Lessons from school: what nurse leaders can learn from education.

The drive to improve quality in the education sector is similar to that in health care, and lessons from the schools system are relevant to nursing leadership. This article discusses these shared traits, and details how school improvement was achieved in London and how a model of learning-centred leadership helped to transform pupil attainment in schools that had been performing poorly. Parallels are drawn between the education inspection system undertaken by Ofsted and the hospital inspections undertaken by the Care Quality Commission, and between the practice discipline-based managerial roles of nurse directors and head teachers. The article suggests that a learning-centred approach to improving the quality of patient care is needed, with a focus on the education and continuing professional development of staff

Future wireless applications for a networked city: services for visitors and residents

Future wireless networks will offer near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth communications to mobile users. In addition, the accurate position of users will be known, either through network services or via additional sensing devices such as GPS. These characteristics of future mobile environments will enable the development of location-aware and, more generally, context-sensitive applications. In an attempt to explore the system, application, and user issues associated with the development and deployment of such applications, we began to develop the Lancaster GUIDE system in early 1997, finishing the first phase of the project in 1999. In its entirety, GUIDE comprises a citywide wireless network based on 802.11, a context-sensitive tour guide application with, crucially, significant content, and a set of supporting distributed systems services. Uniquely in the field, GUIDE has been evaluated using members of the general public, and we have gained significant experience in the design of usable context-sensitive applications. We focus on the applications and supporting infrastructure that will form part of GUIDE II, the successor to the GUIDE system. These developments are designed to expand GUIDE outside the tour guide domain, and to provide applications and services for residents of the city of Lancaster, offering a vision of the future mobile environments that will emerge once ubiquitous high-bandwidth coverage is available in most cities

Mobile-awareness:designing for mobile interactive systems

In recent years, we have witnessed a significant increase in the availability and adoption of mobile devices with wireless communications capabilities. Such devices can be used as the end-system in network-based (single or multi

Numerical representations of fluid mixing

The work contained within this thesis is concerned with a theoretical investigatiop of both laminar and thermally driven types of cavity flow, together with an analysis of their associated mixing processes which find applications to Industrial mixing and also to the environment. The mixing efficiency has been viewed from two perspectives namely the tracking of a selection of fluid particles, and also the simulation of the dispersive mixing of a coloured fluid element as carried along by the flow. This thesis also incorporates features of both Newtonian and a wide range of non-Newtonian fluids

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

Scalable and flexible location-based services for ubiquitous information access

In mobile distributed environments applications often need to dynamically obtain information that is relevant to their current location. The current design of the Internet does not provide any conceptual models for addressing this issue. As a result, developing a system that requires this functionality becomes a challenging and costly task, leading to individual solutions that only address the requirements of specific application scenarios. In this paper we propose a more generic approach, based on a scalable and exible concept of location-based services, and an architectural framework to support its application in the Internet environment. We describe a case study in which this architectural framework is used for developing a location-sensitive tourist guide. The realisation of this case study demonstrates the applicability of the framework, as well as the overall concept of location-based services, and highlights some of the issues involved.To the GUIDE team, and especially to Keith Mitchell and Matthias Franz, for their collaboration in the preparation of this case study. To Adrian Friday for his comments on a draft version of this paper. To the anonymous reviewers for their attentive reading and valuable comments. This work was carried out as part of the PRAXIS funded AROUND project (PRAXIS/P/EEI/14267/1998) and supported by grant PRAXIS XXI/BD/13853/97

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

Public ubiquitous computing systems:lessons from the e-campus display deployments

In this paper we reflect on our experiences of deploying ubiquitous computing systems in public spaces and present a series of lessons that we feel will be of benefit to researchers planning similar public deployments. We focus on experiences gained from building and deploying three experimental public display systems as part of the e-campus pro ject. However, we believe the lessons are likely to be generally applicable to many different types of public ubicomp deployment