only on how people retrieve information but also on how they communicate. Distributed interactive applications support the communication and collaboration of people through the sharing and manipulation of rich multimedia content via the Internet. Aside from shared text editors, meeting support systems, and distributed virtual environments, shared whiteboards are a prominent example of distributed interactive applications. They allow the presentation and joint editing of documents in video conferencing scenarios. The design of such a shared whiteboard application, the multimedia lecture board (mlb), is a main contribution of this thesis. Like many other distributed interactive applications, the mlb has a replicated architecture where each user runs an instance of the application. This has the distinct advantage that the application can be deployed in a lightweight fashion, without relying on a supporting server infrastructure. But at the same time, this peer-to-peer architecture raises a number of challenging problems: First, application data needs to be distributed among all instances. For this purpose, we present the network protocol RTP/I for the standardized communication of distributed interactive applications, and a novel application-level multicast protocol that realizes efficient group communication while taking application-level knowledge into account. Second, consistency control mechanisms are required to keep the replicated application data synchronized. We present the consistency control algorithms “local lag”, “Timewarp”, and “state request”, show how they can be combined, and discuss how to provide visual feedback so that the session members are able to handle conflicting actions. Finally, late-joining participants need to be initialized with the current application state before they are able to participate in a collaborative session. We propose a novel late-join algorithm, which is both flexible and scalable. All algorithms and protocols presented in this dissertation solve the aforementioned problems in a generic way. We demonstrate how they can be employed for the mlb as well as for other distributed interactive applications

Water Governance: Retheorizing Politics

This republished Special Issue highlights recent and emergent concepts and approaches to water governance that re-centers the political in relation to water-related decision making, use, and management. To do so at once is to focus on diverse ontologies, meanings and values of water, and related contestations regarding its use, or its importance for livelihoods, identity, or place-making. Building on insights from science and technology studies, feminist, and postcolonial approaches, we engage broadly with the ways that water-related decision making is often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning—and to what effect. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison

This richly illustrated volume explores Edison's inventive and personal pursuits from 1888 to 1889, documenting his responses to technological, organizational, and economic challenges.Thomas A. Edison was received at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle—the World's Fair—as a conquering hero. Extravagantly fêted and besieged by well-wishers, he was seen, like Gustave Eiffel's iron tower, as a triumphal symbol of republicanism and material progress. The visit was a high-water mark of his international fame.Out of the limelight, Edison worked as hard as ever. On top of his work as an inventor, entrepreneur, and manufacturer, he created a new role as a director of research. At his peerless laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, he directed assistants working in parallel on multiple projects. These included the "perfected" phonograph; a major but little-recognized effort to make musical recordings for sale; the start of work on motion pictures; and improvements in the recovery of low-grade iron ore. He also pursued a public "War of the Currents" against electrical rival George Westinghouse. Keenly attuned to manufacturing as a way to support the laboratory financially and control his most iconic products, Edison created a new cluster of factories. He kept his manufacturing rights to the phonograph while selling the underlying patents to an outside investor in a deal he would regret. When market pressures led to the consolidation of Edison lighting interests, he sold his factories to the new Edison General Electric Company. These changes disrupted his longtime personal and professional relations even as he planned an iron-mining project that would take him to the New Jersey wilderness for long periods.The ninth volume of the series, Competing Interests explores Edison's inventive and personal pursuits from 1888 to 1889, documenting his responses to technological, organizational, and economic challenges. The book includes 331 documents and hundreds of Edison's drawings, which are all revealing and representative of his life and work in these years. Essays and notes based on meticulous research in a wide range of sources, many only recently available, provide a rich context for the documents

Law, development and the Ethiopian revolution.

This thesis explores a series of middle-range hypotheses concerning the interrelation of law and development. These hypotheses are made concrete enough to serve as policy prescriptions by applying them to the problems of Ethiopia, a country which displays most of the development constraints that have been identified in other Third World countries. Development is best understood as a dynamic process, as the broadening of subsistence and small-scale economic, political, legal and social 'markets' that effects a cumulative growth in a wide variety of resources. In Ethiopia, given her highly stratified and fragmented societies, this entails a socio-economic equalisation and integration, a wholesale structural transformation rather than the narrow policies of an economic growth advocated by many development theorists. The magnitude of this transformation, the manifest need for extensive and intensive development planning and the socialist predilections of Ethiopia's revolutionary military rulers (the Derg) suggest that massive state intervention in the economy is both inevitable and the only feasible path to an Ethiopian development which is, nevertheless, fraught with many hazards. It is therefore impossible to segregate economic activity from what is, in Ethiopia, an undifferentiated mass of law, politics and administration. The largest single bottleneck to Ethiopian development is the virtual absence of any political development registered under Haile Selassie or the Derg. The role of law in eliminating an Ethiopian "soft state" (Myrdal's term), which is far from soft on the poor and powerless, is surveyed and law's role in the aggregation, allocation and delegation of a variety of resources, in the formulation and implementation of interrelated policies, and in the amelioration of species of injustice is analysed in detail