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The purpose of this co-produced research project was to conduct interviews with people working in, volunteering with and accessing Canadian recovery colleges (RCs) to explore their perspectives on what an evaluation strategy for RCs could look like.

This study used a participatory action research approach and involved semistructured interviews with 29 people involved with RCs across Canada.

In this paper, the authors share insights from participants about the purposes of RC evaluation; key elements of evaluation; and the most applicable and effective approaches to evaluation. Participants indicated that RC evaluations should use a personalized, humanistic and accessible approach. The findings suggest that evaluations can serve multiple purposes and have the potential to support both organizational and personal-recovery goals if they are developed with meaningful input from people who access and work in RCs.

The findings can be used to guide evaluations in which aspects that are most important to those involved in RCs could inform choices, decisions, priorities, developments and adaptations in RC evaluation processes and, ultimately, in programming.

A recent scoping review revealed that although coproduction is a central feature of the RC model, coproduction principles are rarely acknowledged in descriptions of how RC evaluation strategies are developed. Exploring coproduction processes in all aspects of the RC model, including evaluation, can further the mission of RCs, which is to create spaces where people can come together and engage in mutual capacity-building and collaboration.

The efforts of Ford to get their employees actively involved in improving quality is one of America′s recent success stories. Employee involvement was one of the key reasons why Ford, which recalled more cars than it built in 1978, has progressed to recently outearning the much larger General Motors. It took not only upper management support but a total rethinking of relationships between line management and their employees. Out of this process came Ford′s eight basic steps for launching EI. It is a systematic approach that has produced results.

The resolution of conflicts between shareholders and managers, at minimal cost, is the goal of corporate governance. In 1999, an intriguing series of events occurred that dramatically reshaped the Canadian airline industry. This clinical study considers these events in relation to four corporate governance mechanisms. The results of this clinical study suggest that these four mechanisms may not be sufficient to control a management team that is committed to a course of action and to retaining their positions. In practice, corporate governance can be severely limited, even when the majority of board members are outside directors. In addition, institutional shareholders may not be the disciplining force that theory and logic suggests. Overall, the results imply that managerial entrenchment is a powerful motivating force that may be impossible to counter even for a large, poorly performing corporation that is subject to a very attractive takeover offer.

Secure mental health services in one UK region have acted within a network to develop a range of involvement practices. A new quality benchmarking tool has been created to appraise the implementation of these involvement practices. The purpose of this paper is to report upon a qualitative evaluation of this development.

Staff and service users involved in the co-production of the benchmarking tool were engaged in a series of focus groups and participatory inquiry approaches enacted in the course of scheduled network meetings. Data thus collected was subject to thematic analysis.

Four distinct themes were identified which were titled: Taking time, taking care; The value not the label; An instrument of the network; and All people working together. These are discussed in relation to recent theorising of co-production.

Effectively, this study represents a case study of developments within one region. As such, the findings may have limited transferability to other contexts.

Staff and service users can work together effectively to the benefit of each other and overall forensic services. The benchmarking tool provides a readymade mechanism to appraise quality improvements.

Despite a prevailing culture of competition in wider health-care policy, cooperation leads to enhanced quality.

The benchmarking tool is a unique development of a longstanding involvement network, demonstrating the positive implications for enacting co-production within secure services.

A lot of fibre and fabric structures or finishing parameters influence the functional properties of fabrics. In order to assess the thermal properties of conventional polyester and microfibre types of fabrics the plate/fabric/plate method for conductivity or cool/warm feeling was used. Fabrics made of microfibres show lower heat conductance and therefore higher thermal insulation properties. Microfibre fibres exhibit a warmer feeling than conventional polyester fabrics depending on pressure, which may be due to the difference in the fibre and fabric surface in contact with the human skin.

To understand how females who had recently been street homeless made sense of their lived experience, seven women engaged in semi-structured interviews. This study aims to provide an insight into the complexities of the gendered homeless experience, while using theories of trauma and victimisation to propose a new approach to understanding the cycle of female homelessness.

An interpretative phenomenological analysis approach was chosen to explore the phenomenon of female homelessness. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a small homogenous sample of women recruited in a city in the south of England.

Two super-ordinate themes emerged: victimisation and trauma and the group and the individual. In the male-dominated world of homelessness, women were caught in a cycle of multiple traumatic loss, compounded by pervasive gender-based violence, struggles in identity and systematic control. Gendered, trauma-informed women’s homelessness services are required.

Findings demonstrate the desperate need for an expansion in female-only homelessness services. The lived experience of the participants adds to an evidence base, which is vital to inform effective trauma-informed gendered service provision.

Homelessness policies draw principally on the prevalent literature on men; the UK research with women is lacking. This study gives voice to a hidden population, using the lived experience of women to suggest a new model of female homelessness.

Internships play an important role in the choices engineering students make about future career pathways though there is little research about the messaging students receive regarding internships from academics. This messaging is important because it can contribute to the expectations students set for internships which in turn influences the interpretation of the experience and sense of appropriateness of that particular career pathway. Situated in Expectancy X Value theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the beliefs and behaviors of the academics with whom engineering students interact as related to internship experiences.

The authors conducted and analyzed interviews with 13 career center employees and 14 academic advisers/faculty members across six demographically and geographically diverse schools. Interviews were coded, and within and across case patterns developed.

Across all six schools, interview participants believe internships are important for students with regard to three areas: enabling career discovery, providing opportunities for development of career skills and helping students with full-time job acquisition. However, participants describe few direct actions associated with these beliefs. The lack of recommended actions for making the most of the internship experience, despite a strong belief in their importance, is a major finding of this paper.

This study is original in that it examines an important perspective that is not often a focus of research related to internships: academic advisors, faculty or career center personnel. The multi-institution sample enhances the value of the study as commonalities were seen despite variation in schools, enabling recommendations useful to a variety of contexts.

The purpose of the paper is to predict mapping of areas vulnerable to flooding in the Ourika watershed in the High Atlas of Morocco with the aim of providing a useful tool capable of helping in the mitigation and management of floods in the associated region, as well as Morocco as a whole.

Four machine learning (ML) algorithms including k-nearest neighbors (KNN), artificial neural network, random forest (RF) and x-gradient boost (XGB) are adopted for modeling. Additionally, 16 predictors divided into categorical and numerical variables are used as inputs for modeling.

The results showed that RF and XGB were the best performing algorithms, with AUC scores of 99.1 and 99.2%, respectively. Conversely, KNN had the lowest predictive power, scoring 94.4%. Overall, the algorithms predicted that over 60% of the watershed was in the very low flood risk class, while the high flood risk class accounted for less than 15% of the area.

There are limited, if not non-existent studies on modeling using AI tools including ML in the region in predictive modeling of flooding, making this study intriguing.