361,970 research outputs found
Randomised controlled trials of complex interventions and large-scale transformation of services
Complex interventions and large-scale transformations of services are necessary to meet the health-care challenges of the 21st century. However, the evaluation of these types of interventions is challenging and requires methodological development.
Innovations such as cluster randomised controlled trials, stepped-wedge designs, and non-randomised evaluations provide options to meet the needs of decision-makers. Adoption of theory and logic models can help clarify causal assumptions, and process evaluation can assist in understanding delivery in context. Issues of implementation must also be considered throughout intervention design and evaluation to ensure that results can be scaled for population benefit. Relevance requires evaluations conducted under real-world conditions, which in turn requires a pragmatic attitude to design. The increasing complexity of interventions and evaluations threatens the ability of researchers to meet the needs of decision-makers for rapid results. Improvements in efficiency are thus crucial, with electronic health records offering significant potential
Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study
Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for
providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting
huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud
deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The
availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no
propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and
third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource
software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and
distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated
and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which
is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of
Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in
deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting
Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the
security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical
guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It
also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of
implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures
Drinking-Water and drinking water: Trajectories of Provision and Consumption in the UK, Taiwan and Delhi
In many advanced economies, water is one of the most taken-for-granted and ?ordinary? objects of consumption. However, the emergence of all-purpose (including drinking) water was the outcome of long and varied historical processes, involving major changes in both systems of provision and patterns of consumption. In many parts of the world, there are still different types and sources of water for different consumption purposes, and there are significant inequalities in rights over this most basic resource, especially water fit for drinking. Water presents a critical lens to explore organisations of economies of a good, which are often a complex mix of private, commercial, or public systems of provision. This paper will argue that an ?instituted economic process? approach is fruitful in exploring diverse configurations of production, appropriation, distribution and consumption of water. In particular, it will argue that practices of consumption are best analysed as integral and necessary dimensions of these wider configurations of economic organisation. The analysis will draw on my current comparative research in the UK, Delhi and Taiwan, and empirically demonstrates the need to problematise water as a consumption good, in order to understand its rich and complex diversity. This research arose from my comparative research on bottled water, undertaken in the wider research programme of the ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group
Reflecting on E-Recruiting Research Using Grounded Theory
This paper presents a systematic review of the e-Recruiting literature through a grounded theory lens. The large number of publications and the increasing diversity of publications on e-Recruiting research, as the most studied area within e-HRM (Electronic Human Resource Management), calls for a synthesis of e-Recruiting research. We show interconnections between achievements, research gaps and future research directions in order to advance both e-Recruiting research and practice. Moreover, we provide a definition of e-Recruiting. The use of grounded theory enabled us to reach across sub-disciplines, methods used, perspectives studied, themes discussed and stakeholders involved. We demonstrate that the Grounded Theory Approach led to a better understanding of the interconnections that lay buried in the disparate e-Recruiting literature
Collaborative systems for enhancing the analysis of social surveys: the grid enabled specialist data environments
This paper describes a group of online services which are designed to support social
survey research and the production of statistical results. The 'Grid Enabled Specialist
Data Environment' (GESDE) services constitute three related systems which offer
facilities to search for, extract and exploit supplementary data and metadata concerned
with the measurement and operationalisation of survey variables. The services also offer
users the opportunity to deposit and distribute their own supplementary data resources for
the benefit of dissemination and replication of the details of their own analysis.
The GESDE services focus upon three application areas: specialist data relating to the
measurement of occupations; educational qualifications; and ethnicity (including
nationality, language, religion, national identity). They identify information resources
related to the operationalisation of variables which seek to measure each of these
concepts - examples include coding frames, crosswalk and translation files, and
standardisation and harmonisation recommendations. These resources constitute
important supplementary data which can be usefully exploited in the analysis of survey
data. The GESDE services work by collecting together as much of this supplementary
data as possible, and making it searchable and retrievable to others. This paper discusses
the current features of the GESDE services (which have been designed as part of a wider
programme of ‘e-Science’ research in the UK), and considers ongoing challenges in
providing effective support for variable-oriented statistical analysis in the social sciences
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