Knowledge Management Essay Example for Free

Knowledge Management Essay It involves applying the collective knowledge and abilities of the entire workforce to achieve specific organizational objectives. State agencies should feel free to adapt and use information and tools on the following pages as necessary within their organization. It is provided to be a starting point for sharing knowledge and experience, allowing those who remain with the organization to continue providing quality service. Capturing and sharing critical knowledge and expertise should be occurring continuously among employees. In many cases, however, it is not and this need becomes pressing when a valued employee is preparing to retire or change positions. When an organization is considering implementing a knowledge transfer plan it is important to answer several questions: 1. Is the organization going to fill the vacant position or reassign the duties? 2. Are all the duties of the position still important to the mission of the organization? 3. Is there a need to update the position description? 4. Will the position change, remain as is, or be eliminated once the employee leaves? What is knowledge transfer? David DeLong’s book â€Å"Lost Knowledge† describes knowledge as the â€Å"capacity for effective actions or decision-making in the context of organizational activity†. Accordingly, lost knowledge would decrease this vital capacity and help undermine organizational effectiveness and performance. The goal of transferring knowledge to others [known as Knowledge Transfer] is to: 1. Identify key positions and people where potential knowledge loss is most imminent. 2. Assess how critical the knowledge loss will be. Develop a plan of action to ensure the capture of that critical knowledge and a plan of action to transfer it. Why is knowledge transfer important? A significant percentage of the state’s workforce is nearing retirement age over the next ten years. These employees have acquired a tremendous amount of knowledge about how things work, how to get things done and who to go to when problems arise. Losing their expertise and experience could significantly reduce efficiency, resulting in costly mistakes, unexpected quality problems, or significant disruptions in services and/or performance. In addition, faster turnover among younger employees and more competitive recruiting and compensation packages add significantly to the mounting concern about the state’s ability to sustain acceptable levels of performance. What are the benefits of a knowledge transfer program? Knowledge transfer [KT] programs prevent critical knowledge loss by focusing on key areas. Some of the immediate benefits of KT programs are: 1. They provide reusable documentation of the knowledge required in certain positions or job roles. 2. They result in immediate learning and knowledge transfer when carried out by individuals who can either use the transferred knowledge themselves or have responsibility for hiring, training, mentoring, coaching or managing people within an organizational unit. 3. They reduce the impact of employee departure. 4. They integrate staffing, training, job and organization redesign, process improvements and other responses. 5. They aid in succession planning. 6. They prevent the loss of knowledge held only in employees’ heads when they leave the organization or retire. They enhance career development. Generally Accepted Definitions for Knowledge Management and Transfer Knowledge Management (KM) refers to practices used by organizations to find, create, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organization. Knowledge Management programs are typically tied to organizational objectives and are intended to lead to the achievement of specific outcomes such as shared intelligence, improved performance, or higher levels of innovation. Knowledge Transfer (an aspect of Knowledge Management) has always existed in one form or another through on-the-job discussions with peers, apprenticeship, and maintenance of agency libraries, professional training and mentoring programs. Since the late twentieth century, technology has played a vital role in Knowledge Transfer through the creation of knowledge bases, expert systems, and other knowledge repositories. To understand knowledge management and knowledge transfer, it is helpful to examine the differences between data, information, and knowledge. Data is discrete, objective facts. Data is the raw material for creating information. By itself, data carries no judgment, interpretation or meaning. Information is data that is organized, patterned and/or categorized. It has been sorted, analyzed and displayed, and is communicated through various means. Information changes the way a person perceives something, thus, affecting judgment or behavior. Knowledge is what is known. It is richer and more meaningful than information. Knowledge is gained through experience, reasoning, intuition, and learning. Because knowledge is intuitive, it is difficult to structure, can be hard to capture on machines, and is a challenge to transfer. We often speak of a knowledgeable person, and by that we mean someone who is well informed, and thoroughly versed in a given area. We expand our knowledge when others share theirs with us. We create new knowledge when we pool our knowledge together.

