The LSE identity project. House of Lords : All party briefing : "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear”

The original amendment on cost information, put forward in the House of Lords, sought to address a widely held concern about the government’s unwillingness to be open about the likely costs associated with implementing the identity cards scheme. These concerns are shared by some in the Lords, industry and by the LSE, whose initial alternative costings fuelled the concerns of the Lords over the limited information made available to them. The proposed amendment for the House of Commons does not seek to address this underlying issue and, indeed, the provisions of clause 4, are likely to repeat the same, unnecessary secrecy that the Lords were seeking to explore

Safer clinical systems : interim report, August 2010

Safer Clinical Systems is the Health Foundation’s new five year programme of work to test and demonstrate ways to improve healthcare systems and processes, to develop safer systems that improve patient safety. It builds on learning from the Safer Patients Initiative (SPI) and models of system improvement from both healthcare and other industries. Learning from the SPI highlighted the need to take a clinical systems approach to improving safety. SPI highlighted that many hospitals struggle to implement improvement in clinical areas due to inherent problems with support mechanisms. Clinical processes and systems, rather than individuals, are often the contributors to breakdown in patient safety. The Safer Clinical Systems programme aimed to measure the reliability of clinical processes, identify defects within those processes, and identify the systems that result in those defects. Methods to improve system reliability were then to be tested and re-developed in order to reduce the risk of harm being caused to patients. Such system-level awareness should lead to improvements in other patient care pathways. The relationship between system reliability and actual harm is challenging to identify and measure. Specific, well-defined, small-scale processes have been used in other programmes, and system reliability has been shown to have a direct causal relationship with harm (e.g. care bundle compliance in an intensive care unit can reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia). However, it has become evident that harm can be caused by a variety of factors over time; when working in broader, more complex and dynamic systems, change in outcome can be difficult to attribute to specific improvements and difficulties are also associated with relating evidence to resulting harm. The overall aim of Phase 1 of the Safer Clinical Systems programme was to demonstrate proof-of-concept that using a systems-based approach could contribute to improved patient safety. In Phase 1, experienced NHS teams from four locations worked together with expert advisers to co-design the Safer Clinical Systems programme

DIDET: Digital libraries for distributed, innovative design education and teamwork. Final project report

The central goal of the DIDET Project was to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology. To achieve this overall project goal, the project delivered on the following objectives: 1. Teach engineering information retrieval, manipulation, and archiving skills to students studying on engineering degree programs. 2. Measure the use of those skills in design projects in all years of an undergraduate degree program. 3. Measure the learning performance in engineering design courses affected by the provision of access to information that would have been otherwise difficult to access. 4. Measure student learning performance in different cultural contexts that influence the use of alternative sources of information and varying forms of Information and Communications Technology. 5. Develop and provide workshops for staff development. 6. Use the measurement results to annually redesign course content and the digital libraries technology. The overall DIDET Project approach was to develop, implement, use and evaluate a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. The use of digital libraries and virtual design studios was used to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught at the collaborating institutions. This was done by implementing a digital library at the partner institutions to improve learning in the field of Design Engineering and by developing a Global Team Design Project run as part of assessed classes at Strathclyde, Stanford and Olin. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the class teaching model and the LauLima system developed at Strathclyde to support teaching and learning. Major findings include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful elearning implementations. A need for strong leadership has been identified, particularly to exploit the benefits of cross-discipline team working. One major project output still being developed is a DIDET Project Framework for Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork to encapsulate all project findings and outputs. The project achieved its goal of embedding major change to the teaching of Design Engineering and Strathclyde's new Global Design class has been both successful and popular with students

CC-interop : COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation. Final Project Report

As far as is known, CC-interop was the first project of its kind anywhere in the world and still is. Its basic aim was to test the feasibility of cross-searching between physical and virtual union catalogues, using COPAC and the three functioning "clumps" or virtual union catalogues (CAIRNS, InforM25, and RIDING), all funded or part-funded by JISC in recent years. The key issues investigated were technical interoperability of catalogues, use of collection level descriptions to search union catalogues dynamically, quality of standards in cataloguing and indexing practices, and usability of union catalogues for real users. The conclusions of the project were expected to, and indeed do, contribute to the development of the JISC Information Environment and to the ongoing debate as to the feasibility and desirability of creating a national UK catalogue. They also inhabit the territory of collection level descriptions (CLDs) and the wider services of JISC's Information Environment Services Registry (IESR). The results of this project will also have applicability for the common information environment, particularly through the landscaping work done via SCONE/CAIRNS. This work is relevant not just to HE and not just to digital materials, but encompasses other sectors and domains and caters for print resources as well. Key findings are thematically grouped as follows: System performance when inter-linking COPAC and the Z39.50 clumps. The various individual Z39.50 configurations permit technical interoperability relatively easily but only limited semantic interoperability is possible. Disparate cataloguing and indexing practices are an impairment to semantic interoperability, not just for catalogues but also for CLDs and descriptions of services (like those constituting JISC's IESR). Creating dynamic landscaping through CLDs: routines can be written to allow collection description databases to be output in formats that other UK users of CLDs, including developers of the JISC information environment. Searching a distributed (virtual) catalogue or clump via Z39.50: use of Z39.50 to Z39.50 middleware permits a distributed catalogue to be searched via Z39.50 from such disparate user services as another virtual union catalogue or clump, a physical union catalogue like COPAC, an individual Z client and other IE services. The breakthrough in this Z39.50 to Z39.50 conundrum came with the discovery that the JISC-funded JAFER software (a result of the 5/99 programme) meets many of the requirements and can be used by the current clumps services. It is technically possible for the user to select all or a sub-set of available end destination Z39.50 servers (we call this "landscaping") within this middleware. Comparing results processing between COPAC and clumps. Most distributed services (clumps) do not bring back complete results sets from associated Z servers (in order to save time for users). COPAC on-the-fly routines could feasibly be applied to the clumps services. An automated search set up to repeat its query of 17 catalogues in a clump (InforM25) hourly over nearly 3 months returned surprisingly good results; for example, over 90% of responses were received in less than one second, and no servers showed slower response times in periods of traditionally heavy OPAC use (mid-morning to early evening). User behaviour when cross-searching catalogues: the importance to users of a number of on-screen features, including the ability to refine a search and clear indication that a search is processing. The importance to users of information about the availability of an item as well as the holdings data. The impact of search tools such as Google and Amazon on user behaviour and the expectations of more information than is normally available from a library catalogue. The distrust of some librarians interviewed of the data sources in virtual union catalogues, thinking that there was not true interoperability

