Technical support for AXAF

The effects of ray aberrations due to various surface errors on the point image are discussed, and a new method and rationale for optimizing the performance of nested arrays of grazing incidence telescopes is introduced

Top Notch Support for eBooks

Come learn tips and tricks for delivering top notch technical support for eBooks. Library staff are the front line technical support for a growing number of patrons with diverse technical abilities wanting to access eBooks. We’ll share VPL’s unique team approach and innovative techniques for delivering technical support for your eBook collection. In this session, participants will learn: How to apply reference interview skills to technical support. How to create effective tools to use with patrons, including templates and on-the-spot screencasts. How to build an effective ebook-support team in your reference departmen

Technical Assistance: Coach and Data Facilitator Support Among Texas Colleges

The goal of this research brief is to provide an assessment of the relationship among Achieving the Dream colleges, coaches and data facilitators. This brief places emphasis on the coach and data facilitator relationship to the college and how it affects the work being done related to Achieving the Dream initiative

Support for resistance: technical analysis and intraday exchange rates

“Support” and “resistance” levels—points at which an exchange rate trend may be interrupted and reversed—are widely used for short-term exchange rate forecasting. Nevertheless, the levels’ ability to predict intraday trend interruptions has never been rigorously evaluated. This article undertakes such an analysis, using support and resistance levels provided to customers by six firms active in the foreign exchange market. The author offers strong evidence that the levels help to predict intraday trend interruptions. However, the levels’ predictive power is found to vary across the exchange rates and firms examined.Foreign exchange rates ; Forecasting

Technical support for Life Sciences communities on a production grid infrastructure

Production operation of large distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) still requires a lot of human intervention to reach acceptable quality of service. This may be achievable for scientific communities with solid IT support, but it remains a show-stopper for others. Some application execution environments are used to hide runtime technical issues from end users. But they mostly aim at fault-tolerance rather than incident resolution, and their operation still requires substantial manpower. A longer-term support activity is thus needed to ensure sustained quality of service for Virtual Organisations (VO). This paper describes how the biomed VO has addressed this challenge by setting up a technical support team. Its organisation, tooling, daily tasks, and procedures are described. Results are shown in terms of resource usage by end users, amount of reported incidents, and developed software tools. Based on our experience, we suggest ways to measure the impact of the technical support, perspectives to decrease its human cost and make it more community-specific.Comment: HealthGrid'12, Amsterdam : Netherlands (2012

A manifesto for a socio-technical approach to NHS and social care IT-enabled business change - to deliver effective high quality health and social care for all

80% of IT projects are known to fail. Adopting a socio-technical approach will help them to succeed in the future. The socio-technical proposition is simply that any work system comprises both a social system (including the staff, their working practices, job roles, culture and goals) and a technical system (the tools and technologies that support and enable work processes). These elements together form a single system comprising interacting parts. The technical and the social elements need to be jointly designed (or redesigned) so that they are congruent and support one another in delivering a better service. Focusing on one aspect alone is likely to be sub-optimal and wastes money (Clegg, 2008). Thus projects that just focus on the IT will almost always fail to deliver the full benefits

The relationship of professional support and commitment to the teaching profession

Although the study of professional support and professional commitment are prevalent in the education literature, not many studies examined both these issues issue among technical school educators. Acknowledging this limitation, this study was undertaken to examine the extent to which professional commitment can be influenced by professional support among this group of teachers. Data for this exploratory study were collected using self administered questionnaires, from 120 randomly selected technical school teachers. Correlational analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between professional support and professional commitment among the teachers understudied. Multiple regression analysis showed that the variance in explaining professional commitment was contributed by professional support, comprising, both principal support and collegial support. Based on the statistical results, implications of the findings were discussed in the context of understanding the relationship between professional support and professional commitment. Suggestions on how to increase professional commitment and professional support as well avenues for future research were also provided

Technical guidance and analytic services in support of SEASAT-A

The design of a high resolution radar for altimetry and ocean wave height estimation was studied. From basic principles, it is shown that a short pulse wide beam radar is the most appropriate and recommended technique for measuring both altitude and ocean wave height. To achieve a topographic resolution of + or - 10 cm RMS at 5.0 meter RMS wave heights, as required for SEASAT-A, it is recommended that the altimeter design include an onboard adaptive processor. The resulting design, which assumes a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) processor, is shown to satisfy all performance requirements. A design summary is given for the recommended radar altimeter, which includes a full deramp STRETCH pulse compression technique followed by an analog filter bank to separate range returns as well as the assumed MLE processor. The feedback loop implementation of the MLE on a digital computer was examined in detail, and computer size, estimation accuracies, and bias due to range sidelobes are given for the MLE with typical SEASAT-A parameters. The standard deviation of the altitude estimate was developed and evaluated for several adaptive and nonadaptive split-gate trackers. Split-gate tracker biases due to range sidelobes and transmitter noise are examined. An approximate closed form solution for the altimeter power return is derived and evaluated. The feasibility of utilizing the basic radar altimeter design for the measurement of ocean wave spectra was examined