Business partners and working the pumps: Human resource managers in the recession

This article examines the work and roles of HR managers in the Irish recession. It tests the validity of three competing views about the future of HR: that the profession needs to become a business partner; that it is knee-deep in a legitimacy crisis; and that it is fragmenting by being unable to cope with the complexity of modern organizational life. Three key findings emerge from the research. First, HR managers have gained greater influence in business decision-making, but much of this influence arises from short-run retrenchment measures. Second, many HR managers remain committed to long established professional values and ideas of good practice. Third, modern HR managers are developing a professional identity that allows them to perform multiple, competing roles. These findings challenge existing arguments about the effects of the current recession. They also speak to ongoing debates about changing HR roles by showing how HR managers remain adept at making pragmatic adaptations to secure their role in organizational life. © The Author(s) 2012.

Creating an Online Teaching Resource

Summary of the process through which the After Slavery website was conceived and constructed, including a brief survey of debates on use of online resources in teaching.

A constraints-based resource discovery model for multi-provider cloud environments

Increasingly infrastructure providers are supplying the cloud marketplace with storage and on-demand compute resources to host cloud applications. From an application user's point of view, it is desirable to identify the most appropriate set of available resources on which to execute an application. Resource choice can be complex and may involve comparing available hardware specifications, operating systems, value-added services, such as network configuration or data replication, and operating costs, such as hosting cost and data throughput. Providers' cost models often change and new commodity cost models, such as spot pricing, have been introduced to offer significant savings. In this paper, a software abstraction layer is used to discover infrastructure resources for a particular application, across multiple providers, by using a two-phase constraints-based approach. In the first phase, a set of possible infrastructure resources are identified for a given application. In the second phase, a heuristic is used to select the most appropriate resources from the initial set. For some applications a cost-based heuristic is most appropriate; for others a performance-based heuristic may be used. A financial services application and a high performance computing application are used to illustrate the execution of the proposed resource discovery mechanism. The experimental result shows the proposed model could dynamically select an appropriate set of resouces that match the application's requirements.

Random Regret Minimization: Exploration of a New Choice Model for Environmental and Resource Economics

This paper introduces the discrete choice model-paradigm of Random Regret Minimization (RRM) to the field of environmental and resource economics. The RRM-approach has been very recently developed in the context of travel demand modelling and presents a tractable, regret-based alternative to the dominant choice-modelling paradigm based on Random Utility Maximization-theory (RUM-theory). We highlight how RRM-based models provide closed form, logit-type formulations for choice probabilities that allow for capturing semi-compensatory behaviour and choice set-composition effects while being equally parsimonious as their utilitarian counterparts. Using data from a Stated Choice-experiment aimed at identifying valuations of characteristics of nature parks, we compare RRM-based models and RUM-based models in terms of parameter estimates, goodness of fit, elasticities and consequential policy implications.

Northern Visions? Applying Q methodology to understand stakeholder views on the environmental and resource dimensions of sustainability

Q methodology was used to enable the identification of discourses among stakeholders to the environmental and resource dimensions of sustainability policies and to gain an understanding of the usefulness of Q methodology in informing sustainability policy development. The application of Q methodology has been useful in identifying shared discourses between different stakeholder groups, and providing insights into how stakeholders frame or understand policy issues; and recommendations are made for ongoing research priorities. These insights, in turn, informed the choice of scenarios for an in parallel process of policy evaluation using Ecological and Carbon Footprinting.

Resource utilisation, length of hospital stay, and pattern of investigation during acute medical hospital admission

To describe the patient demographic characteristics and organisational factors that influence length of stay (LOS) among emergency medical admissions. Also, to describe differences in investigation practice among consultant physicians and to examine the impact of these on LOS.

Strategies for Energy-Efficient Resource Management of Hybrid Programming Models

Many scientific applications are programmed using hybrid programming models that use both message passing and shared memory, due to the increasing prevalence of large-scale systems with multicore, multisocket nodes. Previous work has shown that energy efficiency can be improved using software-controlled execution schemes that consider both the programming model and the power-aware execution capabilities of the system. However, such approaches have focused on identifying optimal resource utilization for one programming model, either shared memory or message passing, in isolation. The potential solution space, thus the challenge, increases substantially when optimizing hybrid models since the possible resource configurations increase exponentially. Nonetheless, with the accelerating adoption of hybrid programming models, we increasingly need improved energy efficiency in hybrid parallel applications on large-scale systems. In this work, we present new software-controlled execution schemes that consider the effects of dynamic concurrency throttling (DCT) and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) in the context of hybrid programming models. Specifically, we present predictive models and novel algorithms based on statistical analysis that anticipate application power and time requirements under different concurrency and frequency configurations. We apply our models and methods to the NPB MZ benchmarks and selected applications from the ASC Sequoia codes. Overall, we achieve substantial energy savings (8.74 percent on average and up to 13.8 percent) with some performance gain (up to 7.5 percent) or negligible performance loss.

