Standard-based Approach Research Articles

Certified B Corps: An Examination of a Standard Based Approach to Stakeholder Governance

In 2015, B Corp certification was launched in the UK. Since then, over 1,200 companies have adopted certified B Corps status. Most certified B Corps in the UK are small and medium-sized, with SMEs accounting for 99.9% of businesses in the UK. The B Corp movement seeks to change the economic system from a shareholder capitalism to a stakeholder economy. Certified B Corps adopt a stakeholder-driven mode towards ‘high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency.’ The article explores the growth of the B Corp movement, issues around its standards, certification process, including the legal requirement, transparency, and governance. It examines the effectiveness of this standard-based approach for stakeholder governance. It argues that the certified B Corp creates an avenue for stakeholder governance. However, to fully realise the shift towards stakeholder governance, there is a need for greater work towards achieving accountability for all key stakeholders identified as shareholders, workers, community, environment, and customers.

Physical Ergonomics Monitoring in Human–Robot Collaboration: A Standard-Based Approach for Hand-Guiding Applications

Human–robot collaboration stands as one of the research frontiers in industrial applications due to the possibility for human operators to be supported by robots in carrying out their tasks in a shared workspace. However, advances in this field can be slowed down by the lack of standards regarding the safety and ergonomics of such applications. This article aims at reducing this gap by presenting an adaptation of the standard ISO 11228-3 for the ergonomic evaluation of hand-guiding applications through the OCRA index. This innovative methodology is innovatively applied to a drilling application in which a human operator hand-guides a collaborative robotic system consisting of a Franka Emika Panda robot, a force/torque sensor and an IMU suit to track the motion of the operator’s body. The SaRAH app, a MATLAB 2020a-based software tool developed on purpose, implements the ergonomic assessment procedure, allowing the proper redesign of the working shift (offline mode) or providing the worker suggestions to improve his/her behavior (online mode) so as to reduce the ergonomic risk.

Designing A Standard-Based Approach for Security of Healthcare Systems

Designing A Standard-Based Approach for Security of Healthcare Systems

Dam Safety History and Practice: Is There Room for Improvement?

Dams and reservoirs have always been of interest to human beings, playing a crucial role given the importance of securing water for sanitary use, irrigation, navigation, flood control and energy generation, among others. The main focus of this article is to perform a historical review of dam safety practices. For this purpose, the historical periods are divided into homogeneous periods in terms of dam safety paradigms and, following the narrative of this evolution, the paper considers the fundamentals of the two most important conceptual frameworks applied nowadays: the standard-based approach and the risk-informed one. As a matter of fact, after more than 90 years of experience in the application of dam safety assessment techniques and more than 50 years of recognising and studying the implications of human activity for the environment, today, the industry may have sufficient information and knowledge to take dam safety practice to another stage, being this the core of the discussion that follows the historical review.

Extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation-based approach to refractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: A focus on organ donation, a secondary analysis of a Prague OHCA randomized study

BackgroundRefractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) has a poor outcome. In patients, who cannot be rescued despite using advanced techniques like extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR), organ donation may be considered. This study aims to evaluate, in refractory OHCA, how ECPR versus a standard-based approach allows organ donorship. MethodsThe Prague OHCA trial randomized adults with a witnessed refractory OHCA of presumed cardiac origin to either an ECPR-based or standard approach. Patients who died of brain death or those who died of primary circulatory reasons and were not candidates for cardiac transplantation or durable ventricle assist device were evaluated as potential organ donors by a transplant center. In this post-hoc analysis, the effect on organ donation rates and one-year organ survival in recipients was examined. ResultsOut of 256 enrolled patients, 75 (29%) died prehospitally or within 1 hour after admission and 107 (42%) during the hospital stay. From a total of 24 considered donors, 21 and 3 (p = 0.01) were recruited from the ECPR vs standard approach arm, respectively. Fifteen brain-dead and none cardiac-dead subjects were ultimately accepted, 13 from the ECPR and two from the standard strategy group. A total of 36 organs were harvested. The organs were successfully transplanted into 34 recipients. All transplanted organs were fully functional, and none of the recipients died due to graft failure within the one-year period post-transplant. ConclusionThe ECPR-based approach in the refractory OHCA trial is associated with increased organ donorship and an excellent outcome of transplanted organs.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT 01511666. Registered January 19, 2012.

