Doing it Right for Decades Brochure, 2014

Multipage brochure highlighting the value of UNM Law to students and the leadership of law faculty.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/publications/1003/thumbnail.jp

Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS): Doing It Right

In the twenty-first century, the United States will likely encounter a wide-range of threats, such as those posed by terrorists, rogue states and other non-state actors—all of whom are taking full advantage of globally available, high-tech commercial systems (e.g., from night vision devices, through secure cell phones, to satellite photos). At the same time, technology is changing more rapidly than ever before, and the DoD must learn to embrace the fact that it no longer holds a monopoly on all military-relevant technology (many of the information-intensive innovations result from commercial activities). Furthermore, the rising costs of domestic commitments, such as Social Security and Medicare, coupled with the growing budget deficits, will create an inevitable downward pressure on the DoD budget. These changes have created an urgency for transformation within the defense establishment. We believe this necessary defense transformation will be heavily dependent upon the development of net-centric systems-of-systems; the determination to achieve lower costs, faster fielding and better performance; and a realization of the potential benefits of globalization and use of commercial technology. Greater use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) systems and components is one strategy that can enable achieving the required DoD transformation, and help to ensure American military success in the twenty-first century. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) is a term for software or hardware that is commercially made and available for sale, lease, or license to the general public and that requires little or no unique government modifications to meet the needs of the procuring agency. Because of their rapid availability, lower costs, and low risk, COTS products must be considered as alternatives to in-house, government-funded developments.Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research ProgramThis research was partially sponsored by a grant from The Naval Postgraduate Schoo

Doing It Right for Tax Administration Reform: (Semi-) Autonomous Revenue Authority Anyone?

Amid the calls for the restructuring--and even possible replacement--of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) to effect radical improvements in tax administration in the Philippines, will the creation of a semi-autonomous revenue authority to replace the BIR, as proposed in House Bills 5054, 5465 and their substitute bill, help improve the tax collection in the country and arrest the decline in its tax effort? What has been the experience in countries where such a body was created? What can be learned from their experiences? This Policy Notes expounds on this matter and offers helpful suggestions in the deliberation of the concerned pending bills.tax effort, semi-autonomous revenue authority

Doing it right: procurement talent for the 21st century

An effective procurement strategy positively affects a company’s ability to drive profitability and to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. However, some procurement leaders do not believe their teams have the skill to execute their company’s strategy. Pundits cite a shortage of qualified personnel, and deficiencies in leadership, soft skills, and critical thinking ability. Companies, therefore, must recruit, develop, and retain personnel to execute properly their procurement strategies. Research literature states that employee engagement, transformational leadership, and emotional intelligence affect an employee’s willingness to learn and intention to stay at a firm. A compendium of literature also links organizational performance and business outcomes to leadership style, employee engagement and emotional intelligence levels within an organization. Based on the literature, a leader’s style, emotional intelligence and ability to foster employee engagement has an impact on organizational performance. How can leaders effectively develop procurement personnel to address today’s marketplace challenges and opportunities? Informed by literature, this phenomenological study examines the best practices employed by today’s procurement leaders to develop personnel. In addition, this study examines challenges these managers face in developing employees, and the metrics employed to define success in procurement staff development. The study also summarizes recommendations from today’s procurement leaders to future generations of managers on employee development best practices. Finally, the study contains conclusions, thoughts, and recommendations based on insights gleaned from the study’s participants

Oral morphine prescription pattern accuracy: are we doing it right?

Objectives: Oral morphine is a potent, cheap, easy to use analgesia for moderate to severe pain. The aim of this study is to review the pattern of oral morphine prescription amongst different cadres of Doctors in OOUTH, a Nigerian tertiary hospital. The objectives were to determine how accurately oral morphine prescriptions were written and to find out if the wrong prescriptions were also dispensed.Methods: All prescriptions on oral morphine were retrieved from the hospital's pharmacy records for the period between 1st August 2016 (when oral morphine was introduced to the facility) and 28th February 2018. The data captured included details of the prescriber, the strength and dosage of oral morphine, how accurate each prescription was, and strength of oral morphine often prescribed, and the data was analyzed manually.Results: One hundred and forty-two (142) prescriptions were retrieved. The prescribers included; Resident Doctors (Junior and Senior Residents), Consultants and House/Officers/Medical Officers in 72 (50%), 58 (40.2%) and 14 (9.7%) respectively. The specialties of the doctors that prescribed oral morphine included: General Surgery (62%), Palliative Care (21.8%), Paediatric Surgery (0.7%), while Gynaecology, Internal Medicine, Haematology, Orthopedics and Otolaryngology had 1.4% each with two (2) prescriptions each (1.4%), The remaining 4.9% of the prescriptions were from medical officers at the Accident & Emergency Unit. The strength of oral morphine prescribed was distributed as follows: 10mg/5mls (42.2%), 5mg/5ml (40.8%), 2.5mg/5mls (10.6%), 20mg/5mls (3.5%) and 7.5mg/5mls (2.8%). There were 25 (17.6%) wrong prescriptions and these were written mostly by medical officers and house officers. The errors in prescriptions were mainly in terms of writing volume with no strength indicated and dose prescribed with ambiguous timing intervals.Conclusion: Oral morphine is widely prescribed in this tertiary facility in a developing country and close to one-fifth of the prescriptions was wrong. Therefore, there is a need for training and re-training of prescribers and dispensers for optimal patient safety.Keywords: Oral Morphine, drug prescription, doctors, opioids, palliative car

Speech Self-Supervised Representation Benchmarking: Are We Doing it Right?

