Laws on recycling electronics come into force

Consumers shopping on Sunday for a new electrical appliance or electronic gadget will find something has changed at the check-out. Along with their change and receipt the retailer will give them some information: the arrangements that have been made to dispose of the old equipment so it can be recycled in accordance with European Union legislation.

The waste electrical and electronic equipment regulations come into effect on July 1, requiring distributors and producers to make arrangements for disposing of appliances and gadgets – even if sold or made by other companies.

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Managing Health Services: Cases in Organization Design and Decision Making

Managing Health Services: Cases in Organization Design and Decision Making Deborah E. Bender with Julie Curkendall and Heather Manning 2000, 214 pp $55 softcover

This book was written to help “hone the skills of managers and leaders who walk and breathe in the ever increasingly challenging world of health sciences management.” It is intended to be used in conjunction with the textbooks Health Care Management: Organization Design and Behavior, (1) and The Well Managed Healthcare Organization, (2) but it also can be used on its own. Although the book was written for new nurse managers, it contains valuable information that can be used by managers in any stage of their careers.

The authors use a series of 16 case studies to illustrate real life situations and challenges faced by managers. Each case is divided into the same five-part system:

* a focused topic description,

* learning/teaching objectives,

* background and case overview,

* organizational problems, and

* questions for discussion.

This organizational system helps guide readers in their analysis and provides a focus for discussions in a classroom setting. The book can be used to help students handle situations that will occur during their careers or by managers as a reference book to help them manage situations that occur daily. The authors take a subject that could be dry and make it interesting by presenting relevant case studies, thought-provoking questions, and discussions that promote problem-solving of tough scenarios with results that can be applied to everyday situations.

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Anthony N. Maluccio, Cinzia Canali and Tiziano Vecchiato Assessing Outcomes in Child and Family Services: Comparative Design and Policy Issues

Anthony N. Maluccio, Cinzia Canali and Tiziano Vecchiato (Eds.) Assessing Outcomes in Child and Family Services: Comparative Design and Policy Issues. Hawthorne, NY: 2003. $49.95 hardcover, $24.95 papercover.

The passage of the amendments to the Social Security Act (1994) gave the United State federal government a mandate to examine the nation’s child welfare service delivery system focusing on safety, permanency, and child well being outcomes. Since 2000, states have been participating in Child and Family Services Reviews conducted by the federal Children’s Bureau. While these reviews rely largely on administrative data from established management information systems, they also include examinations of a randomly selected small sample of complete case records and interviews of professional and community partners involved in child welfare services. Public policy resulting from these evaluations will affect what and how children’s and family services are funded for many years.

That is why this collection of papers on conducting outcome research in child and family services is timely for evaluation researchers and practitioners to read. Originally presented at the “Outcome-based Evaluation: A Cross-national Comparison” seminar in Volterra Italy in 2001, this volume is one of two. The companion volume is entitled, Evaluation in Child and Family Services: Comparative Client and Program Perspectives.

The focus of this volume is on sharing perspectives on challenges raised by the intersections of evaluation design and public policy. The reader can expect to examine program evaluation using examples from the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, South Africa, and Italy. Of particular interest is the notion of how complex these evaluations can be and how similar the problems are from country to country.

Ward offers an examination of the Looking After Children study, a national evaluation of fifty performance indicators for children in foster care in the United Kingdom. Two themes raised here and repeated by other contributors are that management information systems are not sensitive enough to drill down to the level of information needed to evaluate outcomes and that social work practitioners do not understand the importance of accurate thorough individual case documentation in evaluation.

Fein, reports on the evaluation of two intensive family preservation sites first emphasizing the importance of comparing what the social workers actually did with the clients rather than measuring time spent. Secondly she articulates the necessity for the definition of a “good” outcome, that is what is considered a good evaluation depends on how “good outcomes” are defined in the beginning. Next, Chaskin applies the theory of change model of evaluation that involves convening and evoking various stakeholders’ theories of change in community building efforts and how complex that can be.

In chapter four, Vecchiato notes the challenges to applying national indicators to detect regional differences, and presents discussion about “the limits of national planning.” In contrast, Goerge presents the case that paying close attention to selecting intervention measurements and control groups will overcome many challenges of non-experimental designs, using national welfare reform as the example.

