244 research outputs found
Project management control utilising innovative forecasting and computerised data bases
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The prime objective of this thesis is to research and develop a new system of project budgeting, monitoring and forecasting to meet the needs of the Construction Industry. It is intended that this work will facilitate the means for more efficient control of projects from inception to final completion, utilising where possible the latest developments in computer technology.
The initial stage of the work involves an investigation and appraisal of existing methods of formulating project budgets. In particular attention is paid to previous work in the development of mathematical 's' curve models, together with their limitations in use and application. Potential for future development is also identified.
The thesis then focuses on the evolution of an improved modelling philosophy for project budgets and forecasts which overcomes previously known problems. In parallel with this work is the development of a computerised system intended to enable the testing of the model against live project data.
The model finally selected is then tested against the extensive research work previously undertaken by the DHSS and the data collected from sixteen construction projects.
To facilitate the development of a suitable control system to act as a vehicle for the application of the principles developed, a contextual survey is included. This survey is intended to provide an update of previous survey work undertaken by the author in 1977 and to further investigate factors orientated specifically to the objectives of the thesis.
The research then concentrates on the development of an integrated set of sub-systems which contribute to the budgeting, monitoring and prediction of project expenditure. These systems are developed in accordance with the need to establish the financial status of projects both before, during and after they are completed. The overall system is based on the latest computer technology available and is designed to be flexible in its application. Tests documented in the text prove that the system operates both in principle and in practice. A further extension of the research is the use of the various project data bases to provide information for a corporate control system which has been developed in principle.
This thesis provides a significant step forward in computerised project budgeting and control utilisng 's' curve philosophy and provides a basis for further development. Potential exists for future development of the prediction and corporate control systems, together with software developments to improve general application over a wide range of industries and disciplines where project work is undertaken
Reduction in Arterial Stiffness Index (SI) in Response to Combination Antioxidant Therapy
No full textAntioxidants reduce arterial stiffness, but the effects previously reported are weak. A systematic review of the antioxidants vitamin E, vitamin C, vitamin A, and beta-carotenes (the most commonly studied antioxidants) on pulse wave velocity (PWV) found an effect size of only −0.20 (approximately −16 m/s or −2.5%). Studies in rats of the potent pro-oxidant substance acetaldehyde have shown that combinations of sulfur-containing antioxidants, including thiamine and l-cysteine, with ascorbic acid potently protect against oxidative-stress-mediated mortality. The effects of these combinations of oxidants on PWV have not been studied. The present study evaluated the effects of 2 weeks of therapy with a combination of sulfur-containing antioxidants (cysteine, thiamine, and pyridoxine) in combination with ascorbic acid on stiffness index (SI), a measure of arterial stiffness that is strongly correlated with PWV, using a Pulse Trace recorder in a diverse group of 78 volunteers. SI fell by −1.7 m/s relative to placebo (95% confidence intervals −0.6 to −2.7 m/s), a reduction of −19% (95% confidence intervals −9% to −31%). The Glass effect size was 1.4, indicating a very strong treatment effect which was substantially greater than the effect size found in previous studies of antioxidants. PWV reduction was correlated significantly with increasing age. Further studies of similar antioxidant combinations are required to determine whether they are of value in the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease
Autobiography of a pioneer : being an account of the personal experiences of the author from 1867 to 1916 /
No full text"Adventures with buffalo, cattle and outlaws" -- Howes, U.S.IANA, S 560.Mode of access: Internet
Using conversation topics for predicting therapy outcomes in schizophrenia.
No full textThis article is available from
http://www.la-press.com.
© the author(s), publisher and licensee Libertas Academica Ltd.
