The Relationship between the State and Universities in the Czech Lands 1849–1939

This text summarises the results of extensive research into the relationship between the state and universities in 1849–1939, i.e. between the so-called ‘Thun reform’ and the closure of Czech universities by the Nazis. The focus is on the state’s respect for the privileged position of universities and the monitoring of tensions arising from the clash between legislation and the universities’ day-to-day operations, resulting mainly from satisfying the economic needs of universities on the one hand, and the interpretation of the responsibility and discipline of their academic staff towards the state and society on the other. The research shows the advancing erosion of the so-called Prussian (Humboldt’s) concept of an autonomous national-oriented university and the difficult search for a democratic alternative in interwar Central Europe’s unstable political and economic conditions.

Responsiveness and Adaptability of Healthcare Facilities in Emergency Scenarios: COVID-19 Experience

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed many vulnerabilities of the contemporary built environment along with limited preparedness and low efficiency in mitigating unexpected and unprecedented challenges. This article discusses the efficiency and responsiveness of basic hospital spatial layouts in three different scenarios: normal operation; the segregation of a large number of patients and still providing them with access to emergency healthcare, typical for a pandemic; and a sudden, extremely high number of admissions typical for compound disasters and terrorist attacks. A set of parameters and a method for general adaptability assessment (GAAT) that can be used as a tool in decision-making processes as well as evaluation of both existing facilities and the new models for resilient hospitals resulting from the experience of the pandemic are proposed. The paper emphasizes why factors among which adaptability, convertibility, and scalability should be at the very core of hospital development and management strategies. It also discusses new models of adaptable healthcare facilities that enable day-to-day operations to continue alongside a pandemic, and other emergency scenarios.

The Impact of Technological Developments on Remote Working: Insights from the Polish Managers’ Perspective

“Stay at home” orders during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the day-to-day operations of many organizations and moved employees from offices to homes. The sudden crisis forced companies to reformulate their operations. Enabling employees to work from home has become a necessity for both business continuity and survival. The unexpected crisis has also proved to be beneficial for some aspects of economic activity. This research focuses on identifying and measuring the benefits of and barriers to remote work from an organizational perspective, as perceived by managerial staff in Poland. We investigate the factors that influence the assessment of the scale of benefits of and barriers to remote working. The study examines the impact of various factors on the benefits of and barriers to remote working, such as a company’s previous experience with remote working, the support provided to employees by the company, the monitoring of remote working effects, and the implementation of new IT tools. These results suggest that the way the company and employees are managed in a crisis, the approach of superiors to the evaluation and control of effects on work, and the adaptation of support to the real needs of employees, all play fundamental roles. The factors examined that influence the perceived benefits of or barriers to remote working from an organization’s perspective contribute to adoption theory.

Automation in Healthcare Services

The health care service industry (also known as a medical industry) is an industry that is comprised of the services related to the safeguarding or enhancement of patient health or provides services to treat patients with medicinal, protective, rehabilitative, and analgesic care. For the last two decades, it has been seen that there are drastic changes in healthcare services through automation, digitalization, technological innovation, and communication. Automation has made a revolutionary change in the healthcare industry and allowed for it to be more cost-effective for the industry to run day-to-day operations. Automation-driven health care activities are free from human fatigue and error, so they can help out to provide consistency, accuracy, and potentially lead to a reduction in patient complications, infections, and deaths. Besides, automation can help hospitals, professionals, and doctors for cost-reduction measures and increased efficiency as part of their monetary benefits.

Sustainable Entrepreneurship in the Light Engineering Industries: A Developing Country Perspective

The study strives to generate deep insights into sustainable entrepreneurship of the Light Engineering Industries (LEIs) from a developing country perspective. This exploratory research has conducted interview schedules with a total of 450 respondents (entrepreneurs 100, workers 350) from 100 LEIs scattered in different parts of Bangladesh. The LEIs belong to the green category as indicated by the environmental regulation of Bangladesh; however, the study has found a clear lack of environmental concerns to its day-to-day practices. Deficiencies are also observed in its value chain processes. This sector is lagging to take environmental initiatives for marketing their products and creating environmental and social risk awareness among workers. In addition to these, the study has found significant deficiencies in the workers' job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment factors that are hindering organizational effectiveness. For the current entrepreneurial activities to be sustainable, this sector needs to scrutinize its product, market, value chain, industry clusters, employee motivation and environmental concerns to its day-to-day operations.

