Non-technical Development Research Articles

The Surgical Subinternship: A Unique Opportunity for Early Leadership Development

Subinternships are formative rotations in the surgery-bound medical student's journey to surgical training. This experience allows for further exploration of career goals, plays an important evaluative role in the residency selection process, and offers ongoing opportunities for technical and non-technical development. The graduated responsibility experienced in this setting extends beyond what was experienced during the core surgical clerkship where students are first interfacing with the clinical environment. We review and reflect on the role of subinternships in developing the leadership skills that surgery-bound medical students will need to effectively lead interprofessional healthcare teams in the future.

The Roles and Synergies of Actors in the Green Building Transition: Lessons from Singapore

Transforming the building sector toward sustainability based on green building (GB) technologies is a multi-faceted, multi-actor process of socio-technical transition. Understanding the different roles of primary actors in both technological and non-technological dimensions of GB transition is pivotal for effectively engaging multiple GB stakeholders during this process. However, relevant research is rare in the GB literature. This paper conducts an actor analysis based on a conceptual framework constructed on the actor and power relation typology from the multi-actor perspective approach and regime insights from the multi-level perspective theory. A qualitative case study of Singapore is adopted to exemplify the roles of the government, developers, citizens and NGOs, determined by their respective power and multi-actor power relations, and to evaluate their synergetic influence on the technological, social and governance dimensions of the GB transition. It was found that the government leads all three dimensions of GB transition and it has an indirect impact on promoting the technological transformation and social adaption by synergizing the other three actors. As the intermediary between government and non-government actors, NGOs indirectly influence GB transition by primarily assisting the government. Developers and citizens directly contribute to technological transformation and social adaption, respectively, and they have an indirect impact on the opposite dimensions through interacting with one another. We argue that a successful GB transition entails synergies from multi-actor interactions and the interplay of technical and non-technical development. This paper offers a heuristic framework for multi-actor analysis in the multi-faceted GB transition and generates policy lessons for other cities.

Cathodic protection of reinforcement in concrete – experience and development over 30 years

This paper presents developments over 30 years in the field of cathodic protection of steel reinforcement in concrete in The Netherlands and elsewhere. From the late 1980s major developments have been: application to large numbers of precast elements corroding due to mixed-in chloride with drilled in titanium anodes and conductive coatings; analysis of working life of systems and components and end-of-life considerations; application to prestressed structures; new anode types including galvanic systems with associated life and design considerations; numerical modelling and preventative applications. Presently, CP has become a fully accepted method of securing safety and serviceability of buildings and infrastructure. Major successes and lessons learned will be presented. Technical and non-technical developments are highlighted and some recent innovative CP systems are discussed.

Cathodic protection of steel in concrete – experience and overview of 30 years application

This paper presents an overview of 30 years' experience with cathodic protection of steel in concrete in The Netherlands. Principles and practical aspects of CP and its design and installation are presented. Three phases have passed from the late 1980s until present: pioneering, development and maturity. In the first period CP was mainly applied to precast elements corroding due to mixedin chlorides. The parties involved worked together to draw up a Technical Guideline. In the second period, application to bridges came up, including post-tensioned structures, which was then innovative. Furthermore, galvanic anode systems were introduced. In the third period, CP became a fully accepted method of securing durability and safety. Renewed collaboration led to a database that allowed analysis of various aspects of CP system working life, including shortcomings in early systems. Major successes and lessons learned will be presented. Technical and non-technical developments are highlighted and some recent innovative CP components and systems are discussed.

US experiences in sustainable development of unconventional resources, appraisal phase approaches for addressing non-technical development risks

The global development of unconventional gas resources is progressing at a remarkable pace, owing to technology advancements, supportive regulatory environments, and expectations of favourable long-term market conditions. In Australia, the sheer scale of the resource potential, the increase in political and public will towards CO2 emissions reduction, and an immediate desire for greater local economic production suggests that exploration and production activity is likely to accelerate in the coming years. The unconventional gas sector, however, has been affected by negative publicity, with attention drawn to the potential environmental impacts and public burden associated with development practices—especially hydraulic fracturing. Stakeholder concerns regarding the significant water requirements, emissions footprint, and infrastructure impacts across the development lifecycle represent significant challenges. This extended abstract focuses on the use of structured decision-making approaches used in the appraisal phase of unconventional gas developments in the US to identify and manage the technical and especially non-technical risks that impact a development’s cost, schedule, and profitability across its lifecycle. An unconventional gas development from the US is presented, where a framework for integrating commercial, public, and environmental concerns from corporate and external stakeholders into field concept development and selection has been successfully applied. The development, which faces resource and regulatory challenges related to water management, air emissions, and local infrastructure impacts, employed fit-for-purpose decision-making tools that quantified non-technical development risks to inform the evaluation and selection of concepts that best met economic, corporate, and stakeholder expectations.