General James Longstreet :: essays research papers

Longstreet was born in Edgefeild District in South Carolina on January eighth, eighteen twenty one. He graduated from West Point in eighteen forty two and went straight to service. There he served until eighteen sixty one. He first saw action in the Mexican War, he was wounded in Chapultepec Mexico. For his services he received two brevets and the staff rank of a Major. He resigned his commission on June first eighteen sixty one and joined the Confederacy. He became a General in the Civil War. His nickname was Old Pete meaning sturdy and trustworthy. He led most of the major battles in Virginia including Bullrun, Freddricsburg, and Chickmauga. He was under Robert E. Lees command, and led the First Corps under Lee also. Longstreet was a General in Gettysburg. but lost because he did not follow Lees plan of action.Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle and that had the most casualties ever fought on American soil. He was blamed in the south for the loss of the battle at Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the most crutial mistake. Many things caused the outcome of the battle like Longstreets soldiers and officers got confused and were backtracking for half the day. Longstreet saw the union position as nearly impregnable. Lee saw believed his army was invincible. One of his officers Jeb Stewart went on a wild goose chase, he was sospost to inform Lee but didnt. Lee had no eyes and ears to tell him what was going on. After the war he befriended with Ulysses S. Grant and joined the Republican party. He was criticized by former confederates for losing the war and befriending with Grant and the Republican party. He served as Grants minister to Turkey. He also became a political apostate in the south. Later he served as a commissioner of the Pacific Railroads from eighteen ninety seven to nineteen o four. In the summer of nineteen o four he became very ill and was diagnosed with Rheumatism. His ear was also damaged and was forced to use an ear horn when spoken to. He traveled to Chicago for a cancerous right eye, his weight dropped from two hundred pounds to one hundred thirty five pounds.

Solar Energy

A new solar powered adsorption refrigerator with high performance Meunier published a comparison of those three sorption systems for solar cooling (Meunier, 1994). The solid-gas system used in the present study is adsorption. The solar adsorption refrigerators have been developed mainly to be used in hot regions with no electricity supply. There is an urgent need in the health sector (for the conservation of medicines and vaccines). These systems have the advantage of not requiring any energy other than solar energy.Regarding performance, the highest values of COPSR (0. 10-0. 12) were obtained with the adsorption systems zeolite + water (Grenier et al. , 1988) and activated carbon + methanol (Boubakri et al. , 1992a,b; Pons and Grenier, 1987). As methanol can easily evaporate at temperatures below O oc, thus favouring the production of ice, the most environmentally friendly refrigerant must be water. Using water, ice can be produced within the evaporator, acting as a ‘cold stor age'. Both refrigerants, water or methanol, operate at below atmospheric pressure and therefore require vacuum technology. The main urpose of the present study is to obtain what is, technically speaking, a simple machine.This aim seems reasonably achievable with an adsorptive machine, operated in a 100% solar-powered 24 h cycle with a flat-plate solar collector containing the adsorbent. However, when referring to the work reported above, both the efficiency of the solar collector and that of the adsorption thermodynamic cycle could be improved. These requirements were crucial to the design of the ‘advanced' machine. The laboratory of solar energy of the Engineering school of the Canton de Vaud (EIVD, Yverdon-lesBains, Switzerland) has been eveloping adsorptive solar refrigerators since 1999. The first systems built used the adsorption pair of activated carbon + methanol.For reasons of reliability and respect for the environment, this pair has been abandoned in favour of a sili cagel + water pair. The prototype described and analyzed in this paper has been functioning since the summer of 2000 on the site of the EIVD. A thorough measurement system allows us to characterise it in a complete way. During the summer of 2001, a constant procedure of thermal load in the cold cabinet allowed us to observe the behaviour of the adsorption system over a continuous period of 68 ays. We have highlighted the great influence of both external temperature and daily irradiation upon the daily coefficient of performance (COPSR ). Previously, few articles were interested in the analysis of the storage. 2.Description of adsorption and of the adsorption cooling cycle Adsorption, also known as physisorption, is the process by which molecules of a fluid are fixed on the walls of a solid material. The adsorbed molecules undergo no chemical reaction but simply lose energy when being fixed: adsorption, the phase change from fluid to adsorbate (adsorbed phase) is exothermic. Moreover this process is reversible. In the following, we will focus on adsorption systems mainly used in cooling (or heatpumping) machines: a pure refrigerant vapour that can easily be condensed at ambient temperature and a microporous adsorbent with a large adsorption capacity.The main components of an adsorptive cooling machine are the adsorber (in the present case, the solar collector itself), the condenser, the evaporator and a throttling valve between the last two devices, see Fig. 2. An ideal cycle is presented in the D‚ ¬hring diagram (LnP vs. †¦I=T), Fig. 1. 2001). We can summarize it in four stages. C. Hildbrand et al. / solar Energy 77 (2004) 311-318 13 Fig. 1 . An ideal adsorption cooling cycle in the D‚ ¬ hring diau gram. Saturation liquid- vapour curve for the refrigerant (EC dashed line), isoster curves (thin lines), adsorption cycle (thick lines). Heating period: step AB (7 a. m. fl 10 a. m. ) and step BD (10 a. m. fl 4 p. m. ); cooling period: step DF ( 4 p. m. fl 7 p. m. ) and step FA(7 p. m. fl 7 a. m. ).Step 1: isosteric heating  ¶A ! BD. The system temperature and pressure increase due to solar irradiance. Step 2: desorption + condensation dB ! DD. Desorption of the water steam contained in the silicagel; condensation of the water steam in the ondenser; the water in the evaporator is drained through the valve. Step 3: isosteric cooling ?D ! FP. Decrease of the period of sunshine; cooling of the adsorber; decrease of the pressure and the temperature in the system. Step 4: adsorption + evaporation  ¶F ! AD. Evaporation of water contained in the evaporator; cooling of the cold cabinet; production of ice in the evaporator; readsorption of water steam by the silicagel. 3.Description of the machine tested in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland Adsorptive pair. The refrigerant is water, and the adsorbent is a microporous silicagel (Actigel SG ¤ , Silgelac). Collector-adsorber. The solar collector (2 m2 , tilt angle of 300) is double- glazed: a Teflon ¤ film is installed between the glass and the adsorber itself. The adsorber consists of 12 parallel tubes (72. 5 mm in diameter) that contain the silicagel (78. 8 kg). The tubes are covered with an electrolytic selective layer (Chrome-black, Energie Solaire SA), which absorbs 95% of the visible solar radiation while presenting an emissivity of 0. 07 in the infrared wave-lengths.A valve located between the graduated tank and the evaporator is needed on this machine. For control strategy reasons, this valve is electrically powered. 4. 5. Ventilation damper management Closing: when the irradiance goes above 100 W/m2 . Opening: at the end of the afternoon when the angle of the solar beam radiation incident upon the aperture plane of collector (angle of incidence) is above 500. 4. Measurements and operations The objective of the 2001 series of measurements was to obtain a high number of measurements continuously, in order to characterise he working of our adsorption ma chine. To do this, a system of measurement and a constant procedure of load has been established. 4. 1.Measurements The temperature is measured (probes Pt100) in the silicagel of a central tube of the collector-adsorber (7 sensors), on two condenser tubes and three evaporator tubes; and the ambient air temperature is also measured. The vapour pressure is measured by a piezogauge in the collector-adsorber, in the condenser and in the evaporator. The global irradiance in the plane of the collector is recorded by a pyranometer. A graduated tank (6. 5 1) collects the condensed water. The level of liquid water is automatically measured by a level detector. The series of measurements took place from July 25th to September 30th 2001 (68 days) in Yverdon-lesBains (altitude: 433 m, longitude: )6. 380, latitude: 46. 470). Fig. 3 shows the observed weather conditions (daily irradiation and mean external temperature).This graph shows two different periods: (1) From July 25th to the beginning of September: during this summer period, the mean external temperature is above 20 oc and the mean daily irradiation reaches 22 MJ/m2 . This fine weather period is interrupted between the 3rd and 9th August by ess favourable weather. (2) From the beginning of September to the end of the measurement: the mean external temperature and the daily irradiation are distinctly lower (13 oc and 13 MJ/m2 ). Furthermore, the conditions are very variable from one day to the next. 4. 2. Acquisition system and command 6. Performance of the tested unit A Labview ¤ program takes measurements and administers various commands (valve, dampers and load). A measurement is made every 30 s.

