Prisons and Drugs: A global review of incarceration, drug use and drug services. Report 12

Prisons play an important role in drug policy. They are used to punish people who break drug laws and they also hold a large number of people who have experience of drug use and drug problems. They therefore have an important part to play in attempts to reduce the harm caused by drugs. Imprisonment itself can be seen as one type of harm, as it causes problems for prisoners and their families and creates a large financial burden for taxpayers. Theseharms and costs are difficult to calculate, but there is little evidence that large scale imprisonment of drug offenders has had the desired results in deterring drug use or reducing drug problems (Bewley- Taylor, Trace, & Stevens, 2005). In this paper, we examine the international prevalence of drug users, drug use and related problems in prisons and we report on the problems that are related to the issue of drugs in prison. We go on to examine the international guidelines and effective responses that have been developed in this area in the last decade. The paper is a review of the literature, based on a search of bibliographic databases, including Medline, PubMed, ISI as well as EMBASE and contacts with researchers and practitioners in the field up to January 2007

A Distributed Architecture for Certificate-based Delegation of Business Process Accessibility in Virtual Organizations

In this paper, a distributed architecture has been proposed in order to support an authorization service more precisely in dynamically created Virtual Organizations (VO). In comparison to other existing architectures such as Akenti, VOMS and TAS, our architecture uses certificates on top a of the distributed agent architecture for managing requested resources among the VOs. The most obscure issue in distributed agents is finding the proper node that keeps the particular requested certificates In this paper, Chord’s Finger Table has been improved to add extra search abilities on the ring architecture of Chord. The process of locating keys can be implemented on the top of the improved Chord by associating a key with each data item, and storing the key/data item pair at the node to which the key maps. In this article, a theatrical analysis is presented for simulations, which shows improvement in the number of passed hops to locate keys in the proposed method in comparison of standard chord, so it’s more cost efficient

Quantitative evaluation of polymer gel dosimeters by broadband ultrasound attenuation

Ultrasound has been examined previously as an alternative readout method for irradiated polymer gel dosimeters, with authors reporting varying dose response to ultrasound transmission measurements. In this current work we extend previous work to measure the broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA) response of irradiated PAGAT gel dosimeters, using a novel ultrasound computed tomography system

New Model Reference Adaptive System Speed Observer for Field-Oriented Control Induction Motor Drives Using Neural Networks

One of the primary advantages of field-oriented controlled induction motor for high performance application is the capability for easy field weakening and the full utilization of voltage and current rating of the inverter to obtain a wide dynamic speed rangeThis paper describes a Model Reference Adaptive System (MRAS) based scheme using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for online speed estimation of sensorless vector controlled induction motor drive. The proposed MRAS speed observer uses the current model as an adaptive model. The neural network has been then designed and trained online by employing a back propagation network (BPN) algorithm. The estimator was designed and simulated in Matlab/Simulink. Simulation result shows a good performance of speed estimator. The simulation results show good performance in various operating conditions. Also Performance analysis of speed estimator with the change in resistances of stator is presented. Simulation results show this estimator robust to parameter variations especially resistances of stator

A Review of Critical Factors for Communicating With Customers on Social Networking Sites

This paper undertakes a systematic review to gain insight into existing studies on the application of Social Network Sites (SNS). Our systematic review of studies from 1995 to 2012 examines the background and trend of research in the area and provides critical factors that organizations should consider for effectively use social networking sites to communicate with their customers. We note a huge growth in the number of academic papers on the topic since 1998. Seventeen factors were identified as a result of review, which shaped two main themes: (i) A customercentric organizational culture, and (ii) SNS Know-How. The findings show that for a successful and effective use of SNSs, and in particular Facebook, a combination of good understanding of SNSs tools and capabilities as well as a constant and transparent relationship with customers are essential. The findings show that for a successful and effective use of SNSs, and in particular Facebook, a combination of good understanding of SNSs tools and capabilities as well as a constant and transparent relationship with customers are essential

Students’ learning experience in flipped classes using social media.

The current work aims at deploying Facebook as a social media site to improve students’ learning experience with the flipped learning materials through implementation of a socially enabled peer and selflearning environment. Provided the body of literature on poor students’ experience in flipped classes, the paper implements an experiment comparing the online quizzes and Facebook to improve students’ experience with the online materials in flipped classes. The study looks at the students’ perceptions. The paper provides recommendations to the instructors on how to use Facebook to improve students’ experience with the flipped materials. This study also motivates teaching practitioners in Information Systems to improve flipped learning by using social networking sites in their courses.N

Can fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making improve Strategic planning by balanced scorecard?

Strategic management is momentous for organizational success and competitive advantage in an increasingly turbulent business environment. Balanced scorecard (BSC) is a framework for evaluating strategic management performance which translates strategy into action via various sets of performance measurement indicators. The main objective of this research is to develop a new fuzzy group Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model for strategic plans selection process in the BSC. For this to happen, the current study has implemented linguistic extension of MCDM model for robust selection of strategic plans. The new linguistic reasoning for group decision making is able to aggregate subjective evaluation of the decision makers and hence create an opportunity to perform more robust strategic plans, despite of the vagueness and uncertainty of strategic plans selection process. A numerical example demonstrates possibilities for the improvement of BSC through applying the proposed model

Fuzzy Logic Based Direct Power Control of Induction Motor Drive

This paper is the design of an induction motor drive system that can be controlled using direct power control. First the possibilities of direct power control (DPC) of induction motors (IMs) fed by a voltage source inverter have been studied. Principles of this method have been separately evaluated. Also the drive system is more versatile due to its small size and low cost. Therefore it is advantageous to use the system where the speed is estimated by means of a control algorithm instead of measuring. This paper proposed one novel induction motor speed control system with fuzzy logic. The estimator was designed and simulated in Matlab/Simulink. Simulation result shows a good performance of speed estimator