This is an open access article published under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 3.0 license.Previous research shows that aspects of doctor-patient communication in therapy can predict patient symptoms, satisfaction and future adherence to treatment (a significant problem with conditions such as schizophrenia). However, automatic prediction has so far shown success only when based on low-level lexical features, and it is unclear how well these can generalize to new data, or whether their effectiveness is due to their capturing aspects of style, structure or content. Here, we examine the use of topic as a higher-level measure of content, more likely to generalize and to have more explanatory power. Investigations show that while topics predict some important factors such as patient satisfaction and ratings of therapy quality, they lack the full predictive power of lower-level features. For some factors, unsupervised methods produce models comparable to manual annotation
ALPS ePortfolio Project Report
No full textThe ALPS ePortfolio project was funded by the Yorkshire and Humber Strategic Health Authority (SHA) to involve students in investigating the use, benefits and requirements of ePorfolios in health and social care education. It was undertaken by the ALPS CETL (www.alps-cetl.ac.uk), which involved 5 universities and 16 health and social-care professions. Sixteen students were employed to work on the project, reviewing ePortfolio use and designing an ideal ePortfolio for health and social care education.
The main project objectives were achieved; the project team identified benefits that could be achieved through ePortfolio use, wrote guidelines for the effective introduction of ePortfolios and agreed on the specification (a list of desired functionalities) for an ideal ePortfolio. In addition, the use of ePortfolios and reflective diaries increased within the student group and various approaches to championing ePortfolios (to both students and staff) were explored. The students enjoyed working as part of a project team alongside the academic staff; feeling that their work was valued and that they gained important skills and experiences from their involvement. The skills reported as being enhanced were in the common competency areas (teamworking, communication and interprofessional working) that the wider ALPS programme has been supporting.
The students identified two key pieces of further work they thought was needed in this area:
• To build the improved ePortfolio based on their specification.
• To integrate ePortfolios more effectively into the courses and the professions
Suggestions for integrating ePortfolios more effectively into their courses included:
• linking it to other key university systems (email and submissions) to encourage daily use
• ensuring that it provided a place where students could save and manage their own material as well as course reflections
• better support and use by staff so that the ePortfolio acted as an interface between students and staff and
• better links between HE and the professions' use of ePortfolios to ease the transition from education to the workplace
Improved linking between the HE and professional use of ePortfolios is an area that the ALPS CETL is in a good position to investigate further, as the CETL has involved collaboration between the universities and 16 health and social care professions. Work in this area could be taken forward by the ALPS ePortfolio network (ALPS 2010) which was set up in Autumn 2010
Measuring Syntactic Priming in Dialogue Corpora
No full textPietsch C, Buch A, Kopp S, de Ruiter J. Measuring Syntactic Priming in Dialogue Corpora. In: Stolterfoht B, Featherston S, eds. Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory: Studies in Meaning and Structure. Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG]. Vol 111. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; 2012: 29-42.The tendency to reuse syntactic constructions is often attributed to
syntactic priming. We devise a simple, distribution-based measure of
priming between linguistic constructions (or syntactic
rules/categories), and find priming in treebanks of dialogue corpora,
both for context-free production rules and for Combinatory Categorial
Grammar categories. It is stronger for task-oriented dialogues, and
stronger in lexical categories than in syntactic categories.
