795 research outputs found
Quality Services, Better Outcomes: A Quality Framework for Achieving Outcomes.
The Childhood Development Initiative (CDI) is an innovative, community based response to a comprehensive consultation process undertaken in Tallaght West. Working with a wide range of locally established service providers, CDI is delivering services to children and families which meet identified needs. Etch of these is being rigorously evaluated, and considerable attention is being given to quality assurance, promotion of reflective practice, and professional training and support. The insights gained, and techniques developed during this process are central to delivering high quality services with the view to improving our understanding of what enables children to meet their potential, gain their developmental milestones within appropriate timeframes and become healthy and active citizens. This Workbook describes key processes relating to practice, organisational culture and systems change which support the implementation of evidence-based and evidence-informed programmes and practices. From CDI's experience, implementing evidence-based programmes not only requires specific structures and processes in place to support programme implementation and fidelity (e.g. training, coaching, and supervision) but also necessities a focus on the more generic aspects of delivering quality services (e.g. engaging in reflective practice in order to promote and maintain fidelity to a programme). The Workbook also addresses some fundamental areas in relation to monitoring and evaluation as a way of determining whether an intervention was effective or not. In effect, this Workbook hopes to explain the 'what', 'why', 'how' and 'did we?' of evidence-based practice. The Workbook is intended to provide readers with a comprehensive introduction to both the shared language and concepts underpinning the science and practice of implementation. It complements the 'What Works Process' guide published by the Centre for Effective Services (CES, 2011) which supports services in assessing how effective they are in improving outcomes for children and helps them to think about what works
What are some Best-in-Class Examples of Corporate Cultures and Values Brought-to-Life in Workplace Behaviors that drove Clear Business Results?
Prominent workplace culture and values have been proven to strengthen employee loyalty time and again, yet there is still a need to understand how these nebulous ideas translate into real business practices. Culture can be the driving force in connecting employees directly to the mission of the company, and therefore creating results for all company stakeholders including employees, customers, and shareholders. But in order to produce these outcomes, companies must create values that represent the workplace culture they want to achieve and have merit and teeth, which requires what the Harvard Business Review refers to as “guts”
Spectral properties of stars and stellar populations
I present the results of an investigation into the spectral properties of stars and galaxies. Firstly
I investigate methods for automatic MKK classification of stellar spectra, providing both a comparative study of some of the standard methods of automatic classification and a demonstration
of a state-of-the-art machine learning technique — Support Vector M achines. Using this technique I obtain a classification accuracy of δ = 1.7.One of the limitations in the classification of stellar spectra is the lack of good training
data at high resolution. With this and also the application of population synthesis in mind, I
present a high resolution (λ/Δλ = 250000) library of 6410 synthetic stellar spectra which I
have generated from the Kurucz model atmospheres. The library covers the wavelength range
3000 - 10 000 with 54 values of effective temperature in the range 5250 - 50 000 K, 11 values
of log surface gravity between 0.0 and 5.0 and 19 metallicities in the range - 5 .0 to 1.0. By
com paring the new synthetic spectra with the STELIB library of observed spectra (Le Borgne
et al., 2003) I demonstrate their suitability for the application of population synthesis.I then extend this library by supplementing the Kurucz spectra with other synthetic spectra,
to form a library for population synthesis similar to that of Lejeune et al. (1998) but at higher
resolution (2 ). I also investigate two methods of empirical population synthesis however I find
that even with modern computational resources these methods are not suitable for the number
and size of current spectra.Finally I measure the Lick indices for a sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectra and use
these in conjunction with the 2dF groups catalogue to investigate the change in these parameters
with the local density of galaxies. I find no strong trends in any of the Lick indices with group
velocity dispersion
Online classification for time-domain astronomy
The advent of synoptic sky surveys has spurred the development of techniques
for real-time classification of astronomical sources in order to ensure timely
follow-up with appropriate instruments. Previous work has focused on algorithm
selection or improved light curve representations, and naively convert light
