UKCES: Understanding Human Centred Management

The Understanding Human Centred Management Project is a research project funded by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills to investigate the effectiveness of a behavioural framework on the communication and decision making of supply chains.The Human Centred Management project was required to solve the problem of supply chain inefficiencies brought about by unproductive human behaviours. Specifically, the project sought to used Behavioural Economics to improve the decisions made by making people aware of their illogical ‘Biases’ and ‘Heuristics’. Use of Transactional Analysis to make people more aware of their impressions and their audience to reduce antagonism in communication. Combine these methods using Behavioural Management Theory to create one unified approach which will create a 21st century solution to behavioural inefficiencies. The project primarily targeted two supply chains, led by two larger or ‘Prime’ organisations that had SME’s feeding the production process. The two supply chains underwent a number of interventions in the form of one-to-one sessions, workshops, master classes and simulations, in order to understand and influence the behavioural inefficiencies they were suffering. An Action Research methodology was used to both provide a flexible approach and also generate qualitative data. Before each intervention, questionnaire data and in some cases a behavioural health check was carried out in order to gain baseline data. Once complete the same questionnaires were completed and interviews with key participants were carried out. The interventions were a success producing a large amount of positive change and behavioural insights for analysis. Such improvements included dramatically improving the supply chain communication leading to claims of improved supply chain effectiveness over all, development of closer ties between supply chains in a geographically separated area and improved logical decision making where managers are aware of their biases and take the time to reflect on all the options. The three areas of psychology introduced proved to combine extremely well, complimenting one another’s weaker areas in order to produce the unified approach envisaged. Behavioural Economics was found to be an excellent analytical tool capable of deconstructing the root causes of behaviours. Transactional Analysis provided a suite of easily implementable and practical techniques for improving communication. Behavioural Management Theory provided a flexible approach to implementing the changes required. From the experience of the project and analysis of the data a Behavioural Framework was generated in order to allow other supply chains to benefit from this effective 21st century solution to behavioural inefficiencies.UK Commission for Employment and Skill

The role of anaerobic digestion in achieving soil conservation and sustainable agricultural development in the UK.

Anaerobic digestion represents one form of renewable energy technology but has many wider benefits. This paper reviews the processes involved in anaerobic digestion, the type of systems in place and the use of digestate to improve soil quality. A case is made for the technology in the UK in the context of soil conservation and sustainable agricultural production. Its broader contribution to sustainable development in the United Kingdom is also considered. Low levels of awareness of the benefits of anaerobic digestion, poor access to funds, inadequate incentives, an unfavourable legislative and policy framework for the technology, limited application of digestate for agricultural purposes and the need for further research on digestate use are identified as key factors hindering uptake of the technology. Anaerobic digestion is presented as a technology that can support soil conservation and sustainable agricultural development while also generating both energy and income, enhancing waste and nutrient recycling and promoting environmental protection

Farmers’ perception of soil: Implications for soil conservation and sustainable agriculture in the UK

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in Global Journal of Agricultural Research. To access the final edited and published work see http://www.eajournals.org/journals/global-journal-of-agricultural-research-gjar/We identify UK farmers' perception of soil, awareness of soil in terms of how they describe it, their awareness of its benefits other than for crop production,their familiarity with soil conservation and their opinions on soil protection and the value of organic fertilizers. Data were collected with the aid of social media using both Twitter and electronic mail to deistribute a survey link to farmers,UK yellow pages, Natural England directory and Twitter were used to search for farms. Data were analysed using SPSS and Wordle. Results showed that farmers' describe soils in abstract, scientific, physical attribute and functional terms. Awareness of soil benefits other than crop production was significantly related to age, and farm ownership. Educational level was significantly related to familiarity with soil conservation and opinion on whether soil should be protected like other natural resources. The implications of these results for soil conservation and sustainable agriculture are discussed and used as the basis for policy recommendations

Optimal omegas – barriers and novel methods to narrow omega-3 gaps. A narrative review

Copyright © 2024 Derbyshire, Birch, Bonwick, English, Metcalfe and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Dietary intakes of omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (O3LC-PUFAs) such as eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acid are central to development and health across the life course. O3LC-PUFAs have been linked to neurological development, maternal and child health and the etiology of certain non-communicable diseases including age-related cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. However, dietary inadequacies exist in the United Kingdom and on a wider global scale. One predominant dietary source of O3LC-PUFAs is fish and fish oils. However, growing concerns about overfishing, oceanic contaminants such as dioxins and microplastics and the trend towards plant-based diets appear to be acting as cumulative barriers to O3LC-PUFAs from these food sources. Microalgae are an alternative provider of O3LC-PUFA-rich oils. The delivery of these into food systems is gaining interest. The present narrative review aims to discuss the present barriers to obtaining suitable levels of O3LC-PUFAs for health and wellbeing. It then discusses potential ways forward focusing on innovative delivery methods to utilize O3LC-PUFA-rich oils including the use of fortification strategies, bioengineered plants, microencapsulation, and microalgae

Energy Proportionality and Workload Consolidation for Latency-Critical Applications

Energy proportionality and workload consolidation are important objectives towards increasing efficiency in large-scale datacenters. Our work focuses on achieving these goals in the presence of applications with microsecond-scale tail latency requirements. Such applications represent a growing subset of datacenter workloads and are typically deployed on dedicated servers, which is the simplest way to ensure low tail latency across all loads. Unfortunately, it also leads to low energy efficiency and low resource utilization during the frequent periods of medium or low load. We present the OS mechanisms and dynamic control needed to adjust core allocation and voltage/frequency settings based on the measured delays for latency-critical workloads. This allows for energy proportionality and frees the maximum amount of resources per server for other background applications, while respecting service-level objectives. The two key mechanism allow us to detect increases in queuing latencies and to re-assign flow groups between the threads of a latency-critical application in milliseconds without dropping or reordering packets. We compare the efficiency of our solution to the Pareto-optimal frontier of 224 distinct static configurations. Dynamic resource control saves 44%–54% of processor energy, which corresponds to 85%–93% of the Pareto-optimal upper bound. Dynamic resource control also allows background jobs to run at 32%–46% of their standalone throughput, which corresponds to 82%–92% of the Pareto bound