Scandals, public inquiries and health professional regulation

Since 1980 there has been an increasing incidence of the use of public inquiries as a process through which scandals raising patient safety and health care quality concerns can be subject to highly public scrutiny. The use of public inquiries and their impact on the governance of health or social systems, especially around issues of patient or client safety, has been examined by a number of commentators (Butler and Drakeford 2003, Masso and Eager 2009, Stanley and Manthorpe 2004, Walshe and Higgins 2002) but public inquiries into scandals in the health system also raise a question about the impact of these inquiries on public perceptions about the adequacy of the various mechanisms for health professional regulation...

Managing the health effects of temperature in response to climate change : challenges ahead

BACKGROUND: Although many studies have shown that high temperatures are associated with an increased risk of mortality and morbidity, there has been little research on managing the process of planned adaptation to alleviate the health effects of heat events and climate change. In particular, economic evaluation of public health adaptation strategies has been largely absent from both the scientific literature and public policy discussion. OBJECTIVES: his paper aims to discuss how public health organizations should implement adaptation strategies, and how to improve the evidence base for policies to protect health from heat events and climate change. DISCUSSION: Public health adaptation strategies to cope with heat events and climate change fall into two categories: reducing the heat exposure and managing the health risks. Strategies require a range of actions, including timely public health and medical advice, improvements to housing and urban planning, early warning systems, and the assurance that health care and social systems are ready to act. Some of these actions are costly, and the implementation should be based on the cost-effectiveness analysis given scarce financial resources. Therefore, research is required not only on the temperature-related health costs, but also on the costs and benefits of adaptation options. The scientific community must ensure that the health co-benefits of climate change policies are recognized, understood and quantified. CONCLUSIONS: The integration of climate change adaptation into current public health practice is needed to ensure they increase future resilience. The economic evaluation of temperature-related health costs and public health adaptation strategies are particularly important for policy decisions.

Science of winning soccer : emergent pattern-forming dynamics in association football

Quantitative analysis is increasingly being used in team sports to better understand performance in these stylized, delineated, complex social systems. Here we provide a first step toward understanding the pattern-forming dynamics that emerge from collective offensive and defensive behavior in team sports. We propose a novel method of analysis that captures how teams occupy sub-areas of the field as the ball changes location. We used the method to analyze a game of association football (soccer) based upon a hypothesis that local player numerical dominance is key to defensive stability and offensive opportunity. We found that the teams consistently allocated more players than their opponents in sub-areas of play closer to their own goal. This is consistent with a predominantly defensive strategy intended to prevent yielding even a single goal. We also find differences between the two teams' strategies: while both adopted the same distribution of defensive, midfield, and attacking players (a 4:3:3 system of play), one team was significantly more effective both in maintaining defensive and offensive numerical dominance for defensive stability and offensive opportunity. That team indeed won the match with an advantage of one goal (2 to 1) but the analysis shows the advantage in play was more pervasive than the single goal victory would indicate. Our focus on the local dynamics of team collective behavior is distinct from the traditional focus on individual player capability. It supports a broader view in which specific player abilities contribute within the context of the dynamics of multiplayer team coordination and coaching strategy. By applying this complex system analysis to association football, we can understand how players' and teams' strategies result in successful and unsuccessful relationships between teammates and opponents in the area of play.

Megaprojects, Affected communities and sustainability decision making

Increasing scrutiny from the wider community is contributing to a shift towards the delivery and operation of major projects that meets and maintains the sustainability priorities of the community. This is especially significant for large economic projects which have a global track record of social benefit shortfalls, cost overruns, and underestimation of risks. Major industrial and infrastructure projects that cost more than US$1 billion are typically called mega-projects. Globally, investment in mega-projects has exceeded $10 trillion in the last ten years. With so many projects in the pipeline -and many taking place in emerging economies – the effectiveness of the sustainability decision making process is particularly important. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the existing sustainability decision making processes and strategies address the potential challenges facing communities affected by mega-projects. It highlights issues with current operational level approaches to social sustainability assessment at the project level, and argues that to improve accountability and transparency of project outcomes, positive externalities that flow from goods and services provided by the social and cultural systems of the community must be incorporated into decision making.