An Extension of the Standard-Based Approach in the Assessment of Liquid Dielectrics Behavior

An Extension of the Standard-Based Approach in the Assessment of Liquid Dielectrics Behavior

IndeGx: A model and a framework for indexing RDF knowledge graphs with SPARQL-based test suits

In recent years, a large number of RDF datasets have been built and published on the Web in fields as diverse as linguistics or life sciences, as well as general datasets such as DBpedia or Wikidata. The joint exploitation of these datasets requires specific knowledge about their content, access points, and commonalities. However, not all datasets contain a self-description, and not all access points can handle the complex queries used to generate such a description.In this article, we provide a standard-based approach to generate the description of a dataset. The generated descriptions as well as the process of their computation are expressed using standard vocabularies and languages. We implemented our approach into a framework, called IndeGx, where each indexing feature and its computation is collaboratively and declaratively defined in a GitHub repository. We have experimented IndeGx on a set of 339 RDF datasets with endpoints listed in public catalogs, over 8 months. The results show that we can collect, as much as possible, important characteristics of the datasets depending on their availability and capacities. The resulting index captures the commonalities, variety and disparity in the offered content and services and it provides an important support to any application designed to query RDF datasets.

Radiant capillary heat exchangers – power calculation for optimal heating and cooling

The issue of switching to renewable energy sources becomes very actual and it is important not only to change the energy source, but also the reduce the final energy needs by improving the energy efficiency of buildings and usage of efficient heating systems. Heat pumps as the most popular renewable energy source are widely used, but their energy efficiency is depending on temperature of the supplied energy carrier. The most efficient are radiant capillary heat exchangers with a large surface area and a low temperature, which typically does not exceed 30°C. Another advantage of radiant capillary heat exchangers is the possibility to operate them in both - heating and cooling modes. Unlike the underfloor heating solution, where the role of thermal convection is very important, the built-in radiant capillary heat exchanger systems provide the energy mainly due to thermal radiation. This study explores two modelling approaches for determination of required power and corresponding area of radiant capillary heat exchangers to be installed in a room to provide heating and cooling: simplified approach, which allows to create the heat balance with a minimum amount of input data and a precise standard-based approach. Calculations were made for three different rooms with variable glazing area and spatial orientation using both approaches. Analysis of the calculation results shows the limits of the simplified method, which overestimates heating need and underestimates cooling need, and the main reason for such differences is simplification of room orientation and subsequent solar heat gains. As the calculated cooling power is less than heating power, therefore the heating estimation is sufficient to estimate the amount of radiant capillary heat exchangers in small/medium rooms for providing both heating and cooling in the climatic conditions of Riga. The use of complex, comprehensive modelling approaches is necessary for rooms with large glazed areas, where the simplified method gives incorrect estimations.

Evaluation and Refinement of a Spot-change-only Cage Management System for Mice.

Maximizing operational efficiency while maintaining appropriate animal housing conditions is a continuous focus of research animal care programs. Our institution's longstanding approach to cage-change management included scheduled cage changes every 2 wk, with spot changes if cages met established visual criteria during the intervening period. This 2-wk plus spot changing (2WS) practice for mice housed in IVC was problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic when the need arose to minimize workload to reduce on-site staffing out of concern for employee health and possible absenteeism. With the approval of the IACUC, a spot-change-only (SCO) process was adopted, with the requirement to evaluate microenvironmental parameters under both practices to confirm acceptable equivalence. These parameters (humidity, temperature, and ammonia) were evaluated in a controlled study that found no significant difference between the 2 groups. Ammonia levels did not exceed 10 ppm in any group throughout the study. To assess operational differences between these 2 approaches, we collected cage-change data and employee feedback from facilities operating under these schemes. The SCO method required fewer cage changes than did the 2WS method (10.3% per day with 2WS and 8.4% per day with SCO). Despite this benefit, through a Plan-Do-Check-Act process that has been regularly employed at our institution, employee feedback identified important operational challenges associated with the SCO practice. The SCO approach was thus refined into a scheduled spot change (SSC) practice that builds on the SCO model by incorporating a scheduled focused cage evaluation period. Based on subsequent feedback, the SSC was found to retain the efficiency benefits afforded by the SCO model and simultaneously alleviated staff and operational concerns. This result underscores the importance of integrating staff feedback with a performance standard-based approach when assessing cage-change management.

