Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon Graduate Center, 1984.

No description available.

One of the problems in organizations, especially in hospitals, is that injury rates are increasing because most safety programs lack the essential safety measures for accident reduction in the workplace. The study examined the safety measures that played a role in accident and injury reduction in the workplace. Specifically, the old and new safety programs of an anonymous company was investigated to identify the safety measures that distinguished both programs, their impact on injury rates, and whether the variables of safety program and the variables of safety performance are independent. Data were described by a narrative method, displayed by descriptive statistics, and analyzed by chi square test of independence. The results showed that: (1) The new safety program had twenty-one additional safety measures more than the old safety program; (2) The old safety program increased the recordable injuries by an average of 85%, increased lost workday cases by an average of 14%, and increased incidence rates by an average of 31%; (3) The new safety program decreased the recordable injuries by 48%, decreased lost workday cases by 3%, decreased incidence rates by 51%, and decreased lost workday rates by 12%; and (4) chi square test of independence showed that the safety performance for the recordable injuries and lost workday cases were different across the old and new safety programs. X² (1, N = 1259) = 29.76, p < 0.001. The researcher concluded that: (1) The new management at the company was committed to safety performance improvements; (2) The new safety program performed better than the old safety program; and (3) safety performance variables were dependent of the safety program variables. The researcher recommended that the new management finalize pending policies and also, to perform facility safety inspections semi-annually rather than annually in selected areas so that hazards can be identified more quickly. Lastly, this study and the results thereof, provided useful information to safety professionals and organizations that plan to develop and implement a successful safety program that will reduce accidents and injuries in the workplace.

Nurses who work with people who use drugs in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (DTES), British Columbia are on the forefront in advancing a harm reduction framework in very controversial, cutting-edge practice environments. The purpose of this study was to explore how these nurses, using the framework of harm reduction, make sense of their nursing practice. It is hoped that the results of this study may advance adopting a harm reduction framework in nursing practice, education and policy development and serve as the foundation for further nursing research. This study utilized a qualitative interpretive descriptive methodology to gather data from eight nurses who work with people who use drugs in harm reduction practice environments. The nurses were divided into two focus groups and data was collected through a semi-structured focus group interview. Following initial data analysis, each focus group was reconvened and a second semi-structured group interview was held to clarify and to further discuss the emerging themes. The data analysis proceeded simultaneously with the interviews utilizing a process of constant comparative analysis. I completed the thematic analysis as I moved between the transcripts and identified commonalties and variations within the emerging themes. Ultimately, I described one overarching theme, which encapsulated the range of experiences described by the nurses. The theme that I identified was: meeting people where they are at. The importance to the nurses of both the therapeutic nurse-client relationship and a commitment to praxis were apparent. In conclusion, the value the nurses placed on "meeting people where they are at" was integral in gaining an understanding of how they make sense of their nursing work.

Despite thirty published evaluation reports citing the effectiveness of Vancouver’s safe injection site (Small 2008), the Canadian federal government refuses to endorse safe injection sites as a health service option available to injection drug users (IDUs). Insite’ s evaluation results are undergoing debate, because two communicative spheres of knowledge, each with a unique authoritative language, are conflicting as each is attempting to gain moral authority over the right to recontextualize drug users. Drawing on a literature review of two harm reduction programs in Vancouver, Insite and Sheway, and expert interviews with evaluators, I show that what constitutes “evidence” is in fact subjective, determined by spheres of communicability that are built upon social, professional and political contexts. To confront the problematic nature of this issue, I suggest that evaluators and overseers need to treat program evaluation as a process of negotiation, best approached in a fluid manner. By obscuring multiple user experiences in the evaluation of harm reduction programs, evaluators and overseers risk imposing their communicative ideologies on what it means to be a drug user.

