Human Error and Organizational Management

The concern for performance is a topic that raises interest in the business environment but also in other areas that – even if they seem distant from this world – are aware of, interested in or conditioned by the economy development. As individual performance is very much influenced by the human resource, we chose to analyze in this paper the mechanisms that generate – consciously or not –human error nowadays.Moreover, the extremely tense Romanian context, where failure is rather a rule than an exception, made us investigate the phenomenon of generating a human error and the ways to diminish its effects.human error, performance, management, information processing, organizational culture

Tracking Error and Active Portfolio Management

Persistent bear market conditions have led to a shift of focus in the tracking error literature. Until recently the portfolio allocation literature focused on tracking error minimization as a consequence of passive benckmark management under portfolio weights, transaction costs and short selling constraints. Abysmal benchmark performance shifted the literature's focus towards active portfolio strategies that aim at beating the benchmark while keeping tracking error within acceptable bounds. We investigate an active (dynamic) portfolio allocation strategy that exploits the predictability in the conditional variance-covariance matrix of asset returns. To illustrate our procedure we use Jorion's (2002) tracking error frontier methodology. We apply our model to a representative portfolio of Australian stocks over the period January 1999 through November 2002.

ASR error management for improving spoken language understanding

This paper addresses the problem of automatic speech recognition (ASR) error detection and their use for improving spoken language understanding (SLU) systems. In this study, the SLU task consists in automatically extracting, from ASR transcriptions , semantic concepts and concept/values pairs in a e.g touristic information system. An approach is proposed for enriching the set of semantic labels with error specific labels and by using a recently proposed neural approach based on word embeddings to compute well calibrated ASR confidence measures. Experimental results are reported showing that it is possible to decrease significantly the Concept/Value Error Rate with a state of the art system, outperforming previously published results performance on the same experimental data. It also shown that combining an SLU approach based on conditional random fields with a neural encoder/decoder attention based architecture , it is possible to effectively identifying confidence islands and uncertain semantic output segments useful for deciding appropriate error handling actions by the dialogue manager strategy .Comment: Interspeech 2017, Aug 2017, Stockholm, Sweden. 201

Evaluating the performance of survey-based operational management procedures

The design and evaluation of survey-based management strategies is addressed in this article, using three case-study fisheries: North Sea herring, Bay of Biscay anchovy and North Sea cod, with a brief history and the main management issues with each fishery outlined. A range of operational management procedures for the case study stocks were designed and evaluated using trends that may be derived from survey indices (spawner biomass, year-class strength and total mortality) with an array of simple and more structured observation error regimes simulated. Model-free and model-based indicators of stock status were employed in the management procedures. On the basis of stochastic stock-specific simulations, we identified the following key determinants of successful management procedures: (i) adequate specification of the stock-recruit relationship (model structure, parameter estimates and variability), (ii) knowledge of the magnitude and structure of the variation in the survey indices, and (iii) explication of the particular management objectives, when assessing management performance. More conservative harvesting strategies are required to meet specified targets in the presence of increasing stochasticity, due to both process and observation error. It was seen that survey-based operational management procedures can perform well in the absence of commercial data, and can also inform aspects of survey design with respect to acceptable levels of error or bias in the surveys

Quality of medication use in primary care - mapping the problem, working to a solution: a systematic review of the literature

