Innovative construction methods

Across London a few bold local authorities and charities have commissioned new housing built using innovative techniques such as modular prefabrication, where the units are stacked like Lego. These developments have an undeniable ‘gadgety’ appeal—but could they be a game changer? Could they overcome long-held negative attitudes to prefabrication, and provide cheaper, better housing—and faster

'It's All About the Grade'. Students' Perceptions of Innovative Assessment

Objectives: The study explored whether innovative assessment methods can enhance the student learning experience and promote effective learning. More specifically: Do innovative assessments encourage students to focus on the processes of teaching and learning rather than outcomes? Design: A qualitative design using focus groups conducted with undergraduate and postgraduate psychology students at University of Worcester was employed. This enabled a detailed exploration of how students made sense of their experiences, their understandings and perceptions of innovative assessment. Methods: Focus groups were conducted with 8 undergraduate and 7 postgraduate students from the University of Worcester. Students were drawn from a convenience sample and were included if they had completed at least one form of innovative assessment during their degree, either at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Transcripts from each focus group were analysed using Ritchie and Spencer’s Thematic framework method. Results: Students’ perceived innovative assessments to have a positive effect on their learning if they: related to authentic ‘real world’ tasks, encouraged the application of psychological knowledge or enabled the development of transferable skills that have long-term benefits for employment. However, the extent to which these perceptions impacted upon their approach to study was unclear. Conclusions: This study demonstrated both the benefits to and challenges of implementing innovative assessment methods. Greater emphasis ought to be placed on students as active participants in the assessment process, developing a shared understanding of criteria. Exposure to these methods ought to be taken into account when evaluating their potential to enhance the learning experience of students

Innovative methods of correlation and orbit determination for space debris

We propose two algorithms to provide a full preliminary orbit of an Earth-orbiting object with a number of observations lower than the classical methods, such as those by Laplace and Gauss. The first one is the Virtual debris algorithm, based upon the admissible region, that is the set of the unknown quantities corresponding to possible orbits for objects in Earth orbit (as opposed to both interplanetary orbits and ballistic ones). A similar method has already been successfully used in recent years for the asteroidal case. The second algorithm uses the integrals of the geocentric 2-body motion, which must have the same values at the times of the different observations for a common orbit to exist. We also discuss how to account for the perturbations of the 2-body motion, e.g., the $J_2$ effect.Comment: 18 page

Leadership as a determinant of innovative behaviour

In knowledge-intensive services innovative behaviour of co-workers is a critical success factor. In sectors like consultancy, research and architecture the nature of the work implies that projects are never alike. Innovative behaviour means that co-workers generate ideas for better and/or different products, services or working methods, and strive for implementing such changes. By carrying out certain leadership styles, entrepreneurs are able to boost innovative behaviour of their employees. This study presents an overview of innovation-enhancing leadership styles.

Achieving Better Chronic Care at Lower Costs Across the Health Care Continuum for Older Americans

Outlines challenges to improving care for seniors, such as fragmentation of financing and care; promising models for infrastructure development, targeted care delivery improvements, and innovative payment methods; and resources in the 2010 reform act

Innovative monitoring methods in the context of adaptive management of hunting in the amazon, Colombia

Managing complex hunting socio-ecological systems within a context of uncertainty requires setting up efficient ways to monitor changes in the system and inform decision making in an adaptive management process. In such context, building trust through collaboration, institutional development, and social learning enhances efforts to foster ecosystem co-management. This approach draws explicit attention to the learning and collaboration functions necessary to improve our understanding of, and ability to respond to, complex social–ecological systems. Monitoring methods can generate observations over long time periods, incorporate large sample sizes, are relatively inexpensive and invite the participation of harvesters as researchers. We tested a combination of role playing games, traditional knowledge, technological innovations (camera traps and KoBoCollect) to co-develop a monitoring system for wildlife resources and hunting efforts in an indigenous hunting territory in the Amazon Colombia where hunters have organized themselves to develop an adaptive management approach to their hunting activities. The methods involve the active participation of hunters in data collection and an automatic tool for data analysis that allows users to visualize outputs instantaneously (e.g. map of offtakes per species, graph with number of prey per species per month). The information generated is directly usable by hunters for management decisions. We demonstrate the importance of such participatory monitoring models for building institutional trust between stakeholders (indigenous communities, governmental institutions in charge of wildlife management and civil society) as well as provide tools that are directly usable by local decision makers