Human Error and Organizational Management

The concern for performance is a topic that raises interest in the business environment but also in other areas that – even if they seem distant from this world – are aware of, interested in or conditioned by the economy development. As individual performance is very much influenced by the human resource, we chose to analyze in this paper the mechanisms that generate – consciously or not –human error nowadays.Moreover, the extremely tense Romanian context, where failure is rather a rule than an exception, made us investigate the phenomenon of generating a human error and the ways to diminish its effects.human error, performance, management, information processing, organizational culture

Tracking Error and Active Portfolio Management

Persistent bear market conditions have led to a shift of focus in the tracking error literature. Until recently the portfolio allocation literature focused on tracking error minimization as a consequence of passive benckmark management under portfolio weights, transaction costs and short selling constraints. Abysmal benchmark performance shifted the literature's focus towards active portfolio strategies that aim at beating the benchmark while keeping tracking error within acceptable bounds. We investigate an active (dynamic) portfolio allocation strategy that exploits the predictability in the conditional variance-covariance matrix of asset returns. To illustrate our procedure we use Jorion's (2002) tracking error frontier methodology. We apply our model to a representative portfolio of Australian stocks over the period January 1999 through November 2002.

The NASTRAN Error Correction Information System (ECIS)

A data management procedure, called Error Correction Information System (ECIS), is described. The purpose of this system is to implement the rapid transmittal of error information between the NASTRAN Systems Management Office (NSMO) and the NASTRAN user community. The features of ECIS and its operational status are summarized. The mode of operation for ECIS is compared to the previous error correction procedures. It is shown how the user community can have access to error information much more rapidly when using ECIS. Flow charts and time tables characterize the convenience and time saving features of ECIS

ASR error management for improving spoken language understanding

This paper addresses the problem of automatic speech recognition (ASR) error detection and their use for improving spoken language understanding (SLU) systems. In this study, the SLU task consists in automatically extracting, from ASR transcriptions , semantic concepts and concept/values pairs in a e.g touristic information system. An approach is proposed for enriching the set of semantic labels with error specific labels and by using a recently proposed neural approach based on word embeddings to compute well calibrated ASR confidence measures. Experimental results are reported showing that it is possible to decrease significantly the Concept/Value Error Rate with a state of the art system, outperforming previously published results performance on the same experimental data. It also shown that combining an SLU approach based on conditional random fields with a neural encoder/decoder attention based architecture , it is possible to effectively identifying confidence islands and uncertain semantic output segments useful for deciding appropriate error handling actions by the dialogue manager strategy .Comment: Interspeech 2017, Aug 2017, Stockholm, Sweden. 201

Evaluating the performance of survey-based operational management procedures

The design and evaluation of survey-based management strategies is addressed in this article, using three case-study fisheries: North Sea herring, Bay of Biscay anchovy and North Sea cod, with a brief history and the main management issues with each fishery outlined. A range of operational management procedures for the case study stocks were designed and evaluated using trends that may be derived from survey indices (spawner biomass, year-class strength and total mortality) with an array of simple and more structured observation error regimes simulated. Model-free and model-based indicators of stock status were employed in the management procedures. On the basis of stochastic stock-specific simulations, we identified the following key determinants of successful management procedures: (i) adequate specification of the stock-recruit relationship (model structure, parameter estimates and variability), (ii) knowledge of the magnitude and structure of the variation in the survey indices, and (iii) explication of the particular management objectives, when assessing management performance. More conservative harvesting strategies are required to meet specified targets in the presence of increasing stochasticity, due to both process and observation error. It was seen that survey-based operational management procedures can perform well in the absence of commercial data, and can also inform aspects of survey design with respect to acceptable levels of error or bias in the surveys

Quality of medication use in primary care - mapping the problem, working to a solution: a systematic review of the literature

Background: The UK, USA and the World Health Organization have identified improved patient safety in healthcare as a priority. Medication error has been identified as one of the most frequent forms of medical error and is associated with significant medical harm. Errors are the result of the systems that produce them. In industrial settings, a range of systematic techniques have been designed to reduce error and waste. The first stage of these processes is to map out the whole system and its reliability at each stage. However, to date, studies of medication error and solutions have concentrated on individual parts of the whole system. In this paper we wished to conduct a systematic review of the literature, in order to map out the medication system with its associated errors and failures in quality, to assess the strength of the evidence and to use approaches from quality management to identify ways in which the system could be made safer. Methods: We mapped out the medicines management system in primary care in the UK. We conducted a systematic literature review in order to refine our map of the system and to establish the quality of the research and reliability of the system. Results: The map demonstrated that the proportion of errors in the management system for medicines in primary care is very high. Several stages of the process had error rates of 50% or more: repeat prescribing reviews, interface prescribing and communication and patient adherence. When including the efficacy of the medicine in the system, the available evidence suggested that only between 4% and 21% of patients achieved the optimum benefit from their medication. Whilst there were some limitations in the evidence base, including the error rate measurement and the sampling strategies employed, there was sufficient information to indicate the ways in which the system could be improved, using management approaches. The first step to improving the overall quality would be routine monitoring of adherence, clinical effectiveness and hospital admissions. Conclusion: By adopting the whole system approach from a management perspective we have found where failures in quality occur in medication use in primary care in the UK, and where weaknesses occur in the associated evidence base. Quality management approaches have allowed us to develop a coherent change and research agenda in order to tackle these, so far, fairly intractable problems

