3,632 research outputs found
Exploring the challenges and responsibilities of mutual engagement within participatory action research
This paper draws on a London-based exploratory action research study into the factors affecting the engagement in UK National Health Service (NHS) clinical trials of African patients and the wider African communities. The paper argues for the use of participatory qualitative methodologies in relation to centralizing the voices of those who are mostly easily marginalized by mainstream UK health and social care policies. The paper describes how the co-researchers in this study (professional/lay members from within the affected communities and academic researchers) shaped the study methodology. The challenges and responsibilities of the co-researchers within this process of mutual engagement are further described in relation to identifying the perspectives of all co-researchers within a methodology that strives to mutually engage diverse communities of NHS clinicians, academic researchers and service users. Drawing on the findings from the data analysis, the paper will discuss emergent issues that are of particular relevance for New Labourâs policies on social exclusion, cultural competence and NHS service user involvement
TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications
In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture âstandardâ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision
Speedy Transactions in Multicore In-Memory Databases
Silo is a new in-memory database that achieves excellent performance and scalability on modern multicore machines. Silo was designed from the ground up to use system memory and caches efficiently. For instance, it avoids all centralized contention points, including that of centralized transaction ID assignment. Silo's key contribution is a commit protocol based on optimistic concurrency control that provides serializability while avoiding all shared-memory writes for records that were only read. Though this might seem to complicate the enforcement of a serial order, correct logging and recovery is provided by linking periodically-updated epochs with the commit protocol. Silo provides the same guarantees as any serializable database without unnecessary scalability bottlenecks or much additional latency. Silo achieves almost 700,000 transactions per second on a standard TPC-C workload mix on a 32-core machine, as well as near-linear scalability. Considered per core, this is several times higher than previously reported results.Engineering and Applied Science
The International Labour Organization and International Labor Standards
With the forces of globalization as a backdrop, this casebook develops labor and employment law in the context of the national laws of nine countries important to the global economy - the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, China, Japan and India. These national jurisdictions are highlighted by considering international labor standards promulgated by the International Labor Organization as well as the rulings and standards that emerge from two very different regional trade arrangements - the labor side accord to NAFTA and the European Union. Across all these different sources of law, this book considers the law of individual employment, collective labor law dealing with unionization as well as the laws against discrimination, the laws protecting privacy and the systems used to resolve labor and employment disputes. This is the first set of law school course materials in English covering international and comparative employment and labor law
Speakable in Quantum Mechanics
At the 1927 Como conference Bohr spoke the now famous words "It is wrong to
think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns
what we can say about nature." However, if the Copenhagen interpretation really
holds on to this motto, why then is there this feeling of conflict when
comparing it with realist interpretations? Surely what one can say about nature
should in a certain sense be interpretation independent. In this paper I take
Bohr's motto seriously and develop a quantum logic that avoids assuming any
form of realism as much as possible. To illustrate the non-triviality of this
motto a similar result is first derived for classical mechanics. It turns out
that the logic for classical mechanics is a special case of the derived quantum
logic. Finally, some hints are provided in how these logics are to be used in
practical situations and I discuss how some realist interpretations relate to
these logics
What explains the uneven take-up of ISO 14001 at the global level?: a panel-data analysis
Since its release in the mid-1990s, close to 37 000 facilities have been certified to ISO 14001, the international voluntary standard for environmental management systems. Yet, despite claims that the standard can be readily adapted to very different corporate and geographic settings, its take-up has been highly geographically variable. This paper contributes to a growing body of work concerned with explaining the uneven diffusion of ISO 14001 at the global level. Drawing from the existing theoretical and empirical literature we develop a series of hypotheses about how various economic, market, and regulatory factors influence the national count of ISO 14001 certifications. These hypotheses are then tested using econometric estimation techniques with data for a panel of 142 developed and developing countries. We find that per capita ISO 14001 counts are positively correlated with income per capita, stock of foreign direct investment, exports of goods and services to Europe and Japan, and pressure from civil society. Conversely, productivity and levels of state intervention are negatively correlated. The paper finishes by offering a number of recommendations to policymakers concerned with accelerating the diffusion of voluntary environmental standards
A Viewing Angle - Kinetic Luminosity Unification Scheme For BL Lacertae Objects
We propose a unified classification for BL Lac objects (BLs), focusing on the
synchrotron peak frequency of the spectral energy distribution. The unification
scheme is based on the angle Theta that describes the orientation of the
relativistic jet and on the electron kinetic luminosity Lambda of the jet. We
assume that Lambda scales with the size of the jet r in a self-similar fashion
(Lambda propto r^2), as supported by observational data. The jets are
self-similar in geometry and have the same pressure and median magnetic field
at the inlet, independent of size. The self-similarity is broken for the
highest energy electrons, which radiate mainly at high frequencies, since for
large sources they suffer more severe radiative energy losses over a given
fraction of the jet length. We calculate the optically thin synchrotron
spectrum using an accelerating inner jet model based on simple relativistic gas
dynamics and show that it can fit the observed infrared to X-ray spectrum of
PKS 2155--304. We couple the accelerating jet model to the unification scheme
and compare the results to complete samples of
BLs. The negative apparent evolution of X-ray selected BLs is explained as a
result of positive evolution of the jet electron kinetic luminosity
. We review observational arguments in favor of the existence of
scaled-down accretion disks and broad emission-line regions in BLs. The
proposed unification scheme can explain the lack of observed broad emission
lines in X-ray selected BLs, as well as the existence of those lines
preferentially in luminous radio-selected BLs. Finally, we review observational
arguments that suggest the extension of this unification scheme to all blazars.Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures, to be published in the ApJ (Oct 20, 1998
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