Awarding global grades in OSCEs: Evaluation of a novel eLearning resource for OSCE examiners

BACKGROUND:
A novel online resource has been developed to aid OSCE examiner training comprising a series of videos of OSCE performances that allow inter-examiner comparison of global grade decisions.

AIMS:
To evaluate this training resource in terms of usefulness and ability to improve examiner confidence in awarding global grades in OSCEs.

METHOD:
Data collected from the first 200 users included global grades awarded, willingness to change grades following peer comparison and confidence in awarding grades before and after training.

RESULTS:
Most (86.5%) agreed that the resource was useful in developing global grade scoring ability in OSCEs, with a significant improvement in confidence in awarding grades after using the training package (p<0.001).

CONCLUSIONS:
This is a useful and effective online training package. As an adjunct to traditional training it offers a practical solution to the problem of availability of examiners.

Aerobic capacity, strength, flexibility, and activity level in unimpaired extremely low birth weight (

To compare aerobic capacity, strength, flexibility, and activity level in extremely low birth weight (ELBW) adolescents at 17 years of age with term-born control subjects.

Does flexibility in secondary level mathematics curriculum affect degree performance?

The authors have much experience in developing mathematics skills of first-year engineering students and attempting to ensure a smooth transition from secondary school to university. Concerns exist due to there being flexibility in the choice of modules needed to obtain a secondary level (A-level) mathematics qualification. This qualification is based on some core (pure maths) modules and a selection from mechanics and statistics modules. A survey of aerospace and mechanical engineering students in Queen’s University Belfast revealed that a combination of both mechanics and statistics (the basic module in both) was by far the most popular choice and therefore only about one quarter of this cohort had studied mechanics beyond the basic module within school maths. Those students who studied the extra mechanics and who achieved top grades at school subsequently did better in two core, first-year engineering courses. However, students with a lower grade from school did not seem to gain any significant advantage in the first-year engineering courses despite having the extra mechanics background. This investigation ties in with ongoing and wider concerns with secondary level mathematics provision in the UK.

Moving to evidence-based practice in long-term care:the role of a Best Practise Resource Centre in two long-term care settings.

In this article, the authors provide an overview on the development of a Long-Term Care Best Practise Resource Centre. The results of both a feasibility study and the outcomes of a 1-year demonstration project are presented. The demonstration project involved a hospital as the information service provider and two demonstration sites, a home care service agency and a nursing home that used the services of the Centre. The goals of the Centre were threefold: provide access to literature for staff in long-term care (LTC) settings; improve the information management skills of health care providers; and support research and the integration of best practices in LTC organizations. The results of the pilot study contributed to the development of a collaborative information access system for LTC clinicians and managers that provides timely, up-to-date information contributing to improving the quality of care for adults receiving LTC. Based on this demonstration project, strategies for successful innovation in LTC are identified.

Resource utilization and cost analyses of home-based palliative care service provision:The Niagara West End-of-Life Shared-Care Project

Background: Increasing emphasis is being placed on the economics of health care service delivery - including home-based palliative care. Aim: This paper analyzes resource utilization and costs of a shared-care demonstration project in rural Ontario (Canada) from the public health care system's perspective. Design: To provide enhanced end-of-life care, the shared-care approach ensured exchange of expertise and knowledge and coordination of services in line with the understood goals of care. Resource utilization and costs were tracked over the 15 month study period from January 2005 to March 2006. Results: Of the 95 study participants (average age 71 years), 83 had a cancer diagnosis (87%); the non-cancer diagnoses (12 patients, 13%) included mainly advanced heart diseases and COPD. Community Care Access Centre and Enhanced Palliative Care Team-based homemaking and specialized nursing services were the most frequented offerings, followed by equipment/transportation services and palliative care consults for pain and symptom management. Total costs for all patient-related services (in 2007 CAN) were 1,625,658.07 - or 17,112.19 per patient/117.95 per patient day. Conclusion: While higher than expenditures previously reported for a cancer-only population in an urban Ontario setting, the costs were still within the parameters of the US Medicare Hospice Benefits, on a par with the per diem funding assigned for long-term care homes and lower than both average alternate level of care and hospital costs within the Province of Ontario. The study results may assist service planners in the appropriate allocation of resources and service packaging to meet the complex needs of palliative care populations. © 2012 The Author(s).

Resource utilisation and costs of palliative cancer care in an interdisciplinary health care model

This paper presents a detailed description of health care resource utilisation and costs of a pilot interdisciplinary health care model of palliative home care in Ontario, Canada. The descriptive evaluation entailed examining the use of services and costs of the pilot program: patient demographics, length of stay broken down by disposition (discharged, alive, death), access to services/resources, use of family physician and specialist services, and drug use. There were 434 patients included in the pilot program. Total costs were approximately CAN$2.4 million, and the cost per person amounted to approximately CAN$5586.33 with average length of stay equal to over 2 months (64.22 days). One may assume that length of stay would be influenced by the amount of service and support available. Future research might investigate whether in-home palliative home care is the most cost effective and suitable care setting for those patients requiring home care services for expected periods of time. © 2009 SAGE Publications.