NFDI4Earth – addressing the digital needs of Earth System Sciences

<p>NFDI4Earth addresses the digital needs of Earth System (ES) Sciences (ESS) in Germany. ES scientists cooperate in international and interdisciplinary networks with the overarching aim to understand the functioning of and interactions within the ES and address the multiple challenges of global change.</p> <p>NFDI4Earth is a community-driven process providing researchers with access to FAIR, coherent, and open ES data, innovative research data management (RDM) and data science methods. The NFDI4Earth work plan comprises four task areas (TA):</p> <p>TA1 2Participate will engage with the ESS community and secures that NFDI4Earth is driven by user requirements: Pilots, small agile projects proposed by the community leverage existing technologies and manifest the researchers’ RDM needs. The Incubator Lab identifies promising new tools and scouts for trends in ES Data Science. The EduHubs produce open, ready to use educational resources on implementing FAIR principles in the ESS. The Academy will connect young researchers and their data-driven research to NFDI4Earth.</p> <p>TA2 2Facilitate realizes the OneStop4All as the web-based entry point to FAIR, open and innovative RDM in ESS. It supports users on how to find, access, share, publish and work with ES data. Specific user requests beyond the scope of the OneStop4All will be routed to a distributed User Support Network. TA2 will also unlock the wealth of data that exists in governmental data repositories and will collaborate with all services on supporting long-term archiving.</p> <p>TA3 2Interoperate aims at interoperability and coherence of the heterogeneous, segmented range of ESS RDM services. The ecosystems of ESS (meta-)data and software repositories, data science services and collaboration platforms will be synthesised. Based on common standards, TA3 provides consistent methods for a self-evaluation of RDM offerings. TA3 works on NFDI cross-cutting topics, provides a Living Handbook and ensures co-operation with international RDM initiatives and standardisation bodies.</p> <p>TA4 2Coordinate facilitates the overall management of the NFDI4Earth consortium. TA4 acts as central support service and coordination of the technical implementations. It also offers virtual research environments. The NFDI4Earth Coordination Office will support the NFDI4Earth community in day-to-day operations and acts as the NFDI4Earth point of contact. It develops a commonly agreed model for a sustainable operation of NFDI4Earth.</p> <p>The NFDI4Earth governance aims for an open and inclusive development of the NFDI4Earth services. As one example, so-called interest groups can be initiated by the NFDI4Earth community to explore individual topics in greater depth and provide input and feedback to the NFDI4Earth developments. Moreover, as a community we will work on a commonly accepted NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment that is key to fostering a cultural change towards FAIR and Open RDM for all.</p>

Construction sustainability of container-modular-housing in coastal regions towards resilient community

PurposeThis paper addresses housing problems of coastal areas in Bangladesh and investigates container-modular-housing (CMH) as a potential sustainable solution that establishes a resilient community.Design/methodology/approachPrimary data highlight the underlying challenges of coastal-housing developed by monitoring the day-to-day operations of the community and conducting interviews with community members. Secondary data came from existing literature on coastal-housing rules and regulations, CMH and similar ideas. The study used a hypothetical CMH cluster design, with three primary objectives in mind: future settlement re-arrangement, economic sustainability and environmental sustainability. To achieve the objectives, the research used a comparative examination of the current constructed form and CMH, as well as a computer-aided simulation approach.FindingsPrimary findings encompass issues of a given coastal area, including surrounding site studies, sustainability and resiliency demands due to broad exposure to the natural calamities. Driving toward a “CMH” based home design has the ability to create strategies for a resilient and sustainable community development while taking three primary objectives into account.Research limitations/implicationsA pilot project is needed to analyze the socio-cultural impact and overall construction feasibility.Practical implicationsThis research could be implemented to transform an informal construction system into a technical, resilient, sustainable architectural and engineering solution to build resilient communities.Originality/valueNumerous research projects have focused on the environmental sustainability of CMH. However, this study focuses on construction sustainability considering three major aspects which are yet to be addressed.

