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Thesis (M.S.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Sept. 20, 2006). Thesis advisor: E. Grady Bouge. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

A Study on the Establishment of Police Work Indicator in Kaohsiung Abstract Social security is the public issue that enjoys the greatest concerns from the civil public. This study attempts to establish a set of indicators based on current situation of police patrol work and commitment in Kaohsiung, in the method of social science indicator establishment to objectively and adequately evaluate Kaohsiung police work efficiency. This essay surveys the issues concerning police work indicators referring to bibliographies of the idea of police, the procedure of patrol duty development, patrol¡¦s effectiveness on crime deterrence, type of crime and criminal indicator in Kaohsiung City. In the first part herein, the frequency of stopping, listening, and seeing while performing patrol duty by police officers serve in the eight police stations governed by Kaohsiung County Police Bureau Fengshan Police Precinct was investigated and ¡§Patrol Duty Indicator¡¨ was established accordingly. And in the second part, citizens attained the age of twenty having household registration set in Kaohsiung City were interviewed through telephone about the seriousness of different crimes on social security to have ¡§Criminal Indicator¡¨ produced. At last, the said two indicators were combined to form the Police Work Indicator. As for statistic analysis, SPSS for windows (8.0) was adopted to perform data organization and statistics. Additionally, Descriptives, Crosstabs, and £q2,Chi-square 2,Chi-square test ,test of independence were implemented to describe the condition and then make statistics of all indicators. From Patrol Duty Indicator, it¡¦s found that the efficiency of patrol duty is determined by the ¡§Unit Personnel Number¡¨ and ¡§Age of Policemen.¡¨ While assigning patrol duties, the police work agency shall take the two principal factors into consideration more carefully to have patrol duties fulfilled. In the respect of criminal indicator, it is concluded from individual comparison that the general public considers it¡¦s good regarding overall criminal indicator, and it is improved slightly concerning criminal indicator of violence. However, it¡¦s slightly worsened in relation to the criminal indicator of theft and drug addicts. The police work agency may observe changes in indicators and modify the measurements moderately. Key Words: Social Science Indicator, Descriptives, Criminal Indicator, Hot Spot Planning, Type of Crime, Patrol Duty Indicator, Variance Analysis, Correlation Analysis

The creation of small molecule libraries for binding into the NS1A protein of influenza A viruses and the development of an indicator displacement assay for the differentiation of fatty acids are reported herein. Using Mitsunobu chemistry, a variety of structures based on hydroquinone, resorcinol and 2,7-dihydroxynaphthalene cores were synthesized. Both polar and non-polar functional groups were added to diversify the cores to help understand which molecule binds best to the protein. Because of poor protein binding, the focus of the project moved to a new lead compound, epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG). EGCG showed promise in computational studies and efforts towards the synthesis of the epigallocatechin core were undertaken. Using a fluorescent indicator displacement assay (IDA), a sensing system for fatty acids was developed. The system consisted of bovine, rabbit, and human serum albumins as host molecules, while the fluorescent indicators were fluorescein, 2-anthracene carboxylic acid, and 1-anilino-8-naphthalene sulfonic acid. Fatty acids were able to be differentiated from one another based on their carbon chain length and the degree of unsaturation. The IDA was then subjected to a complex mixture of fatty acids, in the form of edible oils. The oils (extra virgin olive, hazelnut, peanut, sunflower and canola) with different fatty acid profiles were able to be differentiated from each other using principal component analysis. / text

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In order to better manage progress toward improved human welfare, governments and organizations around the world have begun to report on more comprehensive indicators of environmental, social, and economic conditions. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) has proven useful as a measure of economic welfare by incorporating changes in environmental conditions, resource stocks, social capital, income distribution, and other non-marketed economic activity. Studies at the local scale have also found the GPI to be an effective tool for informing debate and stimulating questions about the nature of the economic development process. In this study, the GPI methodology is applied to Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Maryland in order to explore how sustainable economic welfare in the Baltimore region has changed from 1950-2005. A comparison among per capita GPI trends in four US cities shows Baltimore to have the highest average annual growth rate over the study period. Comparisons are made between per capita GPI and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most widely recognized measure of national economic performance. Analysis of the trends at all three scales show that GDP growth does not correlate well with changes in welfare as measure by GPI. This implies that Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Maryland could be in a period of uneconomic growth, when the social and environmental costs of further economic growth outweigh the benefits of such growth. However, the underlying methods used in sub-national applications of the GPI inevitably lead toward certain results, giving rise to an indicator framework that favors particular policy and development outcomes. This situation is defined as indicator bias. Since indicator bias can inadvertently lead society toward undesirable conditions, key assumptions that contribute to indicator bias in the GPI are tested for how they influence the final GPI results. The costs of crime, long-term environmental damage, and depletion of non-renewable natural resources categories are explored in more depth. GPI is found to be an imperfect measure of true progress, but it is believed to be an improvement over GDP for guiding modern society towards a more sustainable and desirable future. More work is needed to incorporate uncertainty, fine-tune the underlying GPI methodology, and build broad consensus about how to measure economic performance and social progress. By providing information about social, ecological, and economic conditions of the region, though, the Baltimore GPI does inform citizens and decision-makers about a wide range of impacts resulting from the modern ‘GDP growth’ paradigm

