Knowledge Enhanced Notes (KEN)

To aid the creation and through-life support of large complex engineering products, organisations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organisations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. This paper presents an overview of the challenges in creating accurate, re-usable records of synchronous design activities, enhancing the through-life support of engineering products, followed by the development of an information capture software system to address these challenges. The main objectives for the development of the Knowledge Enhanced Notes system are described followed by the techniques chosen to address the objectives, and finally a description of a use-case for the system. Whilst the focus of the KEN System was to aid the creation and through-life support of large complex engineering products through constructing complete and accurate records of design activities, the system is entirely generic in its application to synchronous activities

LIVINGSTON COUNTY EMERGENCY SERVICES ANALYSIS

Rapid population growth challenges the ability of local government to keep pace with increasing and changing demand for public services. These challenges may be physical or organizational in nature. Physical challenges arise from the need to upgrade public infrastructure such as water and sewer service, roads, schools, and emergency services. Although installation of new infrastructure is always expensive, growth-related increases in the tax base provide new revenue for installation of new services. However, when slowing growth rates, againg infrastructure, and addition of expensive new services pressure local government to increase revenue from existing resources decision-makers may then seek to reduce per-capita costs by reorganizing the method or structure of providing community services.Public Economics,

Effect of capital on income and organization of beef farms in the Flint Hills of Kansas

Call number: LD2668 .R4 1967 P6

Evaluation of Disability Employment Policy Demonstration Programs

[Excerpt] Since 2001, the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) has awarded more than $65 million in grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements. Of this, more than$38 million has been awarded to projects under the ODEP Demonstration Program, with about 2 percent directed toward an independent evaluation. The ODEP Demonstration Program consists of a variety of initiatives targeted at both adults and youth with disabilities. All demonstration projects funded under these initiatives are expected to implement and evaluate methods for building the capacity of the workforce development system to better serve people with disabilities. ODEP contracted with Westat, a private research company, to conduct an independent evaluation of its demonstration program. The purpose of the independent evaluation is to provide ODEP with data and information about system change that can be used to assist policy development, decisions, and recommendations, as well as track progress in meeting ODEP’s goals under the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). The independent evaluation has three objectives: 1. To provide ODEP with reliable and valid indicators of program effectiveness; 2. To determine the extent to which each program priority area is effective in building workforce development system capacity; and 3. To document local, regional, and/or state systems change that supports program effectiveness. This paper summarizes the issues and accomplishments identified by the evaluation to date in the context of these three objectives

Contested Moralities: Animals And Moral Value in the Dear/Symanski Debate

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear and Symanski’s comments on ‘animal rights’, followed in turn by discussions of moral value and value paradigms. I then introduce a value paradigm termed geocentrism as a geographical account of our moral relations to animals. Finally, I discuss the wider significance of this debate for geographical ethics, moral philosophy and social theory

Canis Lupus Cosmopolis: Wolves in a Cosmopolitan Worldview

The subject of wolf recovery in North America sparks heated controversy, both for and against. This paper explores how this subject is informed by cosmopolitan worldviews. These worldviews pull nature and culture into a common orbit of ethical meaning, with implications for the normative relationships that ought to pertain in landscapes shared by people and wolves. This theoretical outlook is illustrated using the controversy over wolves in the northeastern region of the United States. I conclude with a set of reflections on theorizing the cosmopolis, the interpretation of cosmopolitan landscapes, and living with cosmopolitan wolves

Contested Moralities: Animals And Moral Value in the Dear/Symanski Debate

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear and Symanski’s comments on ‘animal rights’, followed in turn by discussions of moral value and value paradigms. I then introduce a value paradigm termed geocentrism as a geographical account of our moral relations to animals. Finally, I discuss the wider significance of this debate for geographical ethics, moral philosophy and social theory

Discourse and Wolves: Science, Society, and Ethics

Wolves have a special resonance in many human cultures. To appreciate fully the wide variety of views on wolves, we must attend to the scientific, social, and ethical discourses that frame our understanding of wolves themselves, as well as their relationships with people and the natural world. These discourses are a configuration of ideas, language, actions, and institutions that enable or constrain our individual and collective agency with respect to wolves. Scientific discourse is frequently privileged when it comes to wolves, on the assumption that the primary knowledge requirements are matters of ecology, cognitive ethology, and allied disciplines. Social discourse about wolves implicitly challenges this privilege and provides a rich array of social perspectives on human-wolf relations. Ethical discourse has until recently lagged behind the other two. So too, ethicists are increasingly challenging the adequacy of scientific and social discourse. They do so by calling attention to the value-laden character of all discourse, and the unavoidable ethical questions that confront us as we learn to share the landscape with large predators like wolves

Edge Leadership: Using Senior Leadership Perceptions to Explore Organizational Turnarounds

The researcher developed the concept of an edge leader—that is, one who can mindfully turn around a troubled business to sustain it for the future. In an increasingly turbulent and competitive climate, more edge leaders must be developed to sustain their organizations for the benefit of shareholders, employees, communities, and society. The researcher\u27s review of the classic and contemporary leadership and change literatures suggested that four elements are necessary to develop leaders capable of leading even basic beneficial change. They include: having broad, successful experience; being emotionally and socially aware; having the ability to think differently about priorities and paradoxes when progressing through organizational levels; and having the competencies to fill a role. However, the researcher asserted that those elements, while necessary, are not sufficient to develop edge leaders. Specifically, two additional elements are required to fill the gap between basic change leader development and turnaround leader development: instilling a zest for continuous learning and developing the ability to mindfully apply a balance of transactional and transformational leadership practices. The researcher\u27s review of the classic, contemporary, and empirical leadership literature, along with several preparatory studies, suggested that the edge leadership concept merited further study. The dissertation research further substantiated the concept in three ways within a turnaround case study. The researcher used additional analysis of the literature along with Q methodology, a constructivist approach combining qualitative interview data gathering, researcher interpretation to define the range of participants\u27 perspectives, and quantitative factor analysis to develop conclusions. Based on interview data from a company leader and eight cross-functional senior staff members, the researcher first found that the leader\u27s development profile compared well to the six conceptual elements of edge leadership. Second, the researcher‘s literature-based top-25 turnaround leader action items list matched 23 of those actually taken by the leader within the case. Third, the researcher examined the quantum relationships among the participants and their perceptions of the leader‘s actions, concluding that four factors represented the actions seen by the participants as the most important to the turnaround. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible at the OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu