SLIDES: Impacts of Oil Shale on Carbon Emissions

Presenter: Dr. Jeremy Boak, Center for Oil Shale Technology & Research, Colorado School of Mines 43 slide

Team learning and service improvements in health care

Purpose– This study aims to propose a typology of team learning processes, based on a study of teams of health care therapists across England who were engaged in improving their services.Design/methodology/approach– Information was gathered from 35 teams of health care therapists, through analysis of reports produced by the teams and by interviews with team leaders. The actions taken to achieve service improvements were analysed through a lens of team learning.Findings– Team learning is an appropriate frame of reference for analysing actions designed to bring about change and improvement. Seven distinct team learning activities are defined.Research limitations/implications– The implication of the study is that it is useful to apply a theoretical framework of organisational learning to service improvements undertaken by work teams. The study indicates learning processes that were important elements in these changes. The study limitation was that information was gathered mainly from the leaders of each team; other team members may have contributed different perceptions.Practical implications– Leaders of organisations and of teams should adopt team learning as a useful perspective for improving services and should consider how to encourage and support team learning.Originality/value– This is one of a small number of empirical studies of team learning processes in work organisations.</jats:sec

SLIDES: Impacts of Oil Shale on Carbon Emissions

Presenter: Dr. Jeremy Boak, Center for Oil Shale Technology & Research, Colorado School of Mines 43 slide

Exploring how Interactions and Responses within the Servicescape combine to form Customer Experience – A Text Mining Approach

The core research objective in this thesis is to address the ways in which Customer Experience (CX) emerges through the combinational effects of multiple customer interactions at touchpoints and their resulting CX responses. The empirical study designed in this work is positioned to build upon existing literature within the Service Management field. According to extant work, CX can be viewed from both the provider’s perspective (e.g. ‘intended’ or designed), and the customer’s perspective (e.g. ‘realised’ or subjective). The thesis integrates both accounts through the presentation of a new conceptual model which forms the basis for the design of the empirical study. Several limitations are addressed in this work. First, building on the notion that CX emerges across multiple touchpoint interactions (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016) the study explores the impact multiple interaction types, and their associated responses, have on overall CX. Extant studies have tended to view CX at single touchpoint interactions (Becker and Jaakkola, 2020). CX emerges across multiple touchpoint interactions, which each induce responses in the customer. As it stands, little is known about how this process occurs, or the relationships which exist between customer interaction, customer response, and overall CX. Second, the study widens the field and its understanding of the servicescape from an ‘unbounded’ perspective (Rosenbaum and Massiah, 2011). Traditionally, studies have explored CX through the impact of provider-owned touchpoints, predominantly within bounded service sites. The study addresses requests to explore the impact of wider, non-provider-controlled touchpoints on overall CX (Kandampully et al., 2018). Relating to this aim, very little existing work deals with the impact of natural servicescape touchpoints on CX. The case studies in this work have been chosen for their suitability to address this gap. The study employs a comparative case study approach from the cultural heritage sector. Text mining (TM) and text analytics (TA) techniques are employed to capture and assess CX elements found within customer feedback data from an online review depository. Contrary to existing work in this field, the study employs a three-step annotation process to concept classification which can ensure rigour in the results. The purpose of the analysis process is to capture patterns of CX responses and customer interactions within the data and assess their relationship to overall CX ratings. Both quantitative measures (e.g. statistical analysis) and qualitative measures (e.g. verbatim text analysis) are used to explore a number of key questions relating to the core research objective. The empirical study performed in this work results in several key findings. The study finds that CX arises as a combination of customer interactions and CX responses, with each pattern impacting the overall experience in different ways. Results suggest that pattern prevalence and prominence are not core drivers of customer rating, but rather that significance measures need to be employed. From a customer perspective, negative CX responses have a stronger effect on overall CX rating than positive responses. These can be induced through touchpoint interactions beyond the control of the provider. The emotional content of the experience is key, with customer surprise, anger, and sadness significantly impacting CX to a greater degree than other discrete emotions. The findings suggest that customer expectations play an important role in the delivery of CX. Customer expectations can be used to make sense of the differences in terms of patterns and the statistical significance of their relationship to CX rating. Several potential avenues for future work to further develop these themes are put forward in the final stages of the thesis.EPSRC and University of Exeter Business Schoo