An easy-to-use 3D visualization system for planning context-aware applications in smart buildings

With the proliferation of wireless sensor network technologies, the context-aware applications of smart environments have become more and more popular. However, time-consuming and labor-intensive works hamper the development of smart building applications. Therefore, application developers need the proper software platforms to efficiently design the applications. Much research currently proposed the design approaches based on low-level concerns and the real-world deployments based on high-level programming abstraction are rare. Accordingly, the pressing issue is how to offer the easy-to-use tools with acceptable performance to rapidly and easily design the application scenarios for non-technical application users. Therefore, this study focuses on the application-layer simulation to propose a Visualization System of Context-aware Application Scenario Planning (VS-CaSP) for assisting non-technical developers and end-users in rapidly and easily designing the application scenario of smart buildings and in performing the acceptable and predictable simulation and evaluation. VS-CaSp applies rule-based and 3D visualization techniques to offer a 3D authoring environment integrated with real Zigbee sensor devices, where designers are able to rapidly construct immersive 3D buildings and easily plan the context-aware application scenario via GUI tool based on proposed three-tier rule hierarchy, to visually simulate and verify the planned scenario via virtual and real sensor devices, and to repeatedly modify the control strategies to enhance the deployment effectiveness. The experimental results show that VS-CaSP is easy to use for the support of quickly designing smart building applications, but not professional enough for developments of 3D modeling, animation, and rule expression. Accordingly, it is workable and expected to prove beneficial to non-technical users.

콘텐츠 개발자와 설계자를 위한 보편적 접근성 가이드라인의 개발과 활용

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to develop and use the e-learning contents accessibility guidelines to improve contents accessibility for the non-technical developers and designers. The accessibility guidelines used for web or digital contents are usually technical, field dependent, or specific that are not friendly for many developers or designers. In this study, the e-Learning Contents Accessibility Guidelines was developed based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning. The guidelines could be used to map the necessary skills for the developers and the instructional designers. In this study, 5 users with different disabilities tested 6 e-learning contents, and surveyed e-learning experts to identify core elements for accessibility guidelines. Due to the limited accessibility of the contents, we need to offer manuals and training for developers and designers, need collaborative efforts between different stake holders, include accessibility in quality assurance guidelines, and further research to improve accessibility for many existing Flash contents. Keywords:e-Learning, Accessibility Guidelines, Flash, UDL(Universal Design for Learning)

A roadmap for carbon capture and storage in the UK

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has been endorsed by the IPCC and the UK government as a key mitigation option but remains on the cusp of wide-scale commercial deployment. Here we present a technology roadmap for CCS, depicted in terms of external factors and short- and long-term pathways for its development, moving from a demonstration to commercialisation era. The roadmap was been developed through a two-phase process of stakeholder engagement; the second phase of this, a high level stakeholder workshop, is documented here. This approach has provided a unique overview of the current status, potential and barriers to CCS deployment in the UK. In addition to the roadmap graphics and more detailed review, five consensus conclusions emerging from the workshop are presented. These describe the need for a monetary CO 2 value and the financing of carbon capture and storage schemes; the lack of technical barriers to the deployment of demonstration scale CCS plant; the role of demonstration projects in developing a robust regulatory framework; key storage issues; the need for a long-term vision in furthering both the technical and non-technical development of CCS.

Multilingual rule-based approach to number expansion: Framework, extensions and application

The language development of a multilingual text-to-speech system requires contribution from linguists and native speakers of a given language. Text normalization including number expansion is one of the language-specific processing steps. The most available solutions do not support inflections and are not simple enough to be practical for non-technical developers. This paper presents a novel solution for expressing the number expansion rules. The rule framework is fast and easy to use without technical background and truly multilingual supporting gender-specific inflections of numerals. The rules require only a small amount of memory and are conveniently stored as software independent language data. The same rule framework can be extended to carry out other text-normalization tasks including processing of context-dependent abbreviations and interpretation of formatted text such as date and time expressions. The framework has been successfully used in creating number, unit and time conversion rules for 42 languages. The created rules supported cardinal numbers from 0 to 999999 and 13 units such as m, km, h and min. Professional translators without technical background generated the rules for most of the languages. The average number of rule lines for number, unit and time rules were 87, 49 and 13, respectively. The average development time for a full rule set was seven hours per language. The most complex rule sets were in Slavonic languages whereas the simplest ones were in Sino-Tibetan languages.

Photosensitivity in optical fiber waveguides: from discovery to commercialization

The photosensitivity of germanium-doped-core optical fibers was discovered more than twenty years ago. The discovery provided a means for photoimprinting gratings in the core of optical fibers, and eventually photosensitivity became an important technology for fiber-optic communications. The paper recounts briefly the story of the photosensitivity of optical fiber waveguides and the significant developments that occurred on the journey from its discovery to its commercialization as is often the case with many inventions, the discovery was serendipitous. Furthermore, several technical and nontechnical developments were necessary before the discovery could be exploited commercially. In the case of photosensitivity, the time span from discovery to commercialization was relatively long-about 15 years.

Effectiveness of end-user developed applications in organizations

End-user computing, an environment where users develop applications for their own use, is growing at an astounding rate. This fast-paced growth is due primarily to the proliferation of microcomputers and the availability of end-user languages. However, certain risks have been identified with user-developed applications. Applications have not been adequately tested, documented, or maintained. Users, who are non-technical developers, have failed to identify complete information requirements. In some cases end-user developers have applied the wrong analysis technique or tool to a problem. The research question arising from the current situation is: "What organizational, technical, or user factors will contribute to the effectiveness of end-user developed applications (EUDA)?"