First, Do Less Harm: Confronting the Inconvenient Problems of Patient Safety

[Excerpt] This book is an exploration of why patient safety is advancing at what seems to be an almost glacial pace, despite the often vast and determined efforts of health care workers and managers. A collection of essays from prominent researchers, scholars, and even patients, this book aims to identify some of the gaps in the patient safety movement, the disconnected dots that do not coalesce despite decades of hard work and billions of dollars. It also identifies concerns that have not been integrated into the patient safety discourse or agenda of more established groups

Washington University Record, September 4, 1997

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1765/thumbnail.jp

Wayward Nosh

Design Challenge How do you get 4-8 year olds to understand their food allergy well enough to communicate it to others? When parents learn their child has a food allergy, for them, it is a stressful, life-changing discovery. For the child, this knowledge has no meaning, yet. Here, there is the opportunity to break down connotations associated with allergies. Through design intervention, this book explores the possibilities of transforming food from problems into assets. For instance, Superman might be “allergic” to kryptonite, but he also has superpowers. Rather than label the child with allergies, why not rebrand allergies to turn a perceived negative circumstance into a relatively positive one? There is a moment when a child with food allergies needs to leave their parent’s side for the first time to go to kindergarten. They are plunged into a world of rules and expectations. That alone can be overwhelming for a developing mind, but to add the challenge of having a food allergy on top of it all makes this day all the more intense. The project looks to redesign the overall food allergy experience for both children and their parents, from the moment a parent has that life-changing conversation with their child to when the child is eating lunch at school everyday with their peers. Research for this project was a combination of listening the stories of those people affected by food allergies, gathering literature on the topic of food allergies, market research, and reaching out to professionals with insight into various related topics, such as teachers, librarians, and doctors. The design process was a cycle of sketching, creating, testing, analyzing, refining, and repeat. The idea of having a system of objects that work together to reinforce a narrative began in early design stages. The design process then became about developing a character to use as a vehicle for communicating to children. Wolfelopes are fictional creatures, part wolf, part antelope, designed specifically for this project. In the end, the final prototypes included a children’s book, The Wolfelopes: An Allergy Adventure, a character-based lunch box, and packaging. Each object addresses different design goals, but when they come together, an larger story is created. The collection of objects work together to rewrite the experience children and parents have of learning about and coping with food allergies. The Wolfelopes, the book is meant to be used as a tool by parents to help introduce food allergies to their child. The book can then be brought to show-and-tell and shared with the class. This will help the child with food allergies learn to communicate their allergy to their teachers and peers. While the wolfelope lunch box functions as a toy for the child, it is also a physical representation of a parent’s effort to prepare their child for the world. Further the lunch box signals to carers (i.e. teachers) which students might have food allergies. Since the design works to associate these characters with food allergies, the child will subtly adopt the habit of being conscious of their food allergy during meal times. The book and the lunch box are packaged in a box that, when opened, becomes a toy tray and a poster. The intention of having the revelation of the dominant objects be a process reminiscent of receiving a present is to attach positive connotations to The Wolfelope Kit. In conclusion, these objects each play a role in empowering children with food allergies by turning a perceived flaw into an asset

Annual Report of the University, 2005-2006, Volumes 1-7

PROPOSED POLICIES The Office of Government & Community Relations is in charge of advancing the University\u27s interests at all levels of federal, state and local government. The following policy guidelines for working with University units will achieve a coordinated and effective institutional advancement program. • To inform the Office of Government & Community Relations of all planned contacts and correspondence with elected officials and policy-making employees of federal, state and local government, including those who are alumni or friends of the University. Those items which pertain to sponsored research should be coordinated with the Vice President for Research. • To consult the Office of Government & Community Relations on any verbal or written statements made on behalf of the University that concern federal, state or local policies, legislation or regulations. • To advise the Office of Government & Community Relations on any activities, conferences, seminars, lectures or projects that involve the community and/or impact the University area. • Faculty or staff members who contact federal, state or local policy-making employees as experts in a specific field, or who act on behalf of themselves or another organization, should include a disclaimer which clearly states that they are not acting on behalf of the University

Strata Managers and Educational Mishaps

In Australia, educational qualifications are a prescribed requirement for licensing within various occupations and professions, and each state and territory has varying degrees of educational aims and objectives. This research paper examines the minimum standards of education and knowledge, which are imposed as a pre-requisite for the licensing of a Strata Manager. The paper traces the historical progression which occurred during the last century to the current decade, and includes an assessment of societies changing needs of the role within the profession. In this regard, it is argued that the educational requirements during the mid 1990s to the early 2000s best served the needs of the consumer in comparison to these last 10 years. The discussion is complemented with data from New South Wales, mapping the educational knowledge fields and comparing this information to the duties and responsibilities of a Strata Manager

Education in Undergraduate Construction Management Degrees - Is it "Construction" or "Management" that is in bold type?

The proposition of this study is that the content of education in construction management degree programs has changed over time. Content has moved away from construction technology and has moved more towards generic areas of management. Here, issues arise such as prescriptive versus principle-base teaching and the degree to which experiential learning can be provided. This study explores quantifiable data to test the above proposition over an extended period of time for a selected University in Australia. The study looks at course handbook data for the construction management degree including the likes of assigned subject credit points and contact hours. From the analysis, debate and related sources of supporting information are used to extrapolate themes demonstrating the resultant changes in graduate profile arising from the analysis. Comment is also provided on the impact of such changes including the differentiation of university graduates in the past and present. The industry perspective is also canvassed in terms of how changes have affected their expectations relating to employment of University qualified graduates

ARTIFICIAL IMMUNE SYSTEMS FOR INFORMATION FILTERING: FOCUSING ON PROFILE ADAPTATION

The human immune system has characteristics such as self-organisation, robustness and adaptivity that may be useful in the development of adaptive systems. One suitable application area for adaptive systems is Information Filtering (IF). Within the context of IF, learning and adapting user profiles is an important research area. In an individual profile, an IF system has to rely on the ability of the user profile to maintain a satisfactory level of filtering accuracy for as long as it is being used. This thesis explores a possible way to enable Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) to filter information in the context of profile adaptation. Previous work has investigated this issue from the perspective of self-organisation based on Autopoetic Theory. In contrast, this current work approaches the problem from the perspective of diversity inspired by the concept of dynamic clonal selection and gene library to maintain sufficient diversity. An immune inspired IF for profile adaptation is proposed and developed. This algorithm is demonstrated to work in detecting relevant documents by using a single profile to recognize a user’s interests and to adapt to changes in them. We employed a virtual user tested on a web document corpus to test the profile on learning of an emerging new topic of interest and forgetting uninteresting topics. The results clearly indicate the profile’s ability to adapt to frequent variations and radical changes in user interest. This work has focused on textual information, but it may have the potential to be applied in other media such as audio and images in which adaptivity to dynamic environments is crucial. These are all interesting future directions in which this work might develop

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2012

Proceedings of the 6th Annual Modeling, Simulation & Visualization Student Capstone Conference held on April 19, 2012 at VMASC in Suffolk, Virginia

Bowdoin College Catalogue (2007-2008)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues/1288/thumbnail.jp