Capital expenditure budgeting & organisational change

It was argued in a previous study (Greenwell 1983a and 1983b) that capital expenditure budgeting should be studied within its environmental contexts. In this study, capital expenditure budgeting was studied in the specific setting of the Australian footwear manufacturing industry. This industry was chosen because its environment, which included one of the highest levels of protection in Australia, underwent a significant but orderly change in 1982. This current study addressed the nature of protection and outlined its history in the industry. This was followed by an argument regarding the creation of a particular corporate culture: learned helplessness. A hypothesis, that changes in capital investment were associated with changes in protection, was accepted for the period 1968/69 to 1981/82. However it was argued that the introduction of the seven year plan in 1982 would alter this relationship between capital investment and protection. It was hypothesized that the introduction of the seven year plan would stimulate organisational change, the organisational change would include a change in capital expenditure budgeting and capital investment, and that a change in the corporate culture would be an intervening variable. These hypotheses were accepted for four out of five firms on the basis of case studies undertaken in 1984. In 1986, the remaining footwear manufacturing firms were surveyed to ascertain actions taken in response to the seven year plan. The most frequent and most important action undertaken was capital investment in new production technology. It was argued that this action and others which did not necessarily Involve capital investment, would have been a result of a change in corporate culture

Biosurfactant Production and Biodegradation of Leather Dust from Tannery

Background The leather industry contributes vast amounts of pollution damaging to aquatic and terrestrial environments. Leather dust is a chromium-contaminated waste produced from the shaving and buffering processes involved in leather tanning. Microorganisms have been investigated for their usefulness in bioremediation and recycling of waste materials. Solid leather waste is the current focus of material to be remediated in this study. Objective The present work focuses on the development of a process to degrade the leather dust protein with the aim of removing the chromium bound within the protein. As part of the study, detecting the presence of biosurfactant production was performed to fuel further interest in value-added by-products of the process. Method Bacillus subtilis SA-6 was used to treat the leather dust over a 10 day shake flask study. Daily samples were taken and analysed for chromium content by Atomic Absorption Spectrometry. The surface tension of the shake flask cultures was also investigated to detect for any valuable by-products such as biosurfactants for future prospects of developing an economically viable process. Results Chromium concentration demonstrated an exponential increase between 0-120 h in shake flask experiments. In the presence of B. subtilis SA-6 chromium concentration in cell free supernatant increased from 0.13±0.09 mg/L to 190.81±20.18 mg/L compared to when B. subtilis SA-6 was absent. Surface tension decreased during fermentation from 53.23±0.92 mN/m to 30.13±0.15 mN/m in 24 h. Conclusion This study demonstrates a waste management process, which detoxifies solid tannery waste to reduce environmental pollution, whilst yielding value-added products (such as biosurfactant) to provide an economically viable bioprocess with potential for large-scale development

‘It's like the bad guy in a movie who just doesn't die’ : a qualitative exploration of young people's adaptation to eczema and implications for self‐care

Background Eczema is a common childhood inflammatory skin condition, affecting more than one in five children. A popular perception is that children ‘outgrow eczema’, although epidemiological studies have shown that, for many, eczema follows a lifelong episodic course. Objectives To explore the perceptions of young people about the nature of their eczema and how these perceptions relate to their self‐care and adapting to living with eczema. Methods This is a secondary inductive thematic analysis of interviews conducted for Healthtalk.org. In total 23 interviews with young people with eczema were included. Of the 23 participants, 17 were female and six male, ranging from 17 to 25 years old. Results Participants generally experienced eczema as an episodic long‐term condition and reported a mismatch between information received about eczema and their experiences. The experience of eczema as long term and episodic had implications for self‐care, challenging the process of identifying triggers of eczema flare‐ups and evaluating the success of treatment regimens. Participants’ experiences of eczema over time also had implications for adaptation and finding a balance between accepting eczema as long term and hoping it would go away. This linked to a gradual shift in treatment expectations from ‘cure’ to ‘control’ of eczema. Conclusions For young people who continue to experience eczema beyond childhood, a greater focus on self‐care for a long‐term condition may be helpful. Greater awareness of the impact of early messages around ‘growing out of’ eczema and provision of high‐quality information may help patients to manage expectations and support adaptation to treatment regimens

