Service Profile Research Articles

Adaptive management of ecosystem services across different land use regimes

Using adaptive management to manage desired flows of ecosystem services may seem on the surface to be a good fit, but many social, economic, environmental, legal, and political factors influence how good a fit. One strongly influential factor is the land use regime within which the profile of ecosystem services is being managed. Shaped largely by legal mandates, market forces, and social and cultural practices, different land use regimes present different opportunities for and constraints on goals for ecosystem services and pose different decision making environments. Even where all other conditions appear amenable to using adaptive management, therefore, it is essential to consider the constraining (or liberating) effects of different land use regimes when deciding whether to adopt adaptive management to achieve those goals and, if so, how to implement it.

Profiling wound management in the emergency department: A descriptive analysis

BackgroundThe service profile of wound, skin and ulcer presentations to emergency departments is an area that lacks an existing published commentary. Knowledge of these presentations would inform the allocation of resources, staff training, and, in turn, patient outcomes. The aim of this study was to describe the discharge and referral status of adult patients presenting to one Australian emergency department with a wound, skin or ulcer condition. MethodsA retrospective descriptive review was conducted of all emergency presentations including discharge and referral statuses for skin, wound and ulcer related conditions from 1st January 2014 until 31st December 2014. ResultsA total of 4231 wound, skin and ulcer conditions were managed, accounting for 7% of the total emergency presentations. Wound conditions were the most prevalent (n=3658; 86%). Males were more likely to present for all three conditions. For all conditions, discharge to home was the most common destination. Following discharge to home, over half all patients were referred to the local medical officer. ConclusionsNursing workforce models, education and training needs to reflect the skill set required to respond to wound, skin and ulcer conditions to ensure that high quality skin and wound care continues outside of the emergency department.

Internet of Things – potential for libraries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to subject the potential of Internet of Things (IoT) technology for libraries in terms of the possible scope and usage forms of this technology in public and academic library services. Design/methodology/approach – Based on analysis of the subject literature, the main areas of IoT applications in commercial institutions were identified, then an analysis of Library and Information Science English-language literature from the years 2010 to 2015 was conducted in order to create a profile of modern library services. The range of activities of commercial and non-commercial institutions were compared to ascertain if areas in which commercial entities using or planning to use IoT could also be an inspiration for libraries. In this way, a theoretical model of IoT use in library activities was developed. Findings – The research showed that IoT technology might have the potential to be used in library services and other activities, similar to how it is implemented in the commercial sector. Research limitations/implications – The aim of the paper is to determine the possible, not the actual, scope and forms of using this technology in public and academic libraries’ services. Practical implications – The results can be widely used in libraries as an inspiration for the use of IoT technology in modern library services. Social implications – The use of new technologies in libraries can help to improve the image of these institutions in the eyes of users, especially the younger generation. Originality/value – The use of IoT in libraries is a new issue that has not been studied much yet. The issue of using the potential of this technology for the needs of libraries has, in recent years, been raised at international conferences, become a subject of interest to librarian associations, and been widely discussed in the blogosphere, thus proving that this topic is important to practitioners. It is difficult, however, to find any scientific, comprehensive studies of this topic.

The Impact of Hospital Size on CMS Hospital Profiling.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) profile hospitals using a set of 30-day risk-standardized mortality and readmission rates as a basis for public reporting. These measures are affected by hospital patient volume, raising concerns about uniformity of standards applied to providers with different volumes. To quantitatively determine whether CMS uniformly profile hospitals that have equal performance levels but different volumes. Retrospective analysis of patient-level and hospital-level data using hierarchical logistic regression models with hospital random effects. Simulation of samples including a subset of hospitals with different volumes but equal poor performance (hospital effects=+3 SD in random-effect logistic model). A total of 1,085,568 Medicare fee-for-service patients undergoing 1,494,993 heart failure admissions in 4930 hospitals between July 1, 2005 and June 30, 2008. CMS methodology was used to determine the rank and proportion (by volume) of hospitals reported to perform "Worse than US National Rate." Percent of hospitals performing "Worse than US National Rate" was ∼40 times higher in the largest (fifth quintile by volume) compared with the smallest hospitals (first quintile). A similar gradient was seen in a cohort of 100 hospitals with simulated equal poor performance (0%, 0%, 5%, 20%, and 85% in quintiles 1 to 5) effectively leaving 78% of poor performers undetected. Our results illustrate the disparity of impact that the current CMS method of hospital profiling has on hospitals with higher volumes, translating into lower thresholds for detection and reporting of poor performance.