Torsional strengthening using carbon fiber reinforced polymer of reinforced concrete beams subject to combined bending, shear and torsion

The results of an experimental investigation of six large scale rectangular reinforced concrete (RC) beams subject to different ratios of combined bending, shear, and torsion strengthened with externally-bonded carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) U-wraps are presented. All beams exhibited torsion-dominated behaviour. The presence of discrete CFRP U-wrap strips controlled the cracks well and the resulting torsional cracks were observed to be oriented at about 50°. Regardless of loading ratio, strengthened beams exhibited a 70% increase in torsional capacity. Before cracking, torsion to flexure ratio had a small effect on the flexural and torsional stiffness indicating that twist and deflection have a small counteracting effect on each other. Existing beam capacities were assessed using ACI 318-19 and GB 50010-2010 while CFRP strengthening was assessed based on fib Bulletin 14. Main findings are as follows: the ACI 318-19-predicted torsional capacity was conservative while GB 50010-2010 appeared to result in better capacity-prediction of unstrengthened RC beams. Even though load capacities derived from GB 50010-2010 are consistent with torsion-dominated behaviour, neither standard-based approach addresses the complete interaction of internal forces which is necessary to determine existing in situ strength for FRP strengthening applications. The fib Bulletin 14 approach to FRP strengthening for torsion was extrapolated to U-wraps and shown to overestimate the strengthening effect of the CFRP system applied. Critically, the assumed angle of inclination of torsional cracking was increased by the presence of the U-wraps, reducing the efficacy of the CFRP application.

Influence of pH measurement inaccuracy on the values of acidity constant determined on the basis of electrophoretic and thermophoretic data

The accuracy of the acid dissociation constant (pKa) determined by experimental techniques depends on the potential errors in the pH measurement. This dependence is obvious, but, according to common practice, this effect is either ignored or treated in a greatly simplified manner when discussing the credibility of obtained pKa values. This paper investigates the influence of incorrect pH measurement on the pKa values ​​obtained by capillary electrophoresis (CE) and microscale thermophoresis (MST). A simple self-control procedure has been proposed to control and reliably predict the corresponding total uncertainty of the acidity constant. The significance of the pH measurement error was also investigated in relation to the thermodynamic analysis, which requires determining the thermal dependency of pKa values. The obtained results clearly indicate that the investigated effect should not be ignored, and the actual accuracy of methods using electrophoretic separation may be worse than commonly assumed. It also points at the need to develop alternative methods that do not require measuring pH, such as a known internal standard-based approach. Besides pH-related effects, other sources of inaccuracy of pKa constant should also be considered.

Product Innovation: Job Hunting Guru Application for Students’ Self Assessment

The DUE50032 Communicative English III course is one of the required courses for all polytechnic students. Topic 2: Job Hunting Mechanics is the specific topic (in the course) emphasised in the creation of this innovation material. This innovative material, Job Hunting Guru, was created to aid course lecturers in ensuring that the assessment (coursework) for job hunting mechanics is conducted properly and evenly to all students. The usage of smartphone applications has become a widespread channel utilised in all forms of training, as well as one of the key themes in the construction of polytechnic educational systems. It can convey helpful and vital content while also serving as one of the delivery materials in integrated teaching and learning sessions or online. It is strengthened further by increasing student involvement in smartphone application usage and encouraging active learning sessions through the combination of smartphone application and polytechnic system-provided e-learning platform. Course reviewers will learn how to hunt for a job, prepare for a job interview, and analyse rubrics for simulated suitable employment by comparing students as a reference point in this Job Hunting Guru Application. When students must achieve specific criteria in order to pass a job interview simulation assessment, this standard-based assessment approach is acceptable. Furthermore, this application provides as an additional guidance and reference for pupils when performing self-assessment.

