Thesis (M.Com. (Development Theory and Policy))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2014. / Economic activities such as mining extraction and farming have in the past been supported by railway infrastructure, which continues to provide a cheap transportation option for the movement of freight. This research paper looks at the apparent bias that exists in the shared-use of railway infrastructure in South Africa between coal miners and citrus growers in Mpumalanga. The study is specifically concerned with the regulatory regime governing access and the extent to which it enables or hinders the shared-use of rail infrastructure, which is critical in the movement of freight for different sectors of the economy. The paper uses literature on regulatory practices and a case study of Mpumalanga’s coal miners and citrus growers, to investigate South Africa’s regulatory regime and its role in creating particular biases in the use of rail infrastructure.

Emerging technologies and business models have contributed to the improvement of transportation systems and services towards a more sustainable approach to mobility. Shared mobility has become widespread as a viable solution to the increasing demand for transportation. Many cities worldwide have implemented shared mobility service and demonstrated that it could offer numerous environmental and operational benefits. However, their implementation in rural and suburban areas that feature lower population density and dispersed travel demand is not receiving the same attention. This research considers four suburban communities to evaluate the operation of a fleet of shared mobility as a potential substitute for the currently fix-route public transportation services. For each area, four scenarios were defined to consider different powertrain technologies. These scenarios include the Internal Combustion Engine, Battery Electric, and two Autonomous Electric Vehicles scenarios. While assessing the efficiency of the fleet composition system, four vehicle sizes are considered. Further, an optimized routing solution for serving the known travel demand is utilized to calculate the total cost of fleet ownership, which accounts for the purchase price, energy consumption, CO2, and driver labour costs. The results highlight potential benefits of adopting a fleet of shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles for the case studies and show approximately 67-68% and 69-70% savings compared to a shared fleet of conventional and Battery Electric vehicles, respectively, mainly due to the omission of the driver costs. In the absence of operationally safe Autonomous Electric Vehicles, the more conservative scenario of employing a fleet of shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles with the presence of safety attendants could result in 6-8% and 13-14% savings compared to a shared fleet of conventional and Battery Electric vehicles. Nevertheless, the results indicate low utilization rates for the fleet attributed to the inconsistency in demand throughout the day. The results provided in this research can inform policymakers and service providers and be used for further evaluations of such transportation services. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc) / In pursuit of more equitable, sustainable, and connected transportation services in rural and suburban areas, this research investigates the quantitative benefits and costs of operating a ride-sharing service for four suburban areas located in Hamilton, Ontario. The study considers and compares several options in vehicle sizes and technologies to provide a better ground of knowledge for service providers and policymakers.

Purpose: Shared mental models (SMMs) represent commonly held understandings of task and team related knowledge within a team. Thought to facilitate implicit and adaptive coordination without the need for explicit communication, the construct has been thoroughly studied in non-health care settings. There has been increasing interest in the topic in the healthcare setting, but recent reviews have found that the construct is poorly defined and has significant heterogeneity in how it is measured (Floren et al., 2018). We conducted a scoping review examining the construct of SMMs in medical teams within the acute care setting. Method: Following the Arksey and O’Malley (2005) framework, five data bases were searched: Medline, CINAHL, PsychInfo, Web of Science, and Embase. Eligible studies examined SMMs in the context of medical teamwork in the acute care setting. Definitions, methods, and general study characteristics were examined. Results: Of the 1397 articles retrieved, 25 met eligibility criteria. The studies encompassed a variety of areas of clinical practice. There was no common definition for SMMs across the studies examined. The majority of studies (20/25) used quantitative methods with surveys, questionnaires, and observation being the most common. Conclusions: The construct of the SMM is poorly defined in the setting of acute care medical teams. Although many standard types of SMM measurement exist, few of the studies used these common methods. The lack of direct measurement of SMMs, especially in the case of observation, questions the validity of these studies. We propose a definition for SMMs in this context and a path forward for studying SMM in the acute care setting. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Health care is a team sport and as health care systems become more complex, teamwork becomes increasingly important. However, a team of experts does not make an expert team and highly effective teams possess a particular set of characteristics that allow them to perform high quality care. One characteristic that is receiving an increasing amount of attention is the Shared Mental Model. The purpose of this study was to examine what is already known about these shared mental models in the context of acute care medical teams. This study will act as a launching point for future research exploring how teams think and how it impacts the quality of care they can provide.

