This paper presents a framework for implementing improvement science in a district or educational organization. Findings from interviews with 17 experienced educational improvers indicate critical elements for a school district to effectively support...
This paper aims to discuss how and under which conditions can we best combine research on School Effectiveness with research on School Improvement by utilizing the Dynamic Approach (DA) to School Improvement. We firstly elaborate on the difficulties...
10 January 2022
Universally improving healthcare systems is difficult to achieve in practice with organisations implementing a range of quality improvement (QI) approaches, in varying and changing contexts, and efforts ranging from project-based improvements to whol...
Grapevine (Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera) is one of the most widespread and economically important perennial fruit crops in the world. Viticulture has changed over the years in response to changing environmental conditions and market demands, trigge...
The soybean (Glycine max) is a globally important crop due to its high protein and oil content, which serves as a key resource for human and animal nutrition, as well as bioenergy production. This review assesses recent advancements in soybean geneti...
The Taguchi capability index, which reflects the expected loss and the yield of a process, is a useful index for evaluating the quality of a process. Several scholars have proposed a process improvement capability index based on the expected value of...
To improve the quality of sloping soil in farmlands, exploring the mechanism of farmland soil consolidation is vital. This study investigated the improvement of soil pH, exchangeable acid, crop economic characteristics, and the soil compression index...
Variation in patient outcomes among institutions and within institutions is a major problem in healthcare. Some of this variation is due to differences in practice, termed practice variation. Some practice variation is expected due to appropriately p...
The anticipated population growth by 2050 will be coupled with increased food demand. To achieve higher and sustainable food supplies in order to feed the global population by 2050, a 2.4% rise in the yield of major crops is required. The key to yiel...
Recently, several red-green-blue-white (RGBW) color filter arrays (CFAs), which include highly sensitive W pixels, have been proposed. However, RGBW CFA patterns suffer from spatial resolution degradation owing to the sensor composition having more c...
Biotic constraints, including pathogenic fungi, viruses and bacteria, herbivory insects, as well as parasitic nematodes, cause significant yield loss and quality deterioration of crops. The effect of conventional management of these biotic constraint...
Biomineralization is a common phenomenon in nature, and the use of microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) technology for engineering construction is a successful attempt to utilize natural biological phenomena, which has become a ho...
Dynamic compaction (DC) is one of the most popular methods for ground improvement. To solve the problem of the factors affecting the sandy soil improvement effect and estimate the effective improvement range under DC, the influences of drop number, d...
Desiccation cracking of cohesive soils is the development of cracks on the soil surface as a result of a reduction in the soil moisture content. The decrease in soil surface area owing to the desiccation of cohesive soils has an undesirable impact on...
Background/Objectives: Malnutrition is a key contributor to poor outcomes in older adults with fragility fractures, increasing the risk of complications, functional decline, prolonged hospital stays, mortality, and healthcare costs. Substantial evide...
GPS tomography has been investigated since 2000 as an attractive tool for retrieving the 3D field of water vapour and wet refractivity. However, this observational technique still remains a challenging task that requires improvement of its methodolog...
The various crop species are major agricultural products and play an indispensable role in sustaining human life. Over a long period, breeders strove to increase crop yield and improve quality through traditional breeding strategies. Today, many bree...
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in icariin (ICA) and its derivates, icariside II (ICS) and icaritin (ICT), due to their wide range of potential applications in preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, delaying th...
Material production processes are special processes. As part of continuous improvement, it is extremely important to find the causes of the incompatibilities that occur in them. To increase the effectiveness of these actions, different methods are us...
On the way to building smart factories as the vision of Industry 4.0, the casting process stands out as a specific manufacturing process due to its diversity and complexity. One of the segments of smart foundry design is the application of artificial...
Automation and digitization have gained every aspect of our life. Performance and digital are precepted as twins, and thus process improvement (i.e., performance continuous seek) has fatally met digital. Digital transformation implies a good understa...
The environmental problems caused by sewage sludge generated by the growth of the global population and urbanization are drawing the attention of the scientific community worldwide to the need of developing sustainable solutions to use that material....
Metabolomics is an emerging branch of “omics” and it involves identification and quantification of metabolites and chemical footprints of cellular regulatory processes in different biological species. The metabolome is the total metabolit...
The anionic and cationic species of elements from deeply buried deposits migrate to the near surface driven by various geological forces. The geoelectrochemical exploration method (GEM), derived from CHIM, consists of the application of an electric f...
The dominant position of a member within a service supply chain plays a crucial role in fostering a willingness to improve service quality. Consequently, this study examines a service supply chain comprising a supplier and an integrator, aiming to in...