Higher Education Quality Assurance and Accreditation Implementation in Several Countries across the World and Lessons Learned for Vietnam

Quality assurance and accreditation in higher education has been implemented in many countries across the world with the main purposes of quality control, quality improvement and accountability. This paper aims to synthesize and analyze quality assurance and accreditation policies and practices in Australia, the U.S. and several other countries in Europe and Asia to propose recommendations for Vietnam. Employing the method of document analysis, the study reviewed scholarly papers and scientific reports discussing the implementation of quality assurance and accreditation in many higher education systems across the world. The results showed that quality assurance and accreditation activities were diverse ranging from institutional accreditation to program accreditation, from voluntary to compulsory accreditation, and from fitness-for-purpose approaches to standard-based approaches. These findings were used to compare and contrast the emerging quality assurance and accreditation system of Vietnam and make recommendations for its future development.

Model-based cloud resource management with TOSCA and OCCI

With the advent of cloud computing, different cloud providers with heterogeneous cloud services (compute, storage, network, applications, etc.) and their related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have emerged. This heterogeneity complicates the implementation of an interoperable cloud system. Several standards have been proposed to address this challenge and provide a unified interface to cloud resources. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) thereby focuses on the standardization of a common API for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, while the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) focuses on the standardization of a template language to enable the proper definition of the topology of cloud applications and their orchestrations on top of a cloud system. TOSCA thereby does not define how the application topologies are created on the cloud. Therefore, we analyze the conceptual similarities between the two approaches and we study how we can integrate them to obtain a complete standard-based approach to manage both Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud application layers. We propose an automated extensive mapping between the concepts of the two standards, and we provide TOSCA Studio, a model-driven tool chain for TOSCA that conforms to OCCI. TOSCA Studio allows to graphically design cloud applications as well as to deploy and manage them at runtime using a fully model-driven cloud orchestrator based on the two standards. Our contribution is validated by successfully transforming and deploying three cloud applications: WordPress, Node Cellar and Multi-Tier.

Rules of Medical Necessity

Health insurance contracts have long excluded coverage for care that is “experimental” or not “medically necessary.” Historically, insurance policies defined these key terms of coverage using broad standards. For example, “medically necessary” care might be defined as care that is “generally accepted in the medical community.” This contractual structure provided insurers with significant flexibility when making coverage determinations, even though denying coverage could pad their bottom line. For this reason, lawmakers developed various tools to prevent insurers from exploiting their discretion to determine when care was “medically necessary” or “experimental.” These safeguards allowed insureds to challenge coverage denials internally within the insurance company, externally to an independent medical expert, and before courts via a contract law or ERISA cause of action. Additionally, state and federal mandates required insurers to cover specific medically necessary treatments and services. This Article documents a dramatic shift in health insurers’ contracts and practices from a standard-based approach to determining the medical and scientific appropriateness of health care towards a rule-based approach for making these determinations. It shows how health insurers have increasingly made incredibly detailed and specific rules of medical necessity part of their formal contractual obligations to policyholders. The Article then argues that health insurers’ shift from standards to rules for defining medically and scientifically appropriate health care undermines the effectiveness of traditional legal tools designed to constrain the risk of health insurer over-reaching. The Article concludes by exploring reforms that might effectively address the increasing rulification of medical necessity.

