The COVID-19 pandemic: resilient organisational response to a low-chance, high-impact event

The global healthcare sector is currently in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a ‘low-chance, high-impact’ event which will require healthcare systems, and the organisations within them, to maintain organisational resilience in order to respond effectively. However, contrary to the instinctive reaction to tighten control, the quality of response depends on healthcare systems’ capacity to loosen control and, subsequently, enhance improvisation. Three factors critical to enhancing an organisation’s capacity for improvisation are highlighted; increasing autonomy, maintaining structure and creating a shared understanding. By drawing on the case of Christchurch Hospital’s response to a major earthquake, this paper demonstrates the vital role that improvisation can play within a clinical setting, when responding to a low-chance, high-impact event. This article is made freely available for use in accordance with BMJ's website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid-19 pandemic or until otherwise determined by BMJ. You may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained

Practical feature subset selection for machine learning

Machine learning algorithms automatically extract knowledge from machine readable information. Unfortunately, their success is usually dependant on the quality of the data that they operate on. If the data is inadequate, or contains extraneous and irrelevant information, machine learning algorithms may produce less accurate and less understandable results, or may fail to discover anything of use at all. Feature subset selection can result in enhanced performance, a reduced hypothesis search space, and, in some cases, reduced storage requirement. This paper describes a new feature selection algorithm that uses a correlation based heuristic to determine the “goodness” of feature subsets, and evaluates its effectiveness with three common machine learning algorithms. Experiments using a number of standard machine learning data sets are presented. Feature subset selection gave significant improvement for all three algorithm

Feature subset selection: a correlation based filter approach

Recent work has shown that feature subset selection can have a position affect on the performance of machine learning algorithms. Some algorithms can be slowed or their performance adversely affected by too much data some of which may be irrelevant or redundant to the learning task. Feature subset selection, then, is a method of enhancing the performance of learning algorithms, reducing the hypothesis search space, and, in some cases, reducing the storage requirement. This paper describes a feature subset selector that uses a correlation based heuristic to determine the goodness of feature subsets, and evaluates its effectiveness with three common ML algorithms: a decision tree inducer (C4.5), a naive Bayes classifier, and an instance based learner(IBI). Experiments using a number of standard data sets drawn from real and artificial domains are presented. Feature subset selection gave significant improvement for all three algorithms; C4.5 generated smaller decision trees

Care of Nursery Stock in Retail Outlets

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Towards universal early years provision : analysis of take-up by disadvantaged families from recent annual childcare surveys

The findings of this study suggest that lack of awareness of the entitlement to free early years provision and a low level of information about local options for nursery education and childcare were important factors affecting take-up of early years provision by disadvantaged families. In addition, the way the entitlement to free early years provision is delivered through a range of providers appeared to have an impact on its uptake by the disadvantaged families

Melody based tune retrieval over the World Wide Web

In this paper we describe the steps taken to develop a Web-based version of an existing stand-alone, single-user digital library application for melodical searching of a collection of music. For the three key components: input, searching, and output, we assess the suitability of various Web-based strategies that deal with the now distributed software architecture and explain the decisions we made. The resulting melody indexing service, known as MELDEX, has been in operation for one year, and the feed-back we have received has been favorable

New Products of the 80s & 90s: the Diffusion of Household Technology in the Decade 1985-1995.

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, it has exerted substantial influence on everyone's lives. Over the years various inventions have made their way into homes and have substantially changed the way people work, rest and play. This paper reviews some of these developments and attempts to estimate the extent of these changes with regard to the introduction of five types of household appliances.TECHNOLOGY ; HOUSEHOLD

History and Development of the Goose Lake Upland Game Refuge and Nesting Area

Since nine out of every ten acres in Iowa are either mowed, grazed, or cultivated, Iowa is one of the hardest, if not the most difficult state in the Union to set up a game program

Is Charge Reduction in ESI Really Necessary?

The technique of charge reduction electrospray mass spectrometry (CREMS), which can reduce the charge state complexity produced in electrospray ionization (ESI), is discussed