A packet error recovery scheme for vertical handovers mobility management protocols

Mobile devices are connecting to the Internet through an increasingly heterogeneous network environment. This connectivity via multiple types of wireless networks allows the mobile devices to take advantage of the high speed and the low cost of wireless local area networks and the large coverage of wireless wide area networks. In this context, we propose a new handoff framework for switching seamlessly between the different network technologies by taking advantage of the temporary availability of both the old and the new network technology through the use of an "on the fly" erasure coding method. The goal is to demonstrate that our framework, based on a real implementation of such coding scheme, 1) allows the application to achieve higher goodput rate compared to existing bicasting proposals and other erasure coding schemes; 2) is easy to configure and as a result 3) is a perfect candidate to ensure the reliability of vertical handovers mobility management protocols. In this paper, we present the implementation of such framework and show that our proposal allows to maintain the TCP goodput(with a negligible transmission overhead) while providing in a timely manner a full reliability in challenged conditions

A packet error recovery scheme for vertical handovers mobility management protocols

Mobile devices are connecting to the Internet through an increasingly heterogeneous network environment. This connectivity via multiple types of wireless networks allows the mobile devices to take advantage of the high speed and the low cost of wireless local area networks and the large coverage of wireless wide area networks. In this context, we propose a new handoff framework for switching seamlessly between the different network technologies by taking advantage of the temporary availability of both the old and the new network technology through the use of an “on the fly” erasure coding method. The goal is to demonstrate that our framework, based on a real implementation of such coding scheme, 1) allows the application to achieve higher goodput rate compared to existing bicasting proposals and other erasure coding schemes; 2) is easy to configure and as a result 3) is a perfect candidate to ensure the reliability of vertical handovers mobility management protocols. In this paper, we present the implementation of such framework and show that our proposal allows to maintain the TCP goodput (with a negligible transmission overhead) while providing in a timely manner a full reliability in challenged conditions

DMA ERROR MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

DMA protection is a very important industry security feature. It can block any unauthorized DMA access. Here we use Intel design as the overall example, this feature is implemented by Intel VT-d (Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O). Currently, customer may get two kinds of error message while an unauthorized DMA access blocked on HP commercial personal computer products. One is BSOD 0xE6 (Windows feature) and the other is a warning PPI in pre-boot (HP feature). Once the error happened, the worst case is the system stuck every time. Customer will wait for a very long time for issue fixed. (This kind of issue is usually hard to reproduce with very low fail rate. It may be fixed by BIOS or OS driver, so it will cost lots of time to fix the root cause.) It will also impact the factory process. Customer can’t use their own PCIE add-on Card which is not DMAR compatible. To solve above problems, BIOS provided an interface for the DMAR exception list to allow a PCIE device to execute DMA operation without following DMAR mechanism. Required a new SW driver can monitor if there is any DMAR error happened or not. If yes, SW driver can notify IT to approve this PCIE device and update the result to BIOS. BIOS will also monitor the DMAR error during pre-boot phase

Bayesian Measurement Error Correction in Structured Additive Distributional Regression with an Application to the Analysis of Sensor Data on Soil-Plant Variability

The flexibility of the Bayesian approach to account for covariates with measurement error is combined with semiparametric regression models for a class of continuous, discrete and mixed univariate response distributions with potentially all parameters depending on a structured additive predictor. Markov chain Monte Carlo enables a modular and numerically efficient implementation of Bayesian measurement error correction based on the imputation of unobserved error-free covariate values. We allow for very general measurement errors, including correlated replicates with heterogeneous variances. The proposal is first assessed by a simulation trial, then it is applied to the assessment of a soil-plant relationship crucial for implementing efficient agricultural management practices. Observations on multi-depth soil information forage ground-cover for a seven hectares Alfalfa stand in South Italy were obtained using sensors with very refined spatial resolution. Estimating a functional relation between ground-cover and soil with these data involves addressing issues linked to the spatial and temporal misalignment and the large data size. We propose a preliminary spatial interpolation on a lattice covering the field and subsequent analysis by a structured additive distributional regression model accounting for measurement error in the soil covariate. Results are interpreted and commented in connection to possible Alfalfa management strategies