Advances in Supply Chain Management Decision Support Systems: Potential for Improving Decision Support Catalysed by Semantic Interoperability between Systems

Globalization has catapulted ‘cycle time’ as a key indicator of operational efficiency [1] in processes such as supply chain management (SCM). Systems automation holds the promise to augment the ability of supply chain operations or supply networks to rapidly adapt to changes, with minimal human intervention, under ideal conditions. Business communities are emerging as loose federations or organization of networks that may evolve to act as infomediaries in global SCM. These changes, although sluggish, are likely to impact process knowledge and in turn may be stimulated or inhibited by the availability or lack of process interoperability, respectively. The latter will determine operational efficiencies of supply chains. Currently “community of systems” or organization of networks (aligned by industry or business focus) contribute minimally in SCM decisions because true collaboration remains elusive. Convergence and maturity of multiple advances offers the potential for a paradigm shift in interoperability. It may evolve hand-in-hand with [a] the gradual adoption of the semantic web [2] with concomitant development of ontological frameworks, [b] increase in use of multi-agent systems and [c] advent of ubiquitous computing enabling near real-time access to identification of objects and analytics [4]. This paper examines some of these complex trends and related technologies. Irrespective of the characteristics of information systems, the development of various industry-contributed ontologies for knowledge and decision layers, may spur self-organizing networks of business communities and systems to increase their ability to sense and respond, more profitably, through better enterprise and extraprise exchange. In order to transform this vision into reality, systems automation must be weaned from the syntactic web and integrated with the organic growth of the semantic web. Understanding of process semantics and incorporation of intelligent agents with access to ubiquitous near real-time data “bus” are pillars for “intelligent” evolution of decision support systems. Software as infrastructure may integrate plethora of agent colonies through improved architectures (such as, service oriented architecture or SOA) and business communities aligned by industry or service focus may emerge as hubs of such agent empires. However, the feasibility of the path from exciting “pilots” in specific areas toward an informed convergence of systemic real-world implementation remains unclear and fraught with hurdles related to gaps in knowledge transfer from experts in academia to real-world practitioners. The value of interoperability between systems that may catalyse real-time intelligent decision support is further compromised by the lack of clarity of approach and tools. The latter offers significant opportunities for development of tools that may segue to innovative solutions approach. A critical mass of such solutions may spawn the necessary systems architecture for intelligent interoperability, essential for sustainable profitability and productivity in an intensely competitive global economy. This paper addresses some of these issues, tools and solutions that may have broad applicability in several operations including the management of adaptive supply-demand networks [7]

What is the lived experience of Advanced Nurse Practitioners of managing risk and patient safety in acute settings? A phenomenological perspective

Background: Managing clinical risk and patient safety is high on clinical and political agendas. Advanced Nurse Practitioners (ANPs) are frontline practitioners making critical decisions regarding risk and patient safety. Whilst research around nurse decision-making has been conducted, the extent to which ANPs manage and navigate patient safety and risk is under-researched. Research question: What is the lived experience of Advanced Nurse Practitioners of managing risk and patient safety in acute settings? A phenomenological perspective.Method: Ten ANPs across three acute settings were recruited and iterative data collected over ten months on experiences of managing risk and safety (reflective interviews, written reflections, researcher journal). Data analysis was based on Van Manen’s approach, assisted by NVivo 11 to facilitate circles of interpretation with each data source.Findings: In an environment driven by time pressures, how practitioners cope with managing risk and patient safety is dependent on the presenting situation, breadth of knowledge-base, application of evidence, degree of perceived management support, and channelling of emotive moods. In situations of uncertainty, insufficient knowledge, and/or lack of information, practitioners were guided by care, concern, worry, feeling happy or comfortable and, in critical times, fuelled by fear. These were illuminated to be both drivers and barriers to practitioners’ capabilities in grasping patient presentations. Snapshot judgements were individualized and negotiated dependent on practitioners’ and patients’ capacity to cope with risk. Experiences of risk often identified a learning need or knowledge deficit, revealing an opportunity to develop and advance ANP practice.Implications: These findings have implications for the preparation, training, and ongoing educational and emotional support of ANPs within their practice. Recognising the emotional toll of managing risk and providing the necessary support will ultimately positively impact recruitment and retention of these crucial health care professionals