DILG Negros Occidental Contact Tracer Information Management System

COVID-19 pandemic reshapes the use of technology and innovation in an organization. Organizations are adopting and utilizing technologies in their day-to-day operations. Information Systems offer a wide range of solutions in terms of data management and interconnecting people with the use of a system. Its use was proven to enhance and improve the productivity of an organization in this pandemic. These promising results led the researcher to develop the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Negros Occidental Contact Tracer Information Management System (CTIMS). The CTIMS is a web application that enables DILG Negros Occidental Personnel to manage and facilitate all DILG Hired-Contact Tracers (CT) in the Province of Negros Occidental. The automated system made the data collection easy and error-free, streamlined reporting, and eliminated the time-consuming process of consolidating the Accomplishment Reports (ARs) from the Field and Provincial Offices. The document tracker feature replaced the manual entry in the logbook. It also improved the received and released document reporting. It improved the processes of the CT Task team compared to the manual operations and is expected to increase the productivity, effectivity, and efficiency of DILG Negros Occidental.

Collaborative Working Environment CWE Strategy: An Enterprise Approach to Operational Excellence

Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) are a business solution that improve the quality and speed of decision making by enriching the collaboration between teams and individuals, which results in tangible business benefits. The advantages of working in a collaborative environment are well understood in the organization and the concept is widely embraced throughout the petroleum industry. CWEs provide seamless communication between disciplines and between teams in different locations. Traditionally, they have been used to connect staff in remote locations to teams in the headquarters, allowing real time monitoring of the health of the field, and fast decision making on operational issues and short to medium term optimization opportunities. The main goal is to be quickly alerted to events and make smarter, faster decisions using key capabilities available to the company with access to all relevant knowledge, data and analytical tools required to reach a decision. But this drive to make smarter, faster decisions is applicable to all levels of a company. In fact, it becomes increasingly important as more complex decisions are required at higher levels, which can be influenced by interpreted data, personal opinions and perceptions. In line with strategic objective of digital transformation, a national oil company (NOC) has extensive plans to develop asset specific CWEs and enterprise level CWEs. These will be centralized collaboration facilities to provide more rigorous, effective, and consistent surveillance & optimization to help reduce deferment costs and inefficiencies and accelerate decision-making with a measurable business value to enhance HSE, Reservoir, Drilling, Well and Production system performance through emerging digital innovation. All these centers shall be equipped to receive real time and episodic data and perform exception-based surveillance through trending, analysis, and condition diagnosis. All these CWE Centers shall enable decision making with efficient multi-disciplinary collaboration to address business challenges and increase the efficiency of day-to-day operations. They will have clear roles and responsibilities serving as an integral element of the value realization across the assets. The paper will describe the enterprise CWE strategy, key technical considerations, methodology and standards that have been set up to achieve the ultimate objective of the organization to maximize oil field recovery, eliminating non-productive time, enhancing HSE aspects and increasing profitability through the deployment of these various centers.

Big Data Analytics Maximizes Value from Smart Well Completions

This paper presents a workflow based on big data analytics to model the reliability of downhole Inflow Control Valves (ICVs) and predict their failures. The paper also offers economic analysis of optimum ICV stroking frequency to maintain valves functionality at the lowest possible cost to the oilfield operator. Installing an ICV in a petroleum well is a costly process and is done by a drilling or workover rig. As such, maintaining a fully functional ICV throughout the lifecycle of a well is important to ensure proper return on investment. ICVs are known to malfunction if not periodically stroked/cycled. The action of stroking ensures that each valve opening is free from obstructing material that would prevent the ICV from operating between one valve opening step to another. When an ICV malfunctions, a costly functionality restoration operation is sometime required without guaranteed results. In other cases, the valve is declared no longer useful and the asset cannot be further utilized due to malfunction. In this paper, an analytical decision making model to predict failures of ICVs is presented that is based on rigorous big data analytics. The model factors in the frequency of stroking before a valve fails. Then, an economic analysis accounting for the CAPEX & OPEX of an ICV is included to optimize the stroking frequency. The utilized techniques include ICV failure and stroking records and classifying the data into pre-defined criteria. Cumulative probability distribution functions are defined for each data set and used to generate failure probability functions. The probability equations are factored into an asset management cost scheme to minimize expected maintenance costs and probability of ICV failure. The results of applying this novel methodology to any smart well clearly showed maximized ICV service life and proper return of investment. The results demonstrate that ICVs lifecycle was prolonged with low maintenance cycling cost. Methodologies similar to the one presented in this paper are true manifestation of the fruitful impact IR4.0 technologies have on oilfields day-to-day operations.