Health policy governance in the EU: composing a Jigsaw Puzzle?

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the economic and the political integration and also the Europeanisation on health policies and health systems in the EU. How European Union objectives can affect policies places under exclusively national competence? Health policy appears to be an enclave within the European integration, because health is perceived as an area with firm member state control, with a minimal EU role in the incremental and irresistible process of harmonization and Europeanisation. Although, health systems in the EU share common values and different health priorities and backgrounds the question that arises is : can we talk about market integration of health policies? I argue that the impact of European integration on national healthcare and the ways in which governments adjust their institutionalized healthcare governance do it – in terms of regulation of access, funding, membership entitlements, and management can be an interesting analysis of the evolution of health care systems and policies in the European Union

Towards an integrated perspective on fleet asset management: engineering and governance considerations

The traditional engineering perspective on asset management concentrates on the operational performance the assets. This perspective aims at managing assets through their life-cycle, from technical specification, to acquisition, operation including maintenance, and disposal. However, the engineering perspective often takes for granted organizational-level factors. For example, a focus on performance at the asset level may lead to ignore performance measures at the business unit level. The governance perspective on asset management usually concentrates on organizational factors, and measures performance in financial terms. In doing so, the governance perspective tends to ignore the engineering considerations required for optimal asset performance. These two perspectives often take each other for granted. However experience demonstrates that an exclusive focus on one or the other may lead to sub-optimal performance. For example, the two perspectives have different time frames: engineering considers the long term asset life-cycle whereas the organizational time frame is based on a yearly financial calendar. Asset fleets provide a relevant and important context to investigate the interaction between engineering and governance views on asset management as fleets have distributed system characteristics. In this project we investigate how engineering and governance perspectives can be reconciled and integrated to enable optimal asset and organizational performance in the context of asset fleets

Using Probabilistic Graphical Models to Solve NP-complete Puzzle Problems

Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) are commonly used in machine learning to solve problems stemming from medicine, meteorology, speech recognition, image processing, intelligent tutoring, gambling, games, and biology. PGMs are applicable for both directed graph and undirected graph. In this work, I focus on the undirected graphical model. The objective of this work is to study how PGMs can be applied to find solutions to two puzzle problems, sudoku and jigsaw puzzles. First, both puzzle problems are represented as undirected graphs, and then I map the relations of nodes to PGMs and Belief Propagation (BP). This work represents the puzzle grid as a bipartite graph, which contains disjoint sets S and C such that the graph’s edges connect vertices in S only with vertices in C, and vice versa. S contains all the cells. C contains all constraint groups. Then, I apply the well-known sum-product message passing (MP) algorithm, which is also known as BP. In the jigsaw puzzle problem, I aim to reconstruct an image from a collection of square image patches. I use the neighborhood pairwise compatibility and local evidence similarity to evaluate the correctness of a reconstruction. The sudoku and the jigsaw puzzle problems are known to be NP-complete [16, 6]. In this work, I implement the algorithms mentioned above, and show that PGMs are quite successful in rapidly tackling these two problems. I am able to solve 90% of hard sudoku puzzles within 17 rounds of MP. The jigsaw images that are reconstructed by the chosen algorithm are reasonable

THE EXAMINATION OF ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN TERMS OF RELATIONAL THINKING SKILL IN TEACHER CANDIDATES

This study examined participants' ecological awareness by predicting their relational thinking skills. The study was conducted on 127 teacher candidates in the Department of Science Teaching on a voluntary basis. It was designed as a case study using phenomenological method. A survey form comprising open-ended questions was used to collect data, and content analysis method was applied to analyse the data based on the process of information coding. The results of the study indicated that the teacher candidates could establish cause and effect relationships with regard to ecological relationships, displayed relational thinking skills and had high ecological awareness.  Article visualizations

Machine Shop Learning Kits

Currently in the Cal Poly Machine shops, students are struggling to find ways to fulfill the 10 hours of shop experience required to gain their Yellow Tag certification. Red Tag is the first level of certification students generally achieve their freshman year. It allows them to use basic machine tools such as drills, shears, benders, etc. Then after completing 10 hours of shop experience they can take the Yellow Tag test, which gains them access to use a welder, mill, and lathe. The heads of the machine shop, the shop technicians, and the mechanical engineering students will all have different but mutually beneficial advantages from these kits. Currently, the students ask shop technicians for ideas, and the employees of the shop then give them a stack of project folders on file. These folders contain photos of various wood and metal projects with limited instructions, and can be confusing for a student with no previous shop experience. Students currently have problems because these folders contain limited instructions, and so they are unable to immediately know the correct process to start making the project. Another problem associated with this current solution, is that many students are unable to acquire the proper materials due to lack of transportation or lack of knowledge about which materials they would need. Many students start college without shop or machinery experience, and so entering the machine shops can be intimidating. The managers of the Hangar and Mustang 60 would like to decrease any confusion with a set of kits containing basic and detailed instructions. These projects would ideally be creative and interesting projects students would enjoy making, and in the process learn how to use the various machinery available in both shops. Originally we assumed these students had never used a tool before. We then surveyed around 300 mechanical engineering students to gauge a more accurate depiction of average skill level. We will be designing these kits around the data found in our survey as discussed later in this report. These kits would be available and useful to all students attending Cal Poly who wish to increase their tool and manufacturing knowledge. Our goal, by the end of three quarters, is to create kits for mechanical engineering students to earn hours working in the shop and to become familiarized with the tools and resources there. We will have four kits designed for students with their Red Tag certification, which allows them to use wood tools and general sheet metal work. In addition we will have one kit for students who have their yellow tag, and wish to learn how to use the welders, mills, and lathes. This will give us a final count of 5 projects. Our overall objective is to create projects that contribute to furthering a student’s machining education, and give them first-hand experience with the tools in Mustang 60 and the Hangar. By the end we will deliver a total of five kits containing detailed instructions for kit assembly and product assembly. The different kits will require a variety of experience and certification, more specifically four red tag kits and 1 advanced yellow tag kit

Automated support for experimental approaches in daylighting performances assessment

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, February 2006."October 2005."Includes bibliographical references (leaf 20).The study of daylight and solar reflection has been a topic of increasing interest over the past two decades. A novel mechanical support has been constructed to help better understand this topic that consists of a five foot in diameter circular table driven to rotate and tilt by computer controlled motors. The first use of this machine is to conduct shadow studies on architectural models. Using the tilt and rotation axis concurrently, a model can be rotated through a path that emulates the sun throughout the course of a day. The second use of the machine is to measure the solar flux emitted from and transmitted through a sample at different angles of incidence. An elliptical shell will be cut in half and secured to the table with focal points A and B. The incoming light will shine on or through the sample placed at focal point A, bounce off of the reflective inside of the shell, then be redirected into a camera placed at focal point B. Two cameras will be used to measure the visible and infrared spectra of the reflected light.by Dean M. Ljubicic.S.B