curves into structured feature sets without regard for the time span or phase
of the light curves. In this paper, we highlight the violation of a fundamental
machine learning assumption that occurs when archival light curves with long
observational time spans are used to train classifiers that are applied to
light curves with fewer observations. We propose two solutions to deal with the
mismatch in the time spans of training and test light curves. The first is the
use of classifier committees where each classifier is trained on light curves
of different observational time spans. Only the committee member whose training
set matches the test light curve time span is invoked for classification. The
second solution uses hierarchical classifiers that are able to predict source
types both individually and by sub-group, so that the user can trade-off an
earlier, more robust classification with classification granularity. We test
both methods using light curves from the MACHO survey, and demonstrate their
usefulness in improving performance over similar methods that naively train on
all available archival data.Comment: Astroinformatics workshop, IEEE International Conference on Data
Mining 201
VAST: An ASKAP Survey for Variables and Slow Transients
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give us an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the transient sky at radio wavelengths. In this paper we present VAST, an ASKAP survey for Variables and Slow Transients. VAST will exploit the wide-field survey capabilities of ASKAP to enable the discovery and investigation of variable and transient phenomena from the local to the cosmological, including flare stars, intermittent pulsars, X-ray binaries, magnetars, extreme scattering events, interstellar scintillation, radio supernovae, and orphan afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. In addition, it will allow us to probe unexplored regions of parameter space where new classes of transient sources may be detected. In this paper we review the known radio transient and variable populations and the current results from blind radio surveys. We outline a comprehensive program based on a multi-tiered survey strategy to characterise the radio transient sky through detection and monitoring of transient and variable sources on the ASKAP imaging timescales of 5 s and greater. We also present an analysis of the expected source populations that we will be able to detect with VAST
Ultra- and Hyper-compact HII regions at 20 GHz
We present radio and infrared observations of 4 hyper-compact HII regions and
4 ultra-compact HII regions in the southern Galactic plane. These objects were
selected from a blind survey for UCHII regions using data from two new radio
surveys of the southern sky; the Australia Telescope 20 GHz survey (AT20G) and
the 2nd epoch Molonglo Galactic Plane Survey (MGPS-2) at 843 MHz. To our
knowledge, this is the first blind radio survey for hyper- and ultra-compact
HII regions.
We have followed up these sources with the Australia Telescope Compact Array
to obtain H70-alpha recombination line measurements, higher resolution images
at 20 GHz and flux density measurements at 30, 40 and 95 GHz. From this we have
determined sizes and recombination line temperatures as well as modeling the
spectral energy distributions to determine emission measures. We have
classified the sources as hyper-compact or ultra-compact on the basis of their
physical parameters, in comparison with benchmark parameters from the
literature.
Several of these bright, compact sources are potential calibrators for the
Low Frequency Instrument (30-70 GHz) and the 100-GHz channel of the High
Frequency Instrument of the Planck satellite mission. They may also be useful
as calibrators for the Australia Telescope Compact Array, which lacks good
non-variable primary flux calibrators at higher frequencies and in the Galactic
plane region. Our spectral energy distributions allow the flux densities within
the Planck bands to be determined, although our high frequency observations
show that several sources have excess emission at 95 GHz (3 mm) that can not be
explained by current models.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Using the VO to Study the Time Domain
Just as the astronomical "Time Domain" is a catch-phrase for a diverse group
of different science objectives involving time-varying phenomena in all
astrophysical regimes from the solar system to cosmological scales, so the
"Virtual Observatory" is a complex set of community-wide activities from
archives to astroinformatics. This workshop touched on some aspects of adapting
and developing those semantic and network technologies in order to address
transient and time-domain research challenges. It discussed the VOEvent format
for representing alerts and reports on celestial transient events, the SkyAlert
and ATELstream facilities for distributing these alerts, and the IVOA
time-series protocol and time-series tools provided by the VAO. Those tools and
infrastructure are available today to address the real-world needs of
astronomers.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of IAU Symposium 285, "New Horizons
in Time Domain Astronomy": http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/IAUS285/, 6 page
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