Network Virtualization Over Elastic Optical Networks With Different Protection Schemes

With network virtualization, the physical infrastructure can be partitioned into multiple parallel virtual networks for sharing purposes. However, different transport technologies or quality of service (QoS) levels may impact both the requested amount of resources and the characteristics of different virtual instances that can be built on top of a single physical infrastructure. In this paper we propose a novel mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for different schemes of protection in scenarios where multiple virtual topologies run over an elastic optical network. The proposed MILP formulation uses the concept of bandwidth squeezing to guarantee a minimum bandwidth for surviving virtual topologies. It achieves a high level of survivability for traffic that is subject to a different committed service profile for each virtual topology. Case studies are carried out in order to analyze the basic properties of the formulation in small networks, and three heuristics are proposed for larger networks.

Vulnerability Bandwidth Depletion Attack on Distributed Cloud Computing Network: A QoS Perspective

A previous work on Airport Information Resource Management System (AIRMS) established that sophisticated attacks in the form of Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed DoS (DDoS), and related attacks are becoming the most effective schemes used by cyber terrorists on such enterprise systems. Similarly, a novel Smart Green Energy Management Distributed Cloud Computing Network (SGEM-DCCN) was developed as an extension to the work. Interestingly, the DCCN could be shut down by malicious attackers while running its renewable energy management cloud service. Consequently, this work presents a security model designed to improve the security architecture in a mission-critical DCCN running Enterprise Energy Tracking Analytic Cloud Portal (EETACP). As a result of the EETACP DCCN vulnerability to DoS attacks, this work employed a core OpenFlow gateway firewall to pre-empt DDoS attacks and subsequently mitigate such destructive vulnerabilities in the network. In this case, Vulnerability Bandwidth Depletion DDoS Attack (VBDDA) was detected using Cisco Nexus 9000 firewall as an embedded network device with support for Virtual DDoS protection in the DCCN threat mitigation design. Also, security Quality of Service (QoS) profiling was employed to ascertain the network behavior in terms of resource utilization and query response times. For DDoS traffic flows, the network metrics were compared under simulated firewall scenarios involving Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC), Cisco Nexus 9000 Series multilayer Switches and Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS). It was concluded that with a robust firewall in place, VBDDA will be mitigated in DCCN infrastructure. This offers protection and reliability in the Smart Green Energy Management System architecture.

Falling in love with a [sperm] warrior: conscripting women’s wombs to the dissemination of a religio-political ideology

This article focuses on the screening and marketing of sperm in Israel as a mechanism for enlisting women’s wombs to political goals. The background for the analysis is the recent rise in demand for sperm from combat soldiers during the war between Israel and Hamas. The data-set for the project is comprised of multiple sources which converge to provide evidence for the transfusion of Zionist ideology into sperm donation. The article suggests the compatibility of the venerated status gained by donors who are Israeli Defense Force combatants with Zionist militarism. The banks screen candidates for sperm donation based on their military service and military health profile. The discursive climate which glorifies ‘warriors’ permeates sperm marketing, contributing to the cultural reproduction of a militaristic ideology. The article concludes by contending that sperm banks provide a platform for a subversive discourse that triggers Enloe’s thesis of patriotic motherhood and the role of women in the process of militarization.

Access to oral care before hematopoietic stem cell transplantation: understand to improve.

Although the relevance of dental intervention before transplant is recognized, many patients are undergoing transplantation without receiving dental care. The objective of this study was to identify the searching profile, access, and use of dental services by candidates to hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), and the difficulties faced by those candidates. All candidates for an allogeneic HSCT from a bone marrow transplant unit were invited to take part in this research from March 2014 to March 2015. A questionnaire was developed consisting of five sections with questions about personal information, hematologic disease, access to dental services, and history of dental treatment, patient's preferences, and knowledge. One hundred and ten candidates for allogeneic HSCT participated in this study. Fifty-five participants received professional oral care in the previous year of interview. The majority of patients (64%) went to a dentist not linked to transplant staff, and private dental service was the most visited (42%). To visit a dentist during the previous year was statistically associated with the habit of going to a dentist outside the hospital (p<0.001), which was statistically associated with the family income (p=0.001). The main barriers to access to dental treatment were lack of guidance (66%), apprehension (45%), and lack of confidence (29%) in an "external" dentist. Most of the barriers seem to be associated to lack of confidence and information among patients and professionals, as well as a lack of parameters for scheduling or referrals to dental care, especially for those with a low-socioeconomic background.

