1,214 research outputs found
Identifying common problems in the acquisition and deployment of large-scale software projects in the US and UK healthcare systems
Public and private organizations are investing increasing amounts into the development of
healthcare information technology. These applications are perceived to offer numerous benefits.
Software systems can improve the exchange of information between healthcare facilities. They
support standardised procedures that can help to increase consistency between different service
providers. Electronic patient records ensure minimum standards across the trajectory of care when
patients move between different specializations. Healthcare information systems also offer economic
benefits through efficiency savings; for example by providing the data that helps to identify potential
bottlenecks in the provision and administration of care. However, a number of high-profile failures
reveal the problems that arise when staff must cope with the loss of these applications. In particular,
teams have to retrieve paper based records that often lack the detail on electronic systems.
Individuals who have only used electronic information systems face particular problems in learning
how to apply paper-based fallbacks. The following pages compare two different failures of
Healthcare Information Systems in the UK and North America. The intention is to ensure that future
initiatives to extend the integration of electronic patient records will build on the âlessons learnedâ
from previous systems
Applying the lessons of the attack on the World Trade Center, 11th September 2001, to the design and use of interactive evacuation simulations
The collapse of buildings, such as terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaule Airport, and of fires, such as the Rhode Island, Station Night Club tragedy, has focused public attention on the safety of large public buildings. Initiatives in the United States and in Europe have led to the development of interactive simulators that model evacuation from these buildings. The tools avoid some of the ethical and legal problems from simulating evacuations; many people were injured during the 1993 evacuation of the World Trade Center (WTC) complex. They also use many concepts that originate within the CHI communities. For instance, some simulators use simple task models to represent the occupants' goal structures as they search for an available exit. However, the recent release of the report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the '9/11 commission') has posed serious questions about the design and use of this particular class of interactive systems. This paper argues that simulation research needs to draw on insights from the CHI communities in order to meet some the challenges identified by the 9/11 commission
Lessons from the evacuation of the World Trade Center, Sept 11th 2001 for the future development of computer simulations
This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in evacuation simulations. These interactive computer based tools have been developed to help the owners and designers of large public buildings to assess the risks that occupants might face during emergency egress. The development of the Glasgow Evacuation Simulator is used to illustrate the existing generation of tools. This system uses Monte Carlo techniques to control individual and group movements during an evacuation. The end-user can interactively open and block emergency exits at any point. It is also possible to alter the priorities that individuals associate with particular exit routes. A final benefit is that the tool can derive evacuation simulations directly from existing architects models; this reduces the cost of simulations and creates a more prominent role for these tools in the iterative development of large-scale public buildings. Empirical studies have been used to validate the GES system as a tool to support evacuation training. The development of these tools has been informed by numerous human factors studies and by recent accident investigations. For example, the 2003 fire in the Station nightclub in Rhode Island illustrated the way in which most building occupants retrace their steps to an entrance even when there are alternate fire exits. The second half of this paper uses this introduction to criticise the existing state of the art in evacuation simulations. These criticisms are based on a detailed study of the recent findings from the 9/11 Commission (2004). Ten different lessons are identified. Some relate to the need to better understand the role of building management and security systems in controlling egress from public buildings. Others relate to the human factors involved in coordinating distributed groups of emergency personnel who may be physically exhausted by the demands of an evacuation. Arguably the most important findings centre on the need to model the ingress and egress of emergency personnel from these structures. The previous focus of nearly all-existing simulation tools has been on the evacuation of building occupants rather than on the safety of first responders1
-pairing Interactions of Fermions in a Single- Shell
In this talk I shall introduce our recent works on general pairing
interactions and pair truncation approximations for fermions in a single-j
shell, including the spin zero dominance, features of eigenvalues of fermion
systems in a single-j shell interacting by a pairing interaction.Comment: 10 pages and 4 figures, international symposiu
Safety arguments for next generation location aware computing
Concerns over the accuracy, availability, integrity and
continuity of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)
have limited the integration of GPS and GLONASS for
safety-critical applications. More recent augmentation
systems, such as the European Geostationary Navigation
Overlay Service (EGNOS) and the North American Wide
Area Augmentation System (WAAS) have begun to address
these concerns. Augmentation architectures build on the
existing GPS/GLONASS infrastructures to support locationbased services in Safety of Life (SoL) applications. Much of the technical development has been directed by air traffic management requirements, in anticipation of the more extensive support to be offered by GPS III and Galileo. WAAS has already been approved to provide vertical guidance against ICAO safety performance criteria for aviation applications. During the next twelve months, we will see the full certification of EGNOS for SoL applications.