Good Systems Network Meeting

You're viewing a past event from the Good Systems Grand Challenge team at The University of Texas at Austin that contains two presentations from May 19, 2020.Office of the VP for Researc

INSPIRAL: investigating portals for information resources and learning. Final project report

INSPIRAL's aims were to identify and analyse, from the perspective of the UK HE learner, the nontechnical, institutional and end-user issues with regard to linking VLEs and digital libraries, and to make recommendations for JISC strategic planning and investment. INSPIRAL's objectives -To identify key stakeholders with regard to the linkage of VLEs, MLEs and digital libraries -To identify key stakeholder forum points and dissemination routes -To identify the relevant issues, according to the stakeholders and to previous research, pertaining to the interaction (both possible and potential) between VLEs/MLEs and digital libraries -To critically analyse identified issues, based on stakeholder experience and practice; output of previous and current projects; and prior and current research -To report back to JISC and to the stakeholder communities, with results situated firmly within the context of JISC's strategic aims and objectives

Systems Engineering Leading Indicators Guide, Version 1.0

The Systems Engineering Leading Indicators guide set reflects the initial subset of possible indicators that were considered to be the highest priority for evaluating effectiveness before the fact. A leading indicator is a measure for evaluating the effectiveness of a how a specific activity is applied on a program in a manner that provides information about impacts that are likely to affect the system performance objectives. A leading indicator may be an individual measure, or collection of measures, that are predictive of future system performance before the performance is realized. Leading indicators aid leadership in delivering value to customers and end users, while assisting in taking interventions and actions to avoid rework and wasted effort. The Systems Engineering Leading Indicators Guide was initiated as a result of the June 2004 Air Force/LAI Workshop on Systems Engineering for Robustness, this guide supports systems engineering revitalization. Over several years, a group of industry, government, and academic stakeholders worked to define and validate a set of thirteen indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of systems engineering on a program. Released as version 1.0 in June 2007 the leading indicators provide predictive information to make informed decisions and where necessary, take preventative or corrective action during the program in a proactive manner. While the leading indicators appear similar to existing measures and often use the same base information, the difference lies in how the information is gathered, evaluated, interpreted and used to provide a forward looking perspective

Systems Engineering Leading Indicators Guide, Version 2.0

The Systems Engineering Leading Indicators Guide editorial team is pleased to announce the release of Version 2.0. Version 2.0 supersedes Version 1.0, which was released in July 2007 and was the result of a project initiated by the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI) at MIT in cooperation with: the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM), and the Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri) at MIT. A leading indicator is a measure for evaluating the effectiveness of how a specific project activity is likely to affect system performance objectives. A leading indicator may be an individual measure or a collection of measures and associated analysis that is predictive of future systems engineering performance. Systems engineering performance itself could be an indicator of future project execution and system performance. Leading indicators aid leadership in delivering value to customers and end users and help identify interventions and actions to avoid rework and wasted effort. Conventional measures provide status and historical information. Leading indicators use an approach that draws on trend information to allow for predictive analysis. By analyzing trends, predictions can be forecast on the outcomes of certain activities. Trends are analyzed for insight into both the entity being measured and potential impacts to other entities. This provides leaders with the data they need to make informed decisions and where necessary, take preventative or corrective action during the program in a proactive manner. Version 2.0 guide adds five new leading indicators to the previous 13 for a new total of 18 indicators. The guide addresses feedback from users of the previous version of the guide, as well as lessons learned from implementation and industry workshops. The document format has been improved for usability, and several new appendices provide application information and techniques for determining correlations of indicators. Tailoring of the guide for effective use is encouraged. Additional collaborating organizations involved in Version 2.0 include the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), US Department of Defense Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), and National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) Systems Engineering Division (SED). Many leading measurement and systems engineering experts from government, industry, and academia volunteered their time to work on this initiative