There are a variety of domains where it is desirable to learn a representation of an environment defined by a stream of sensori-motor experience. This dissertation introduces and formalizes subjective mapping, a novel approach to this problem. A learned representation is subjective if it is constructed almost entirely from the experience stream, minimizing the requirement of additional domain-specific information (which is often not readily obtainable). In many cases the observational data may be too plentiful to be feasibly stored. In these cases, a primary feature of a learned representation is that it be compact---summarizing information in a way that alleviates storage demands. Consequently, the first key insight of the subjective mapping approach is to phrase the problem as a variation of the well-studied problem of dimensionality reduction. The second insight is that knowing the effects of actions is critical to the usefulness of a representation. Therefore enforcing that actions have a consistent and succinct form in the learned representation is also a key requirement. This dissertation presents a new framework, action respecting embedding (ARE), which builds on a recent effective dimensionality reduction algorithm called maximum variance unfolding, in order to solve the newly introduced subjective mapping problem. The resulting learned representations are shown to be useful for reasoning, planning and localization tasks. At the heart of the new algorithm lies a semidefinite program leading to questions about ARE's ability to handle sufficiently large input sizes. The final contribution of this dissertation is to provide a divide-and-conquer algorithm as a first step to addressing this issue.

With the development of the economy in today’s business world, competitiveness became more important than ever before in every sector. How to keep advantages during global trade and survive the strong competitive environment has become an issue which multinational enterprises also have to face. Outsourcing occurred under these circumstances. This study has integrated outsourcing theories and the empirical study aims to analyses the method and strategy to combining sustainable quality with cost reduction through outsourcing. This study was done in the context of outsourcing  from Sweden to China. Ergorapido of Electrolux is the example-case study used to investigate methods in both cost reduction and quality control. The data was collected by questionnaires, interviews and tele-conference interviews. The paper found that outsourcing has three stages. The first stage is the assessment of the motivations and risks associated with the process of outsourcing. The second stage is the decision making process involved in outsourcing and the arrangement of the outsourcing. The third stage is the management of the relationship with suppliers. Furthermore, both of the participants can benefit from outsourcing no matter whether it is the OEM supplier or the outsourced supply company. Electrolux is a famous company which is successful as a result of outsourcing. All Swedish share enterprises, whether small, medium or large, share the same domestic and international trade climate. If Electrolux can successfully outsource on a global basis,  so can they.

There are a variety of domains where it is desirable to learn a representation of an environment defined by a stream of sensori-motor experience. This dissertation introduces and formalizes subjective mapping, a novel approach to this problem. A learned representation is subjective if it is constructed almost entirely from the experience stream, minimizing the requirement of additional domain-specific information (which is often not readily obtainable). In many cases the observational data may be too plentiful to be feasibly stored. In these cases, a primary feature of a learned representation is that it be compact---summarizing information in a way that alleviates storage demands. Consequently, the first key insight of the subjective mapping approach is to phrase the problem as a variation of the well-studied problem of dimensionality reduction. The second insight is that knowing the effects of actions is critical to the usefulness of a representation. Therefore enforcing that actions have a consistent and succinct form in the learned representation is also a key requirement. This dissertation presents a new framework, action respecting embedding (ARE), which builds on a recent effective dimensionality reduction algorithm called maximum variance unfolding, in order to solve the newly introduced subjective mapping problem. The resulting learned representations are shown to be useful for reasoning, planning and localization tasks. At the heart of the new algorithm lies a semidefinite program leading to questions about ARE's ability to handle sufficiently large input sizes. The final contribution of this dissertation is to provide a divide-and-conquer algorithm as a first step to addressing this issue.

A formal [3+3] cycloaddition strategy to substituted glutarimides was studied. N-Alkyl-sulfonylacetamides and various a,b-unsaturated esters were used as starting materials. Regioselective reduction of N-alkyl-3-sulfonyl glutarimides and the applications in pharmaceuticals and natural product synthesis

Integrated circuits manufactured in current technology consist of millions of transistors with dimensions shrinking into the nanometer range. These small transistors have quiescent (leakage) currents that are increasingly sensitive to process variations, which have increased the variation in good-chip quiescent current and consequently reduced the effectiveness of IDDQ testing. This research proposes the use of a multivariate statistical technique known as principal component analysis for the purpose of variance reduction. Outlier analysis is applied to the reduced leakage current values as well as the good chip leakage current estimate, to identify defective chips. The proposed idea is evaluated using IDDQ values from multiple wafers of an industrial chip fabricated in 130 nm technology. It is shown that the proposed method achieves significant variance reduction and identifies many outliers that escape identification by other established techniques. For example, it identifies many of the absolute outliers in bad neighborhoods, which are not detected by Nearest Neighbor Residual and Nearest Current Ratio. It also identifies many of the spatial outliers that pass when using Current Ratio. The proposed method also identifies both active and passive defects.