Control of antibiotic prescribing in UK NHS hosptials. Available in 2 volumes.

This thesis is an evaluation of practices to control antibiotic prescribing in UK NHS hospitals. Within the past ten years there has been increasing international concern about escalating antibiotic resistance, and the UK has issued several policy documents for pmdent antibiotic prescribing. Chief Pharmacists in 253 UK NHS hospitals were surveyed about the availability and nature of documents to control antibiotic prescribing (formularies, policies and guidelines), and the role of pharmacists and medical microbiologists in monitoring prescribers' compliance with the recommendations of such documents. Although 235 hospitals had at least one document, only 60% had both an antibiotic formulary and guidelines, and only about one-half planned an annual revision of document(s). Pharmacists were reported as mostly checking antibiotic prescribing on every ward whilst medical microbiologists mostly visited selected units only. Response to a similar questionnaire was obtained from the Chief Medical Microbiologists in 131 UK NHS hospitals. Comparisons of the questionnaires indicated areas of apparent disagreement about the roles of pharmacists and medical microbiologists. Eighty three paired-responses received from pharmacists and medical microbiologists in the same hospital revealed poor agreement and awareness about controls. A total of 205 institutional prescribing guidelines were analysed for recommendations for the empirical antibiotic prescribing of Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP). Variation was observed in recommendations and agreement with national guidance from the British Thoracic Society (BTS). A questionnaire was subsequently sent to 235 Chief Pharmacists to investigate their awareness of this new guidance from the BTS, and subsequent revision of institutional guidelines. Documents had been revised in only about one-half of hospitals where pharmacists were aware of the new guidance. An audit of empirical antibiotic prescribing practices for CAP was performed at one hospital. Although problems were experienced with retrieval of medical records, diagnostic criteria were poorly recorded, and only 57% of prescribing for non-severe CAP was compliant with institutional guidelines. A survey of clinicians at the same hospital identified that almost one-half used the institutional guidelines and most found them useful. However, areas for improvement concernmg awareness of the guidelines and ease of access were identified. It is important that hospitals are equipped to react to changes in the hospital environment including frequent movement of junior doctors between institutions, the employment of specialist "infectious diseases pharmacists" and the increasing benefits offered by information technology. Recommendations for policy have been suggested.

Adaptive resource allocation for QoE-aware mobile communication networks

A real-time adaptive resource allocation algorithm considering the end user's Quality of Experience (QoE) in the context of video streaming service is presented in this work. An objective no-reference quality metric, namely Pause Intensity (PI), is used to control the priority of resource allocation to users during the scheduling process. An online adjustment has been introduced to adaptively set the scheduler's parameter and maintain a desired trade-off between fairness and efficiency. The correlation between the data rates (i.e. video code rates) demanded by users and the data rates allocated by the scheduler is taken into account as well. The final allocated rates are determined based on the channel status, the distribution of PI values among users, and the scheduling policy adopted. Furthermore, since the user's capability varies as the environment conditions change, the rate adaptation mechanism for video streaming is considered and its interaction with the scheduling process under the same PI metric is studied. The feasibility of implementing this algorithm is examined and the result is compared with the most commonly existing scheduling methods.

Cuba’s Role in Venezuela’s Control of the Internet and Online Social Networks

The arrival of Cuba’s Information Technology (IT) and Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés to Venezuela in the Spring of 2010 to serve as a ‘consultant’ to the Venezuelan government awakened a new reality in that country. Rampant with deep economic troubles, escalating crime, a murder rate that has doubled since Chávez took over in 1999, and an opposition movement led by university students and other activists who use the Internet as their primary weapon, Venezuela has resorted to Cuba for help. In a country where in large part traditional media outlets have been censored or are government-controlled, the Internet and its online social networks have become the place to obtain, as well as disseminate, unfiltered information. As such, Internet growth and use of its social networks has skyrocketed in Venezuela, making it one of Latin America’s highest Web users. Because of its increased use to spark political debate among Venezuelans and publish information that differs with the official government line, Chávez has embarked on an initiative to bring the Internet to the poor and others who would otherwise not have access, by establishing government-sponsored Internet Info Centers throughout the country, to disseminate information to his followers. With the help of Cuban advisors, who for years have been a part of Venezuela’s defense, education, and health care initiatives, Chávez has apparently taken to adapting Cuba’s methodology for the control of information. He has begun to take special steps toward also controlling the type of information flowing through the country’s online social networks, considering the implementation of a government-controlled single Internet access point in Venezuela. Simultaneously, in adapting to Venezuela’s Internet reality, Chávez has engaged online by creating his own Twitter account in an attempt to influence public opinion, primarily of those who browse the Web. With a rapidly growing following that may soon reach one million subscribers, Chávez claims to have set up his own online trench to wage cyber space battle.

