Emergency pre-hospital disaster response training. What's the state of play?

Study/Objective This study examines the current state of disaster response education for Australian paramedics from a national and international perspective and identifies both potential gaps in content and challenges to the sustainability of knowledge acquired through occasional training. Background As demands for domestic and international disaster response increase, experience in the field has begun to challenge traditional assumptions that response to mass casualty events requires little specialist training. The need for a “streamlined process of safe medical team deployment into disaster regions”1 is generally accepted and, in Australia, the emergence of national humanitarian aid training has begun to respond to this gap. However, calls for a national framework for disaster health education2 haven’t received much traction. Methods A critical analysis of the peer reviewed and grey literature on the core components/competencies and training methods required to prepare Australian paramedics to contribute to effective health disaster response has been conducted. Research from the past 10 years has been examined along with federal and state policy with regard to paramedic disaster education. Results The literature shows that education and training for disaster response is variable and that an evidence based study specifically designed to outline sets of core competencies for Australian health care professionals has never been undertaken. While such competencies in disaster response have been developed for the American paradigm it is suggested that disaster response within the Australian context is somewhat different to that of the US, and therefore a gap in the current knowledge base exists. Conclusion Further research is needed to develop core competencies specific to Australian paramedics in order to standardise teaching in the area of health disaster management. Until this occurs the task of evaluating or creating disaster curricula that adequately prepares and maintains paramedics for an effective all hazards disaster response is seen as largely unattainable.

Service analysis : A critical assessment of the state of the art

The service-orientation paradigm has not only become prevalent in the software systems domain in recent years, but is also increasingly applied on the business level to restructure organisational capabilities. In this paper, we present the results of an extensive literature review of 30 approaches related to service identification and analysis for both domains. Based on the consolidation of a superset of comparison criteria for service-oriented methodologies found in related literature, we compare and evaluate the different characteristics of service engineering methods with a focus on service analysis. Although a close business and IT alignment is regarded as one of the core beneficial promises of service-orientation, our analysis suggests that there is a lack of unified, comprehensive methodology for service identification and analysis integrating and addressing both domains. Thus, we discuss how our results can inform directions for future research in this area.

State-of-the-Art Review on Opinion Mining from Online Customers’ Feedback

Dealing with the ever-growing information overload in the Internet, Recommender Systems are widely used online to suggest potential customers item they may like or find useful. Collaborative Filtering is the most popular techniques for Recommender Systems which collects opinions from customers in the form of ratings on items, services or service providers. In addition to the customer rating about a service provider, there is also a good number of online customer feedback information available over the Internet as customer reviews, comments, newsgroups post, discussion forums or blogs which is collectively called user generated contents. This information can be used to generate the public reputation of the service providers’. To do this, data mining techniques, specially recently emerged opinion mining could be a useful tool. In this paper we present a state of the art review of Opinion Mining from online customer feedback. We critically evaluate the existing work and expose cutting edge area of interest in opinion mining. We also classify the approaches taken by different researchers into several categories and sub-categories. Each of those steps is analyzed with their strength and limitations in this paper.

A quite unreasonable state of affairs : corporate social responsibility and the John Lewis Partnership

On the surface the subjects of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Critical Management Studies (CMS) seem to be closely related. Both are concerned with reflecting on the impact of management and organisation on employees, the wider community and the environment. Both suggest that there may be a need for organisations to take responsibility for and account of people other than shareholders and both have used the concept of accountability to suggest that organisations may need to do more than just comply with the legal framework.

State of the arts and innovation : before and after the review of the national innovation system

This article examines the relationship between the arts and national innovation policy in Australia, pivoting around the Venturous Australia report released in September 2008 as part of the Review of the National Innovation System (RNIS). This came at a time of optimism that the arts sector would be included in Australia’s federal innovation policy. However, despite the report’s broad vision for innovation and specific commentary on the arts, the more ambitious hopes of arts sector advocates remained unfulfilled. This article examines the entwining discourses of creativity and innovation which emerged globally and in Australia prior to the RNIS, before analysing Venturous Australia in terms of the arts and the ongoing science-and-technology bias to innovation policy. It ends by considering why sector-led policy research and lobbying has to date proved unsuccessful and then suggests what public policy development is now needed.

Artful determination : "state of the art" and PCME Ltd v. Goyen COntrols Co. UK Ltd

In a recent decision by Mr Justice Laddie, a patent was held anticipated by, inter alia, prior use of a device which fell within the claims of the patent in suit, even though its circuitry was enclosed in resin. The anticipating invention had been "made available to the public" within the terms of section 2 (2) of the Patents Act 1977 because its essential integers would have been revealed by an interesting character, the "skilled forensic engineer".

V2V/V2I augmented maps : state-of-the-art and contribution to real-time crash risk assessment

A number of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are currently being released on the market, providing safety functions to the drivers such as collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control or enhanced night-vision. These systems however are inherently limited by their sensory range: they cannot gather information from outside this range, also called their “perceptive horizon”. Cooperative systems are a developing research avenue that aims at providing extended safety and comfort functionalities by introducing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) wireless communications to the road actors. This paper presents the problematic of cooperative systems, their advantages and contributions to road safety and exposes some limitations related to market penetration, sensors accuracy and communications scalability. It explains the issues of how to implement extended perception, a central contribution of cooperative systems. The initial steps of an evaluation of data fusion architectures for extended perception are exposed.

Customers behaving badly : a state of the art review, research agenda and implications for practitioners

The purpose of this paper is to highlight important issues in the study of dysfunctional customer behavior and to provide a research agenda to inspire, guide, and enthuse. Through a critical evaluation of existing research, the aim is to highlight key issues and to present potentially worthy avenues for future study.