Reluctant Bedfellows or Model Marriage? : Postmodern Thinking Applied to Mainstream Public Sector Health Services Research Settings

An important mobilisation of postmodernism is as a way of thinking that pays particular attention to the play of differences in human thought and experience. Informed by the Derridean theory of deconstruction, the current discussion critically examines an original piece of health services research undertaken by the author, which aimed to derive propositions about how health service researchers disseminated research information to those in daily practice in the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS). The objective is to provide an analytical review of those tacit and oftentimes suppressed, marginalized or hidden, forms of knowledge that may be conveniently overlooked or glossed over in mainstream health services research, which is largely produced by university-based researchers who remain subject to traditional academic pressures. Following a review of the theory and practice of deconstruction, Boje and Dennehy’s (1994) specific seven-point ‘deconstruction methodology’, based on drawing empirical data through bipolar opposite themes, is deployed before concluding with a consideration of the implications of a postmodern analysis of mainstream healthcare practice, policy and organisation settings, which have a central role to play in delivering service improvement in the new financial environment

Nutrition and Exercise Resources for Clinton County

The obesity epidemic is a nation wide problem that has increased prevalence in Clinton County, NY when compared to the surrounding areas. Obesity leads to many co-morbid health conditions and is associated with a large increase in health care spending costs. This brochure tackles the limited resources, such as limited number of fitness centers, lack of nutrition education and an overall lower socioeconomic status, that is present in the Clinton County area. This brochure offers help in these areas through free phone applications which cover nutrition education, healthy shopping guidance, at home exercise routines, motivation, habit trackers and mindfulness exercises.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1314/thumbnail.jp

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Investigating data-flow coverage of classes using evolutionary algorithms

It is not unusual for a software development organization to expend 40% of total project effort on testing, which call be a very laborious and time-consuming process. Therefore, there is a big necessity for test automation. This paper describes an approach to automatically generate test-data for 00 software exploiting a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to achieve high levels of data-flow (d-u) coverage. A proof-of-concept tool is presented. The experimental results from testing six Java classes helped us identify three categories of problematic test targets, and suggest that in the future full d-u coverage with a reasonable computational cost may be possible if we overcome these obstacles

The Java system dependence graph

The Program Dependence Graph was introduced by Ottenstein and Ottenstein in 1984 [14]. It was suggested to be a suitable internal program representation for monolithic programs, for the purpose of carrying out certain software engineering operations such as slicing and the computation of program metrics. Since then, Horwitz et al. have introduced the multi-procedural equivalent System Dependence Graph [9]. Many authors have proposed object-oriented dependence graph construction approaches [11, 10, 20, 12]. Every approach provides its own benefits, some of which are language specific. This paper is based on Java and combines the most important benefits from a range of approaches. The result is a Java System Dependence Graph, which summarises the key benefits offered by different approaches and adapts them (if necessary) to the Java language

Investigating effort prediction of web-based applications using CBR on the ISBSG dataset

As web-based applications become more popular and more sophisticated, so does the requirement for early accurate estimates of the effort required to build such systems. Case-based reasoning (CBR) has been shown to be a reasonably effective estimation strategy, although it has not been widely explored in the context of web applications. This paper reports on a study carried out on a subset of the ISBSG dataset to examine the optimal number of analogies that should be used in making a prediction. The results show that it is not possible to select such a value with confidence, and that, in common with other findings in different domains, the effectiveness of CBR is hampered by other factors including the characteristics of the underlying dataset (such as the spread of data and presence of outliers) and the calculation employed to evaluate the distance function (in particular, the treatment of numeric and categorical data)

Introducing digital literacy skills through IBL: A comparative study of UG and PG business information systems students

This paper reports a comparative study of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) at Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG) levels at a university in the north west of England. Both student cohorts undertook a professional, legal and ethical module centred on IT. This study focuses on how the different student cohorts approached this style of teaching, and how it impacted on overall student engagement throughout the semester. IBL was introduced in the 2009-2010 academic years; to the UG students in the first semester and the PG students in the second semester. Key observations gained from the study were unexpected in that the UG level students fully embraced the IBL approach, they maintained a high attendance level throughout the semester, and all preliminary and formative assessment work/tasks were eagerly completed. Ultimately, this developed students’ information literacy skills. PG students enjoyed the in-class IBL activities, but actively avoided module preparation and formative assessment work/tasks, and so minimized their opportunities to develop rich digital literacy skills. This study highlights potential enablers required to employ IBL techniques successfully