Design and implementation of a web based shop floor control system to maintain schedule feasibility in a dynamic job shop environment

The effective control of production activities in dynamic job shop with predetermined resource allocation for all the jobs entering the system is a unique manufacturing environment, which exists in the manufacturing industry. In this thesis a framework for an Internet based real time shop floor control system for such a dynamic job shop environment is introduced. The system aims to maintain the schedule feasibility of all the jobs entering the manufacturing system under any circumstance. The system is capable of deciding how often the manufacturing activities should be monitored to check for control decisions that need to be taken on the shop floor. The system will provide the decision maker real time notification to enable him to generate feasible alternate solutions in case a disturbance occurs on the shop floor. The control system is also capable of providing the customer with real time access to the status of the jobs on the shop floor. The communication between the controller, the user and the customer is through web based user friendly GUI. The proposed control system architecture and the interface for the communication system have been designed, developed and implemented.

Data compilation on the biological response to ocean acidification: environmental and experimental context of data sets and related literature

The exponential growth of studies on the biological response to ocean acidification over the last few decades has generated a large amount of data. To facilitate data comparison, a data compilation hosted at the data publisher PANGAEA was initiated in 2008 and is updated on a regular basis (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.149999). By January 2015, a total of 581 data sets (over 4 000 000 data points) from 539 papers had been archived. Here we present the developments of this data compilation five years since its first description by Nisumaa et al. (2010). Most of study sites from which data archived are still in the Northern Hemisphere and the number of archived data from studies from the Southern Hemisphere and polar oceans are still relatively low. Data from 60 studies that investigated the response of a mix of organisms or natural communities were all added after 2010, indicating a welcomed shift from the study of individual organisms to communities and ecosystems. The initial imbalance of considerably more data archived on calcification and primary production than on other processes has improved. There is also a clear tendency towards more data archived from multifactorial studies after 2010. For easier and more effective access to ocean acidification data, the ocean acidification community is strongly encouraged to contribute to the data archiving effort, and help develop standard vocabularies describing the variables and define best practices for archiving ocean acidification data.

Estados Unidos y la guerra por el desarrollo: el control de la natalidad en Chile, 1960-1970

Bajo el paradigma de modernización y desarrollo norteamericano -y en un contexto de Guerra Fría-, durante la década de 1960 se adecuaron a la realidad chilena programas de control de natalidad que no sólo buscaron disminuir las altas tasas de mortalidad materno infantil, sino que además respondieron al proyecto de seguridad hemisférica norteamericana de contención a posibles revoluciones populares en países del Tercer Mundo.

Social machines dictating social behaviors – When context is missing what is the fallout of uberveillance?

Abstract: In the mid-1990s when I worked for a telecommunications giant I struggled to gain access to basic geodemographic data. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time to simply purchase a tile of satellite imagery from Marconi, and it was often cheaper to create my own maps using a digitizer and A0 paper maps. Everything from granular administrative boundaries to right-of-ways to points of interest and geocoding capabilities were either unavailable for the places I was working in throughout Asia or very limited. The control of this data was either in a government’s census and statistical bureau or was created by a handful of forward thinking corporations. Twenty years on we find ourselves inundated with data (location and other) that we are challenged to amalgamate, and much of it still “dirty” in nature. Open data initiatives such as ODI give us great hope for how we might be able to share information together and capitalize not only in the crowdsourcing behavior but in the implications for positive usage for the environment and for the advancement of humanity. We are already gathering and amassing a great deal of data and insight through excellent citizen science participatory projects across the globe. In early 2015, I delivered a keynote at the Data Made Me Do It conference at UC Berkeley, and in the preceding year an invited talk at the inaugural QSymposium. In gathering research for these presentations, I began to ponder on the effect that social machines (in effect, autonomous data collection subjects and objects) might have on social behaviors. I focused on studying the problem of data from various veillance perspectives, with an emphasis on the shortcomings of uberveillance which included the potential for misinformation, misinterpretation, and information manipulation when context was entirely missing. As we build advanced systems that rely almost entirely on social machines, we need to ponder on the risks associated with following a purely technocratic approach where machines devoid of intelligence may one day dictate what humans do at the fundamental praxis level. What might be the fallout of uberveillance? Bio: Dr Katina Michael is a professor in the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wollongong. She presently holds the position of Associate Dean – International in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences. Katina is the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine editor-in-chief, and IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine senior editor. Since 2008 she has been a board member of the Australian Privacy Foundation, and until recently was the Vice-Chair. Michael researches on the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies with an emphasis on an all-hazards approach to national security. She has written and edited six books, guest edited numerous special issue journals on themes related to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, supply chain management, location-based services, innovation and surveillance/ uberveillance for Proceedings of the IEEE, Computer and IEEE Potentials. Prior to academia, Katina worked for Nortel Networks as a senior network engineer in Asia, and also in information systems for OTIS and Andersen Consulting. She holds cross-disciplinary qualifications in technology and law.