Chapters six through eight address specific design issues. Pilati and associates offer an example of a public health intervention evaluation for smoking and compares it to other cross-national studies. Landsverk and Davis note that system improvements in child mental health systems do not demonstrate individual clinical level improvements. Pompei promotes the importance of informed documentation and how it enables embedded program evaluation using an example of residential care.

Berry and Cash’s intriguing study of risk assessment resulted in the conclusion that differential response family assessment and service provision are disconnected from the risk assessment process. Next, Wright and Paget’s paper specifically discusses the genesis of the United States’ federal reviews from a learning organization perspective, applying the logic model of evaluation. In chapter 11 Ainsworth discusses the cultural issues involved in the research agenda setting process and across professional disciplines, using an institutional review process example from Australia.

Finally Lightburn raises concerns about applying experimental evaluation designs before programs are mature enough to implement the services as intended, using the Family Resource Centers evaluation as an example. This reflects the condition of many new programs which target the most needy: those parents with multiple needs who live in dangerous or isolated communities, and who take longer to engage in services offered.

This book truly does not offer a cross-national comparison. However, the similarity of design and policy perspectives among nations should encourage more information sharing forums. Several contributors caution about the unintended consequences of focusing evaluations on indicators and systems, in view of lack of evidence that changes in systems influence outcomes for particular children. This book raises the caveat that, to paraphrase Amitai Etzioni in Modern Organizations, organizations under scrutiny of evaluation tend to neglect doing those things that are less easily measured because some things lend themselves to measurement better than others. As Vecchiato has discussed, evaluation efforts should be directed at building better theories to support effective children and family services.

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Design For Six Sigma As Strategic Experimentation: Planning, Designing, And Building World-Class Products And Services

Cook (engineering, U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) presents a practical, science-based methodology (DFSS/SE) for guiding the product realization process for highly competitive markets. The methodology uses forecasts of cash flow, market share, and price to select the final design from among the alternatives considered. A single formalism is used to integrate the tasks and responsibilities of marketing research, product planning, finance, design, engineering, and manufacturing within the overall process. The accompanying CD-ROM contains Excel macros, sample files, and templates; tutorials; and raw data used as input for the problems analyzed in the text. For graduate engineers, statisticians, and scientists who are or soon will be involved in product developing and servicing; specialists in marketing research and finance; and CEOs.


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Development Kit facilitates embedded system design

Helping developers create processing-based systems to best suit application, MicroBlaze(TM) Development Kit: Spartan(TM)-3E 1600E Edition delivers integrated platform with hardware, design tools, intellectual property, and reference designs. Kit supports 32-bit MicroBlaze soft processing design for Spartan-3E series of Platform FPGAs. Central XC3S1600E-4FG320C device provides platform logic, DSP coprocessing, and embedded system integration capabilities.

Low-Cost Kit Includes Xilinx Award-Winning Platform Studio Integrated Design Environment, Spartan-3E Embedded Board and Flexible 32-Bit MicroBlaze Soft Processor

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 30 /– Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) today released the MicroBlaze(TM) Development Kit: Spartan(TM)-3E 1600E Edition, a comprehensive design environment with everything embedded developers need to create processing-based systems. The Spartan-3E 1600E Edition delivers an integrated platform with hardware, design tools, intellectual property (IP) and reference designs to kick-start the development process. The fully integrated kit allows developers to rapidly customize their processor and IP to best suit their specific application and configure complete systems.

“Embedded processing customers continue to demand complete solutions to quickly start and complete their hardware and software development,” said Lawrence Getman, director of marketing for the Embedded Processing Division at Xilinx. “The fully integrated MicroBlaze embedded development kit enables both rapid hardware and software creation on an inexpensive, pre-verified Spartan-3E platform to accelerate the design of low-cost embedded solutions.”

Complete Development Kit

The MicroBlaze Development Kit: Spartan-3E 1600E Edition supports flexible 32-bit MicroBlaze soft processing design for the Xilinx Spartan-3E series of Platform FPGAs. MicroBlaze soft processing cores are instantiated in FPGA hardware, and combined with IP peripherals, FPUs and other co-processing engines to enable a fully customizable platform that meets the developer’s demanding and ever-changing embedded design requirements.