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently allowed leveraging large datasets of unlabeled speech signals to reach impressive performance on speech tasks using only small amounts of annotated data. The high number of proposed approaches fostered the need and rise of extended benchmarks that evaluate their performance on a set of downstream tasks exploring various aspects of the speech signal. However, and while the number of considered tasks has been growing, most rely upon a single decoding architecture that maps the frozen SSL representations to the downstream labels. This work investigates the robustness of such benchmarking results to changes in the decoder architecture. Interestingly, it appears that varying the architecture of the downstream decoder leads to significant variations in the leaderboards of most tasks. Concerningly, our study reveals that benchmarking using limited decoders may cause a counterproductive increase in the sizes of the developed SSL models.Comment: 6 page

Doing It Right: OT Meeting Population Needs with COVID-19

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) identified strategic goals for health promotion and disease prevention in Healthy People 2020. Some of the overarching goals were to “achieve health equity, eliminate disparities, and improve the health of all groups” in order to address inequities tied to race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, geography, and disability (p. 3). The plan also targeted health disparities by recognizing social determinants of health and creating “social and physical environments that promote good health,” including the development of policy and programs (HHS, 2010, p. 3). Health disparities are population specific and quantify “differences in disease rates, health outcomes, and access to health care services” (American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA], 2013, p. S48). In times of crisis, vulnerable populations may be particularly susceptible to disease, illness, and mortality because of health disparities related to social and environmental barriers and determinants of health. AOTA’s official stand on nondiscrimination and inclusion is that every individual be treated fairly and equitably (AOTA, 2014b); that an individual’s culture, race, ethnicity, age, and capacities be respected; and that all occupational therapy personnel avoid prejudice and bias (AOTA, 2015). As a profession, occupational therapy promotes access and inclusion and limits health disparities in daily practice. Advocacy is a critical role and value of the profession for promoting resilience for populations based on health equity and occupational justice

Doing It Right: OT Meeting Population Needs with COVID-19

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) identified strategic goals for health promotion and disease prevention in Healthy People 2020. Some of the overarching goals were to “achieve health equity, eliminate disparities, and improve the health of all groups” in order to address inequities tied to race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, geography, and disability (p. 3). The plan also targeted health disparities by recognizing social determinants of health and creating “social and physical environments that promote good health,” including the development of policy and programs (HHS, 2010, p. 3). Health disparities are population specific and quantify “differences in disease rates, health outcomes, and access to health care services” (American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA], 2013, p. S48). In times of crisis, vulnerable populations may be particularly susceptible to disease, illness, and mortality because of health disparities related to social and environmental barriers and determinants of health. AOTA’s official stand on nondiscrimination and inclusion is that every individual be treated fairly and equitably (AOTA, 2014b); that an individual’s culture, race, ethnicity, age, and capacities be respected; and that all occupational therapy personnel avoid prejudice and bias (AOTA, 2015). As a profession, occupational therapy promotes access and inclusion and limits health disparities in daily practice. Advocacy is a critical role and value of the profession for promoting resilience for populations based on health equity and occupational justice

The outcome of arthroscopic meniscal repairs: are we doing it right?

Background: The main aim of our study was to evaluate the outcome of arthroscopic meniscal repairs for all isolated meniscal tears.Methods: A total of 60 patients were included in our retrospective analysis, including all patients with isolated meniscal tears undergoing arthroscopic meniscal repairs from January to December 2015. All those patients who underwent menisectomies were excluded. Outcome measures involved location and type of tear, technique of repair, KOOS scoring system to analyse presence of post-op symptoms as well as the need for repeat surgery.Results: Of the 60 patients, 46 (76.6%) had successful repairs with no post-op repeat symptoms at 6 and 12 months follow up. The remaining 14 patients (23.3%) underwent repeat surgery out of which 5 (35.7%) underwent partial menisectomies, 4 (28.6%) re-repairs, 3 (21.4%) re-repair and partial menisectomy and the remaining 2 patients, MACI procedure.Conclusions: Arthroscopic repair of meniscal tears has shown to be an effective method of treating this surgical entity, meeting success rates comparable to published results. However, the gold standard repair method still needs to be identified.