392,552 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Landscape Study in Wireless and Mobile Learning in the post-16 sector
In the post-16 sector (further and higher education, and adult and community learning) there is a need to understand how wireless and mobile technologies can contribute to improving the student experience of learning, and help institutions fulfil their missions in an age of incomparably fast technological change. In the context of this interest and growing need, a Landscape Study project was commissioned by JISC through the Innovation strand of the JISC e-Learning Programme in 2004-5. Our project aims were to take a birds-eye view of developments and practice in the UK and internationally, and to communicate our findings to a broad and varied audience. The Summary report is accompanied by 3 associated reports on 'Current Uses', 'Potential Uses' and 'Strategic Aspects'. (The four reports are available in one single document here.
Sanitation as a Business: Unclogging the Blockages
The first Unclogging the Blockages conference took place in Kampala, Uganda in February 2014 with the aim of putting on the table some of the major challenges facing the scale up of sustainable sanitation as well as collaborating towards innovaive soluions. This report summarizes the discussions and takeaway messages from the conference, including concrete action plans developed around a number of thematic areas. [KEY FINDINGS]Market based approaches are key to addressing some of the main barriers for scaling sustainable sanitation solutions. Participants came away with a much richer understanding of the principles and key tenets of sanitation as a business. A push for greater integration in sanitation programming between the housing, energy, business, health, and education sectors will allow for sustainable city and district-wide sanitation services.Unlocking finance for businesses and households and embedding monitoring within all work is critical. One interesting outcome of the group work was a suggestion to form a Global Sanitation Financing Alliance.Supporting sanitation businesses to be successful in the realities of the market requires on-the-ground, real time, market-focused technology development and R&D. A variety of these technologies were on display at the meeting
Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice
22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3
Salford postgraduate annual research conference (SPARC) 2012 proceedings
These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2012 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC). They reflect the breadth and diversity of research interests showcased at the conference, at which over 130 researchers from Salford, the North West and other UK universities presented their work. 21 papers are collated here from the humanities, arts, social sciences, health, engineering, environment and life sciences, built environment and business
On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review
Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many
competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud
services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively
chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory
about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the
aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation
implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research
opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual
evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR)
method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud
services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant
evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially
represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services
evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work.
Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide
research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps
in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security
evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while
some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services
(e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is
particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some
previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE)
lessons
- …