Audiovisual processing for sports-video summarisation technology

In this thesis a novel audiovisual feature-based scheme is proposed for the automatic summarization of sports-video content The scope of operability of the scheme is designed to encompass the wide variety o f sports genres that come under the description ‘field-sports’. Given the assumption that, in terms of conveying the narrative of a field-sports-video, score-update events constitute the most significant moments, it is proposed that their detection should thus yield a favourable summarisation solution. To this end, a generic methodology is proposed for the automatic identification of score-update events in field-sports-video content. The scheme is based on the development of robust extractors for a set of critical features, which are shown to reliably indicate their locations. The evidence gathered by the feature extractors is combined and analysed using a Support Vector Machine (SVM), which performs the event detection process. An SVM is chosen on the basis that its underlying technology represents an implementation of the latest generation of machine learning algorithms, based on the recent advances in statistical learning. Effectively, an SVM offers a solution to optimising the classification performance of a decision hypothesis, inferred from a given set of training data. Via a learning phase that utilizes a 90-hour field-sports-video trainmg-corpus, the SVM infers a score-update event model by observing patterns in the extracted feature evidence. Using a similar but distinct 90-hour evaluation corpus, the effectiveness of this model is then tested genencally across multiple genres of fieldsports- video including soccer, rugby, field hockey, hurling, and Gaelic football. The results suggest that in terms o f the summarization task, both high event retrieval and content rejection statistics are achievable

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

Integration of Reciprocal Teaching-ICT Model To Improve Students’Mathematics Critical Thinking Ability

This research examines the effectiveness on how mathematics teachers have begun to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) with reciprocal teaching model to improve students’ mathematics critical thinking ability into seventh junior high school classroom practice. This study was experimental research with a quasi-experimental design. The samples of the study are 36 students for classroom experiments and 36 students for classroom control. The instruments employed in this study were pre-test and post-test. All the instruments are made in essays forms. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. Based on the research findings, it was gotten that (1) the development of teaching instructional multimedia of the seven grade students of junior high school; (2) the improvement of students’ mathematics critical thinking ability in experimental class; (3) the aspect of attractiveness shows that the developed instructional multimedia was very interesting; and (4) reciprocal learning has good impact on students’ mathematics critical thinking ability

Promoting Healthy Body Image Through the Costume Design Process

This paper focuses on incorporating healthy body image and body awareness into two aspects of teaching costume design; the research and rendering phase, and the fitting and design realization process. Using Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room, a play exploring the body modification of three women from different cultures and time periods as a basis for research and character analysis, students begin to understand the cultural, social, and political frameworks behind significant historical fashion trends, and to translate that information into a design that communicates the same messages on a contemporary body to a contemporary audience. As students begin to research each culture and time period, they are tasked with finding ways to relate to the characters through common feelings of body confinement and dysmorphia, for example, finding commonalities between the Chinese practice of foot binding, Victorian corsetry, and modern day plastic surgery. Advanced student designers, when given the opportunity to realize their designs, are challenged with promoting healthy body image through their sketches and in fittings with performers. By addressing the way costume sketching is taught and steering away from 9-head fashion sketches, student designers are better able to demonstrate a full understanding of character, and the performer who is represented in the sketch is more likely to relate to the design and see it as an attainable image. In preparation for fittings, student designers are coached on how to address and clothe varying body types and are then guided through the fitting. Designers learn to see and dress each performer’s body without judgment or cultural bias, while maintaining the significant style lines and aesthetics a particular production, time period, and culture requires

Intermedial Studies

Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media. The detailed introduction offers a short history of the field and outlines the main theoretical approaches to the field. Part I explains the approach, examining and exemplifying the dimensions that construct every media product. The following sections offer practical examples and case studies using many examples, which will be familiar to students, from Sherlock Holmes and football, to news, vlogs and videogames. This book is the only textbook taking both a theoretical and practical approach to intermedial studies. The book will be of use to students from a variety of disciplines looking at any form of adaptation, from comparative literature to film adaptations, fan fictions and spoken performances. The book equips students with the language and understanding to confidently and competently apply their own intermedial analysis to any text

Design, organization and implementation of a methods pool and an application systematics for condition based maintenance

