An examination of information systems and technology maturity and it’s relationship to methods of contributing information to the information systems planning process in National Health Service acute trust hospitals

As a result of the use of Nolan's six Stage model of IS and IT maturity in a number of consultancy studies in the early 1980s, managers felt they could maximise the contribution of the IS and IT portfolios to the achievement of business strategy by becoming more IS and IT mature. Despite the development of a further eight models since 1979, empirical tests exist only of the Nolan model and one other, McFarlan, McKenney and Pyburn's model ofIT assimilation. This research has sought further empirical evidence of IS and IT maturity in National Health Service (NHS) acute Trust hospitals. Survey method was used to collect data from over seventy top and middle managers representing four Trust hospitals. Statistical analysis of these data provided evidence that six of twenty-three maturity characteristics identified in existing models can currently be used to differentiate the maturity of NHS acute Trust hospitals. These six characteristics had been identified both in models which considered a range of IS and IT issues and in models which had concentrated on a single aspect of IS and IT management. This indicated that further insight is gained by combining these approaches when modelling IS and IT maturity. Managers also placed different emphasis on the use of specific methods of contributing information to the IS planning process in hospitals which exhibited greater IS and IT maturity than in hospitals which exhibited lesser IS and IT maturity. This indicates the existence ,of a further IS maturity characteristic, further evidence of which can now be sought in other industry sectors

Outsourcing transitions and the employment relationship implications

Drawing on three longitudinal case studies involving the outsourcing of public leisure services, this paper explores the work transitions of staff as they transfer from one organisation to another using a three-phase analytical framework. The obtained findings confirm the idea that outsourcing can be a difficult transition to go through, with losses occurring in relation to terms and conditions of employment. However, they also show how such changes can occur alongside the development of seemingly positive employment relationships with the new employer that challenge the view that the employment effects of public service outsourcing are invariably perceived in a negative light by employees. In doing so, the study’s findings are seen to point towards the value of exploring outsourcing related work transitions longitudinally and through the lens of the adopted analytical framework. They are also seen to have implications for how such transitions are theorised and managed, including how we might understand the nature of the employment relationship and the role of line managers

Outsourcing transitions and the employment relationship implications

Drawing on three longitudinal case studies involving the outsourcing of public leisure services, this paper explores the work transitions of staff as they transfer from one organisation to another using a three-phase analytical framework. The obtained findings confirm the idea that outsourcing can be a difficult transition to go through, with losses occurring in relation to terms and conditions of employment. However, they also show how such changes can occur alongside the development of seemingly positive employment relationships with the new employer that challenge the view that the employment effects of public service outsourcing are invariably perceived in a negative light by employees. In doing so, the study’s findings are seen to point towards the value of exploring outsourcing related work transitions longitudinally and through the lens of the adopted analytical framework. They are also seen to have implications for how such transitions are theorised and managed, including how we might understand the nature of the employment relationship and the role of line managers

Quantifying the Impact of Women’s Participation in Post-Conflict Economic Recovery

There is still a considerable lack of systematic and rigorous understanding about the impact of violent conflict on women‘s roles, activities and aspirations, or about the nature and magnitude of the benefits of including women more fully in economic recovery and peace-building processes. Policy programming around gender issues in post-conflict contexts is currently being designed based on limited rigorous evidence, and incorporates inadequate procedures to evaluate its impact in terms of gender roles and gender equality. This situation has at times resulted in misplaced interventions and the continued emphasis on the reintegration of (male) combatants, and male employment generation programmes. The main aim of this report is to analyse how changes in the roles and activities of women during episodes of violent conflict may shape their contribution to post-conflict economic recovery and sustainable peace. The report poses two important questions for which limited evidence is to date available in the academic literature on violent conflict or in policy programming in post-conflict contexts: 1) How does violent conflict change the roles that women take on within their households and communities? 2) How do changes in female roles during conflict affect women‘s own status after the conflict, and the capacity of households and communities to recover from the conflict?UN Wome

Behavior Analysis of NLI Models: Uncovering the Influence of Three Factors on Robustness