Planificación económica y control democrático del mercado

El cuestionamiento de las relaciones capitalistas de producción debe surgir a partir de su tendencia inherente a los desequilibrios y a la irracionalidad económica y no desde algún pre-juicio ideológico o político. En este contexto, la planificación económica se presenta como necesaria en la medida en que se requiera asegurar una autonomía humana de decisión con respecto a la distribución del ingreso, el acceso al empleo y la protección del medio ambiente. A partir de la constatación de este hecho, la planificación no sustituye a las relaciones mercantiles sino que cumple la función de garantizar una tendencia al equilibrio sobre la base de las relaciones mercantiles, lo que ningún automatismo del mercado puede garantizar. Se propone un principio de delimitación entre la planificación y la autonomía de las empresas (la reproducción de la vida humana), principio ampliable a la delimitación entre el Estado y las actividades de los grupos autónomos y de los mismos sujetos en general. Abstract The questioning of the capitalist relations of production must come from their inherent tendency to irrationality and economic imbalances and not from any ideological or political prejudice. In this context, economic planning is as necessary as it is required to ensure a human decision-making autonomy with respect to income distribution, access to employment and environmental protection. From the observation of this fact, planning is not a substitute for market relations but serves to ensure a tendency to balance on the basis of market relations, so no automatic of the market can guarantee. The article proposes a principle of demarcation between the planning and autonomy for enterprises (the reproduction of human life), expandable to top the demarcation between the state and the activities of autonomous groups and the same subjects in general.

Scalable semantic aware context storage

The number of connected devices collecting and distributing real-world information through various systems, is expected to soar in the coming years. As the number of such connected devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to store and share all these new sources of information. Several context representation schemes try to standardize this information, but none of them have been widely adopted. In previous work we addressed this challenge, however our solution had some drawbacks: poor semantic extraction and scalability. In this paper we discuss ways to efficiently deal with representation schemes' diversity and propose a novel d-dimension organization model. Our evaluation shows that d-dimension model improves scalability and semantic extraction.

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.

A non-contrast self-navigated 3-dimensional MR technique for aortic root and vascular access route assessment in the context of transcatheter aortic valve replacement: proof of concept.

OBJECTIVES: Due to the high prevalence of renal failure in transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) candidates, a non-contrast MR technique is desirable for pre-procedural planning. We sought to evaluate the feasibility of a novel, non-contrast, free-breathing, self-navigated three-dimensional (SN3D) MR sequence for imaging the aorta from its root to the iliofemoral run-off in comparison to non-contrast two-dimensional-balanced steady-state free-precession (2D-bSSFP) imaging. METHODS: SN3D [field of view (FOV), 220-370 mm(3); slice thickness, 1.15 mm; repetition/echo time (TR/TE), 3.1/1.5 ms; and flip angle, 115°] and 2D-bSSFP acquisitions (FOV, 340 mm; slice thickness, 6 mm; TR/TE, 2.3/1.1 ms; flip angle, 77°) were performed in 10 healthy subjects (all male; mean age, 30.3 ± 4.3 yrs) using a 1.5-T MRI system. Aortic root measurements and qualitative image ratings (four-point Likert-scale) were compared. RESULTS: The mean effective aortic annulus diameter was similar for 2D-bSSFP and SN3D (26.7 ± 0.7 vs. 26.1 ± 0.9 mm, p = 0.23). The mean image quality of 2D-bSSFP (4; IQR 3-4) was rated slightly higher (p = 0.03) than SN3D (3; IQR 2-4). The mean total acquisition time for SN3D imaging was 12.8 ± 2.4 min. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that a novel SN3D sequence allows rapid, free-breathing assessment of the aortic root and the aortoiliofemoral system without administration of contrast medium. KEY POINTS: • The prevalence of renal failure is high among TAVR candidates. • Non-contrast 3D MR angiography allows for TAVR procedure planning. • The self-navigated sequence provides a significantly reduced scanning time.