As priming cannot be measured directly in language corpora, we use the
decay of rule repetition probability as a proxy. A limitation of the
method presented here is that it conflates self-priming and
other-priming. However, we consider it a great advantage that our
method takes into account all rules or categories occurring in a given
corpus, not just a few carefully selected constructions
Comparison of Tooth Size Discrepancy of Three Main Ethnics in Malaysia with Bolton's Ratio
No full textThe objective of this study was to investigate the applicability of Bolton's ratios in orthodontic population of Malaysian main ethnics; Malay, Chinese and Indians. Ninety convenient samples consisting of 30 pre-orthodontic study casts from each ethnic that fits the inclusion criteria were selected. The greatest mesiodistal widths of each tooth from six to six for overall ratio and three to three for anterior ratio were measured using a digital callipers linked to Hamilton Arch Tooth System software to the nearest 0.01mm. Means of the ratios were calculated using Bolton analysis. One sample t-test statistic analysis was carried out to compare the means with Bolton values of anterior ratio and overall ratio and one-way ANOVA was used to analyze comparison between ethnic groups of the anterior ratio and the overall ratio with the level of statistical significance set at p < 0.05. However, there were no significant differences when comparing Bolton values with Chinese and Indian anterior and overall ratios. The Bolton standards could be applied to Malaysian Chinese, Indians and Malay's female. Subsequently, a specific standard should be used for the Malays orthodontic population.Article URL : http://www.ukm.my/jsm/pdf_files/SM-PDF-41-2-2012/17%20Aida%20Nur%20Ashikin.pd
Divergence in Dialogue
No full textCopyright: 2014 Healey et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; http://www.esrc.ac.uk/) through the DynDial project (Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue, RES-062-23-0962) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/) through the RISER
project (Robust Incremental Semantic Resources for Dialogue, EP/J010383/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
‘Monkey Business’ : an artist’s action research into the parameters of temporary gallery installation through reflexive formal and informal documentary practice
No full textThe term ‘installation’, referring to both process and product, is a significant component of contemporary fine art practice and the working lives of those involved. Consequently ‘installation’ can be seen as a domain of both fine art professional development and practice-led research. However, as art historian Mary Ann Staniszewski has observed (1998), the implication is that as process, this is an underresearched field of knowledge and this Ph.D. is an attempt, through a thesis and a body of practical work, to address this omission. Writing as an artist with significant experience as a technician, the thesis explores the insights that inform the work of technicians, using related theoretical concepts which map the conditions particular to the processes of installation: that of exhibits being subject to a binary condition, which I term ‘proper/improper’, and the concept of ‘tacit knowing’, developed by Michael Polyani (1966) as an index of specialist embedded understanding. Both ‘proper/improper’ and ‘tacit knowing’ are concealed by the sense of what I term ‘effortlessness’ that makes displayed objects part of an immutable fabric of exhibition culture. This is, in turn, compounded by the photographic ‘installation shot’, a form of documentation that, for commentators such as the writer and artist Brian O’Doherty (1976), creates idealized images of artworks. In reflecting upon the action research I have undertaken in order to penetrate the idealized surface of the ‘installation shot’, the thesis journeys from the visual to the aural in order to open up the ‘sensual 7 culture’ (Howes, 2005) around ‘installation’. Although not directly settingout to respond to Staniszewski’s proposition, the experiments with sound practice described and exhibited do, I claim, offer a creative response to our amnesia and an unfolding re-presentation of the processes and conditions of exhibition as it is currently experienced throughout museum and gallery culture
Who will care for the women?
No full textOver 20 million people today, including children, working-age disabled, and elderly persons, require some sort of assistance to live safely. Largely because women live longer than men, well into the ages when the probability of needing care increases, 70 percent of elderly people who need long-term care are women. Furthermore, most long-term care is provided by women, mainly as unpaid care in the home, or as low-paid care in institutions and community settings (Stone & Weiner 2001). The United States faces a severe long-term care crisis because of the nation\u27s inability to plan for the changing demographic balance. The crisis in long term care has two problems: a) that we are putting too many resources into institutional care relative to home- and community-based care and relying too heavily on unpaid care in the home to meet the real needs of the aging population, and b) that we do not, and increasingly will not, have enough people to provide for the volume of care that will be needed in the coming decades. This chapter begins with a description of the long-term care system in the United States – what long-term care is, who needs it, in what settings it is provided, and who pays for it. Using the author\u27s analysis of a national survey of caregivers conducted by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP in 2003 along with other sources, this section shows that a substantial portion of the people who need long-term care rely on unpaid care from family and friends, mainly women. When people do receive paid care, almost half – mostly women -- receive it in institutional settings. The discussion demonstrates that women are far more likely to end up in institutions than men, even controlling for age and level of impairment. It then argues that, for a number of reasons, states and the federal government will have to respond to the preferences of consumers for home- and community-based care
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