Analyzing causes for reworks in construction projects in China

Although rework is a common phenomenon in the Chinese construction industry and significantly affects project success, the reasons for rework remain largely unknown and most construction companies are unable to manage the issue effectively. To investigate the causes of rework in construction projects, a total of 39 causes were first identified through a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured interviews with 13 experienced construction professionals in China. A questionnaire survey was further conducted to prioritize these causes, in which unclear project process management, poor quality of construction technology, and the use of poor construction materials rank the highest. Finally, a factor analysis revealed 11 major underlying dimensions of these causes, relating to design management, communication management, field management, project scope management, project process management, active rework, project plan changes, subcontractor management, contract management, owner capability, and the external environment. The contribution of this work lies in its examination of the underlying causes of rework perceived by construction professionals in the world’s largest developing country, which is characterized by its unique economic and social systems. In particular, newly identified causes of contract management, active rework, and scope management help expand existing knowledge of the underlying causes of rework for the global construction community.

Community development and community resilience: An integrative approach

Throughout history, communities and civilizations have sought to enhance the quality of community life and the well-being of its people. However, more recently there has been greater interest in attending to the details of community development by capitalizing on the improved ability to capture community well-being and successes scientifically. That interest invites greater attention to the development of indicators that can quantify those qualities of life that lead to strong and healthy communities. The selection of meaningful indicators is dependent upon several factors including a process that stimulates meaningful involvement of community stakeholders, but the single most important is the identification of an underlying model to guide the work. Indicators do not have meaning in themselves. For these measures to provide a coherent assessment of the community, an integrative approach to understanding what constitutes a healthy and strong community in a dynamic environment is required. A resilience perspective serves that purpose and provides a framework that is broad, neutral, and conceptually strong enough to structure development of significant sets of indicators. Exemplary community indicator processes across the nation, particularly recent efforts in the Phoenix, Arizona region, provide evidence supporting the value of indicator development for community building.

Cues in the environment: A design principle for ambient intelligence

The aim of this paper is to propose design principles for ambient intelligence (AmI) environments. The question we are investigating is how these environments can be designed to support a group to be able to carry out common goal-oriented activities. The approach we are taking in answering this question is informed by the concept of collective intelligence (CI). We are applying the concept of CI to AmI as we have found it works well in biological and social systems. Examples from nature demonstrate the power of CI stimulated by implicit cues in the environment. We use these examples to derive design principles for AmI environments. By applying these design principles to a concrete scenario, we are able to propose ways to help decrease environmental pollution within urban areas.

perCues: Trails of persuasion for ambient intelligence

The realization of the ambient intelligence (AmI) vision will have a profound impact on our everyday lives and society. AmI applied in contexts like homes or public spaces will not only affect individual users but influence entire groups of users. The question is how we can apply such technologies to persuade groups and individual users. Our approach is to design AmI environments by borrowing a concept which works very well in biological and social systems: Collective Intelligence (CI). The intelligence of a group surpasses the individual intelligences and leads to improved problem solving capabilities of individuals and groups. From nature we borrow examples of cues in the environment to stimulate goal directed collective intelligence (perCues). The application of perCues in AmI environments helps to persuade users to reach a common goal like decreasing environmental pollution. Adopting CI for AmI we blaze a trail for the design of persuasive AmI environments.

Personalized recommender systems integrating social tags and item taxonomy

The social tags in web 2.0 are becoming another important information source to profile users' interests and preferences to make personalized recommendations. To solve the problem of low information sharing caused by the free-style vocabulary of tags and the long tails of the distribution of tags and items, this paper proposes an approach to integrate the social tags given by users and the item taxonomy with standard vocabulary and hierarchical structure provided by experts to make personalized recommendations. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively improve the information sharing and recommendation accuracy.