Design and development of an LADM-driven 3D Land administration system: Lessons learned in Malaysia

Urban infrastructure has been dramatically increasing in Malaysian cities over the last decades. The current 2D-based practices are challenged by the stratified development of urban land in underground and aboveground areas. Currently, in Malaysia, surveying measurements are stored in a 2D-based cadastral database in the form of horizontal coordinates. However, this method is not capable to accommodate ownership complexities in the vertical dimension. The existing methods to capture, compute and adjust cadastral survey data need to be upgraded for the purpose of implementing a 3D land administration system (LAS) in Malaysia. The transformation from 2D to 3D LAS should be in accordance with a standard-based approach. Land Administration Domain Model (LADM): ISO 19152:2012 provides an internationally accepted standard model for recording and managing cadastral data. This study aims to design and develop an LADM-driven 3D LAS for Malaysia by building on existing research carried out for LADM adoption in this country. The proposed approach includes modifications in the existing workflows for capturing 3D survey data, new architecture to support 3D land parcels, and a new database for creating an LADM-based 3D LAS in line with data requirements in Malaysia. The major part of the upgrade from 2D to a 3D environment consists of capturing, processing and management of height of survey points that define parcel boundaries. This study demonstrated and confirmed that the LADM standard plays a significant role in realising a 3D-enabled system for Malaysian land administration.

PENILAIAN RISIKO KEAMANAN BENDUNGAN DI JAWA TIMUR

Dam risk assessment is basically a additional to a standard-based approach, which is a conservative approach to dam engineering. For existing and new dams, dam risk assessment aims to determine whether existing hazard risks can be tolerated, and if hazard risks cannot be tolerated, actions to reduce risk are planned. Risk assessments for existing dams can also be used as a basis for determining priorities in carrying out the required repair or rehabilitation work. This paper discusses the dam risk assessment at Sengguruh Dam, Sutami Dam, Lahor Dam, Wlingi Dam, Bening Dam, Wonorejo Dam and Selorejo Dam. The methods used in risk assessment include the preparation of risk assessments, risk analysis, risk evaluation, risk reduction and management. These seven dams are managed by one manager, namely PJT I and are considered to be representative of this method that can be used to determine the priority value of dam handling. Based on the results of the assessment, the 7 dams fulfill the risk criteria. The next action that can be taken for these dams is to monitor the dam's behavior on a regular basis and in the aftermath of the earthquake, renew and socialize the RTD.

A standard-based approach for multi-criteria performance evaluation of engineered systems

It is a common practice to periodically monitor the key performance indicators of an engineered system (ES) and quantitatively evaluate the system's ability to perform its functions. For a specific ES, the technical standards for managing its operations and maintenance are usually available and deal with multiple aspects. Therefore, the performance evaluation of ESs should use a standard-based multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach. It is different from the generic MCDA methods where the performance evaluation for alternatives is based on the decision matrices of alternatives. The literature on performance evaluation of ESs is vast but the literature on standard-based performance evaluation is very limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by proposing a standard-based MCDA approach for evaluating operational performance of ESs. The proposed approach derives the weights of the performance parameters and the parameters of their normalization functions based on the information specified in the technical standards. The robustness and weak compensation degree of the reverse quadratic mean model are identified and it can be used as an aggregation model. A real-world case study is included to illustrate the proposed approach and its usefulness.

Meeting Standards through Integrated Curriculum: Point of View by Sussan M. Drake and Rebecca C. Bruns

Through an integrated curriculum, it is expected that the fulfillment of a maximum standard of learning for students' problems while learning, the integrated curriculum will determine the content, processes, materials, and learning materials that teachers do to students in the classroom. Students who have problems are expected to be able to overcome the problem both those who lack achievement and are left behind, the evaluation carried out is also expected to be able to measure the ability of students to improve learning that has been done, besides it can be compared between one school to another with an evaluation. So we need a standard-based approach and an integrated curriculum, the second offers several strategies in developing an integrated curriculum that has been proven in its implementation, thirdly to validate an integrated curriculum by offering examples of integrated curricula that have proven to be successful.

Using Fuzzy-Logic in Decision Support System based on Personal Ratings

The decision making process of selecting a service is very complex. Current recommendation systems make a generic recommendation to users regardless of their personal standards. This can result in a misleading recommendation because different users normally have different standards in evaluating services. Some of them might be harsh in their assessment while others are lenient. In this paper, we propose a standard-based approach to assist users in selecting their preferred services. To do so, we develop a judgement model to detect users’ standards then utilize them in a service recommendation process. To study the accuracy of our approach, 65536 service invocation results are collected from 3184 service users. The experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves better prediction accuracy than other approaches.