investr: An R Package for Inverse Estimation

Inverse estimation is a classical and well-known problem in regression. In simple terms, it involves the use of an observed value of the response to make inference on the corresponding unknown value of the explanatory variable. To our knowledge, however, statistical software is somewhat lacking the capabilities for analyzing these types of problems. In this paper, we introduce investr (which stands for inverse estimation in R), a package for solving inverse estimation problems in both linear and nonlinear regression models

Explainable Boosting Machines with Sparsity -- Maintaining Explainability in High-Dimensional Settings

Compared to "black-box" models, like random forests and deep neural networks, explainable boosting machines (EBMs) are considered "glass-box" models that can be competitively accurate while also maintaining a higher degree of transparency and explainability. However, EBMs become readily less transparent and harder to interpret in high-dimensional settings with many predictor variables; they also become more difficult to use in production due to increases in scoring time. We propose a simple solution based on the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) that can help introduce sparsity by reweighting the individual model terms and removing the less relevant ones, thereby allowing these models to maintain their transparency and relatively fast scoring times in higher-dimensional settings. In short, post-processing a fitted EBM with many (i.e., possibly hundreds or thousands) of terms using the LASSO can help reduce the model's complexity and drastically improve scoring time. We illustrate the basic idea using two real-world examples with code.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Faculty Development for the Use of High-Fidelity Patient Simulation: A Systematic Review

This is a systematic review of the research data between 1995 and June 2013 concerning faculty development in the use of high-fidelity patient simulation for health professionals and students with a search of the following databases: CINAHL, Nursing and Allied Health Collection: Comprehensive, OVID Medline, ScienceDirect, PubMed, Scopus, and ProQuest Dissertation/Theses Database. The primary search terms were high-fidelity patient simulation and faculty development. Reference lists from relevant articles were also reviewed. Twenty-five studies were included for this review. The majority of the studies were surveys with a few quasi-experimental designs. The themes were similar to those found in the non-research literature: strengths, incentives, barriers, use of faculty champions/simulation coordinator, and faculty development. The validity and reliability differed by study. There are numerous incentives and barriers to the use of high-fidelity patient simulation by faculty. Several examples of faculty development programs have been described in the literature but little evaluation has taken place beyond the end of the program. The goal of the use of high-fidelity patient simulation is to enhance the student’s knowledge, skills, and critical thinking in the care of patients. It is essential that the faculty are competent to provide instruction with high-fidelity patient simulation and therefore, the efficacy of these developmental programs need closer attention

Farmers’ ethno-ecological knowledge of vegetable pests and pesticidal plant use in Malawi and Zambia

While pests are a major constraint in vegetable production in many parts of Southern Africa, little is known about farmers’ knowledge and management practices. A survey was conducted among 168 and 91 vegetable farmers in Northern Malawi and Eastern Zambia, respectively, to evaluate their knowledge, attitudes and traditional management practices in tomato and crucifers (brassica). All respondents in Malawi and Zambia reported pest damage on tomato and crucifers, and 75% had used synthetic pesticides. The use of pesticidal plants, cultural practices and resistant varieties constituted a smaller portion of the pest control options in both crucifers and tomato. Over 70% of the respondents were aware of pesticidal plants, and more female (75%) than male (55%) respondents reported using them. While over 20 different plant species were mentioned by respondents, Tephrosia vogelii accounted for 61 and 53% of the pesticidal species known to respondents in Malawi and Zambia, respectively. Farmers with small landholdings were more inclined to use pesticidal plants than those with medium and large landholding highlighting the importance of this management alternative for poor farmers. Most respondents were willing to cultivate pesticidal plants, which indicate that farmers understand the potential value of these plants in pest management