Exploring The Role Of Associate Deans In UK Universities - end of project report

Aims and Objectives This bid brings together colleagues from the Open University Business School and the University of Reading to explore the under-researched role of the Associate Dean in UK Universities. Specifically, it aims to explore how the role is defined, perceived and experienced across a range of post and pre 1992 Universities in order to highlight and disseminate models of good practice, identify challenges, and make recommendations for improved policy and practice

The role of the associate dean in UK universities: distributed leadership in action?

This paper reports on findings from a Leadership Foundation for Higher Education funded project exploring the role of associate deans in UK universities. While the number of associate deans leading cross-curricular and inter-disciplinary initiatives appears to be on the increase, there has been very little research focusing on the exact nature of the role and its importance, or otherwise, in the leadership and management of universities. Drawing on mixed-methods data from 15 semi-structured interviews and a follow-up online survey (n = 172), this paper reports on how the role is defined and positioned in relation to university organisational structures and identifies what the similarities and differences are between associate deans working at traditional and modern universities. As the first national survey of the role, it is argued that this paper makes a significant and original contribution to knowledge. By drawing on the concept of distributed leadership, the paper also offers new theoretical insights into how different types of universities in the UK are responding to external pressures as a consequence of the fast-changing and increasingly complex sector environment

Exploring the role of Associate Dean in UK Universities - Initial Findings

Fundamental changes to the HE sector over recent years have forced universities to review their organisational management structures. Consequently, middle leadership roles such as the Associate Dean (AD) have gained in importance. Below the level of Dean, but above the level of department head, ADs are involved in largely strategic as opposed to operational duties. In supporting the Dean, they can have a critical effect on success and provide a link between the academic voice and the ever-changing demands being placed upon University faculties. However, it is a role that is not well understood with previous research tending to look at more clearly defined positions. The purpose of this paper is to report on initial data from an on-going Leadership Foundation funded project investigating the role of Associate Dean in UK universities. To answer the study’s research questions, an embedded, sequential mixed methods design has been adopted

Transforming Philanthropic Transactions

Evaluates the approach and effectiveness of SVP's first five years working to inspire philanthropy and volunteerism and build organizational capacity among nonprofits. Describes SVP's model that fuses donor education and capacity building activities

A UNIFIED HARDWARE/SOFTWARE PRIORITY SCHEDULING MODEL FOR GENERAL PURPOSE SYSTEMS

Migrating functionality from software to hardware has historically held the promise of enhancing performance through exploiting the inherent parallel nature of hardware. Many early exploratory efforts in repartitioning traditional software based services into hardware were hampered by expensive ASIC development costs. Recent advancements in FPGA technology have made it more economically feasible to explore migrating functionality across the hardware/software boundary. The flexibility of the FPGA fabric and availability of configurable soft IP components has opened the potential to rapidly and economically investigate different hardware/software partitions. Within the real time operating systems community, there has been continued interest in applying hardware/software co-design approaches to address scheduling issues such as latency and jitter. Many hardware based approaches have been reported to reduce the latency of computing the scheduling decision function itself. However continued adherence to classic scheduler invocation mechanisms can still allow variable latencies to creep into the time taken to make the scheduling decision, and ultimately into application timelines. This dissertation explores how hardware/software co-design can be applied past the scheduling decision itself to also reduce the non-predictable delays associated with interrupts and timers. By expanding the window of hardware/software co-design to these invocation mechanisms, we seek to understand if the jitter introduced by classical hardware/software partitionings can be removed from the timelines of critical real time user processes. This dissertation makes a case for resetting the classic boundaries of software thread level scheduling, software timers, hardware timers and interrupts. We show that reworking the boundaries of the scheduling invocation mechanisms helps to rectify the current imbalance of traditional hardware invocation mechanisms (timers and interrupts) and software scheduling policy (operating system scheduler). We re-factor these mechanisms into a unified hardware software priority scheduling model to facilitate improvements in performance, timeliness and determinism in all domains of computing. This dissertation demonstrates and prototypes the creation of a new framework that effects this basic policy change. The advantage of this approach lies within it's ability to unify, simplify and allow for more control within the operating systems scheduling policy

Preston Alan Harris in a Senior Baritone Recital

This is the program for the senior baritone recital of Preston Alan Harris. Mr. Harris was accompanied by Lowella Cherry on the piano. This recital took place on February 5, 1999, in the McBeth Recital Hall in the Mabee Fine Arts Center

Projective toric varieties of codimension 2 with maximal Castelnuovo--Mumford regularity

The Eisenbud--Goto conjecture states that $\operatorname{reg} X\le\operatorname{deg} X -\operatorname{codim} X+1$ for a nondegenerate irreducible projective variety $X$ over an algebraically closed field. While this conjecture is known to be false in general, it has been proven in several special cases, including when $X$ is a projective toric variety of codimension $2$. We classify the projective toric varieties of codimension $2$ having maximal regularity, that is, for which equality holds in the Eisenbud--Goto bound. We also give combinatorial characterizations of the arithmetically Cohen--Macaulay toric varieties of maximal regularity in characteristic $0$.Comment: 26 page

Efficacy of a Series of Alkylammonium Compounds Against Wood Decay Fungi and Termites

The efficacy of four alkylammonium compounds was determined for eight common wood decay fungi and Reticulitermes sp. termites in laboratory tests. All of the compounds tested were found to be effective against both fungi and termites, but only dialkyldimethylammonium chloride was fully effective against all of the brown- and white-rot fungi tested in this study. On the basis of this and other studies, it is concluded that some of the alkylammonium compounds are satisfactory wood preservatives for the treatment of softwoods used in out-of-ground contact applications. More extensive field studies will be required before their potential as ground contact wood preservatives can be determined

Controllability and optimality in economic stabilisation theory

This thesis is a contribution to the theory of economic policy under certainty, viewed in abstract rather than specific terms. Concern is not for particular applications, such as the debate over monetarism and fiscalism but for theoretical principles. More precisely, the thesis is built around the two fundamental issues of existence and design. By existence is meant the primary ability to stabilise a given economic system; by design, the techniques employed to construct a stabilising policy once existence is assured. This thesis contends, firstly, that the question of existence has been ignored in the theory of dynamic stabilisation; and secondly, that several aspects of dynamic design theory yield profitably to further analysis