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The purpose of this paper is to describe how clinical registers were designed and used to serve multiple purposes in three health systems, in order to contribute practical experience for building learning healthcare systems.

Case description and comparison of the development and use of clinical registries, drawing on participants’ experience and published and unpublished research.

Clinical registers and new software systems enable fact-based decisions by patients, clinicians, and managers about better care, as well as new and more economical research. Designing systems to present the data for users’ daily work appears to be the key to effective use of the potential afforded by digital data.

The case descriptions draw on the experience of the authors who were involved in the development of the registers, as well as on published and unpublished research. There is limited data about outcomes for patients or cost-effectiveness.

The cases show the significant investments which are needed to make effective use of clinical register data. There are limited skills to design and apply the digital systems to make the best use of the systems and to reduce their disadvantages. More use can be made of digital data for quality improvement, patient empowerment and support, and for research.

Patients can use their data combined with other data to self-manage their chronic conditions. There are challenges in designing and using systems so that those with lower health and computer literacy and incomes also benefit from these systems, otherwise the digital revolution may increase health inequalities.

The paper shows three real examples of clinical registers which have been developed as part of their host health systems’ strategies to develop learning healthcare systems. The paper gives a simple non-technical introduction and overview for clinicians, managers, policy-advisors and improvers of what is possible and the challenges, and highlights the need to shape the design and implementation of digital infrastructures in healthcare services to serve users.

This chapter is an attempt to review the New START Treaty and put forward the perspectives and prospects. The chapter outlines certain assumptions that should be kept in mind for the success of arms control based upon the findings therein. This point about arms race should be obvious, but is often ignored although the need for arms control can never be undermined.

The prime issue in Russo–American relations – apart from economic and political reforms – remains arms' control (or nuclear security). Both nuclear superpowers wish to reduce and/or redeploy forces for reasons of cost and effectiveness, and the signing of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that builds on a previous agreement is an important step. Both sides have deep incentives to cooperate as they share common concerns on one hand and yet their interests differ owing to different force postures and perceived threats giving rise to an inequality of interest on the other.

The New START Treaty is not just about Washington and Moscow. It is about the entire world community. While the treaty is bilateral, it has big implications for global security. The United States and Russia control more than 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, and the world looks to these two countries for leadership in securing nuclear materials globally and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Thus, the new Treaty sets the stage for engaging other powers in fulfilling the goals of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the chapter examines the issues concerning the fallout of the New START Treaty.

This article describes the strategy for delivering integrated care in Trafford on a whole‐systems basis. It describes an approach to integrating services across primary care, community health services, social services and acute care. It covers the (clinically led) process of developing the strategic framework, the principles developed and used, and the specific programme to be carried out in 2010/11.

Because information is vital to effective decision making, the fostering of conditions which promote effective use of existing channels of information is therefore seen as a prime element contributing to organizational survival and success (Fulmer et al, 1990). In particular, the way in which characteristics of individuals and the attributes of the tasks they perform, affect the use of different information sources is a pertinent issue in organizational analysis. It is also an important consideration in information systems development and management. Much of the existing research in this area has been dominated by attempts to define appropriate modes of information processing and the construction of models that might enhance effective communication (O'Reilly, 1982; Schick et al, 1990; Kim 8c Lee, 1991). The importance of this area of research has been heightened by the dynamics and complexities of industrial organizations and the need for various modes of information processing to address these dynamics (Kim & Lee, 1991). Also, because the appropriate use of information is the ‘life‐blood’ of organizational dynamics, the identification of aspects that might affect differential use of various channels (of information) is fundamental to an understanding of the area.

GraphQL is a new Open API specification that allows clients to send queries and obtain data flexibly according to their needs. However, a high-complexity GraphQL query may lead to an excessive data volume of the query result, which causes problems such as resource overload of the API server. Therefore, this paper aims to address this issue by predicting the response data volume of a GraphQL query statement.

This paper proposes a GraphQL response data volume prediction approach based on Code2Vec and AutoML. First, a GraphQL query statement is transformed into a path collection of an abstract syntax tree based on the idea of Code2Vec, and then the query is aggregated into a vector with the fixed length. Finally, the response result data volume is predicted by a fully connected neural network. To further improve the prediction accuracy, the prediction results of embedded features are combined with the field features and summary features of the query statement to predict the final response data volume by the AutoML model.

