Serving Limited English Proficient Clients

When serving walk-ins, the goal is to provide the same services, information and referrals as we would provide to the English-speaking public. This is true whether the walk-in ultimately turns out to be eligible for our services or not. When in doubt, ask yourself what services, information or referrals you would provide to an English speaking person in the same situation. Then make sure the Limited English Proficient person gets that same service, information or referrals

Web 2.0 and micro-businesses: An exploratory investigation

This is the author's final version of the article. This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.This article was chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2013.Purpose – The paper aims to report on an exploratory study into how small businesses use Web 2.0 information and communication technologies (ICT) to work collaboratively with other small businesses. The study had two aims: to investigate the benefits available from the use of Web 2.0 in small business collaborations, and to characterize the different types of such online collaborations. Design/methodology/approach – The research uses a qualitative case study methodology based on semi-structured interviews with the owner-managers of 12 UK-based small companies in the business services sector who are early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies. Findings – Benefits from the use of Web 2.0 are categorized as lifestyle benefits, internal operational efficiency, enhanced capability, external communications and enhanced service offerings. A 2×2 framework is developed to categorize small business collaborations using the dimensions of the basis for inter-organizational collaboration (control vs cooperation) and the level of Web 2.0 ICT use (simple vs sophisticated). Research limitations/implications – A small number of firms of similar size, sector and location were studied, which limits generalizability. Nonetheless, the results offer a pointer to the likely future use of Web 2.0 tools by other small businesses. Practical implications – The research provides evidence of the attraction and potential of Web 2.0 for collaborations between small businesses. Originality/value – The paper is one of the first to report on use of Web 2.0 ICT in collaborative working between small businesses. It will be of interest to those seeking a better understanding of the potential of Web 2.0 in the small business community.WestFocu

Building the Infrastructure: The Effects of Role Identification Behaviors on Team Cognition Development and Performance

The primary purpose of this study was to extend theory and research regarding the emergence of mental models and transactive memory in teams. Utilizing Kozlowski et al.’s (1999) model of team compilation, we examine the effect of role identification behaviors and argue that such behaviors represent the initial building blocks of team cognition during the role compilation phase of team development. We then hypothesized that team mental models and transactive memory would convey the effects of these behaviors onto team performance in the team compilation phase of development. Results from 60 teams working on a command and control simulation supported our hypotheses

Healthcare PANs: Personal Area Networks for trauma care and home care

The first hour following the trauma is of crucial importance in trauma care. The sooner treatment begins, the better the ultimate outcome for the patient. Generally the initial treatment is handled by paramedical personnel arriving at the site of the accident with an ambulance. There is evidence to show that if the expertise of the on-site paramedic team can be supported by immediate and continuous access to and communication with the expert medical team at the hospital, patient outcomes can be improved. After care also influences the ultimate recovery of the patient. After-treatment follow up often occurs in-hospital in spite of the fact that care at home can offer more advantages and can accelerate recovery. Based on emerging and future wireless communication technologies, in a previous paper [1] we presented an initial vision of two future healthcare settings, supported by applications which we call Virtual Trauma Team and Virtual Homecare Team. The Virtual Trauma Team application involves high quality wireless multimedia communications between ambulance paramedics and the hospital facilitated by paramedic Body Area Networks (BANs) [2] and an ambulance-based Vehicle Area Network (VAN). The VAN supports bi-directional streaming audio and video communication between the ambulance and the hospital even when moving at speed. The clinical motivation for Virtual Trauma Team is to increase survival rates in trauma care. The Virtual Homecare Team application enables homecare coordinated by home nursing services and supported by the patient's PAN which consists of a patient BAN in combination with an ambient intelligent home environment. The homecare PAN provides intelligent monitoring and support functions and the possibility to ad hoc network to the visiting health professionals’ own BANs as well as high quality multimedia communication links to remote members of the virtual team. The motivation for Virtual Homecare Team is to improve quality of life and independence for patients by supporting care at home; the economic motivation is to replace expensive hospital-based care with homecare by virtual teams using wireless technology to support the patient and the carers. In this paper we develop the vision further and focus in particular on the concepts of personal and body area networks

University of Twente at the TREC 2007 Enterprise Track : modeling relevance propagation for the expert search task

This paper describes several approaches which we used for the expert search task of the TREC 2007 Enterprise track.\ud We studied several methods of relevance propagation from documents to related candidate experts. Instead of one-step propagation from documents to directly related candidates, used by many systems in the previous years, we do not limit the relevance flow and disseminate it further through mutual documents-candidates connections. We model relevance propagation using random walk principles, or in formal terms, discrete Markov processes. We experiment with\ud innite and nite number of propagation steps. We also demonstrate how additional information, namely hyperlinks among documents, organizational structure of the enterprise and relevance feedback may be utilized by the presented techniques