This paper identifies strong similarities between the safety
assessment techniques used in Europe and North America.
Both have relied on hazard analysis techniques to derive
estimates of the Probability of Hazardously Misleading
Information (PHMI). Later sections identify significant
differences between the approaches adopted in application
development. Integrated fault trees have been developed by
regulatory and commercial organisations to consider both
infrastructure hazards and their impact on non-precision
RNAV/VNAV approaches using WAAS. In contrast,
EUROCONTROL and the European Space Agency have
developed a more modular approach to safety-case
development for EGNOS. It remains to be seen whether the
European or North American strategy offers the greatest
support as satellite based augmentation systems are used
within a growing range of SoL applications from railway
signalling through to Unmanned Airborne Systems. The key
contribution of this paper is to focus attention on the safety
arguments that might support this wider class of location
based services
The natural history of bugs: using formal methods to analyse software related failures in space missions
Space missions force engineers to make complex trade-offs between many different constraints including cost, mass, power, functionality and reliability. These constraints create a continual need to innovate. Many advances rely upon software, for instance to control and monitor the next generation âelectron cyclotron resonanceâ ion-drives for deep space missions.Programmers face numerous challenges. It is extremely difficult to conduct valid ground-based tests for the code used in space missions. Abstract models and simulations of satellites can be misleading. These issues are compounded by the use of âband-aidâ software to fix design mistakes and compromises in other aspects of space systems engineering. Programmers must often re-code missions in flight. This introduces considerable risks. It should, therefore, not be a surprise that so many space missions fail to achieve their objectives. The costs of failure are considerable. Small launch vehicles, such as the U.S. Pegasus system, cost around 4 million up to 73 million from the failure of a single uninsured satellite. It is clearly important that we learn as much as possible from those failures that do occur. The following pages examine the roles that formal methods might play in the analysis of software failures in space missions
Geometry of random interactions
It is argued that spectral features of quantal systems with random
interactions can be given a geometric interpretation. This conjecture is
investigated in the context of two simple models: a system of randomly
interacting d bosons and one of randomly interacting fermions in a j=7/2 shell.
In both examples the probability for a given state to become the ground state
is shown to be related to a geometric property of a polygon or polyhedron which
is entirely determined by particle number, shell size, and symmetry character
of the states. Extensions to more general situations are discussed
Recommended from our members
Legal Aspects of Land Use Regulation of Lake Shorelands by State and Local Governments for the Protection of Lakes
U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Water Research and TechnologyCenter for Water and the Environmen
The quantitative soil pit method for measuring belowground carbon and nitrogen stocks
Many important questions in ecosystem science require estimates of stocks of soil C and nutrients. Quantitative soil pits provide direct measurements of total soil mass and elemental content in depth-based samples representative of large volumes, bypassing potential errors associated with independently measuring soil bulk density, rock volume, and elemental concentrations. The method also allows relatively unbiased sampling of other belowground C and nutrient stocks, including roots, coarse organic fragments, and rocks. We present a comprehensive methodology for sampling these pools with quantitative pits and assess their accuracy, precision, effort, and sampling intensity as compared to other methods. At 14 forested sites in New Hampshire, nonsoil belowground pools (which other methods may omit, double-count, or undercount) accounted for upward of 25% of total belowground C and N stocks: coarse material accounted for 4 and 1% of C and N in the O horizon; roots were 11 and 4% of C and N in the O horizon and 10 and 3% of C and N in the B horizon; and soil adhering to rocks represented 5% of total B-horizon C and N. The top 50 cm of the C horizon contained the equivalent of 17% of B-horizon carbon and N. Sampling procedures should be carefully designed to avoid treating these important pools inconsistently. Quantitative soil pits have fewer sources of systematic error than coring methods; the main disadvantage is that because they are time-consuming and create a larger zone of disturbance, fewer observations can be made than with cores
Generalized seniority from random Hamiltonians
We investigate the generic pairing properties of shell-model many-body
Hamiltonians drawn from ensembles of random two-body matrix elements. Many
features of pairing that are commonly attributed to the interaction are in fact
seen in a large part of the ensemble space. Not only do the spectra show
evidence of pairing with favored J=0 ground states and an energy gap, but the
relationship between ground state wave functions of neighboring nuclei show
signatures of pairing as well. Matrix elements of pair creation/annihilation
operators between ground states tend to be strongly enhanced. Furthermore, the
same or similar pair operators connect several ground states along an isotopic
chain. This algebraic structure is reminiscent of the generalized seniority
model. Thus pairing may be encoded to a certain extent in the Fock space
connectivity of the interacting shell model even without specific features of
the interaction required.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
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