A Long and Winding Road to Employment?: Disabled young people in Northern Ireland making the transition to adulthood

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research project that explores the experiences and aspirations of disabled young people in Northern Ireland as they make and deal with the transition to adulthood. The study involved young people with disabilities (n=76) in four areas of Northern Ireland, ensuring a geographical spread, an urban/rural mix and representation of both communities. Young people with learning disabilities were included as well as those with physical and/or sensory impairments. This paper focuses on those who were completing job training or work placements and examines the role of such schemes in assisting young people’s transition to adulthood. The research found that many young people had positive experiences of work placement and job training and that social interaction was important to them. Few young people, however, had made the actual transition from work placement or training to ‘real’ employment.

Sources of Software Requirements Change from the Perspectives of Development and Maintenance

Changes to software requirements occur during initial development and subsequent to delivery, posing a risk to cost and quality while at the same time providing an opportunity to add value. Provision of a generic change source taxonomy will support requirements change risk visibility, and also facilitate richer recording of both pre- and post-delivery change data. In this paper we present a collaborative study to investigate and classify sources of requirements change, drawing comparison between those pertaining to software development and maintenance. We begin by combining evolution, maintenance and software lifecycle research to derive a definition of software maintenance, which provides the foundation for empirical context and comparison. Previously published change ‘causes’ pertaining to development are elicited from the literature, consolidated using expert knowledge and classified using card sorting. A second study incorporating causes of requirements change during software maintenance results in a taxonomy which accounts for the entire evolutionary progress of applications software. We conclude that the distinction between the terms maintenance and development is imprecise, and that changes to requirements in both scenarios arise due to a combination of factors contributing to requirements uncertainty and events that trigger change. The change trigger taxonomy constructs were initially validated using a small set of requirements change data, and deemed sufficient and practical as a means to collect common requirements change statistics across multiple projects.

Long-term outcomes for cross-arch stabilizing bridges in periodontal maintenance patients - a retrospective study

Background: Cross-arch bridges are used to stabilize teeth for patients with reduced periodontal support. Little is known about technical or biological complications, whether teeth and implants can be combined in this type of bridge and the long-term effects on tooth loss.

Accruals accounting in the public sector: A road not always taken

The move from cash to accruals accounting by many governments is viewed as an aspect of an ongoing New Public Management agenda designed to achieve a more business-like and performance-focused public sector. Proponents argue that accruals accounting provides more appropriate information for decision makers and ultimately leads to a more efficient and effective public sector. The transition from cash to accruals accounting for UK central government departments was announced in the early 1990s and was embedded within approximately ten years. At that time there were clear indications that analogous changes, following a similar timeline, would occur in the Republic of Ireland (RoI). In reality, the changes were significantly less extensive. Utilising document analysis and interviews with key actors, this paper considers why a functioning accruals system was established in the UK whereas in the RoI the change to accruals accounting was a ‘road not taken’.