Zunehmender Wettbewerb in der Industrie erfordert immer kürzere Amortisationszeiten von kapitalintensiven Produktionsanlangen. Wesentliche Voraussetzungen für die Realisierung kurzer Amortisationszeiträume sind eine hohe Verfügbarkeit der Anlagen und das Erreichen einer gleichmäßig hohen und konstanten Produktqualität. Eine effiziente Instandhaltungsstrategie unterstützt diese Anforderungen an die Verfügbarkeit und an die Produktqualität, vor allem durch eine geringe Bedarfswartung und zunehmend vorbeugende Instandhaltungsbemühungen. In der Industrie wird hierzu häufig die zustandsbasierte Instandhaltung (Condition Based Maintenance - CBM) angewendet. Die CBM Methode versucht aus Zustandseinschätzung der Maschinen, abgeleitet von verschiedenen Zustandsüberwachungs-Verfahren (Condition Monitoring Technique - CMT) und zerstörungsfreien Prüfungen (Nondestructive Test - NDT), erste Mängel zu identifizieren, bevor sie sich kritisch auf die Produktion auswirken. Ein effektives CBM Programm verlangt eine frühe Fehlererkennung und eine genaue Identifikation der Fehlerattribute. Diese Anforderungen werden in der Industrie heute noch unzureichend erfüllt. Die Ursache liegt vor allem in den hohen Kosten, die sich aufgrund unzureichender Information über die potenziellen Fehler ergeben, sowie in der unzulänglichen Kenntnis oder ungeeigneten Anwendung von verschiedenem CMTs und NDTs begründet. Daher werden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit eine neuartige Toolbox und ein Anwendungskonzept entwickelt, um die Umsetzung eines effektiven CBM Programms in der Automobil-Zulieferindustrie zu unterstützen. Hierbei ist der Ansatz so allgemein gewählt, dass er nicht nur auf das Anwendungsgebiet der Automobilindustrie beschränkt ist, sondern auch auf die allgemeine Herstellungs- oder Produktionsindustrie angewendet werden kann. Die CBM-Toolbox setzt sich aus drei Hauptwerkzeugen zusammen. Das erste Werkzeug fasst statistische Fehler-Analysen zusammen, die die in einem Informationssystem des Betriebes vorhandenen Fehlerdaten auswertet, um die relevanten Informationen tabellarisch bzw. grafisch darzustellen. Das zweite Werkzeug ist eine Wissensdatenbank in der das Expertenwissen über verschiedene CMTs und NDTs verwaltet wird. Dieses Expertenwissen ist so strukturiert, dass zusätzlich zu jeder Methode, ihre Anwendbarkeit, Nachweisbarkeit und Vorteile bzw. Nachteile dargestellt werden. Das dritte Werkzeug ist eine objektbasierte Problem-und-Ursache-Analyse, deren Ergebnis eine tabellarisch dargestellte Problem-Ursache Beziehung von besonderen Maschinenanlagen ist. Diese Hauptwerkzeuge werden durch zwei weitere Werkzeuge, ein Finanzanalyse-Werkzeug und eine Auswahlmatrix ergänzt, die die verschiedenen Entscheidungsmöglichkeiten hinsichtlich der Umsetzbarkeit bewertet.The everyday increasing competition in industry and the compulsion of faster investment paybacks for complex and expensive machinery, in addition to operational safety, health and environmental requirements, take for granted high availability of the production machinery and high and stable quality of products. These targets are reached only if the machinery is kept in proper working condition by utilizing an appropriate maintenance tactic. In this frame of thought, monitoring of machinery systems has become progressively more important in meeting the rapidly changing maintenance requirements of today’s manufacturing systems. Besides, as the pressure to reduce manning in plants increases, so does the need for additional automation and reduced organizational level maintenance. Augmented automation in manufacturing plants has led to rapid growth in the number of machinery sensors installed. Along with reduced manning, increased operating tempos are requiring maintenance providers to make repairs faster and ensure that equipment operates reliably for longer periods. To deal with these challenges, condition based maintenance (CBM) has been widely employed within industry. CBM, as a preventive and predictive action, strives to identify incipient faults before they become critical through structural condition assessment derived from Different condition monitoring techniques (CMT) and nondestructive tests (NDT). An effective CBM program requires early recognition of failures and accurate identification of the associated attributes in a feasible manner. The achievement of this proficiency in industry is still intricate and relatively expensive due to deficient information about the potential failures as well as inadequate knowledge or improper application of different CMTs and NDTs. Accordingly, a new toolbox has been developed to facilitate and sustain effective CBM programs in the automotive supply industry. The CBM toolbox is consisted of three major tools. The first tool is a series of statistical failure analyses which uses the failure history data available in a plant’s information system to generate valuable information in tabulated and graphical postures. The second tool is a repository filled with expert knowledge about different CMTs and NDTs formatted in a way that in addition to the concept of each technique, its applicability, detectability, and its pros and cons are expressed. The third tool is an object based problem and cause analysis whose outcome is tabulated problem-cause relationships associated with particular machinery objects. These major tools are also accompanied by two supplementary tools, a financial analysis tool and a selection matrix, to ensure feasibility of all undertaken decisions while using the toolbox

An in-situ exploration of the reflection and experience-based learning of professional football players and coaches

The aim of the current thesis was to critically examine the reflection and experience-based learning of professional football players and coaches at a football club. Specific attention was paid to the influence that the social environment had on players and coaches experiences and the extent to which they influenced each others experience-based learning and reflective practice. A case study approach using semi-structured interviews and ethnography including participant observation, informal interviews and audio/video recordings informed the current research. Schön s (1983) experience-based theory of learning and reflective practice was used to represent coaches and players reflective practice prior to the application of Foucault (1972, 1979, 1988, 1991a) as social theory. It was found that an institutionally reproduced discourse, which emphasized the importance of winning, governed both coaches and players experience-based learning at the club. Positive discourses of reflection were introduced by coaches and embodied by willing and docile players due to the added legitimacy that was associated with their knowledge. Players reflective practice represented a technology of power as it was dominated by their coaches presence and resulted in players interpretations being normalised to the extent that they became self-surveillant. Players compliance contributed to the construction and reproduction of an overarching disciplinary culture of surveillance that was initially introduced by the club s coaches and made possible through the constant assimilation of data and different forms of performance monitoring (i.e. GPS, video-based PA, physical testing)