Under the background of worldwide transition towards sustainability, Chinese government has begun to advocate nationwide sustainable-industrialization through initiating Eco-industrial Parks (EIPs) since last decade. While EIP projects are widely carried out by both central and local governments, the standards for EIP planning and management promulgated in China are considered to be inefficient and incomprehensive in this study. Due to the challenge of economy-environment conflict China confronts and the consequent narrow definition of China's EIPs which focuses mainly on environmental performance, a main limitation of the standards is the unbalanced considerations between the three basic foundations of sustainable development (SD) concept - economic growth, social development, and environmental protection and restoration. By reviewing several leading assessment tools being used internationally, as well as analyzing the specific issues existing during industrial development in China, this research intends to develop a synthetic and advanced indicator system, to evaluate China’s EIP performance. This system comprises 34 indicators that integrate four broad aspects of 'economic development', 'social development', 'environmental management', and 'administration'. For each indicator, detailed measurement and criterion are proposed for evaluation and implementation. Additionally, a case study of Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Area (TEDA), a certificated EIP, is conducted to illustrate the application of this assessment system. The proposed indicator system is supposed to fill in the gap in EIP performance evaluation in China, from a view of the internationally perceived understandings of EIP and SD concepts. Although future studies are still needed to test and improve its feasibility and accuracy in terms of both indicator selection and criteria setting, this system provides a generic framework for EIP assessment work in China and is expected to drive China's EIP movement towards a more sustainable approach.

Facilities management is emerging rapidly as a distinct and critical field of study and professional practice for all sectors of the economy. In the past it has tended to be regarded as a service function and subsumed within other areas such as engineering, the built environment and business management. The health sector is an important part of the overall FM industry because it represents a driver of capital works that is both extensive and expensive. The health sector building requirements are growing, demand regular maintenance and upgrading, and are critical to core business. An extensive literature review revealed that there has been minimal published research into the development and implementation of a central feature of effective FM, namely, performance management. Performance management provides the primary evaluation and planning tool for FM, in that it identifies the performance indicators that are meaningful to FM and core business, provides measures for those indicators and enables projective planning and benchmarking to be undertaken. This research study assesses the possibility of developing a comprehensive performance measurement system for FM in the healthcare sector. The research has two main aims: - To identify the knowledge gaps in current FM performance measurement systems in general, and for the healthcare sector in particular. - To investigate the possibility of benchmarking FM performance across the healthcare sector using a weighted assessment across all categories of performance. In order to meet the research purpose and data collection requirements from the relatively limited number of FM experts who specialise in the health sector, the research methodology employs a combination of a case study approach as an exploratory tool, and a phenomenological approach as the main qualitative design. In achieving the aims and objectives, this research helps in improving FM practice in the healthcare sector through: - Providing facility managers with a comprehensive study which highlights the achievements and knowledge gaps in FM and its performance measurement - Providing top management with a study for the effectiveness of developing decision support strategy to make effective and efficient changes to their facility management practices - Facilitate the implementation of benchmarking techniques in the health sector, in order to improve the performance of the healthcare sector FM over time. The study concludes that developing aggregate/collective KPIs for each performance measurement category of possible measure (social/quality, financial, environmental, functional, and technical) is feasible. However, before being able to develop and implement that approach an improvement to the current FM practices is required. The improvement can be achieved via either a voluntarily or compulsory commitment from top management towards FM in the organizations. This commitment should be implemented with an appropriate hierarchy from the bottom to the top. The key components include: establishing the contribution of FM to the success of the overall business in financial terms; setting agreed FM objectives; deriving meaningful general KPIs; defining the data required for each KPI; establishing the system for collecting, analyzing and interpreting the data; and conducting the benchmarking process for continual improvement.

A model study has been conducted to understand the influence of hydrodynamic features, environmental conditions as well as bather shedding and animal fecal sources on the fate and transport of indicator microbe enterococci at a subtropical marine beach in South Florida. The model being used is based on an existing finite element hydrodynamic and transport model CAFE3D to which a first order microbe deactivation function due to solar radiation is added. The decay coefficient is assumed to be linearly proportional to the solar insolation value, while the constant coefficient linking the two is determined to be 0.368[m2/MJ] using local experimental data. This value corresponds to decay coefficients in the range of 0 to 1 hr-1 and is of similar magnitude to values found in the literature. The hydrodynamic model produces water current velocities, which are used in the transport model to simulate water enterococci concentration in space and time. Previous measurements have suggested that enterococci originate from the beach shoreline area. In this case the simulated velocity fields and Lagrangian particle trajectories indicate that the small velocity (generally less than 0.05m/s) and weak dilution at the water?s edge may cause enterococci accumulation and elevated concentration. Among human and animal sources, the impacts on maximum enterococci concentration in descending order is a dog fecal event, human bather shedding and seagull fecal events. A single dog fecal event at the middle part of the beach is found to cause enterococci far field concentrations to reach hundreds of CFU/100ml, which exceeds the EPA water quality standard (104 CFU/100ml). These high concentrations, however, only impact a small area. Concentration due to tens of bathers shedding enterococci during a course of 4 hours reaches 0.01 CFU/100ml, while the concentration due to thousands of bather shedding during a Memorial Day weekend reaches about 1 CFU/100ml. Concentration due to tens of seagull fecal events reaches only 0.0001 CFU/100ml. Thus, only the presence of dogs could explain the high enterococci observations infrequently found in monitoring data. The limited spatial extent compared to beach survey data of the enterococci plume from a dog fecal event suggests that other microbial sources are present, most likely microbes released from the beach sand.