20,191 research outputs found
Practical post-modernism: FM and socially constructed realities
The theme of the paper, with examples, is that strategic FM should engage not with elaborate structural functional models of building service supply but with the socially constructed realities of organisations and their results. Several, evidence based, examples of FM creating different conversations will be provided, viz:
• The creation of excellent patient environments in English Hospitals is not a function of structure (whether or not there is an integrated FM Directorate), sourcing (in house or outsourced) or a particular business process. It is a function of leadership exercised through context specific conversations.
• The creation of effective new ‘knowledge’ environments is not a function of a particular design or project structure. It is a reflection of FMs ability to create conversations for changes in business results.
• The failure of FM to capture strategic attention deriving from an obsession with considerations of unit costs and building condition rather than overall costs and business outcomes.
• The role of perceptions and assertions in creating or blocking effective business relationships between FM providers and clients
In the process the paper will challenge academic FM, whether research or education, to stop being in thrall to ‘practice’ to a degree that is arguably greater than is found in other areas of business and management, let alone other established disciplines. FM has too many models, too little theory and too little empirical evidence of specific business contributions. It is too concerned with supplying facilities rather than considering the purpose for which a given facility is managed.</p
Voting for candidates: adapting data fusion techniques for an expert search task
In an expert search task, the users' need is to identify people who have relevant expertise to a topic of interest. An expert search system predicts and ranks the expertise of a set of candidate persons with respect to the users' query. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for predicting and ranking candidate expertise with respect to a query. We see the problem of ranking experts as a voting problem, which we model by adapting eleven data fusion techniques.We investigate the effectiveness of the voting approach and the associated data fusion techniques across a range of document weighting models, in the context of the TREC 2005 Enterprise track. The evaluation results show that the voting paradigm is very effective, without using any collection specific heuristics. Moreover, we show that improving the quality of the underlying document representation can significantly improve the retrieval performance of the data fusion techniques on an expert search task. In particular, we demonstrate that applying field-based weighting models improves the ranking of candidates. Finally, we demonstrate that the relative performance of the adapted data fusion techniques for the proposed approach is stable regardless of the used weighting models
Using relevance feedback in expert search
In Enterprise settings, expert search is considered an important task. In this search task, the user has a need for expertise - for instance, they require assistance from someone about a topic of interest. An expert search system assists users with their "expertise need" by suggesting people with relevant expertise to the topic of interest. In this work, we apply an expert search approach that does not explicitly rank candidates in response to a query, but instead implicitly ranks candidates by taking into account a ranking of document with respect to the query topic. Pseudo-relevance feedback, aka query expansion, has been shown to improve retrieval performance in adhoc search tasks. In this work, we investigate to which extent query expansion can be applied in an expert search task to improve the accuracy of the generated ranking of candidates. We define two approaches for query expansion, one based on the initial of ranking of documents for the query topic. The second approach is based on the final ranking of candidates. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, to determine if query expansion can be successfully applied in the expert search task, and secondly, to ascertain if either of the two forms of query expansion can provide robust, improved retrieval performance. We perform a thorough evaluation contrasting the two query expansion approaches in the context of the TREC 2005 and 2006 Enterprise tracks
Combining fields in known-item email search
Emails are examples of structured documents with various fields. These fields can be exploited to enhance the retrieval effectiveness of an Information Retrieval (IR) system that mailing list archives. In recent experiments of the TREC2005 Enterprise track, various fields were applied to varying degrees of success by the participants. In his work, using a field-based weighting model, we investigate the retrieval performance attainable by each field, and examine when fields evidence should be combined or not
Five-dimensional SU(2) AGT conjecture and recursive formula of deformed Gaiotto state
This note deals with the five-dimensional pure SU(2) AGT conjecture proposed
by Awata and Yamada. We give a conjecture on a recursive formula for the inner
product of the deformed Gaiotto state. We also show that the K-theoretic pure
SU(2) Nekrasov partition function satisfies the same recursion relation.
Therefore the five-dimensional AGT conjecture is reduced to our conjectural
recursive formula.Comment: 16 pages. Typos correcte
Leadership conversations: the impact on patient environments
Purpose – The aim of this study is to examine 15 NHS acute trusts in England that achieved high scores at all their hospitals in the first four national Patient Environment audits. No common external explanations were discernible. This paper seeks to examine whether the facilities managers responsible for the Patient Environment displayed a consistent leadership style.
Design/methodology/approach – Overall, six of the 15 trusts gave permission for the research to take place and a series of unstructured interviews and observations were arranged with 22 facilities managers in these trusts. Responses were transcribed and categorised through multiple iteration.
Findings – The research found common leadership and managerial behaviours, many of which could be identified from other literature. The research also identified managers deliberately devoting energy and time to creating networks of conversations. This creation of networks through managing conversation is behaviour less evident in mainstream leadership literature or in the current
Department of Health and NHS leadership models.
Practical implications – The findings of this study offer managers (particularly those in FM and managers across NHS) a unique insight into the potential impact of leaders giving an opportunity to re-model thinking on management and leadership and the related managerial development opportunities. It provides the leverage to move facilities management from the role of a commodity or support service, to a position as a true enabler of business.
Originality/value – Original research is presented in a previously under-examined area. The paper illuminates how facilities management within trusts achieving high Patient Environment Action Team (PEAT) scores is led.</p
Asymptotically exact trial wave functions for yrast states of rotating Bose gases
We revisit the composite fermion (CF) construction of the lowest angular
momentum yrast states of rotating Bose gases with weak short range interaction.
For angular momenta at and below the single vortex, , the overlaps
between these trial wave functions and the corresponding exact solutions {\it
increase} with increasing system size and appear to approach unity in the
thermodynamic limit. In the special case , this remarkable behaviour was
previously observed numerically. Here we present methods to address this point
analytically, and find strongly suggestive evidence in favour of similar
behaviour for all . While not constituting a fully conclusive proof
of the converging overlaps, our results do demonstrate a striking similarity
between the analytic structure of the exact ground state wave functions at , and that of their CF counterparts. Results are given for two different
projection methods commonly used in the CF approach
On Multiple Zeta Values of Even Arguments
For k <= n, let E(2n,k) be the sum of all multiple zeta values with even
arguments whose weight is 2n and whose depth is k. Of course E(2n,1) is the
value of the Riemann zeta function at 2n, and it is well known that E(2n,2) =
(3/4)E(2n,1). Recently Z. Shen and T. Cai gave formulas for E(2n,3) and
E(2n,4). We give two formulas form E(2n,k), both valid for arbitrary k <=n, one
of which generalizes the Shen-Cai results; by comparing the two we obtain a
Bernoulli-number identity. We also give explicit generating functions for the
numbers E(2n,k) and for the analogous numbers E*(2n,k) defined using multiple
zeta-star values of even arguments.Comment: DESY number added; misprints fixed; reference added. Second revision
(2016): New result on multiple zeta-star values adde
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