Introduction

May you live in interesting times, runs the legendary Chinese curese. These are interesting times: almost anything can happen except a return to the delicate but enduring balance between two blocs that marked international relations for nearly half a century after World War II. The possibilities include nuclear war, not in the form of the long-feared mutual destruction of the Soviet Union and the United States, but as a last resort in the course of escalating regional conflicts in the Middle East or South Asia. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, United Nations inspectors found evidence of strong steps toward the production of nuclear weapons in Iraq, a country whose leaders did not hesitate to rain missiles on noncombatant Israel during their struggle to hold Kuwait; the same science is available to many other small, rich despots throughout the world. While the chances that two of the world\u27s largest countries would annihilate each other simultaneously have surely receded, the risk of nuclear war has by no means vanished

Evaluation for what purpose? Findings from two stakeholder groups

A host of reasons exist for the pursuit of evidence in the public sector, including to support good governance and policy development. As the expectations for program evaluation from policymakers have evolved, so too has evaluation practice and a great deal of experimentalism has ensued. There is a risk that these developments and the complexity inherent in them, may lead to conflicting expectations about why program evaluation is done, or even a loss of purpose. This prompts the meso-level analysis of two types of stakeholders in a governance network, explored in this chapter. This chapter presents the findings of an ongoing study which explores the perceptions of program evaluators and policy implementers towards the purpose of evidence. The findings suggest that program evaluators and policy implementers have divergent expectations of why and how evaluation data might be used. The findings suggest that program evaluators aspire to support change and enhance the policy domains they serve, whereas policy implementers perceive program evaluation as serving a more governance-/management-orientated role. The chapter demonstrates the complexity of both program evaluation and policy and may have implications for the twin pillars of governance and responsibility at the heart of the book. If governance and responsibility are the twin pillars of sustainability then the complex networks of relationships, expectations, values, and outcomes may need to be considered. The findings also have implications for evaluation commissioners and practitioners, demonstrating the need for the purpose and expectations of program evaluation to be agreed early. The use of program evaluation as a symbolic, aesthetic or structural mechanism also emerges, prompting opportunity for further research, for instance, to explore legitimacy and program evaluation.N/

The QuinteT Recruitment Intervention supported five randomized trials to recruit to target: a mixed-methods evaluation

ObjectiveTo evaluate the impact of the Quintet Recruitment Intervention (QRI) on recruitment in challenging randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have applied the intervention. The QRI aims to understand recruitment difficulties, and then implements ‘QRI-actions’ to address these as recruitment proceeds.Study Design and SettingA mixed-methods study, comprising: a) before-and-after comparisons of recruitment rates and numbers of patients approached, and b) qualitative case studies, including documentary analysis and interviews with RCT investigators.ResultsFive UK-based publicly-funded RCTs were included in the evaluation. All recruited to target. RCT2 and RCT5 both received up-front pre-recruitment training before the intervention was applied. RCT2 did not encounter recruitment issues and recruited above target from its outset. Recruitment difficulties, particularly communication issues, were identified and addressed through QRI-actions in RCTs 1, 3, 4 and 5. Randomization rates significantly improved post-QRI-action in RCTs 1,3, and 4. QRI-actions addressed issues with approaching eligible patients in RCTs 3 and 5, which both saw significant increases in patients approached. Trial investigators reported that the QRI had unearthed issues they had been unaware of, and reportedly changed their practices post QRI-action.ConclusionThere is promising evidence to suggest the QRI can support recruitment to difficult RCTs. This needs to be substantiated with future controlled evaluations