Cooperation and information replication in wireless networks.

A significant portion of today's network traffic is due to recurring downloads of a few popular contents. It has been observed that replicating the latter in caches installed at network edges-close to users-can drastically reduce network bandwidth usage and improve content access delay. Such caching architectures are gaining increasing interest in recent years as a way of dealing with the explosive traffic growth, fuelled further by the downward slope in storage space price. In this work, we provide an overview of caching with a particular emphasis on emerging network architectures that enable caching at the radio access network. In this context, novel challenges arise due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, which allows simultaneously serving multiple users tuned into a multicast stream, and the mobility of the users who may be frequently handed off from one cell tower to another. Existing results indicate that caching at the wireless edge has a great potential in removing bottlenecks on the wired backbone networks. Taking into consideration the schedule of multicast service and mobility profiles is crucial to extract maximum benefit in network performance.

“Managing the Migration From Military to Civil Society”

An estimated 70,000 personnel are annually released at the prime of life from the Indian armed forces to maintain a youthful service profile. The migration of veterans in search of a second career to civil society involves managing crucial socioeconomic needs. This article examines the resettlement needs of veterans using survey research which measured resettlement needs of air force veterans in two distinct districts (regions) in India ( N = 400). The analysis reveals that the educational needs of dependent children are on top of the agenda followed by the need to find civilian employment. This study also develops a socioeconomic need continuum and a motivation model of resettlement.

Two decades of change in European general practice service profiles: conditions associated with the developments in 28 countries between 1993 and 2012

Objective: Evidence regarding the benefits of strong primary care has influenced health policy and practice. This study focuses on changes in the breadth of services provided by general practitioners (GPs) in Europe between 1993 and 2012 and offers possible explanations for these changes. Design: Data on the breadth of service profiles were used from two cross-sectional surveys in 28 countries: the 1993 European GP Task Profile study (6321 GPs) and the 2012 QUALICOPC study (6044 GPs). GPs’ involvement in four areas of clinical activity (first contact care, treatment of diseases, medical procedures, and prevention) was established using ecometric analyses. The changes were measured by the relative increase in the breadth of service profiles. Associations between changes and national-level conditions were examined though regression analyses. Data on the national conditions were used from various other public databases including the World Databank and the PHAMEU (Primary Health care Activity Monitor) database. Setting: A total of 28 European countries. Subjects: GPs. Main outcome measure: Changes in the breadth of GP service profiles. Results: A general trend of increased involvement of European GPs in treatment of diseases and decreased involvement in preventive activities was observed. Conditions at the national level were associated with changes in the involvement of GPs in first contact care, treatment of diseases and, to a limited extent, prevention. Especially in countries with stronger growth of health care expenditures between 1993 and 2012 the service profiles have expanded. In countries where family values are more dominant the breadth in service profiles decreased. A stronger professional status of GPs was positively associated with the change in first contact care. Conclusions: GPs in former communist countries and Turkey have increased their involvement in the provision of services. Developments in Western Europe were less evident. The developments in the service profiles could only to a very limited extent be explained by national conditions. A main driver of reform seems to be the changes in health care expenditure, which may indicate a notion of urgency because there may be a pressure to curb the rising expenditures. Key pointsBroad GP service profiles are an indicator of strong primary care in a country. It is expected that developments in the breadth of GP service profiles are influenced by various national conditions related to the urgency to reform, politics, and means.Between 1993 and 2012 the involvement of GPs in European countries in treatment of diseases increased and their involvement preventive activities decreased.The national conditions were found to be associated with changes in GPs’ involvement as first contact of care, treatment of diseases, and, to a limited extent, prevention.More specifically, in countries with a stronger growth in health care expenditures, service profiles of European GPs have expanded more in the past decades.

Evaluation of Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals implementation.

