Search results

A study of the effect of poling conditions on screen‐printed piezoceramics was undertaken. Printable pastes were produced, using a commercially available lead zirconate titanate (PZT) powder, mixed with two types of binder, lead (II) oxide and a lead borosilicate glass. Sample devices were fabricated using the two paste types and processed, using standard thick film techniques, before being poled under varying conditions. Samples were compared by measurement of piezoelectric charge constant, d₃₃ and using scanning electron microscopy techniques. Temperature and time are shown to increase poling efficiency, while poling field reaches an optimum at 2‐3 MV m^‐1. The PZT layers start to fail through a process of dielectric breakdown at fields of 3.5 MV m^‐1 and above.

Self‐contained emergency lighting luminaires are mandatory in most countries for public buildings, offices and factories to ensure maximum safety in the event of a power failure. A major Netherlands‐based manufacturer, Blessing Electronics, Breda, produces a wide range of luminaires to suit most applications which are sold widely within Benelux and in other European countries.

The University of Southampton Thick‐Film Unit (TFU) was originally established in the Department of Electronics in 1985 to service the requirements of a transducer research group. This group originally pioneered the concept of the intelligent transducer and the thick‐film unit was initially used to explore the opportunities for fabricating low‐cost miniature and robust electronic interface circuits suitable for incorporation within transducers. The benefits to be derived from these thick‐film fabrication techniques soon become evident and the unit rapidly grew in stature with the commencement of several research programmes in the area of thick‐film sensors. The 1989 review of advanced sensor technologies undertaken by the DTI reported that the Southampton group was emerging as a centre of expertise in a technology offering significant short to medium‐term scope for commercial exploitation. This prediction is rapidly being fulfilled with an ever increasing number of thick‐film sensors being made commercially available.

People who have yet failed to realize how serious the food situation may become are inclined to criticize the multiplication of Orders and appeals, and in some cases to contest their wisdom. Mistakes may have been made or fresh conditions may have arisen to make less urgent some particular restriction, but generally the position has grown more critical in recent weeks, and instead of looking for any relaxation of the regulations now in operation the public should be prepared for still more drastic orders. No one as a result of the restrictions on food consumption yet introduced has suffered anything more than inconvenience arising out of interference with established habits. There has been no hardship and no hunger. In Germany the rationing of bread began so long ago as January in 1915, and to‐day there is hardly an article of food which is not rationed. When the existing prohibitions, regulations, and appeals issued by LORD DEVONPORT are summarized it will be realized to how limited an extent they have disturbed the character or the quantity of the food which may be consumed without exceeding the directions of the Food Controller. The position may be stated under the following headings:—

The following report was brought up by Dr. P. Brouardel, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, President of the Commission, and was submitted for the approval of the Congress:

In pre‐war Russia the canning industry would seem to have been limited to the preparation of canned meat—beef—for army purposes. The average annual output in round figures was 47,500 tons according to K. I. Rubinstein—who last year published a monograph on the canning industry as conducted in Russia—which is equivalent to about 120 millions of standard cans with a nett content of 400 grams each. The demands of the war caused this output to be raised to 150 million cans. Some of the then existing packing centres were at that time moved so as to be nearer to the supply of raw material. Thus new canning centres were opened at Rastov and Stavropol in substitution for some already existing at Petrograd, Moscow, and Kamenetz‐Podolsk.

There have been profound changes in the Portuguese national health system (NHS), instigated under the influence of managerialism and the new public management (NPM) “philosophy”. These changes have been in line with what has happened in other developed countries. At the beginning of the new century, important reforms that emphasised the efficient use of scarce resources were implemented. The objective of this study is to understand how nurses are adapting to a more managerial environment, one in which economic rationalism and market‐driven initiatives are the key principles behind the health reforms.

A qualitative study was developed, based on semi‐structured interviews with 83 nurses with managerial duties in ten hospitals in Portugal. All interviews were tape‐recorded and each interviewee's discourses were subjected to content analysis.

Data analysis led to the conclusion that under the new logic of the market and managerialism, these professionals have tried to (re)define their professionalisation route by emphasising the importance of care but also by trying to incorporate management as their dominant role in the social division of work. In reconfiguring their notion of professionalism, nurses were incorporating new practices in their day‐to‐day activities. This empirical study confirms that professionalism can also be conceptualised as a technology of self‐control being able to discipline professionals at the micro level.

This research is an empirical study based on the effects of managerialism on nurses with managerial duties in Portugal. This study contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of the professionalisation of nurses in a context of institutional change.

The purpose of this article is to review the use of competence frameworks in the UK healthcare sector and to explore characteristics of the sector that may influence the success of projects to develop new frameworks.

The paper draws on project reports and evaluations of practice in a range of recent projects to develop new competence frameworks.

There are a number of competence frameworks in use in the UK healthcare sector, principally the NHS, designed for a range of purposes. There are many potential benefits of such frameworks. The main characteristics of the UK healthcare sector that can present difficulties to the development, and ultimate use, of such competence frameworks are the size, complexity, professionalisation and extent of other simultaneous change in the sector. Potential difficulties caused by these characteristics can be ameliorated by measures to align the development of the framework with priorities, interests and concerns of practitioners and stakeholder bodies. A case study of effective implementation of a framework demonstrates the benefits of integrating the competences with other measures to deliver a new service.

The paper gives practical guidance for those who intend to develop and implement competence frameworks in healthcare and other complex environments.

The paper applies established organisational change concepts to the specific issue of developing new frameworks of competence. The article provides high originality and high value to those who commission and those who develop competence frameworks.

Context‐awareness is an essential property of any pervasive system perceiving its environment. Such a system captures and processes context, i.e. the features describing the relevant aspects of environment state and user behaviour. However, development of these systems still requires solving a number of research and engineering challenges. The purpose of this paper is to propose perception framework, a RESTful middleware which simplifies and accelerates the development of pervasive systems. Perception framework allows constructing services' application logic using rules and context. Moreover, it collects sensor data and produces the context information that is required for the rules. The authors present the architecture, design, complete implementation, and prototype‐based verification of perception framework.

Development of context‐aware services is achieved with a novel architecture supporting building of the logic of web services using rules which directly manipulate the available elementary context represented with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology. These rules are described using the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) with support for different rule languages. The implementation of this framework is aligned with RESTful principles, providing a lightweight and flexible solution for large‐scale context‐aware systems.

The fully implemented prototype verifies the feasibility of constructing the logic of context‐aware web services with the rules supported by perception framework.

The contributions of this paper include: the requirement specification for a generic context‐aware pervasive middleware; and the design and implementation of the framework (i.e. perception framework) supporting the development of context‐aware web services. The perception framework includes a generic rule‐based reasoner allowing developers to use several RIF‐compliant rule description languages.