Standards and Bibliographic Data Representation

published or submitted for publicatio

Diversity and Inclusion Council - Panel Discussion

Presented on September 26, 2018 from 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. in the Reinsch-Pierce Family Auditorium, Architecture East Building, College of Design at Georgia Tech.College of Design Diversity & Inclusion Council presented a panel discussion with Special Guest Peggy McIntosh.Peggy McIntosh is Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She is Founder of the National S.E.E.D. Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). She consults widely in the United States and throughout the world with college and school faculty who are creating more gender-fair and multicultural curricula. In 1988, she published the ground-breaking article, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work on Women’s Studies.” This analysis and its shorter form, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” (1989), have been instrumental in putting the dimension of privilege into discussions of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the United States. McIntosh has taught at the Brearley School, Harvard University, Trinity College (Washington, D.C.), the University of Denver, the University of Durham (UK), and Wellesley College. She is co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute and has been consulting editor to Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. She has consulted with women on 22 Asian campuses on the development of Women’s Studies, and programs to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the main curriculum. She has consulted frequently in China, Japan, and Korea. In addition to having four honorary degrees, she is the recipient of the Klingenstein Award for Distinguished Educational Leadership from Columbia Teachers College.Kaye Husbands Fealing specializes in science of science and innovation policy, the public value of research expenditures related to food safety, and the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields and workforce. Prior to her position at Georgia Tech, she developed and was the inaugural program director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program and co-chaired the Science of Science Policy Interagency Task Group, chartered by the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Policy Council. At NSF she also served as an economics program director. Husbands Fealing was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development, where she conducted research on NAFTA’s impact on the Mexican and Canadian automotive industries, and research on strategic alliances between aircraft contractors and their subcontractors. Husbands Fealing was elected to the Executive Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (term 2017-2020) and named AAAS Distinguished Fellow. She is the recipient of the 2017 Trailblazer Award from the National Medical Association Council on Concerns of Women Physicians. She serves on the National Institutes of Health National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, the National Science Foundation's Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering, and the National Academies panel on Review of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs at the Department of Energy. She has served on the National Academies panels on Reengineering the Census Bureau’s Annual Economic Surveys, the Developing Indicators for Undergraduate STEM Education, a Council on Canadian Academies workshop steering committee, and an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Advisory Group. She is a board member for the Center for Organization Research and Design at Arizona State University, and for the Society for Economic Measurement. In recent years she served on several panels and committees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NSF, and on AAAS committees, including the Nominations Committee for Social, Economic, and Political Sciences, the Dialog on Science, Ethics and Religion, and two terms on the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy. She also served on the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession. At Georgia Tech, she serves on the Institute for Data Engineering and Science Council and the Intellectual Property Advisory Board. Husbands Fealing holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania.Robert Kirkman is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His current focus is on the design, implementaiton and assessment of innovative approaches to teaching practical ethics, including problem-based learning, the integration of ethics and design and the use of interactive narrative. His prior work in environmental ethics examined the values in play in decisions about the built environment, especially in cities and suburbs in the United States. He is the author of The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth: The Future of our Built Environment (Continuum, 2010) and Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science (Indiana University Press, 2002).Runtime: 61:21 minutesThe College of Design Diversity and Inclusion Council at Georgia Tech, has invited Peggy McIntosh, Senior Research Scientist and former Associate Director for the Wellesley Centers for Women, Kaye Husbands Fealing, Professor and Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, and Robert Kirkman, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Public Policy to discuss what diversity and inclusion means to them, and to facilitate an open discussion from the audience about issues of diversity and inclusion. The overall ambition of this event is to foster and enable engagement and open dialogue between the audience and the speakers

G9.5 Experiments with an ecosystems model for integrated production planning

This paper outlines a coevolutionary distributed genetic algorithm for tackling an integrated manufacturing planning and scheduling problem. In this multispecies ecosystems model, the genotype of each species represents a feasible manufacturing (process) plan for a particular component to be manufactured in the machine shop. Separate populations evolve under the pressure of selection to find near-optimal process plans for each of the components. However, their fitness functions take into account the use of shared resources in their common world (a model of the machine shop). This means that without the need for an explicit scheduling stage, a low cost schedule will emerge at the same time as the plans are being optimised. Results are presented of the use of this model on a set of industrial problems. It is shown to significantly outperform simulated annealing and a dispatching rule algorithm over a wide range of optimisation criteria. G9.5.1 Project Overview Research on job shop sched..