5 February 2018
As a major part of farming sustainability, the issues of grain production and its quality improvement have been important in many countries. This paper aims to address these issues in China. Based on the data from the main production provinces and by...
Several authors have studied construction defects, but no studies were found implementing best practices and control strategies through the implementation of continuous improvement projects. This article shows a procedure based on Continuous Improvem...
The development and improvement of molecular biology methods have led to the creation of new technologies that make it possible to modify plant genomes by transferring and integrating into the genomes’ heterologous genes from various expression...
Different from new product development, design improvement aims to solve the problems of existing products. Although design knowledge and effect tools have been applied in product improvement, the existing methods for design improvement are limited i...
Marine clay soils are problematic soils in the construction industry when they are subjected to construction loads. When these soils are loaded, they lose their structure. This leads to the soil being unable to withstand loads of any magnitude withou...
14 November 2019
With the aim to explore how improvement science is understood, taught, practiced, and its impact on quality healthcare across Europe, the Improvement Science Training for European Healthcare Workers (ISTEW) project “Improvement Science Training...
Plant tissue culture plays an important role in plant biotechnology due to its potential for massive production of improved crop varieties and high yield of important secondary metabolites. Several efforts have been made to ameliorate the effectivene...
Rice is one of the most important staple crops in the world; therefore, the improvement of rice holds great significance for enhancing agricultural production and addressing food security challenges. Although there have been numerous studies on the r...
Finger-vein biometrics have been extensively investigated for person verification. One of the open issues in finger-vein verification is the lack of robustness against variations of vein patterns due to the changes in physiological and imaging condit...
12 October 2022
To explore the niche improvement path of photovoltaic agriculture in China, a niche influencing factor system was constructed first. Then, this study innovatively combined the DEMATEL and analytic network process (DANP) method and the NK model, which...
Rituximab, used in the treatment of some rheumatic and kidney diseases, can lead to hepatitis B virus (HBV) reactivation; HBV screening is recommended for those starting this medication. We aimed to improve by 50% the proportion of patients undergoin...
Population expansion and the development of technology have led to an increase in construction activities. In many cases, foundation grounds do not have a high enough bearing capacity and are not capable of ensuring the safe exploitation of the const...
13 May 2021
Traditional user research methods are challenged for the decision-making in product design and improvement with the updating speed becoming faster, considering limited survey scopes, insufficient samples, and time-consuming processes. This paper prop...
One of today’s great challenges is radical process improvement. TRIZ (theory of inventive problem solving) could help to resolve this. This study aims to answer the following research question: Which tool of TRIZ is best for process improvement...
Thailand has experienced severe air-quality problems for the past 10 years. Complicating this situation, the Thai government allocates an insufficient budget for the management of air pollution. Using the contingent valuation method, this paper estim...
This review synthesizes knowledge on epigenetic regulation of leaf senescence and discusses the possibility of using this knowledge to improve crop quality. This control level is implemented by different but interacting epigenetic mechanisms, includi...
The rapid growth of the global population has resulted in a considerable increase in the demand for food crops. However, traditional crop breeding methods will not be able to satisfy the worldwide demand for food in the future. New gene-editing techn...
Today’s manufacturing environment is characterized by rising production costs. Automotive companies are faced with a challenge of meeting the ever-changing customer needs at the minimum possible cost. Reducing the production costs is of paramou...
This study addresses the issue of poor construction labor productivity, exploring the process and methodology for increasing construction workers’ participation in labor productivity improvement, as well as a situational awareness (SA) developm...
Plant protection in contemporary agriculture requires intensive pesticide application. Their use has enabled the increase in yields, simplifying cultivation systems and crop protection strategies, through successful control of harmful organisms. Howe...
Schools worldwide are developing innovative models in response to, and in anticipation of, societal changes. Aiming to address non-academic barriers to learning, while capitalizing on out-of-school time, some school and community leaders have priorit...
1 February 2022
This study developed and tested a new measurement instrument, the Systematic Workplace-Improvement Needs Generation (SWING), to identify workplace-improvement needs. The participants were 53 workers in a Japanese nursing home for the elderly. The res...
In the finite element method, the conventional linear elements have long been precluded, due to their low accuracy of nodal displacements, from the analysis of super-convergence and adaptivity via the element energy projection (EEP) technique. To ove...
Digital holography is actively used for the characterization of objects and 3D-scenes, tracking changes in medium parameters, 3D shape reconstruction, detection of micro-object positions, etc. To obtain high-quality images of objects, it is often nec...
In this paper, a method is proposed to improve the interferometric phase quality, based on fusing data from different polarimetric channels. Since lower amplitude implies less reliable phase in general, the phase quality of polarimetric interferometr...
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