This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government. Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants ...an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones. In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations-ranging from small departments to entire states-Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies. Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day. You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.
Bureaucracy is a much-maligned feature of contemporary government. And yet the aftermath of September 11 has opened the door to a reassessment of the role of a skilled civil service in the survival ...and viability of democratic society. Here, Ezra Suleiman offers a timely and powerful corrective to the widespread view that bureaucracy is the source of democracy's ills. This is a book as much about good governance as it is about bureaucratic organizations. Suleiman asks: Is democratic governance hindered without an effective instrument in the hands of the legitimately elected political leadership? Is a professional bureaucracy required for developing but not for maintaining a democratic state? Why has a reform movement arisen in recent years championing the gradual dismantling of bureaucracy, and what are the consequences?
Suleiman undertakes a comparative analysis of the drive toward a civil service grounded in the New Public Management. He argues that "government reinvention" has limited bureaucracy's capacity to adequately serve the public good. All bureaucracies have been under political pressure in recent years to reduce not only their size but also their effectiveness, and all have experienced growing deprofessionalism and politicization. He compares the impact of this evolution in both democratic societies and societies struggling to consolidate democratic institutions.Dismantling Democratic Statescautions that our failure to acknowledge the role of an effective bureaucracy in building and preserving democratic political systems threatens the survival of democracy itself.
Translational CT (TCT), in developing nations, a low-end computed tomography (CT) technology are relatively common. The limited-angle TCT scanning mode is often used with large-angle scanning to scan ...items within a narrow angular range, reduce X-ray radiation, scan long objects, and prevent detector discrepancies.. However, this scanning mode greatly reduces the picture quality and diagnostic accuracy due to the added noise and limited-angle distortions. A U-net convolutional neural network-based approach for limited-angle TCT image reconstruction has been created to reconstruct a high-quality image for the limited-angle TCT scanning mode (CNN). The limited-angle TCT projection data are first examined using the SART method, and the resulting picture is then fed into a trained CNN that can reduce artifacts and maintain structures to provide a better reconstructed image. Simulated studies are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm designed for the limitedangle TCT scanning mode. In contrast to certain modern techniques, the developed algorithm considerably lowers noise and limited-angle artifacts while maintaining image structures.
What is the gene expression pattern of prolactin receptor (PRLR) in human pre-implantation embryos and what are its functions during the embryonic development and adhesion process?
A total of 405 ...discarded human vitrified oocytes and embryos donated for research by consenting couples were used in this study. The oocytes and embryos were used to analyse PRLR expression and to evaluate the influence of prolactin (PRL) supplementation in the embryo culture medium on embryo developmental competence and viability. The rates of blastocyst development and adhesion, outgrowth area, cytoskeletal reorganization and nascent adhesion formation were compared between groups.
PRLR expression increased significantly after embryo compaction (P < 0.0001) and blastulation (P < 0.0001). Supplementation of the embryo culture medium with PRL did not improve the developmental rate and morphological grade. In contrast, blastocyst outgrowth was significantly increased in embryos cultured with PRL (P = 0.0004). Phosphorylation of JAK2, downstream of the prolactin receptor family, was markedly higher in the PRL-treated embryos than in embryos cultured without PRL. Furthermore, the expression of mRNAs encoding ezrin–radixin–moesin proteins and epithelial–mesenchymal transition-related genes was stimulated by the activation of PRL-JAK2 signalling. The PRL-treated embryos had higher mRNA expression of integrins than non-treated embryos, and transcriptional repression of cadherin 1 was observed after PRL treatment. More nascent adherent cells expressed focal adhesion kinase and paxillin in PRL-treated embryos than in non-treated embryos.
Human embryos express PRLR at the morula and blastocyst stages, and PRLR signalling stimulates blastocyst adhesion by promoting integrin-based focal adhesions and cytoskeletal organization during trophoblast outgrowth.
•BACN is thermodynamically and chemically stable.•BACN is a good organic semiconductor and has excellent hole transport properties.•BACN exhibits good optoelectronic and nonlinear optical ...properties.•BACN is fluorescent, it can improve colour purity of OLED and be used as an emitter.