ABSTRACTOBJECTIVE To describe the Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals and evaluate their implementation considering formal regulations.METHODS We conducted a program evaluation, of evaluative research type. From August 2011 to January 2012, a questionnaire was applied to the 42 Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals existing in the Country, approaching the structure, human resources, and developed activities dimensions. We conducted a descriptive analysis of data and used a clustering for binary data with the squared Euclidean distance, by the farthest neighbor method, to aggregate services with similar features.RESULTS We observed great diversity among the services in the three dimensions. The clustering resulted in five service profiles, named according to their characteristics. 1) Best structure: 12 Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals with the highest proportion of services with the minimum of rooms recommended, purpose-built vaccine refrigerators, preventive maintenance of the cold chain, and oxygen source. 2) Immunobiologicals distributor: six Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals that distributed more than applied immunogens; no doctor present for more than half of the working hours and no purpose-built vaccine refrigerators . 3) Incipient implementation: five Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals with inadequate structure, such as absence of purpose-built vaccine refrigerators, preventive maintenance of the cold chain and oxygen source; none had computer. 4) Vaccination rooms: 13 Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals, everyone did routine immunization, most participated in vaccination campaigns. 5) Teaching and research: six services, all inserted into teaching hospitals, developed researches and received trainees; most had doctors in more than half of the working hours.CONCLUSIONS The evaluation of the Reference Centers for Special Immunobiologicals implementation was based on the profiles found and considered the official regulations: services categorized as “better structure” and “teaching and research” were considered implemented; “immunobiologicals distributor” and “vaccination room” services, partially implemented, and the ones with the “incipient implementation” profile, not implemented. The results of this evaluation can contribute to the reformulation of the services, considering the current context.

A study to assess patient satisfaction in out patient department of a tertiary care hospital in north India

Background: OPD is very crucial department of any hospital services as huge number of patient’s visits the OPD. Yet, the published information about patients' profile and utilization of OPD services in both developing and developed countries is scarce. The objective of our study was to study the socio-demographic profile, patient’s satisfaction towards hospital services and pattern of referral of the outdoor patients visiting Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, India. Methods: It is a cross-sectional survey of patients visiting OPD in a tertiary care hospital in Lucknow. Data was collected by a structured questionnaire designed for the purpose. Results: A total of 200 patients were included in the study with average age of 40 years. The majority of patients (40%) were graduate & above. No patient was found illiterate in our study. 74.5% of the patients are currently married. 25% of the total were employed in some service, 9% were doing business. 27.5% were unemployed or students. The main presentation was Cardiac disease (20%) and Gastric problems (18.5%), followed by kidney problems (13%). 69% patients were referred to a tertiary care hospital by a doctor as a first referral. Outcome of first treatment & distance of patient’s usual place of residence from a tertiary care hospital was found to be significantly associated with referral pattern. Patient’s satisfaction towards OPD services were found to be associated with Caste, occupation, outcome of first treatment & distance of patients usual place of residence from hospital. All of the patients are highly satisfied with doctors (97%) while they were least satisfied by canteen (31.6%), transport (31.1%) & pharmacy services (25.6%). Conclusions: Overall the study showed a good level of satisfaction of patients with services obtained from this tertiary care centre. Appropriate and on-going data collection and analysis could help in optimizing utilization of outpatient services to achieve better outcomes.

Isolation-based subsumption reasoning with enormous volume of web ontologies for scalable semantic service discovery

The description of service with expressive Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies facilitates semantics-based service advertisement and discovery. However, modern description logic (DL) reasoners do not provide sufficiently tolerable and scalable infrastructure for the advertisement and discovery of service profiles on the basis of enormous volumes of OWL ontologies on the web. In this paper, we present an import graph-based tolerable and scalable reasoner that can be implemented on top of off-the-shelf DL reasoners. The reasoner has been designed to reduce the reasoning workload of these reasoners by excluding ontologies not relevant for resolving a given subsumption query. On average, the proposed method isolates about 87.6%-99.9% of all ontologies when performing a given reasoning task. This leads to a significant reduction, by at least 85.6%, in the response time of subsumption reasoning when a naive reasoning strategy involving the loading of all ontologies onto a reasoner is used.

Perfil dos usuários do LIOP – Laboratório de Informação e Orientação Profissional da UFSC: mudanças observadas nos últimos anos

The constant identification of users of public services profile enables to know the main characteristics of people seeking for those services and to tailor interventions to these characteristics. This study aimed to identify characteristics of users from a university vocational and career guidance service. 237 protocols from 2011, 2012 and 2013 were analyzed. Among the results, there was an increased demand for retirement preparation services and also by young adults. These data confirm the expansion of the search for career interventions by individuals beyond adolescence and indicate the need to think about career guidance as a lifelong intervention strategy.