Natural Language Inference is a challenging task that has received substantial attention, and state-of-the-art models now achieve impressive test set performance in the form of accuracy scores. Here, we go beyond this single evaluation metric to examine robustness to semantically-valid alterations to the input data. We identify three factors - insensitivity, polarity and unseen pairs - and compare their impact on three SNLI models under a variety of conditions. Our results demonstrate a number of strengths and weaknesses in the models' ability to generalise to new in-domain instances. In particular, while strong performance is possible on unseen hypernyms, unseen antonyms are more challenging for all the models. More generally, the models suffer from an insensitivity to certain small but semantically significant alterations, and are also often influenced by simple statistical correlations between words and training labels. Overall, we show that evaluations of NLI models can benefit from studying the influence of factors intrinsic to the models or found in the dataset used.Comment: Accepted at NAACL 201

The importance of microstructure in electrochemical jet processing

© 2018 Electrochemical jet processing (EJP) is an athermal technique facilitating precision micromachining and surface preparation, without recast layer generation. The role of the microstructure in determining machining characteristics has been largely overlooked. In this study, we show that in order to optimise EJP for a given material, fundamental material factors must be considered to ensure the desired near-surface response in terms of metallurgy, topography and dimensional accuracy. In this work, specimens have been prepared from the same feedstock material (brass, Cu39Zn2Pb), to appraise the role of microstructure in the determination of key removal characteristics, such as resultant topography, removal efficiency and form. Topography is shown to be highly dependent upon microstructure across large current density ranges, whereby the phase ratio is generally the dominant amplitude-defining material property, where preconditions with divergent ratios result in lower amplitudes. The microstructure, specifically the phase ratio, significantly changes the form, where predominantly single-phase conditions result in deeper and narrower features (up to 15% deeper compared with as-received condition). In addition, removal efficiency is greater (by 6%) at low current density for small grained dual-phase conditions, than for predominantly single-phase, due to erosion complementing anodic dissolution. Mechanisms are discussed for these removal phenomena and used to inform industrial practice

Nonlinear directional coupler for polychromatic light

We demonstrate that nonlinear directional coupler with special bending of waveguide axes can be used for all-optical switching of polychromatic light with very broad spectrum covering all visible region. The bandwidth of suggested device is enhanced five times compared to conventional couplers. Our results suggest novel opportunities for creation of all-optical logical gates and switches for polychromatic light with white-light and super-continuum spectrum.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Calibration of uncertainty in the active learning of machine learning force fields

FFLUX is a machine learning force field that uses the maximum expected prediction error (MEPE) active learning algorithm to improve the efficiency of model training. MEPE uses the predictive uncertainty of a Gaussian process (GP) to balance exploration and exploitation when selecting the next training sample. However, the predictive uncertainty of a GP is unlikely to be accurate or precise immediately after training. We hypothesize that calibrating the uncertainty quantification within MEPE will improve active learning performance. We develop and test two methods to improve uncertainty estimates: post-hoc calibration of predictive uncertainty using the CRUDE algorithm, and replacing the GP with a student- t process. We investigate the impact of these methods on MEPE for single sample and batch sample active learning. Our findings suggest that post-hoc calibration does not improve the performance of active learning using the MEPE method. However, we do find that the student- t process can outperform active learning strategies and random sampling using a GP if the training set is sufficiently large

Mental health in 2020 for men who have sex with men in the United States

Despite continued advances in HIV prevention and treatment, gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men (MSM) remain the population most impacted by HIV/AIDS in the US and many other Western countries. Additionally, MSM are disproportionately affected by various psychological problems, including depression, distress, trauma and substance use. These challenges frequently co-occur, and are associated with higher rates of behaviours related to HIV acquisition and transmission, HIV infection, and, for those living with HIV/AIDS, lower levels of treatment engagement. Moreover, racial disparities exist among MSM in the US; for example, young African American MSM bear a disproportionate burden of the continuing HIV epidemic, likely related to disparate HIV prevalence in partner pools as well as long-standing structural inequities. In this review, the mental health challenges facing MSM primarily in the US, related to HIV and STI prevention and across the HIV care cascade, including HIV diagnosis, engagement and retention in care, and antiretroviral adherence, are illustrated. Disparities among MSM including racial and ethnic, age-related and structural barriers associated with HIV prevention and treatment, as well as current interventions, are also described. Moving forward towards 2020, resources will be needed to assess and implement scalable intervention strategies to address psychological and social barriers to HIV and STI risk reduction and treatment for MSM, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable subpopulations. As access to prevention and treatment strategies expand, and new breakthroughs continue to emerge, behavioural strategies will continue to be needed to reduce risk and increase uptake and engagement among MSM most at risk through 2020 and beyond