Anthony Montgomery, Efharis Panagopoulou, Ian Kehoe and Efthymios Valkanos
To date, relatively little evidence has been published as to what represents an effective and efficient way to improve quality of care and safety in hospitals. In addition, the…
Abstract
Purpose
To date, relatively little evidence has been published as to what represents an effective and efficient way to improve quality of care and safety in hospitals. In addition, the initiatives that do exist are rarely designed or developed with regard to the individual and organisational factors that determine the success or failure of such initiatives. One of the challenges in linking organisational culture to quality of care is to identify the focal point at which a deficient hospital culture and inadequate organisational resources are most evident. The accumulated evidence suggests that such a point is physician burnout. This paper sets out to examine this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews the existing literature on organisational culture, burnout and quality of care in the healthcare sector. A new conceptual approach as to how organisational culture and quality of care can be more effectively linked through the physician experience of burnout is proposed.
Findings
Recommendations are provided with regard to how future research can approach quality of care from a bottom‐up organisational change perspective. In addition, the need to widen the debate beyond US and North European experiences is discussed.
Originality/value
The present paper represents an attempt to link organisational culture, job burnout and quality of care in a more meaningful way. A conceptual model has been provided as a way to frame and evaluate future research.
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Shifeng Lin and Ning Wang
In multi-robot cooperation, the cloud can share sensor data, which can help robots better perceive the environment. For cloud robotics, robot grasping is an important ability that…
Abstract
Purpose
In multi-robot cooperation, the cloud can share sensor data, which can help robots better perceive the environment. For cloud robotics, robot grasping is an important ability that must be mastered. Usually, the information source of grasping mainly comes from visual sensors. However, due to the uncertainty of the working environment, the information acquisition of the vision sensor may encounter the situation of being blocked by unknown objects. This paper aims to propose a solution to the problem in robot grasping when the vision sensor information is blocked by sharing the information of multi-vision sensors in the cloud.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the random sampling consensus algorithm and principal component analysis (PCA) algorithms are used to detect the desktop range. Then, the minimum bounding rectangle of the occlusion area is obtained by the PCA algorithm. The candidate camera view range is obtained by plane segmentation. Then the candidate camera view range is combined with the manipulator workspace to obtain the camera posture and drive the arm to take pictures of the desktop occlusion area. Finally, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to approximate the shape of the object projection and for every single Gaussian model, the grabbing rectangle is generated and evaluated to get the most suitable one.
Findings
In this paper, a variety of cloud robotic being blocked are tested. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can capture the image of the occluded desktop and grab the objects in the occluded area successfully.
Originality/value
In the existing work, there are few research studies on using active multi-sensor to solve the occlusion problem. This paper presents a new solution to the occlusion problem. The proposed method can be applied to the multi-cloud robotics working environment through cloud sharing, which helps the robot to perceive the environment better. In addition, this paper proposes a method to obtain the object-grabbing rectangle based on GMM shape approximation of point cloud projection. Experiments show that the proposed methods can work well.
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The Internet is a decentralized network of computers located throughout the world. Many of these machines (or servers) contain information which is freely available while others…
Abstract
The Internet is a decentralized network of computers located throughout the world. Many of these machines (or servers) contain information which is freely available while others require payment or at least some form of authorization to log in. The growth of the network in recent years has opened up new ways of storing and accessing information and presents a challenge for anyone involved in information work. Improvements in telecommunications will see the Internet develop into a vital piece of information infrastructure through which it will be possible to transmit not just text but images and video. This paper provides a brief overview of the Internet: what it is, where it came from and what it offers. It introduces some of the tools that have emerged in recent years to help find and retrieve information from the many servers throughout the world. It also provides hints on where to look for more information on getting connected. In conclusion some comments are made on the relevance of the Internet for the information community and attention is drawn to some policy developments in the USA and the UK.
Sarah Kelly and David Nicholas
The Internet is now with us and as a result fundamental changes in information work encompassing the ‘virtual library’ and the ‘cybrarian’ are being forecasted. But how much of…
Abstract
The Internet is now with us and as a result fundamental changes in information work encompassing the ‘virtual library’ and the ‘cybrarian’ are being forecasted. But how much of all this is hype — and have we not all been here before, when online in the shape of full‐text systems like FT PROFILE first arrived? And PROFILE has been with us more than a dozen years and, yes, the basic shape of the information service has changed as a result — a little more buying in of the full text and less indexing it yourself. Indeed it was the advent of full text information services that first enabled librarians to run a purely electronic library. Why then should we look to more fundamental changes as a result of the arrival of the Internet? Since business librarians have often been at the forefront of technological and management changes within the information world — the early learners — their experiences with the Internet are of interest to us all. Can they tell us where we are all going? Since the business sector is such a large and multivariate group the assertion has been tested out on just one sector — the banking and finance sector. There are sound grounds for choosing this sector, for it employs more information professionals than any other business field. It is also, perhaps, the most influential business sector since anything that happens in the banking world is soon felt by all those working in other areas. The largest proportion of information professionals in the banking and finance sector are based in the City of London. However, this group contains two diverse banking areas, namely investment and dealing. While many of the target group were involved in in‐depth project finance research, others had to answer questions on companies and currencies within minutes. The information professionals in this sector are under intense pressure to deliver quality information at speed. It was assumed that if the Internet was a welcome part of this environment, it would not be long before it was a staple part of any efficient library. And after all, unlike PROFILE, the Internet is free isn't it?
Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to…
Abstract
Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.
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Abstract
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Libraries are increasingly active on the Internet. Internet access allows libraries to retrieve and disseminate information electronically (often at no cost), communicate with…
Abstract
Libraries are increasingly active on the Internet. Internet access allows libraries to retrieve and disseminate information electronically (often at no cost), communicate with other libraries and librarians through discussion groups, access images of unique materials, as well as offer Internet access to their communities. This article briefly describes some of these services, offers specific guidelines for choosing an Internet service provider, summarizes services provided by several firms, and recommends sources for further information.
The information available through the Internet continues to proliferate. As it does so, it gains increasing importance and legitimacy throughout the scientific community…
Abstract
The information available through the Internet continues to proliferate. As it does so, it gains increasing importance and legitimacy throughout the scientific community. Researchers can obtain information from the network just as easily as from a library. The network is thus growing into one of a multiplicity of sources of knowledge of use to the scientific community. Above all, it is about to become an invisible everyday desktop work tool (much in the same way as wordprocessing programs did before it). Hence the increasingly pressing need for systematic, standardised mechanisms to identify, locate and describe the network's information resources.
Virtually any personal computer user who uses contemporary software probably needs a huge hard disk storage drive that holds 6, or 10 or more gigabytes (remember, a gigabyte is…
Abstract
Virtually any personal computer user who uses contemporary software probably needs a huge hard disk storage drive that holds 6, or 10 or more gigabytes (remember, a gigabyte is 1000 million bytes). For example, if you store the popular Microsoft Office ‘97 software package in your computer, you'll need about 100 megabytes for that package alone. If you want a computer that uses Windows '98, you will have to provide over 500 megabytes just for the Windows software. By the time you have installed a few standard packages, plus some software for applications like library operations and database access, the first gigabyte of hard disk space has probably been filled. If the computer is used for Internet access, additional large blocks of storage will soon be filled with pages downloaded from the World Wide Web. A huge disk drive can be a wonderful asset if you use your computer to manipulate very large database files, or large graphics/picture files, or if you want to store historical files that can be expected to continue to grow in the future.