In this study, we investigate the structural, vibrational, electronic, optical, transport, and thermodynamic properties of pure BACN using density functional theory (DFT). The B3LYP, B3PW91, CAM-B3LYP and ωB97XD functionals associated with the basis sets 6-31G(d,p) and 6-311G(d,p) were used. With regard to the electronic and transport properties, analysis of the HOMO and LUMO frontier orbitals, the gap values obtained and the reorganisation energies show that BACN is a good donor-acceptor semiconductor and has a good hole transport capacity. The study of non-linear optical properties shows that BACN is a good candidate for applications in nonlinear optics (NLO) because of its first-order hyperpolarisability, which is higher than that of urea. The time density functional theory (TD-DFT) approach was used for the photophysical analysis of BACN. It was found that BACN exhibits a maximum absorption in the near-UV range, peaking at 222.42 nm, and strong emission in the near-UV range with a maximum wavelength value of 229.75 nm through TD-CAM-B3LYP/6-311G(d,p). The Stokes shift values obtained indicate that the molecule is chemically stable. The full width at half-maximum (FWHM) and radiative lifetime values for this molecule are 19.924 nm and 16.071 ns, respectively. These results show that BACN is a fluorescent material that can be used as an emitter material for designing and improving the colour purity of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).
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Primary care nurses play a pivotal role in the response to disasters and pandemics. The coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic required preventative, diagnostic, and curative measures for ...persons presenting with symptoms of COVID-19 by healthcare providers, whilst continuing other essential services. We aimed to investigate the reorganisation of primary care services during COVID-19 from the perspectives of primary care nurses in the Western Cape province of South Africa.
We administered an online survey with closed and open-ended questions to professional nurses enrolled for a Postgraduate Diploma in Primary Care Nursing at Stellenbosch University (2020) and alumni (2017-2019) working in the Western Cape. Eighty-three participants completed the questionnaire.
The majority of the participants (74.4%) reported that they were reorganising services using a multitude of initiatives in response to the diverse infrastructure, logistics and services of the various healthcare facilities. Despite this, 48.2% of the participants expressed concerns, which mainly related to possible non-adherence of patients with chronic conditions, the lack of promotive and preventative services, challenges with facility infrastructure, and staff time devoted to triage and screening. More than half of the participants (57.8%) indicated that other services were affected by COVID-19, whilst 44.6% indicated that these services were worse than before.
Our findings suggest that the very necessary reorganisation of services that took place at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa enabled effective management of patients infected with COVID-19. However, the reorganisation of services may have longer-term consequences for primary care services in terms of lack of care for patients with other conditions, as well as preventive and promotive care.
The decommissioning of a health‐care service is invariably a highly complex and contentious process which faces many implementation challenges. There has been little specific theorisation of this ...phenomena, although insights can be transferred from wider literatures on policy implementation and change processes. In this paper, we present findings from empirical case studies of three decommissioning processes initiated in the English National Health Service. We apply Levine's (1979, Public Administration Review, 39(2), 179–183) typology of decommissioning drivers and insights from the empirical literature on pluralistic health‐care contexts, complex change processes and institutional constraints. Data include interviews, non‐participant observation and documents analysis. Alongside familiar patterns of pluralism and political partisanship, our results suggest the important role played by institutional factors in determining the outcome of decommissioning processes and in particular the prior requirement of political vulnerability for services to be successfully closed. Factors linked to the extent of such vulnerability include the scale of the proposed changes and extent to which they are supported at the macrolevel.
Numerous recent studies have identified critical issues with a high percentage of museum storage facilities around the world. The problems detected in such studies are usually solved with ambitious ...renovation projects, or through the reorganisation of existing resources. This article, drawing from the example of five Spain-based museums, explores the new concept of 'Storage Debt'. Storage debt refers to the cumulative processes and factors that generate the critical conditions mentioned above, which are quite costly to reverse and which adversely affect museums' activities at multiple levels.
The storage debt concept arose from the theoretical framework of 'technical debt' (coined in the software development industry) and applied to the museum field. The former concept refers to actions and decisions that solve a need in the short term, but that in the future generate contexts that make core activities challenging and whose resolution involves extra efforts and resources. This article brings the theory of debt to the museum discipline by defining the concept, characterising the debt that accumulates in the context of museum storage and identifying strategies that museums can apply to solve the problem within the context of their collections.
Making the accumulation of storage debt visible raises awareness around the additional cost that it implies for museum operations, but also around its potential effects on the value of collections. In this sense, the concept can facilitate communication with museum partners unfamiliar with the more technical aspects of museum management, such as patrons or sponsors. Likewise, when paired with risk analysis, the concept of storage debt makes it possible to shift away from a crisis model toward a predictive model: one that is more institutionally viable and sustainable.
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