Delivery of palliative care to patients in a patient’s home, where they live with their family or in a retirement or nursing home, is an improved, shared-care team approach of providing quality healthcare services at the end of a patient’s life to reduce pain and stress. The palliative care shared-care teams in the Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) for Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant (HNHB also called LHIN4) manage patient health care through documents and trackers created and retained by providers within the circle of care, using several different systems and communication tools. These systems are not currently integrated and are unable to connect in a way that enables the preview, transfer, and receipt of data between these systems to support the needs of palliative care users. The primary objective of this thesis is to provide a proposal to improve the user experience of palliative care users through enhancement and integration of some of the systems currently in use. These include OSCAR EMR (Open Source Clinical Application Resource Electronic Medical Record) Hospice – InfoAnywhere, CHRIS (Client Health Related Information System) and Clinical Connect. Integration of these systems will address other limitations the shared-care teams are facing, such as communication, system or organizational policies and privacy and information security concerns that stem from the sharing of patient information across the systems, to support a shared-care team’s ability to provide patient care. During this study, an extensive requirements gathering and analysis was carried out: in-person interviews and teleconference meetings, brain storming sessions on the current systems and review of the secondary data with key stakeholders in the palliative care community. The local hospice sites were visited and extensive input was received from hands-on palliative shared-care teams and hospices across the HNHB LHIN, to ensure that the project team implemented their expressed needs into the integrated solution. The used case and prototyping approach of gathering the requirements is then used on the initial requirements gathered by sending out an initial draft to the users and stakeholders for their review, changes and additional requirements, hence fostering communication between the business and the development teams each time the brain storming session is held to review the refined requirements, resulting in the development of a high-quality Business Requirement Document (BRD). The project manager, lead developer, software architect, and users/testers were all utilized throughout the entire delivery process to ensure they were all in sync with the documented requirements. This lays the foundation for programmers to implement a quality end product with a technical solution that will enhance and integrate the systems to improve the user’s experience at the point of care. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

No description available.

Problem: While shared governance (SG) literature is present in practice, minimal literature exists addressing SG in nursing education. Using principles of quality improvement one College of Nursing (CON) transformed its hierarchal, paternalistic model to a SG model for its governance structure. Purpose: This discussion will introduce the SG model and the CON’s stages of transformation by blending quality improvement approaches with Prochaska’s change theory.Method: Frustration during the pre-contemplation stage with the college administration’s perceived communication deficits was an initial barrier to SG. This deficit was a primary reason that faculty wanted SG. As faculty began to look inward, it became apparent that administration was not solely responsible. The governing model was ineffective as well. During the contemplation stage, faculty explored the CON governance structure. Many faculty were ambivalent about these explorations which resulted in faculty turnover and instability in the classroom. Concurrently, during this tumultuous time, many faculty banded together, held meetings, gathered facts, weighed options, and began exploring SG. The preparation stage involved faculty embracing a vision of SG for the CON. The CON hired a mediator to address faculty anxieties and administration’s ineffective attempts to appease faculty requests. Mediation resulted in a change in CON top administration and departmental structure. The lengthy action stage had some faculty and staff disillusioned that SG was not in the best interest of the CON. Transforming the governance model had mishaps and setbacks. These misfortunes led the employees charged with designing the SG model insight into how all CON employees would have representation. Perseverance of formal and informal CON leadership prevailed. Evaluation: Currently, the CON faculty, staff and administration are adjusting to the SG model. During this year, evaluation of the SG model will occur. Providing an example of how methods associated with quality improvement and Prochaska’s change theory can be applied to a CON governance will assist organizations in how transformation occurs.

With the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, tablets, and large pixel-rich displays, there are many exciting new possibilities for using these devices for collaborative work. While there already exist hardware and software that support communication and interaction between mobile devices and shared displays, application sharing in these scenarios is still limited and inflexible. We present a new method of application sharing which allows collaborators to download clips or snapshots of each other's applications. These snapshots can be used to re-launch and resume the shared application back to the state it was in when it was shared. We have built a system that supports sharing, annotating, organizing, and downloading these applications to and from a LearnSpace server. We have built an application framework which allows Android applications to be built for this system while only requiring minimal changes to the program. We also describe solutions for extending our solution to new types of collaborative displays and to other application platforms.