How Internet Affects Our Day Life And The Ethical...

Internet There is a big influence from the internet on our day to day life. Multimedia, computers and electronic devices are things we have to encounter and use each day. The Internet is appearing to be more and more dependable for almost everybody as it is one of the most modern and forward-looking media and certainly channel of the future. We are currently living in a contemporary world which is totally different from the past. Now we are reachable to almost anything that makes us feel contented in our day to day life. Since the improvement of current technology such as the internet, people can do numerous activities than they were unable to perform in the previous account. As far as this paper is concerned, the Internet plays a very important role in our day to day life. This paper articulates how internet plays an important role in our day to day life and the ethical implication of internet on information privacy. According to survey conducted on March 2005, indicated respondents were first probed whether they had encountered a decision relating to a specific item within the past two years and, if they did, how the internet played a severe role, significant one, a trivial role, or no role at all. Five themes namely: making a major financial decision, buying a car, getting additional education choosing a school for oneself or child, helping someone deal with a major illness and training for your career. Participants were questioned which happened most currently, withShow MoreRelatedCyber Crimes, Moral And Ethical Implication1664 Words   |  7 PagesCyber Crimes, Moral and Ethical Implication Introduction The internet’s rapid growth and computer technology has helped people around the world over the past few years. This evolution has also enabled new forms of crime-dubbed cyber-crime. This phenomenon has greatly evoked feelings such as admiration and fear in people mind. 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