A manifesto for a socio-technical approach to NHS and social care IT-enabled business change - to deliver effective high quality health and social care for all

80% of IT projects are known to fail. Adopting a socio-technical approach will help them to succeed in the future. The socio-technical proposition is simply that any work system comprises both a social system (including the staff, their working practices, job roles, culture and goals) and a technical system (the tools and technologies that support and enable work processes). These elements together form a single system comprising interacting parts. The technical and the social elements need to be jointly designed (or redesigned) so that they are congruent and support one another in delivering a better service. Focusing on one aspect alone is likely to be sub-optimal and wastes money (Clegg, 2008). Thus projects that just focus on the IT will almost always fail to deliver the full benefits

DUMP: A Database of Useful MCQs for Physics

This communication describes the output of a Development Project awarded in 2005 to fund a collaborative project between the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews. The project aimed to take an in-house collection of over 400 multiple choice / multiple response questions on topics in introductory Physics (gathered and developed over many years of teaching) and publish them in an interactive, online, browsable collection, freely available to educators to use as a resource for their teaching. The system that we have created has functionality similar to online shopping or auction sites such as Amazon and eBay (without the cost!). In this communication we will outline some of the rationale that led us to attempt this project, describe the issues and challenges for the project, illustrate ways the system can be used to support teaching and learning and conclude with thoughts for the future progress and sustainability of such systems, including plans for the continuing development of the output from this project

The Relationship Between Purchase Decisions and Quality Assessment of Office Furniture

The use of multiple attributes to measure attitudes and predisposition to certain behavior in marketing was developed in the 1970s in studies aimed at identifying determinant attributes. Rising concerns over quality in the 1980s saw similar use of attributes to define quality. Some authors of these latter studies infer that quality and determinant attributes are one and the same; however, no studies were found that directly examined this relationship. This study was undertaken to examine the determinant attribute/quality attribute relationship in office furniture. More than 260 purchasing executives nationwide participated in rating 26 product and dealer/manufacturer attributes on the basis of their influence on purchase decisions and on the basis of their use in assessing quality. Respondents rated attributes on importance and on the degree of difference in a particular attribute among the products and services available to them.The three most important attributes respondents used to rate quality were: (1) absence of defects, (2) delivery on schedule, and (3) structural integrity. The three most important attributes influencing purchase decisions were: (1) absence of defects, (2) structural integrity, and (3) reliability.Results indicate a very high correlation between purchase decisions and quality assessment in the relative rankings of the 26 attributes. However, the results suggest that purchasing executives place more importance on attributes in the purchase decision but may perceive bigger differences in the attributes when assessing quality

VALIDITY OF ESTIMATING ACTIVE DRAG USING THE BOTH ASSISTED AND RESISTED TECHNIQUES WITH FLUCTUATING VELOCITY

The main purpose of this study was to examine the validity of assisted and resisted techniques which are used for active drag estimation. Ten national and international male sprint swimmers performed two maximum effort free swims, two passive trials and two active drag trials in each technique. The computation of active drag for both techniques was based upon assumptions of the Velocity Perturbation Method (VPM) of Kolmogorov and Duplishcheva (1992). Results of a one-way ANOVA with repeated measures indicated there was no statistical significance between the active drag values obtained from the assisted and resisted techniques (p=0.05). There was however variation between active drag values. This is likely due to different power outputs that were applied during the test conditions and also, active drag varies as a function velocity squared

RELIABILITY OF ESTIMATING ACTIVE DRAG USING THE ASSISTED TOWING METHOD (ATM) WITH FLUCTUATING VELOCITY

The aim of this study was to examine the reliability of active drag values obtained using a method that compared free swim velocity with measurements taken by towing swimmers slightly faster than their maximum swim speed, while allowing for intra stroke velocity fluctuations. Using nine national level swimmers on two alternate days, reliability was determined using within-subject intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) within each day and between the days. The ICCs for days one and two were 0.80 and 0.84 respectively, while the comparison of mean active drag values between days was 0.92. Results found that the ATM method with fluctuating velocity to be only moderately reliable within a single test. Taking average values improved this reliability, even when measured over different days. Further investigation is suggested to improve the current method

Evaluation of the School Administration Manager Project

Examines the results to date of a Wallace-supported project to help principals delegate some administrative and managerial tasks to school administration managers and spend more time interacting with teachers, students and others on instructional matters

THE EFFECT OF STARTING POSITION ON ELITE SWIM START PERFORMANCE USING AN ANGLED KICK PLATE

The addition of a new start block in competitive swimming, the OSB11 with incline (kick) plate, has led to the development of a new starting technique, the kick start. Although some swimmers have limited access to these blocks, their approach to using it may determine their level of success. The purpose of this study was to a) determine the effect of kick plate position on the performance of the start and b) determine the effect on start performance of changing the swimmers position on the block prior to the start signal. Eighteen elite swimmers completed 30 ‘dive and glide’ starts using the kick start in three different kick plate positions along with three variations in their weight. There was no effect of kick plate position on time. Leaning further towards the rear of the block resulted in higher velocity off the block however no significant difference in time to 7.5 m was seen

On Nonmixed Symmetric End-Load Problems in Elastic Waveguides

This investigation deals with the response of the semi-infinite, linear elastic, homogeneous, isotropic plate in plane strain, subject to symmetric normal loads acting, in the absence of shear stress, on its edge. A double Laplace transform technique is used to obtain long-time information for two problems; a uniform load and a line-load. Near- and far-field approximations are found, the far-field approximations giving the integral of the Airy integral for both problems