Technological innovations in data transfer and communication have given rise to the virtual team where geographically separate individuals interact via one or more technologies to combine efforts on a collective activity. In military, business, and spaceflight settings, virtual teams are increasingly used in training and operational activities; however there are important differences between these virtual collaborations and more traditional face-to-face (FTF) interactions. One concern is the absence of FTF contact may alter team communication and cooperation and subsequently affect overall team performance. The present research examined this issue with a specific focus on how communication modality influences team learning and performance gains. Evidence from a recent study on virtual team performance (Singer, Grant, Commarford, Kring, and Zavod, 2001) indicated local teams, with both members in same physical location in Orlando, Florida which allowed for FTF contact before and after a series of virtual environment (VE) missions, performed significantly better than distributed teams, with team members in separate physical locations in Orlando and Toronto, Canada and no FTF contact. For the first mission, local and distributed teams exhibited no significant difference in performance as measured by the number of rooms properly cleared in the building search exercises. In contrast, for the second mission, occurring after each team had completed the opportunity to discuss mission performance and make plans for future missions, local teams performed significantly better than distributed teams; a pattern that continued for the remaining six missions. Given that the primary difference between local and distributed teams was how they communicated outside of the VE during after action reviews (AARs), and that the localiii distributed difference was first detected on the second mission, after teams had completed one, 10-min discussion of mission performance, a tenable conclusion is that certain team characteristics and skills necessary for performance were communication-dependent and negatively affected by the absence of FTF communication. Although Singer et al. (2001) collected multiple dependent variables related to performance and communication activities, these measures were not designed to detect communication-dependent team factors and therefore incapable of supporting such an explanation. Therefore, the present research replicated Singer et al. (2001) and incorporated additional measures in order to determine if specific communication-dependent factors could explain the inferior performance of distributed teams. Three factors critical to team communication, particularly during the AAR process, are the similarity of team members. shared mental models (SMMs), team cohesion (task and interpersonal), and team trust (cognitive and emotional). Because evidence suggests FTF communication has a positive effect on processes related to each of these factors, the current study tested whether distributed teams exhibit less similar mental models and degraded cohesion and trust in comparison to local teams, which can affect performance. Furthermore, to test the prediction that distributed teams possess degraded communication and would benefit from improved communication skills, brief team communication training (TCT) was administered to half of the teams in each location condition. Thirty two, 2-person teams comprised of undergraduate students were equally distributed into four experimental conditions (n = 8) based on the independent variables of location (local vs. distributed) and training (TCT vs. no-TCT). Teams completed five missions using the same VE system and mission tasks as in Singer et al. (2001), however in the present study distributed team members were in separate rooms in the same building, not separate geographic locations. In iv addition to performance data, participants completed a series of questionnaires to assess SMMs, cohesion, and trust. It was hypothesized that local teams would again exhibit better performance than distributed teams and that the local team advantage could partly be explained by a greater similarity in mental models and higher levels of cohesion and trust. Moreover, TCT teams in both locations were expected to exhibit improved performance over their non-trained counterparts. Analyses of the three team factors revealed the largest location and communication training differences for levels of cognitive trust, with local teams reporting higher levels than distributed teams early after the second VE mission, and TCT teams reporting higher levels than no-TCT teams after the second and fifth VE missions. In contrast, the main effects of location and communication training were only significant for one SMM measure agreement between team members on the strengths of the team's leader during the AAR sessions. Local teams and TCT teams reported higher levels of agreement after the first VE mission than their distributed v and no-TCT counterparts. Furthermore, on the first administration of the questionnaire, TCT teams reported higher levels of agreement than non-TCT teams on the main goals of the VE missions. Overall, teams in all conditions exhibited moderate to substantial levels of agreement for procedural and personnel responsibility factors, but poor levels of agreement for mental models related to interpersonal interactions. Finally, no significant differences were detected for teams in each experimental condition on levels of task or interpersonal cohesion which suggests cohesion may not mature enough over the course of several hours to be observable. In summary, the first goal of the present study was to replicate Singer et al..s (2001) findings which showed two-person teams conducting VE missions performed better after the first mission if allowed face-to-face (FTF) contact during discussions of the team's performance. Local and distributed teams in the current study did show a similar pattern of performance, completing a greater total of rooms properly, although when evaluating mission-by-mission performance, this difference was only significant for missions 3 and 4. Even though distributed team members experienced the same experimental conditions as in Singer et al. (no pre-mission contact, no FTF contact during missions or AARs) and were told their partner was at .distant location, familiarity with a teammate's dialect and other environmental cues may have differentially affected perceptions of physical and psychological distance, or social presence, which ultimately altered the distributed team relationship from before. The second goal was to determine if brief TCT could reduce or eliminate the distributed team disadvantage witnessed in Singer et al. (2001). Results did not support this prediction and revealed no significant differences between TCT and no-TCT teams with regard to number of rooms searched over the five missions. Although purposefully limited to 1 hr, the brevity of the TCT procedure (1 hr), and its broad focus, may have considerably reduced any potential benefits of learning how to communicate more effectively with a teammate. In addition, the additional training beyond the already challenging requirements of learning the VE mission tasks may have increased the cognitive load of participants during the mission phase, leading to a detriment in performance due to divided attention. Despite several notable differences from Singer et al. (2001), the present study supports that distributed teams operating in a common virtual setting experience performance deficits when compared to their physically co-located counterparts. Although this difference was not attributed to agreement on SMMs or levels of cohesion, local teams did posses higher levels of cognitive trust early on in the experimental session which may partly explain their superior performance. However additional research that manipulates cognitive trust as an independent variable is needed before implying a cause-and-effect relationship. Ultimately, this study's most significant contribution is identifying a new set of questions to understand virtual team performance. In addition to a deeper examination of cognitive trust, future research should address how features of the distributed team experience affect perceptions of the physical and psychological distance, or social presence, between team members. It is also critical to understand how broadening the communication channel for distributed teams, such as the inclusion of video images or access to biographical information about one's distant teammate, facilitates performance in a variety of virtual team contexts.

No / We propose an efficient alternative to commonly used parametric surfaces such as NURBS surfaces for definition of complex geometry in shared virtual spaces. Our mathematical model allows to define objects by only providing coordinates of the section curves in 3-space. The resulting parametric functions allow fast calculation of the coordinates of the points on the surface of the objects. We devise an algorithm which evaluates the coefficients of these functions in real time. Given the small size of the resulting formulas and interactive rates for their calculation, we are able to efficiently use such PDE-based models for making virtual objects in shared virtual spaces. We describe the modeling framework and illustrate the proposed theoretical concepts with our function-based extension of VRML and X3D.

No description available.