Personal and theoretical politics in the writings of C.P. Snow

CP. Snow's work may usefully be treated as a whole, despite the verity of forms in which it appears. As such, it contains a comprehensive set of related theories relevant to political activity and founded on Snow's view of the individual, and centreing on the relationship between personal and theoretical politics. This thesis presents a reconstruction of Snow's basic theories of the individual condition and the processes of political activity. Personal politics describes the immediate interaction of individuals in situations of acknowledged limited conflict; theoretical politics refers to any theory of the mode of political activity. These categories overlap but do not coincide with, Snow's own categories of "open" and "closed" politics, and Snow's thoughts and attitudes to his own dichotomy are discussed. The crucial action of the individual is that of making decisions, and a parallel is seen in social organisation, where the mode of activity is persuasion, the effective resolution is through compromise and the tools of insist and reason. While Snow's writings otherwise represent a congruent system of ideas there is an apparent gap between his analysis and his hopes for (the future, which is resolved in terms of his own theories, and his contribution is found to provide a certain type of political education

Factors that impact scale inhibitor mechanisms

The formation of mineral scales such as barium sulphate and calcium carbonate remains an issue for the oil industry, after many years of oil exploration. In the last 10 years, the difficulty in dealing with scale deposition has been accentuated by the appearance of more complex conditions, involving complicated well completions for deepwater or long sub-sea tiebacks. If scale control measures fail in these situations then long distances between the scale deposits and the production platform are present. Intervention into such systems is either impossible or extremely expensive. To combat such problems, the front end engineering design stage (FEED) now attempts to bring together multidisciplinary teams to provide a full risk assessment of all areas in which production chemistry problems might arise. Hence, benefits come from each discipline team having as much knowledge as possible available to them. This thesis aims to fuel this knowledge by developing a fundamental understanding of how various factors, conditions or environmental, impact scale inhibitor mechanisms, so that the results can be incorporated into the FEED process. Key areas affecting scale inhibitor operation were investigated. From these studies, a number of important findings can be highlighted. The presence of calcium was found to improve scale inhibitor (SI) performance, especially phosphonate types, whilst magnesium ions had little effect on polymeric performances and detrimentally affected the phosphonates’ inhibition efficiency (IE). These trends were related to the SI affinity for the divalent ions – polymer PPCA binds to calcium but shows incompatibility at [Ca2+] > 1000ppm - observed as low IE, whilst the phosphonate DETPMP binds with either ion but prefers calcium. Two inhibition mechanisms - nucleation and crystal growth blocking - were identified for different types of SI species and were illustrated using static IE tests relating IE to [SI] left in solution. High IE corresponds to high [SI] and similarly low IE with low [SI]. These initial results have since been investigated further in a additional study. An extensive range of phosphonate and polymeric scale inhibitor species can now be classified as i. either Type 1 or 2 (based on IE, Ca2+ and Mg2+ sensitivity ration and SI consumption tests) or ii. either Type A or B (based on compatibility/incompatibility with [Ca2+]= ~1000-2000ppm+). A requirement for both homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation to be investigated for a scaling system was identified, as deposition kinetics can vary requiring different ii levels of SI. A [SI] falling below minimum inhibitor concentration (MIC), can promote surface scaling. Hence, scaling systems should be studied experimentally over a range of temperatures, to represent the conditions from sub-sea tiebacks to the production well. A model was developed from experimental data enabling the prediction of safe sulphate levels and mass of barite deposited. This model can be applied to un-seeded and seeded tests where, as expected, the foreign particles accelerated the reaction to equilibrium with the greatest deposition rate for barite over sand and for a higher surface area over a lower one. Both theoretical and experimental confirmation of each retention mechanism occurring in a porous medium was achieved. This adsorption/precipitation model has been incorporated into Squeeze VII, an in-house squeeze design software, to allow a better physical description of a squeeze treatment. The predictions of Squeeze VII have also been improved by using the more accurate data for the scale inhibitor return concentrations from core floods due to the better developed analysis techniques. The direct value of these improvements to industry is significant. These advances reduce OPEX costs and deferred oil production whilst giving the industry the opportunity of improved future lifetime predictions and operations

Some Greek Legal Papyri from the Michigan Collection

The documents which form the subject of this paper are part of the Michigan Collection of Papyri recently acquired by Professor F. W. Kelsey in Egypt and secured for the University by the generosity of the Regents and certain friends and alumni, among the latter Mr. J. W. Anderson, of the Law Class of 189o. A large proportion of these documents are of a legal nature, and from these I have selected for translation four, which may be regarded as typical specimens of their respective classes