Experiments on two public GraphQL API data sets, GitHub and Yelp, show that the accuracy of the proposed approach is 15.85% and 50.31% higher than existing GraphQL response volume prediction approaches based on machine learning techniques, respectively.

This paper proposes an approach that combines Code2Vec and AutoML for GraphQL query response data volume prediction with higher accuracy.

Reports on a recently published research‐based report identifying trends and best practice in career development. Focuses on what is happening at Pilkington Optronics, the London Borough of Brent and ICL. Concludes that developing individual competences to match the requirements of business is crucial if employees are to be developed, and kept motivated in ever‐changing organizations.

President Bill Clinton has had many opponents and enemies, most of whom come from the political right wing. Clinton supporters contend that these opponents, throughout the Clinton presidency, systematically have sought to undermine this president with the goal of bringing down his presidency and running him out of office; and that they have sought non‐electoral means to remove him from office, including Travelgate, the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, the Filegate controversy, and the Monica Lewinsky matter. This bibliography identifies these and other means by presenting citations about these individuals and organizations that have opposed Clinton. The bibliography is divided into five sections: General; “The conspiracy stream of conspiracy commerce”, a White House‐produced “report” presenting its view of a right‐wing conspiracy against the Clinton presidency; Funding; Conservative organizations; and Publishing/media. Many of the annotations note the links among these key players.

This study aims to explore how placement of lean practices (removal of waste from all areas of an organization’s value stream) (Worley and Doolen, 2006) within different organizational strategic contexts can affect the factors that lead to lean implementation success.

The authors use empirical data to examine how strategy affects various factors that are identified as prerequisites for successful lean implementation. Specifically, this study uses Venkatraman’s (1998) measures to examine various types of strategy within organizations, how they correlate with both the workers’ mindset (perceived job security and perceived personal benefits of lean) and the processes in implementation (training on lean concepts and techniques).

Findings indicate that a relationship exists between strategy and factors needed for lean implementation success. Perceived job security had a positive relationship with all four types of strategies examined (proactiveness, defensiveness, analysis and futurity) (Venkatraman, 1998). Moreover, perceived personal benefits of lean had a positive relationship with futurity but negative relationships with proactiveness and defensiveness strategies. Finally, training on lean concepts and techniques was positively related to analysis and futurity strategies but negatively related to proactiveness strategy.

The authors’ research illustrates the positive impact of aligning lean with strategy. This topic may be of particular interest to executives, especially middle managers, looking to improve firm performance.

The chapter will review significant changes in information technology (IT) affecting research over the 30-year history of Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology. It compares broad overviews of computers and the social sciences published shortly after the beginning of the section (1989 and 1990) with a contemporary overview of online research methods from 2017. It also draws on my own experiences from 1981 to the present as both an academic and a software entrepreneur. The author will discuss how changes in the section parallel developments in social science computing over this period, identifying some of the significant ways IT has transformed both the methods of research and the substantive foci of research. Finally, the author extrapolates into the future to consider how continuing changes in the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence, and natural language understanding may change how sociological research is conducted in the foreseeable future.

Gatekeepers play an important role in research conducted with children and youth. Although qualitative researchers frequently discuss institutional and individual gatekeepers, such as schools and parents, little attention has been paid to the role that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play in determining who is allowed to research particular populations and the ramifications of these decisions for findings involving children and youth. In order to examine this role, we compare negotiations of two researchers working on separate projects with similar populations with the IRB of a large Midwestern university. In both cases, it is likely that board members used their own personal experience and expertise in making assumptions about the race, social class, and gender of the researchers and their participants. The fact that these experiences are supported by findings across a wide range of IRBs highlights the extent to which qualitative research with children is changed (or even prevented) by those with little knowledge of typical qualitative methodologies and the cultural contexts in which research takes place. While those such as principals, teachers, and parents who are traditionally recognized as gatekeepers control access to specific locations, their denial of access only requires researchers to seek other research sites. IRBs, in contrast, control whether researchers are able to conduct research at any site. Although they wield considerably more control over research studies than typical gatekeepers, the fact that they are housed in the institutions at which academic researchers work also means that we can play a role in their improvement.