Innovation sustainability in challenging health-care contexts : embedding clinically led change in routine practice

The need for organizational innovation as a means of improving health-care quality and containing costs is widely recognized, but while a growing body of research has improved knowledge of implementation, very little has considered the challenges involved in sustaining change – especially organizational change led ‘bottom-up’ by frontline clinicians. This study addresses this lacuna, taking a longitudinal, qualitative case-study approach to understanding the paths to sustainability of four organizational innovations. It highlights the importance of the interaction between organizational context, nature of the innovation and strategies deployed in achieving sustainability. It discusses how positional influence of service leads, complexity of innovation, networks of support, embedding in existing systems, and proactive responses to changing circumstances can interact to sustain change. In the absence of cast-iron evidence of effectiveness, wider notions of value may be successfully invoked to sustain innovation. Sustainability requires continuing effort through time, rather than representing a final state to be achieved. Our study offers new insights into the process of sustainability of organizational change, and elucidates the complement of strategies needed to make bottom-up change last in challenging contexts replete with competing priorities

A Bayesian spatio-temporal model of panel design data: airborne particle number concentration in Brisbane, Australia

This paper outlines a methodology for semi-parametric spatio-temporal modelling of data which is dense in time but sparse in space, obtained from a split panel design, the most feasible approach to covering space and time with limited equipment. The data are hourly averaged particle number concentration (PNC) and were collected, as part of the Ultrafine Particles from Transport Emissions and Child Health (UPTECH) project. Two weeks of continuous measurements were taken at each of a number of government primary schools in the Brisbane Metropolitan Area. The monitoring equipment was taken to each school sequentially. The school data are augmented by data from long term monitoring stations at three locations in Brisbane, Australia. Fitting the model helps describe the spatial and temporal variability at a subset of the UPTECH schools and the long-term monitoring sites. The temporal variation is modelled hierarchically with penalised random walk terms, one common to all sites and a term accounting for the remaining temporal trend at each site. Parameter estimates and their uncertainty are computed in a computationally efficient approximate Bayesian inference environment, R-INLA. The temporal part of the model explains daily and weekly cycles in PNC at the schools, which can be used to estimate the exposure of school children to ultrafine particles (UFPs) emitted by vehicles. At each school and long-term monitoring site, peaks in PNC can be attributed to the morning and afternoon rush hour traffic and new particle formation events. The spatial component of the model describes the school to school variation in mean PNC at each school and within each school ground. It is shown how the spatial model can be expanded to identify spatial patterns at the city scale with the inclusion of more spatial locations.Comment: Draft of this paper presented at ISBA 2012 as poster, part of UPTECH projec

Letter to Members of the American Institute of Accountants re: Immediate Threat to the CPAS\u27s Position in Tax Practice

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/2285/thumbnail.jp

International Labor Standards, Soft Regulation, and National Government Roles

[Excerpt] In this article, we briefly describe the different approaches to the regulation of international labor standards, and then argue for a new role for national governments based on soft rather than hard regulation approaches. We argue that this new role shows potential for significantly enhancing progress in international labor standards, since it enables governments to articulate a position without having to deal with the enforcement issues that hard regulation mandates. We justify this new role for governments based on the increasing use of soft regulation in the international arena. Of course, this approach is not without its own problems, but given that existing approaches have all provided imperfect solutions to the problem of improving labor standards globally, re-visiting the role of national governments is in our view, highly important

Linda B. Godfrey

Linda B. Godfrey’s 35 years as a registered dietitian have taken her from work on the food service staffs of a hospital and nursing home, as a teacher, and as a U.S. Army reserve unit member to her retirement in 2005. She retired as Child Nutrition Program Director for the Shelby County, Alabama, School System and from the United States Army Reserves with the rank of Colonel. She received her B.S. Degree from the University of Tennessee in Food Science and Institution Management, completed a dietetic internship at the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham, and received a M.S. in Nutrition and Foods from the University of Alabama. Ms. Godfrey continues to be active in a number of school nutrition and dietetic associations and serves or has served in a major leadership role in a number of nutrition-oriented organizations. She has received numerous awards and was awarded the Management Practice Award by the American Dietetic Association in 2004. Her presentations include meetings at the local, state, and national level.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/icn_ohistories/1059/thumbnail.jp

