Easy Innovation and the Iron Cage: Best Practice, Benchmarking, Ranking, and the Management of Organizational Creativity

The use of what came to be known as best practices, benchmarking, and ranking, which took corporate America by storm in the 1980s as a method for managing innovation, has seeped into government and nonprofit organizations in the intervening years. In fact, as H. George Frederickson demonstrates in this Kettering Foundation occasional paper, these practices have proven to be counterproductive both in the business and the public sector. Frederickson suggests, instead, a more flexible, less directive, model he calls "sustained innovation." He offers abundant evidence that this model is more effective in producing organizational effectiveness

Utility of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) for educational psychologists’ work

Despite embracing a bio-psycho-social perspective, the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) assessment framework has had limited application to date with children who have special educational needs (SEN). This study examines its utility for educational psychologists’ work with children who have Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Mothers of 40 children with ASD aged eight to 12 years were interviewed using a structured protocol based on the ICF framework. The Diagnostic Interview for Social and Communication Disorder (DISCO) was completed with a subset of 19 mothers. Internal consistency and inter-rater reliability of the interview assessments were found to be acceptable and there was evidence for concurrent and discriminant validity. Despite some limitations, initial support for the utility of the ICF model suggests its potential value across educational, health and care fields. Further consideration of its relevance to educational psychologists in new areas of multi-agency working is warranted

Managing biowaste and promoting sustainability - profiling community composting

The voluntary and community waste sector makes an important contribution to waste objectives (Williams et al, 2006). The community composting sector would appear to be leading the development of innovative biowaste collection and processing systems in areas unsuitable for traditional kerbside. Such schemes can contribute to developing local areas by improving local soils and green spaces as well as diverting waste from landfill. However, this is often only part of the story. Well managed community activity has huge potential for providing work and volunteering opportunities, as well as bringing people together and improving skills, knowledge and self-confidence. Considered collectively these factors may contribute to local sustainability more effectively than reliance on meeting particular targets. Although there is some anecdotal and financial evidence for the growth in, and diversity of, community composting, there is very little comprehensive data that draws together the activity of the sector as a whole. The paper addresses this gap by presenting findings from a national survey profiling community based composting. Results show that a range of activities fall under the umbrella of community composting and these include: collecting / receiving and processing material, running education campaigns, promoting home composting and facilitating others to develop / promote community composting. The survey recorded over 100 groups actively engaged in at least one of these activities with many involved in more than one. Overall 80% of groups are involved in collecting and composting material and 20% are involved in composting related activity other than collecting and composting, such as educational and promotional activities. The sector has a large potential for providing work and volunteering opportunities and results indicate over 1,300 volunteers, trainees and staff involved in community composting. In addition, most groups (68%) carry out composting alongside other waste and recycling activities or, more commonly, alongside non-waste activities such as community gardens, city farms, local food production, day and residential services and work integration schemes. These activities may bring about positive environmental impacts and social benefits over and above quantities of material diverted from landfill, and these benefits often cut across different policy agendas. Knowing and understanding these impacts and benefits is important in understanding the role of the community composting sector. In addition to results from profiling the sector, this paper will also present findings from participatory research with groups to develop ways to better understand and demonstrate the impacts of their work

Enhancing sustainable biowaste management in the UK: the role of the commercial and community composting sectors

This paper considers the different roles of the commercial and community composting sectors in contributing to sustainable biowaste management in the UK. Legislation and policy have driven the rapid development of a diverse composting sector. The next section sets out this policy context. This is followed with an analysis of the growth in, and characteristics of, the commercial composting sector and then the community composting sector. It is contended that both sectors have different strengths in contributing to sustainable biowaste management. For commercial composting this is based around large-scale composting and quality products, for the community sector this is based around services in difficult collection environments, local sustainability, promoting social cohesion and building stronger communities. The extent to which the benefits from the commercial and composting sectors will be realised in the future will depend on whether the sectors can develop synergistically and the extent to which this is encouraged by national and local policies

Dielectrics for long term space exposure and spacecraft charging: A briefing

Charging of dielectrics is a bulk, not a surface property. Radiation driven charge stops within the bulk and is not quickly conducted to the surface. Very large electric fields develop in the bulk due to this stopped charge. At space radiation levels, it typically requires hours or days for the internal electric fields to reach steady state. The resulting electric fields are large enough to produce electrical failure within the insulator. This type failure is thought to produce nearly all electric discharge anomalies. Radiation also induces bond breakage, creates reactive radicals, displaces atoms and, in general, severely changes the chemistry of the solid state material. Electric fields can alter this process by reacting with charged species, driving them through the solid. Irradiated polymers often lose as much as a percent of their mass, or more, at exposures typical in space. Very different aging or contaminant emission can be induced by the stopped charge electric fields. These radiation effects are detailed

FARM ORGANIZATION ROUNDTABLE: "COMPETING IN THE 21ST CENTURY"

Farm Management,

Totally parallel multilevel algorithms

Four totally parallel algorithms for the solution of a sparse linear system have common characteristics which become quite apparent when they are implemented on a highly parallel hypercube such as the CM2. These four algorithms are Parallel Superconvergent Multigrid (PSMG) of Frederickson and McBryan, Robust Multigrid (RMG) of Hackbusch, the FFT based Spectral Algorithm, and Parallel Cyclic Reduction. In fact, all four can be formulated as particular cases of the same totally parallel multilevel algorithm, which are referred to as TPMA. In certain cases the spectral radius of TPMA is zero, and it is recognized to be a direct algorithm. In many other cases the spectral radius, although not zero, is small enough that a single iteration per timestep keeps the local error within the required tolerance