Maple Syrup Value Systems and Value Chains - Considering Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Perspectives

Harvested from both intensive sugar maple stands and diverse mixed forest ecosystems across Ontario, maple syrup is an important rural and Aboriginal non-timber forest product that contributes to social, economic and environmental sustainability. This paper presents our ongoing work to map Ontario’s maple syrup value system from two different perspectives, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. In the economic sense, analyses of value systems are useful for members to identify the opportunities and challenges they are facing to advance industry growth and innovation. In the social and environmental sense, these analyses provide a window into how different worldviews and belief systems can lead to more effective and sustainable maple production. A value system is the inter-connected network of firms and activities that comprise an industry from the supplier to the consumer that is focused on quality and efficiency rather than costs. In this project, we pushed the boundaries of the traditional business approach, to incorporate sustainable development thinking and re-imagine the mapping according to Aboriginal ways of knowing. We undertook thirty four interviews representing Aboriginal and rural industry members and other key informants. We compare and contrast the rural and Aboriginal models of the value systems and conclude by providing insights useful for community forestry operations

Accounting Students’ Perceptions of Electronic Learning in Industrial Revolution 4.0

This study focused on the continuance usage intention toward electronic learning environments using Dağhan & Akkoyunlu integrated model to better understand the determinants of students’ continuance intention to use these environments. The hypothetical model was determined using Technology Continuance Theory, Information Systems Success Model, Cognitive Model, and Information Systems Expectation Con-firmation. Empirical data from university students who had used an online learning environment infrequently were tested against the research model by using path analysis. The results indicated that the continuance variable was explained by utilitarian value, satisfaction, perceived value and perceived usability. The satisfac-tion variable was explained by system quality, service quality, outcome expectations and perceived value. The confirmation of the usage of online learning environments could be explained by information quality, system quality and service quality variables. In line with the obtained findings and results, some suggestion of implementation was provided for the next studies

Agenator: An open source computer-controlled dry aging system for beef

Dry aging of beef is a process where beef is exposed to a controlled environment with the ultimate goal of drying the beef to improve its quality and value. Comprehensive investigations into the effects of various environmental conditions on dry aging are crucial for understanding and optimizing the process, but the lack of affordable equipment focused on data collection makes it difficult to do so. The Agenator was thus developed as an open source system with a suite of features for investigating dry aging such as: measuring and recording relative humidity, temperature, mass, air velocity, and fan rotational speed; precise control within 1% for relative humidity and 50 rpm for fan rotational speed; robust signal integrity preservation and data recovery features; modular design for easy addition and removal of individual chamber units; and non-permanent fixtures to allow easy adaptation of the system for other applications such as investigating dehydration of food products. The open source system comes with user-friendly computer software for interfacing with the system and creating sophisticated environmental control programs. The Agenator is available to the public at https://osf.io/87nck/

Effectiveness and Best Practices of Lean and Six Sigma Methodologies in Hospitals

Healthcare quality and costs are a growing problem in the United States. Healthcare organizations are facing increasing costs combined with declining quality (Schoenbaum). This unsustainable trend is putting a great burden on the health care system as a whole. The improvement of quality within the healthcare system would increase the value of the care (Schoenbaum).Improving healthcare quality, and thereby lowering the costs, is critical for the sustainability of healthcare organizations. There are many different ways that organizations can use quality to reduce costs and increase the quality of service to their patients. There are also various ways an organization can implement quality. The processes can lead to different results and focuses. The potential processes include lean based A3 Report, Kaizen events, and Six Sigma. These processes focus on continuous improvement of quality within a process. The ideal situation would utilize these processes to create a high quality environment while lowering costs. This report will investigate the impact of projects utilizing the A3, Kaizen, and Six Sigmamethodologies in order to improve processes efficiency,increase quality, and reduce costs of care.These methods can be applied in many different organizations, including the health care industry. The impact of these process improvement projects should be substantial and essential to the health care industry. The impact of the methodologies will be analyzed to see if they substantially reduce the costs and increase the quality. The focus of this research is on hospitals and will compare hospitals in a quality position, as defined by the 100 Top hospitals list and the MalcolmBaldrigeQuality Award recipients nationwide, and other regional hospitals in the Northeast not currently on the 100 Top lists or a Baldrige award winner. The goal of any organization should be to increase the quality of their service. An ACPE Quality of Care Surveyfound that 18.5% of respondents utilized Six Sigma to improve quality, 13.3% utilized Lean processes, 12.2% used vendor-provided systems, 26.7% used other methods including homegrown, and 29.2% did not utilize any programs (Martin). This project looks to identify if there are trends between those that utilize the programs and positioning as a top quality performance hospital and if so what quality management programs had the biggest impact at the different types of hospitals. While this project focused on hospitals as the health care organization to be surveyed and examined, similar principals would be expected to hold true for any patient facing organization