Perfil dos usuários do LIOP – Laboratório de Informação e Orientação Profissional da UFSC: mudanças observadas nos últimos anos

Este estudo teve como objetivo identificar caracteristicas demograficas e educacionais dos clientes de um servico universitario de carreira. Foram analisados os 207 protocolos de clientes atendidos em 2011, 2012 e 2013. Entre os resultados, observa-se o predominio de mulheres (61,83%), adolescentes e jovens adultos entre 14 e 30 anos (79,32%) e provenientes de escolas publicas. Houve aumento de procura por servicos de preparacao para aposentadoria e tambem por parte de clientes adultos jovens. Entre outros aspectos, esses dados confirmam a ampliacao da busca por intervencoes de carreira por parte de publicos diferentes do adolescente e, assim, indicam a necessidade de ajuste das intervencoes as caracteristicas de tais publicos e de se conceber a orientacao como estrategia de intervencao ao longo da vida. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.35700/ca.2015.ano2n3.p91-100.1880

CULTUROLOGICAL APPROACH IN THE SYSTEM OF ETHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO TRAINING IN COLLEGES OF MID-LEVEL LAWYERS

The article describes the essential relationship of culturalogical approach to vocational training in secondary vocational education of mid-level future lawyers and competence-based, qualitative and quality oriented, prognostic approaches to vocational education. The authors reveal the essence of the concept of “professional culture of a mid-level lawyer”, present the characteristics of some components of this culture; consider the factors and conditions that affect the efficiency of the process of formation and development of College foundations of professional culture of future graduates majoring in “Law and organization of social security". Also the article reveals the content and functionality of the professional culture of lawyers’ profile of social services. The authors state that the professional culture of a socio-humanitarian profile specialist has two levels (two "plans", self-unfolding circuit): internal and external, give detailed characteristics of each of these levels. Special attention is paid to the relationship of the concepts of «professional culture» and «professional competence» of the specialist of social sciences and humanities (including law) profile. The article proves the thesis that the synthesis of cultural, competence, qualitative, and predictive approaches to the development of professional training of law profile specialists ensures multifunctional training of future specialists in the context of scientifically based prediction of their future employability at the modern labor market and to address specific professional problems (including the regional ones) of improving the quality of human rights and legal services provided to Russian citizens.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure Approach for the Characterization of New Zealand's Groundwater Systems

AbstractThe future information needs of stakeholders for hydrogeological and hydro‐climate data management and assessment in New Zealand may be met with an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards‐compliant publicly accessible web services framework which aims to provide integrated use of groundwater information and environmental observation data in general. The stages of the framework development described in this article are search and discovery as well as data collection and access with (meta)data services, which are developed in a community process. The concept and prototype implementation of OGC‐compliant web services for groundwater and hydro‐climate data include demonstration data services that present multiple distributed datasets of environmental observations. The results also iterate over the stakeholder community process and the refined profile of OGC services for environmental observation data sharing within the New Zealand Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) landscape, including datasets from the National Groundwater Monitoring Program and the New Zealand Climate Database along with datasets from affiliated regional councils at regional‐ and sub‐regional scales. With the definition of the New Zealand observation data profile we show that current state‐of‐the‐art standards do not necessarily need to be improved, but that the community has to agree upon how to use these standards in an iterative process.

Service Profile of Orthognathic Surgery of a Medical School

AbstractOrthognathic surgeries are very important for both the correction of dentofacial deformities as well as for the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea syndrome. Nowadays, most of the population presents some type of morphological and/or functional disorder of the stomatognathic system. AimThe present study aims at assessing the information from the individuals treated in the Orthognathic Surgical Service of a Medical School. MethodsSearch in medical records - 2004-2008, identification procedures, individual characteristics, malocclusion and surgery. ResultsThe number of surgical treatments due to dentofacial deformities has been increasing. Maxillary advancement surgery alone comprised the highest number in the sample. ConclusionOrthognathic surgery cases have been increasing in the last years and maxillary advancement alone comprised the highest number of surgical treatments.

Semantic approach for Web service classification using machine learning and measures of semantic relatedness

Web service classification, a task of assigning a category to the service from a predefined set, is a challenging task nowadays as manually organizing and searching services are simply not feasible, given the time constraints or the exponentially growing number of services. In this paper, a hybrid approach independent of service description models is suggested for automatic classification of Web services to improve classification accuracy. The proposed classification approach assists the repository administrator and the users during registration and service retrieval, respectively. It utilizes the semantic as well as syntactic information present within the service description by combining the techniques from machine learning, data mining, logical reasoning, statistical methods and measures of semantic relatedness. The proposed approach applies Omiotis measure of semantic relatedness to transform the service vectors into semantically enriched service vectors which are used by the classification algorithms. Supervised machine learning-based support vector machines and k-Nearest Neighbor classifiers are used to categorize service profiles under different categories. Empirical evaluation and comparison of the proposed approach implemented on OWL-X dataset is presented for enabling the discovery and reusability of the existing services.