Designing for participation in local social ridesharing networks : grass roots prototyping of IT systems

This abstract explores the possibility of a grass roots approach to engaging people in community change initiatives by designing simple interactive exploratory prototypes for use by communities over time that support shared action. The prototype is gradually evolved in response to community use, fragments of data gathered through the prototype, and participant feedback with the goal of building participation in community change initiatives. A case study of a system to support ridesharing is discussed. The approach is compared and contrasted to a traditional IT systems procurement approach.

Analyzing the factors influencing the successful design and uptake of interactive systems to support social networks in urban neighborhoods

In urban residential environments in Australia and other developed countries, Internet access is on the verge of becoming a ubiquitous utility like gas or electricity. From an urban sociology and community informatics perspective, this article discusses new emerging social formations of urban residents that are based on networked individualism and the potential of Internet-based systems to support them. It proposes that one of the main reasons for the disappearance or nonexistence of urban residential communities is a lack of appropriate opportunities and instruments to encourage and support local interaction in urban neighborhoods. The article challenges the view that a mere reappropriation of applications used to support dispersed virtual communities is adequate to meet the place and proximity-based design requirements that community networks in urban neighborhoods pose. It argues that the key factors influencing the successful design and uptake of interactive systems to support social networks in urban neighborhoods include the swarming social behavior of urban dwellers; the dynamics of their existing communicative ecology; and the serendipitous, voluntary, and place-based quality of interaction between residents on the basis of choice, like-mindedness, mutual interest and support needs. Drawing on an analysis of these factors, the conceptual design framework of a prototype system — the urban tribe incubator — is presented.

The state-of-the-art in personalized recommender systems for social networking

With the explosion of Web 2.0 application such as blogs, social and professional networks, and various other types of social media, the rich online information and various new sources of knowledge flood users and hence pose a great challenge in terms of information overload. It is critical to use intelligent agent software systems to assist users in finding the right information from an abundance of Web data. Recommender systems can help users deal with information overload problem efficiently by suggesting items (e.g., information and products) that match users’ personal interests. The recommender technology has been successfully employed in many applications such as recommending films, music, books, etc. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing technologies for building personalized recommender systems in social networking environment, to propose a research direction for addressing user profiling and cold start problems by exploiting user-generated content newly available in Web 2.0.

Designing mobile systems for social navigation in urban public places

This thesis presents social requirements and design considerations from a study evaluating interactive approaches to social navigation and user-generated information sharing in urban environments using mobile devices. It investigates innovative ways to leverage mobile information and communication technology in order to provide a social navigation platform for residents and visitors in and for public urban places. Through a design case study this work presents CityFlocks, a mobile information system that offers an easy way for information-seeking new residents or visitors to access tacit knowledge from local people about their new community. It is intended to enable visitors and new residents in a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents in order to gather information about their new environment. Its design specifically aims to lower existing barriers of access and facilitate social navigation in urban places. In various user tests it evaluates two general user interaction alternatives – direct and indirect social navigation – and analyses which interaction method works better for people using a mobile device to socially navigate urban environments. The outcomes are relevant for the user interaction design of future mobile information systems that leverage the social navigation approach.

Social Media Analytics : Ein interdisziplinärer Ansatz und seine Implikationen für die Wirtschaftsinformatik [Social Media Analytics - An Interdisciplinary Approach and Its Implications for Information Systems]

Social Media Analytics ist ein neuer Forschungsbereich, in dem interdisziplinäre Methoden kombiniert, erweitert und angepasst werden, um Social-Media-Daten auszuwerten. Neben der Beantwortung von Forschungsfragen ist es ebenfalls ein Ziel, Architekturentwürfe für die Entwicklung neuer Informationssysteme und Anwendungen bereitzustellen, die auf sozialen Medien basieren. Der Beitrag stellt die wichtigsten Aspekte des Bereichs Social Media Analytics vor und verweist auf die Notwendigkeit einer fächerübergreifenden Forschungsagenda, für deren Erstellung und Bearbeitung der Wirtschaftsinformatik eine wichtige Rolle zukommt.