EVALUATING TEACHING PERFORMANCE. FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE USING STATISTICAL TOOLS

The teaching performance is influenced firstly by the quality of the educational system. The universities are trying to raise the expectations regarding the methods used for evaluating the teaching quality. In order for the results to be as much as credible the evaluation must defer to the existing theory and to follow the standardized procedures, starting from some basic principles. The most used framework is represented by the 3P model which contains three parts: 1. The input (factors that come under the students and the professor) 2. The learning process (activities focused on learning, teaching methods, practical ability, individual study) 3. The outcome (the output of the learning process).This study presents some results of a questionnaire based on the existing economic theory and applied to a sample of master business students from Romania. The students were asked to give grades from 1 to 5 to several aspects related to the educational process. These aspects took into consideration the following: if the didactic activity was interesting for the students/ the relationship between the objectives of the course and the activity evolved/ the clarity of the presentations/ the degree of studentsï¿1/2 participation required by the teacher/ the methods and materials used/ the availability of the teacher. The average grade is 4.39, indicating a very high level of satisfaction, taking into account that the grades ranged from 1 to 5. For 50% of the students, the average grade was below 4.53, while for the other half it was above the specified value. But one has to see the value returned for the majority of the students. The mode equals 5, meaning that most of the students involved in the analyzed programme are extremely satisfied with the quality of the educational process. With a significance value Sig. = 0.004higher education, teaching quality

Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics

Application of Value Focused Thinking and Fuzzy Systems to Assess System Architecture

AbstractSince a majority of resources are obligated during the design phase of a system lifecycle, critical assessment of candidate functional and system architectures is vital to identify optimal architectures before proceeding to subsequent lifecycle phases. Common challenges associated with generation and evaluation of system functional architectures include search of the expansive design space and assessment of key performance attributes that are particularly “fuzzy” and qualitative in early architecture development. Several assessment approaches have been presented in the literature to address the assessment challenge to include Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Value-Focused Thinking (VFT), and fuzzy logic. In this research we combine the use of value functions and fuzzy assessment to assess a functional and system architecture. There are several benefits of a methodology that combines value-focused thinking and fuzzy assessment. A distinct advantage of the methodology presented is the explicit inclusion of the customer in the assessment process through validation of the TPM value functions Involving the customer in TPM value function development and validation ensures the customer has direct input regarding the TPMs and their associated value across the range of discourse The methodology presented is flexible enough to assess architectures early in the process when things are “fuzzy” as well as later when subsystem and component performance are well defined. The methodology can also be used to analyze and assess impacts of interface changes within the system architecture. . The methodology is domain independent and can be coupled with executable models linked to scenarios. The assessment methodology is applied to the architecture for a soldier knowledge acquisition system for which the key performance attributes are affordability, performance, flexibility, updateability, and availability

The impact of corporate governance on the market value of financial institutions : empirical evidences from Italy

This paper analyses how the quality of the Corporate Governance system impacts on the market value of Italian financial institution listed on Italian Stock Exchange. As implementing a good Corporate Governance is costly, this study is useful to verify if the investment is worth its cost. This work wants to fill a gap in literature: in fact there are few studies that have focused on financial institutions despite the central role that they hold in the real economy, especially in Italy where the enterprises are highly dependent on the banking system for their financing needs