The kit includes:

– Spartan-3E SP3E1600E development board;

– Fully licensed versions of the award-winning Platform Studio embedded tool suite and ISE(TM) FPGA design software;

– Extensive peripheral support of processing IP cores;

– JTAG probe for code download, debug and FPGA programming;

– Serial and Ethernet cables, regional power supply, pre-configured FLASH device;

– Variety of pre-verified reference designs and full documentation; and

– Embedded operating system support

Central to the SP3E1600E board functionality is the Spartan-3E XC3S1600E-4FG320C device with platform logic, DSP co-processing and embedded system integration capabilities. The 1600E evaluation board provides a rich set of features and includes several options for peripherals, memory, displays, connectors, and interfaces that enable designers to easily and cost effectively prototype and evaluate their embedded system design.

Kit Accelerates Development

Xilinx Platform Studio’s intelligent design tools combine with a programmable FPGA platform in the MicroBlaze Development Kit to enable developers to craft embedded systems with the optimal combination of features, performance, area and cost. They can choose the most effective processing system for the target application, select IP, optimize performance, and validate software on the development board before their own custom hardware is available.

In addition, the pre-verified reference designs delivered with the development kit offer a broad set of options for rapidly configuring complete systems, allowing developers to get the basic design running quickly so they can focus more of their valuable time on optimizing the application. These include both hardware and software implementations to exercise the many features of the SP3E1600E platform, such as Ethernet, DDR memory, and various FLASH functions. Embedded OS (eOS) support is also included for Mentor Nucleus, Petalogix micron Clinux and Micrium micron C/OS-II.

Pricing and Availability

The MicroBlaze Development Kit: Spartan-3E 1600E Edition (Model #: DO-S3E1600E-DK-UNI-G, lead free RoHS compliant) is available now for purchase at $595 USD. The ISE FPGA and Platform Studio embedded tools shipped with the 1600E Edition kit support the following computing platforms: Windows(R) 2000 SP2, SP3, SP4, and XP SP1, SP2, Solaris(R) 2.8/5.8 and 2.9/5.9, as well as Linux(R) Red Hat(R) Enterprise 3 and 4. For more information on Xilinx embedded development kits, including the Spartan-3E 1600E, visit www.xilinx.com/embdevkits .


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Samsung mobile phones - The art of innovative engineering

For better or for worse, although the former seems to weigh over commandingly, mobile phones have changed human lives with the many possibilities that they bring along with them. The question is not what more new developments are bound our way in the future, but whether we really need such added applications from a device whose primary purpose is to provide a problem free communication platform. Today's mobile phones innovatively venture into a newer horizon of multi tasking where these highly evolved communication devices play multifarious roles of a mini music player, a competitive digital camera, a multimedia device and even a mini computer. Quite naturally, the incorporation of such applications carry some demerits in the form of breakdowns and slower processing. However, manufacturers are trying hard to overcome all odds with the help of the evolving technology, and one name that has shown great resilience in this aspect is the South Korean electronics giant Samsung.

Samsung owes its reputation of an innovative manufacturer to a league of really advanced and sophisticated mobile phones that it has released over the years. The manufacturer seems to take to improvisation as easily as a bird takes to flying. Evidently, it has best applied its intelligence for the purpose of etching out neatly designed samsung mobile phones that score high on the beauty charts. Exemplary speaking, the Samsung Z650i is a pure delight for users who want a dash of style along with their well endowed communication devices. This slider Tri Band beauty is exactly what Samsung promises to deliver in a perfect blend of style and substance within its package. Owing to such phone as the Samsung Z650i, the highly popular manufacturer has contributed much to the much profitable mobile phone industry, whose fanfare seems to grow with every minute all over the world.

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Refill Kit for Print Cartridge

We wish to introduce ourselves as one of the leading manufacturers of ATC Brand Do-it-Yourself Inkjet refill kits, Compatible Toner Cartridges for inkjet and laser printers. 90% MONEY SAVING IN REFILL KIT FOR PRINT CARTRIDGES.

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The product, which we sell in the market, has a minimum shelf life of two years and more. We stand by the guarantee of the inks used and are willing to take back any products that may be considered defective with respect to the quality of ink.

This item is refill kit for print cartridge meant for computer printers and made out of non-toxic plastic material.

Our total commitment to quality and innovation and extensive dealer network helps us to deliver quality products within the stipulated time.

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ATC Inkjet supply offers bulk ink, compatible cartridges and inkjet kits which produce vibrant colours and cheap ink alternative to the high cost of original inkjet cartridge.

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