Background: The UK, USA and the World Health Organization have identified improved patient safety in healthcare as a priority. Medication error has been identified as one of the most frequent forms of medical error and is associated with significant medical harm. Errors are the result of the systems that produce them. In industrial settings, a range of systematic techniques have been designed to reduce error and waste. The first stage of these processes is to map out the whole system and its reliability at each stage. However, to date, studies of medication error and solutions have concentrated on individual parts of the whole system. In this paper we wished to conduct a systematic review of the literature, in order to map out the medication system with its associated errors and failures in quality, to assess the strength of the evidence and to use approaches from quality management to identify ways in which the system could be made safer. Methods: We mapped out the medicines management system in primary care in the UK. We conducted a systematic literature review in order to refine our map of the system and to establish the quality of the research and reliability of the system. Results: The map demonstrated that the proportion of errors in the management system for medicines in primary care is very high. Several stages of the process had error rates of 50% or more: repeat prescribing reviews, interface prescribing and communication and patient adherence. When including the efficacy of the medicine in the system, the available evidence suggested that only between 4% and 21% of patients achieved the optimum benefit from their medication. Whilst there were some limitations in the evidence base, including the error rate measurement and the sampling strategies employed, there was sufficient information to indicate the ways in which the system could be improved, using management approaches. The first step to improving the overall quality would be routine monitoring of adherence, clinical effectiveness and hospital admissions. Conclusion: By adopting the whole system approach from a management perspective we have found where failures in quality occur in medication use in primary care in the UK, and where weaknesses occur in the associated evidence base. Quality management approaches have allowed us to develop a coherent change and research agenda in order to tackle these, so far, fairly intractable problems

A packet error recovery scheme for vertical handovers mobility management protocols

Mobile devices are connecting to the Internet through an increasingly heterogeneous network environment. This connectivity via multiple types of wireless networks allows the mobile devices to take advantage of the high speed and the low cost of wireless local area networks and the large coverage of wireless wide area networks. In this context, we propose a new handoff framework for switching seamlessly between the different network technologies by taking advantage of the temporary availability of both the old and the new network technology through the use of an “on the fly” erasure coding method. The goal is to demonstrate that our framework, based on a real implementation of such coding scheme, 1) allows the application to achieve higher goodput rate compared to existing bicasting proposals and other erasure coding schemes; 2) is easy to configure and as a result 3) is a perfect candidate to ensure the reliability of vertical handovers mobility management protocols. In this paper, we present the implementation of such framework and show that our proposal allows to maintain the TCP goodput (with a negligible transmission overhead) while providing in a timely manner a full reliability in challenged conditions

Safety of medication use in primary care

© 2014 Royal Pharmaceutical Society.BACKGROUND: Medication errors are one of the leading causes of harmin health care. Review and analysis of errors have often emphasized their preventable nature and potential for reoccurrence. Of the few error studies conducted in primary care to date, most have focused on evaluating individual parts of the medicines management system. Studying individual parts of the system does not provide a complete perspective and may further weaken the evidence and undermine interventions.AIM AND OBJECTIVES: The aim of this review is to estimate the scale of medication errors as a problem across the medicines management system in primary care. Objectives were: To review studies addressing the rates of medication errors, and To identify studies on interventions to prevent medication errors in primary care.METHODS: A systematic search of the literature was performed in PubMed (MEDLINE), International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), Embase, PsycINFO, PASCAL, Science Direct, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, and CINAHL PLUS from 1999 to November, 2012. Bibliographies of relevant publications were searched for additional studies.KEY FINDINGS: Thirty-three studies estimating the incidence of medication errors and thirty-six studies evaluating the impact of error-prevention interventions in primary care were reviewed. This review demonstrated that medication errors are common, with error rates between 90%, depending on the part of the system studied, and the definitions and methods used. The prescribing stage is the most susceptible, and that the elderly (over 65 years), and children (under 18 years) are more likely to experience significant errors. Individual interventions demonstrated marginal improvements in medication safety when implemented on their own.CONCLUSION: Targeting the more susceptible population groups and the most dangerous aspects of the system may be a more effective approach to error management and prevention. Co-implementation of existing interventions at points within the system may offer time- and cost-effective options to improving medication safety in primary care.Peer reviewe

Does size matter? : Economies of scale in the German mutual fund industry

In this paper, we analyze economies of scale for German mutual fund complexes. Using 2002-2005 data of 41 investment management companies, we specify a hedonic translog cost function. Applying a fixed effects regression on a one-way error component model there is clear evidence of significant overall economies of scale. On the level of individual mutual fund complexes we find significant economies of scale for all of the companies in our sample. With regard to cost efficiency, we find that the average mutual fund complexes in all size quartiles deviate considerably from the best practice cost frontier. JEL Classification: G2, L25 Keywords: mutual fund complex, investment management company, cost efficiency, economies of scale, hedonic translog cost function, fixed effects regression, one-way error component mode