Time constraint

This two-pronged study seeks to ascertain the research psychographic characteristics of a select group of nurse professoriate (n=37) in a comprehensive university in the Philippines. The quantitative part of the study had an adapted survey questionnaire, which profiled the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the respondents. Defining the qualitative aspect of the inquiry was an in-depth interview with five (5) of the respondents chosen purposively to triangulate the data yielded by the questionnaire. Data were treated statistically and interpretively to describe the phenomenon under inquiry. It is interesting to note that while the nurse professoriate had shown a positive attitude towards research, variables such as time constraints, lack of research knowledge, research support structure and motivation hinder them from doing research activities. Implications of the study to reculturing, restructuring and reformulating efforts in research are also discussed.

PurposeThis research uses an optimisation model, based on the Six Sigma methodology, which assists marine container terminal operators to minimize trucks' congestions, as a defect in the global containerisation and smoothing the gate activity to reduce trucks' turn‐around times. The main purpose of this paper is implementing the Six Sigma in the landside of marine container terminals to reduce the average number of trucks in queues and average trucks' waiting times in both entrance and exit gates.Design/methodology/approachThis study examines the applicability of the DMAIC method along with the SIPOC, cause and effect diagram, and failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA).FindingsIn this paper, Six Sigma methodology is found as an accurate optimisation tool in marine container terminals. Risk Priority Numbers obtained from the FMEA analysis denote that additional control procedures and associated inspections are needed as monitoring tools on the working time and activity o...

Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being used for applications with real-time characteristics such as speech understanding and synthesis, media computations and I/O, and animation, often concurrently executed with traditional non-real-time workloads. This paper presents a system that can schedule multiple independent activities so that: . activities can obtain minimum guaranteed execution rates with application-specified reservation granularities via CPU Reservations, . CPU Reservations, which are of the form "reserve X units of time out of every Y units", provide not just an average case execution rate of X/Y over long periods of time, but the stronger guarantee that from any instant of time, by Y time units later, the activity will have executed for at least X time units, . applications can use Time Constraints to schedule tasks by deadlines, with on-time completion guaranteed for tasks with accepted constraints, and . both CPU Reservations and Time Con...

The diagnostic performance of the medical expert system MUNIN for diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders was evaluated on a set of 30 test cases. The cases were provided by 7 experienced electromyographers who were subsequently invited to participate in the evaluation. To reasonably cover the range of disorders, the electromyographers were asked to provide cases from patients with different types of muscular dystrophy, with neuromuscular transmission disorders, with motor neurone disease, and with different types of polyneuropathies. In addition, patients with a range of local neuropathies were provided. Out of the 30 cases, 11 cases were evaluated by an "almost peer review" method and the remaining 19 cases were evaluated by a "silver standard" method. The number of cases evaluated by "almost peer review" was limited to 11 due to time constraints on the evaluation procedure. During the "almost peer review," each electromyographer was asked to d...

University of Malaya (UM) became the first public university in Malaysia to implement a QMS across all departments and faculties within the institution and being accredited for it. In December 2002, UM attained the MS ISO 9001:2000 Certification for Quality Management System ...

Background The complicity of the South African health sector in apartheid and the international relevance of human rights as a professional obligation prompted moves to include human rights competencies in the curricula of health professionals in South Africa. A Train-the-Trainers course in Health and Human Rights was established in 1998 to equip faculty members from health sciences institutions nationwide with the necessary skills, attitudes and knowledge to teach human rights to their students. This study followed up participants to determine the extent of curriculum implementation, support needed as well as barriers encountered in integrating human rights into health sciences teaching and learning. Methods A survey including both quantitative and qualitative components was distributed in 2007 to past course participants from 1998-2006 via telephone, fax and electronic communication. Results Out of 162 past participants, 46 (28%) completed the survey, the majority of whom were sti...

Personal development planning (PDP) is a key issue in relation to professional and career development, and e-portfolios are a tool that can aid in this process. Many benefits of paper-based and online portfolios have been investigated but less has been reported on the technological and organisational issues which impact on user acceptance and uptake. This paper reports on experiences of the Enhancing Learner Progression Project in implementing two different e-portfolio systems in six different personal development contexts. Findings relate to access to the e-portfolio, the need for changes in pedagogy, time constraints for staff using e-portfolios and the future direction and questions raised from using e-portfolios.

This paper presents TiNA, a scheme for minimizing energy consumption in sensor networks by exploiting end-user tolerance to temporal coherency. TiNA utilizes temporal coherency tolerances to both reduce the amount of information transmitted by individual nodes (communication cost dominates power usage in sensor networks), and to improve quality of data when not all sensor readings can be propagated up the network within a given time constraint. TiNA was evaluated against a traditional in-network aggregation ...

In this paper, we present results from a study of realistic MPEG-2 video streams to analyze the validity of common assumptions for software decoding. Our analysis identifies a number of misconceptions. We present actual demands based on quality considerations and derive timing constraints for their decoding. We show that standard, fixed timing constraints are restrictive and flexible ones are better suited for MPEG-2 software de-

In contemporary computers, and networks of computers, various application domains are making increasing demands on the system to move data from one place to another, particularly under some form of soft real-time constraint. A brute force technique for implementing applications in this type of domain demands excessive system resources, even though the actual requirements by different parts of the application vary according to the way it is being used at the moment. A more sophisticated approach is to provide applications with the ability to dynamically adjust resource requirements according to their precise needs as well as the availability of system resources. This paper describes a set of principles for designing systems to provide support for soft real-time applications using dynamic negotiation. Next, the execution level abstraction is introduced as a specific mechanism for implementing the principles. The utility of the principles and the execution level abstraction is then sho...

BackgroundClinical handover between paramedics and the trauma team is undertaken in a time-pressured environment. Paramedics are often required to handover complex problems to a multitude of staff. There is evidence that information loss occurs at this transition. The aims of this project were to (1) develop a minimum dataset to assist paramedics provide handover; (2) identify attributes of effective and

Purpose: The unique strategy of using cadaveric models for teaching ultrasound-guided blocks has been described for blocks of the upper and lower extremities. This report considers the parallels between cadaveric and live imaging relevant to scanning of the trunk. The inter-individual variation between subjects (particularly for epidural blocks) is also considered, for practicing ultrasound-guided or supported trunk and central neuraxial techniques. Technical features: Ultrasound images using a portable machine C60 5-2 MHz curved array probe or HFL38 13-6 MHz linear array probe were obtained from scanning the trunk of a male adult cadaver, and were compared with ultrasound and magnetic resonance images from an adult male volunteer. Observations: Ultrasound imaging at the midline of the spine in the transverse/coronal plane provided an overview of the vertebral column, while scanning in a medial-to-lateral direction using longitudinal/sagittal plane sequentially localized the spinous...