This book is an accessible, contemporary, and comprehensive guide to the concepts and practice of evaluation. Authors Gail Vallance Barrington and Beverly Triana-Tremain integrate new approaches and concerns, and classic frameworks with practical tools that readers can use to design evaluation studies. They show how evaluators measure whether the planned and implemented interventions or services are achieving their goals and objectives, while focusing on the questions most important to the community and organizations in which the evaluation takes place. The book stresses the role of critical and evaluative thinking, as well as self-reflection, and demonstrates the importance of context and equity in today’s turbulent environment, offering a new stance for evaluators to support global as well as local issues.

Sensory evaluation is a scientific discipline used to evoke, measure, analyse and interpret responses to products perceived through the senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. It is used to reveal insights into the way in which sensory properties drive consumer acceptance and behaviour, and to design products that best deliver what the consumer wants. It is also used at a more fundamental level to provide a wider understanding of the mechanisms involved in sensory perception and consumer behaviour. Sensory perception of products alters considerably during the course of consumption/use. Special techniques are used in product development to measure these changes in order to optimise product delivery to consumers. Time-Dependent Measures of Perception in Sensory Evaluation explores the many facets of time-dependent perception including mastication and food breakdown, sensory-specific satiety and sensory memory. Both traditional and cutting-edge techniques and applications used to measure temporal changes in sensory perception over time are reviewed, and insights into the way in which sensory properties drive consumer acceptance and behaviour are provided. This book will be a valuable resource for sensory professionals working in academia and industry, including sensory scientists, practitioners, trainers and students; and industry-based researchers in QA/QC, R&D and marketing.

Towards the end of the fifties methods for planning, scheduling,and control of proj ects were developed on the basis that the evolution of a project can be associated with a special weighted directed graph, called activity network. In this association, the individual activities of the project correspond to the arcs, the so-called proj ect events (beginning or termination of activities) correspond to the nodes, and the durations of the activities correspond to the weights of the respective arcs of the directed graph. 1) Contiguous arcs are assigned to activities which succeed one another immediately. The event corresponding to a node occurs exactly at the time at which all activities which are associated with the arcs leading into the node are terminated. After the occurrence of an event all those activities are be gun which correspond to the arcs emanating from the respective node. This implies especially that the evolution of the project has to be uniquely determined before hand, that every activity and every event are realized exactly once during the exe cution of the project, and that "feedback" (corresponding to cycles in the asso ciated network) is not permitted. Many projects, for example most R&D projects and projects in the area of production p 1 anni ng, do not sa ti sfy the foregoi ng res tri cti ons.

Shuttle-based storage and retrieval systems (SBS/RSs) are an important part of today's warehouses. In this work, a new approach is developed that can be applied to model different configurations of SBS/RSs. The approach is based on the modeling of SBS/RSs as discrete-time open queueing networks and yields the complete probability distributions of the performance measures.

Landscape ecology has been a discrete, established discipline since at least 1980. Its marine counterpart, seascape ecology, is barely a decade old, its first applications dating from the early 2010s. Lack of perception of the marine environment hampers the adoption of many landscape ecology approaches to the sea. Seascape ecology relies on special technologies such as remote sensing (either acoustic or optical), robotics, and scuba diving. Both disciplines deal with the spatial configuration of ecosystems and consider environmental heterogeneity and dynamics as the main subjects of study and the key for ecosystem functioning and persistence. Seascape is here intended as the totality of natural and anthropogenic characters of a marine region. To the geologist, it is defined by sedimentology and underwater geomorphology, to the biologist by the nature of the living cover of the seafloor, to the ecologist by the relationships among functional processes and the spatial organization of ecosystems. The goal of this research topic is to encourage original research, case studies, reviews, and viewpoints to identify research priority gaps and possibly contribute to filling them in. We will appreciate, in particular, manuscripts dealing with recent advances such as high-resolution habitat mapping; underwater soundscape and biophony; development, application and validation of biotic indices to assess seafloor integrity (as requested, for instance, by recent European Directives). Papers of interest may discuss the multivarious facets of stability and describe resistance and resilience patterns, the role of stress and disturbance, regime shift and phase shift, or may take up the challenge of integrating coastal landscape and seascape analyses. Studies of long-term series are welcome, as well as methodological improvements, and macroecological approaches on the importance of species diversity and connectivity in seascape organization.

Safety evaluation by definition involves many complex factors and thus covers a wide range of topics. In order to focus the content of the workshop the subject matter was specific to the state of the art and the recent developments in nonlinear and time-variant methods employing identification procedures. Participants in the workshop represented a wide range of expertise. They were se lected in order to cover the state of the art of knowledge in fault-detection and dam age assessment, system identification, signal processing, mathematical and physical modelling and applications of techniques such as fuzzy logic and neural networks. The emphasis was placed on the exploitation and understanding of nonlinearity arising from structural or material faults. Figure 1 indicates the range of topics covered in the workshop. Since no unique or general approach yet exists for treating nonlinearity in the field of safety evaluation, many of the topics presented were problem specific. In order to assist the reader in selecting the material of primary interest a matrix of the topics covered by each participant is shown in Table 1. This table relates the authors to the subject matter, providing a guide through the diverse range of topics presented at the workshop.

Evaluation, whether in schools and colleges, LEAs or TECs is now universally recognised as an essential part of any effective educational and training system. There are, however, two major problems in its implementation: lack of time and a perceived lack among middle and senior managers of the special skills necessary for an evaluation to have external validity. This book provides a solution to both problems. It offers evaluation processes which accept time limitations and work within them an it strips away the mystique of evaluation to describe methods and procedures which will enable educational and training staff at all levels to organise and carry out useful evaluations. Administrators, teachers and trainers as well as the staff of local and national inspectorates will welcome its cogent and realistic guidance.

For online learning and other forms of distance learning, time management is vital. As a recognized social asset, time constitutes a consistent and complete new approach to online higher education. Assessment and Evaluation of Time Factors in Online Teaching and Learning combines empirical and methodological research to study the role of time comprehensively from an institutional and management perspective, a technological perspective, and a pedagogical perspective. Focusing on higher education, this book is aimed at educational researchers, social science researchers, teachers, and students interested in improving the learning process and experience.