Five-Year Growth Report: From Inception to Global Influence 2010 - 2015

While we are proud of our accomplishments in building an institutional framework, we are even more proud of our institute’s initial work to build an impact-driven program. This work is indeed the central focus of this report. Through the leadership of our new directors for research and policy, we have begun to build a vigorous research and policy development program that includes engagement with both local and global stakeholders. We have also developed a strong set of collaborations with national and international partners, striving to achieve a balance between work in Nebraska and globally, including in India, Brazil, China and selected countries in East Africa and the Middle East and North Africa region. Our annual Water for Food Global Conference has become a sought-after event for thought partners, researchers, students, policymakers, producers, business leaders and others in our sector. We have also convened or co-convened many policy dialogues, workshops and seminars in the last five years, including at the annual Stockholm World Water Weeks and the 2012 and 2015 World Water Forums. We are pleased by the progress we have made in our work to educate the next generation and engage young talent, through such activities as the double Master of Science program in Agricultural Water Management with UNESCO-IHE in Delft and a fellowship program for undergraduate and graduate students and post-docs. Now, with a full complement of directors and staff, the past year has witnessed a transformation at WFI. Relationships and partnerships have matured, programs launched and directions clarified. After reflecting on lessons learned in our initial years and many discussions with university leadership, global experts and faculty, we’ve identified where WFI’s greatest capacities lie to effect change. As we’ve developed new strategies for the next five years, we’ve targeted key subject areas and geographic locations in which we will focus our resources. The 2015-2020 Strategic Plan details specific research, policy and educational projects we are undertaking and how we will measure progress in outputs and outcomes. A year ago, when we moved into our new location on the Nebraska Innovation Campus, we had many empty desks. Today, those desks are filled and our offices bustling with core staff as well as students, faculty and visiting researchers. As WFI heads into its next five years, we’re excited to embrace promising new projects, from closing water and agricultural productivity gaps in Africa to educating the next generation of researchers and practitioners. Contents: 10 I Ending Water and Food Insecurity 12 I A Comprehensive Plan for Today... 15 I ... and Tomorrow / Innovation through Research and Policy 19 I Key research & Policy Accomplishments 21 I Improving Yields and Water Productivity 23 I Telling Nebraska’s Groundwater Governance Story 25 I Making Crop CIRCLES in Tanzania 27 I Setting a River in Motion 29 I Educating, Engaging and Communicating 35 I Building Capacity in Developing Countries 36 I A Global Forum for Water for Food 37 I 50 Years of Nebraska Water Experience 40 I Connecting Nebraska to the World 42 I Bringing People Together 44 I Building the Institute 48 I The Water for Food Institute: A Founding Story 52 I Conclusion 54 I Financials 56 I Leadership/ Board of Directors/International Advisory Panel 57 I Faculty Advisory Panel 58 I Leadership Team/Staff 59 I Credit

Jerry B. Cater

Jerry B. Cater retired after 11 years as Research Scientist with the Applied Research Division of the National Food Service Management Institute. She served 19 years as Director of School Food Services in Long Beach, Mississippi. While at NFSMI, she served as project manager on numerous research projects including the development of Financial Management Information System model for school nutrition programs. The model served as the basis the design of FUNDamentals, a financial management reporting software.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/icn_ohistories/1033/thumbnail.jp

Flexible Session Management in a Distributed Environment

Many secure communication libraries used by distributed systems, such as SSL, TLS, and Kerberos, fail to make a clear distinction between the authentication, session, and communication layers. In this paper we introduce CEDAR, the secure communication library used by the Condor High Throughput Computing software, and present the advantages to a distributed computing system resulting from CEDAR's separation of these layers. Regardless of the authentication method used, CEDAR establishes a secure session key, which has the flexibility to be used for multiple capabilities. We demonstrate how a layered approach to security sessions can avoid round-trips and latency inherent in network authentication. The creation of a distinct session management layer allows for optimizations to improve scalability by way of delegating sessions to other components in the system. This session delegation creates a chain of trust that reduces the overhead of establishing secure connections and enables centralized enforcement of system-wide security policies. Additionally, secure channels based upon UDP datagrams are often overlooked by existing libraries; we show how CEDAR's structure accommodates this as well. As an example of the utility of this work, we show how the use of delegated security sessions and other techniques inherent in CEDAR's architecture enables US CMS to meet their scalability requirements in deploying Condor over large-scale, wide-area grid systems

Multi-paradigm modeling of mode I&II dynamic fracture mechanisms in single crystal silicon

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-43).In addition to its semi-conducting properties, silicon has the ability to be manipulated with high precision at very small length- scales. This property makes it very useful in the design of Nano/Micro-Electromechanical Systems (N/MEMS) and similar technologies. The understanding of fracture of silicon is crucial for the engineering process and the development of robust devices. However, the mechanisms of fracture in silicon are complex and are still not fully understood. Several experimental studies of fracture have been reported, however, these often lack insight into atomistic mechanisms of fracture. Ab initio computational methods (e.g. based on Density Functional Theory) to study silicon that are able to provide a fundamental description of the complex fracture mechanisms remain an open challenge. In particular, the mechanisms that lead to brittle cleavage or to the transition to ductile behavior of silicon at higher temperatures remains an open question. Empirical molecular dynamics (MD) studies have proven successful in simulating silicon fracture, but are unreliable and most models could not be validated against experimental results. Here we propose to use MD modeling based on a novel first principles reactive force fields ReaxFF, which has shown to be an accurate model to describe fracture processes of silicon. Two numerical methods are used here to study fracture mechanisms in silicon: a multi-paradigm model employing reactive and non-reactive force fields, and a fully reactive model. The CMDF and GRASP are used for the simulation of brittle fracture mechanisms in mode I and mode II loading conditions, as well as simulations of the brittle-to-ductile transition (BDT). Our results indicate that CMDF is suitable for modeling silicon brittle fracture, but has limitations during the study of the mechanisms involved in the BDT. GRASP provides a suitable framework for BDT study, and the results in this study provide for the first time an observation of the BDT without the use of an empirical model. In this thesis we report, for the first time, the direct atomistic simulation of the BTD in silicon, revealing the microscopic atomistic mechanisms that explains this drastic change in the behavior of silicon.by Alan Cohen.S.B