People, vital importance

The Cochrane Collaboration prepares Cochrane Reviews and aims to update them regularly with the latest scientific evidence. Members of the organisation (mostly volunteers) work together to provide evidence to help people make decisions about health care. Some people read the healthcare literature to find reports of randomised controlled trials others find such reports by searching electronic databases others prepare and update Cochrane Reviews based on the evidence found in these trials others work to improve the methods used in Cochrane Reviews others provide a vitally important consumer perspective and others support the people doing these tasks. The Cochrane Collaboration website provides information on a variety of ways of registering interest or becoming directly involved www.cochrane.org/docs/involve.htm involve. 

Unfortunately, terrorism and counterterrorism are enormous subjects that are not only vitally important, but are also urgent. A terrorist attack can come in many forms the most worrisome of these is airborne bioterrorism. Anthrax distributed upwind of a city is a serious threat that could kill 100,000 people or more. More frightening, however, is an agent like smallpox that is not only infective, but contagious. Past experience with smallpox has proven its efficiency at causing tens of millions of deaths around the world. 

The major factors I wish to address in recognizing the vital importance of people are leadership, the influence of visionaries, outstanding scientists and engineers, the value of consultants, and the recognition of the achievements of people through awards and a scientific/engineering ladder of promotion. 

In the above, I have tried to illustrate the importance of education in creating the interdisciplinary interactions needed to progress chemistry and increase appreciation of its importance in the modern world. More national publicity of all sciences is essential to increase realization of the vitally important role that science will play in the future. More early exposure to the magic of experimentation would help to inspire people to follow a science career. People need to be galvanized to want to learn more. Chemical Process Development is one of the more practical areas of chemistry and, as the thrust of the earlier chapters illustrates, one which particularly requires that practitioners embrace many other disciplines in order to create success in any mission. 

A detailed consideration of the cost aspect is beyond the scope of this book but it is vitally important. Factory space and plant cost money in rent and maintenance so that, the longer they are occupied in producing a given number of items, the higher is the cost of each. The number of people involved in a process, especially if they are skilled, often accounts for a major part of the cost. The price of raw materials may only contribute a small fraction to the ultimate cost but must be kept to a minimum. An unnecessarily close specification for purity, dimensional tolerances etc. may result in a large increase in price. 

These primitive peoples had one major concern howto preserve the crops and wild fruits and vegetables, as well as the meat from the animals they slaughtered. Over time, they developed methods for storing excess food in such a way that it could be eaten even when there was little fresh food available. Especially in northern climates where winters could be harsh, food preservation became vitally important if people were to live from harvest to spring, when the first wild fruits and vegetables became available. 

Where you decide to locate is also vitally important, so when you are looking at potential properties or businesses, you will probably need to see them more than once. Some people think the emphasis on location is overrated, but if you locate your store in an area where there are abandoned stores or businesses that are not doing well, you may not succeed. 

Third, we have a basic nature, an essence. To be human is to have characteristics, potentials, limits. We are not mountains or dolphins or gorillas or angels we are people. I will not attempt to define what that basic nature is here. It is vitally important, however, not to confuse what our ultimate nature actually is or might be with what we currently think it is or what we have been told it is. 

This does not diminish in any way the importance of striving for sustainability, nor does it mean that a sustainable manufacturing process makes no contribution to security. In fact, by virtue of striving to meet societal needs, sustainability addresses terrorism at its roots. Therefore, it is vitally important when proceeding down the road to sustainability to consider the basic needs of those who would wish us harm, because meeting these needs may well turn potential foes into, if not friends, people we can coexist with. 

Physical scientists are not much given to philosophy. They tend to be down-to-earth people, prepared to believe what their senses tell them, and not very concerned about the wider philosophical implications. This reluctance is very clearly seen in the study of heterogeneous catalysis, where the construction of models and the drawing of inferences are exceptionally difficult but vitally important the great variation in the vigour with which these actions are pursued reflects the uncertainty that scientists feel on departing from tangible observations. 

Some information on how the project got under way and on the financial or institutional support you ve received to date. Your passion for the project and your connection to the story are likely to come through here, because this is where you tell people how you got involved in the project, why the story appealed to you and/or seemed vitally important to tell, and what you ve done, so far, to tell it. 

Lowen was, however, full of fight and he left no stone unturned to get the ear of the highest authorities for his story. We must not forget that the question of our progress was of vital importance in the eyes of everyone who knew about the Project. Lowen succeeded in seeing some of the most infiuential people in Washington and to tell them his story. He even saw the President of the United States around the 31st of July. 

Flexibility is a term with different meanings to different people. The importance of flexibility raises the need to define what flexible is actually and what is needed in the way of supply chain flexibility. It is vital to SCM because needed flexibility should be a design criterion for the supply chain itself and its operational capabilities. For this to happen, management must be prepared to respond in three ways ... 

Danger is always present in the work situation (as in all other situations). The task of the individual is to keep it under control to avoid errors which provoke an increase in danger and to detect and avoid or recover from danger increasing from other reasons. Much of this activity occurs at the skill- and rule-based levels by more or less routine reaction to warning signals. Only occasionally do people in their normal work situations need actively to contemplate danger. However these occasions are vitally important when they do occur. Examples of such activities are ... 

The data obtained must be translated into language that is understood by the company and its people. It is this translation that must extract the customers needs and wants and put them in words that the designers, manufacturers, etc., can use in their tasks. Yet, the intent of the customers words must not be lost. This is not always an easy task, but is a vitally important one. Another facet of this is the determination of unstated but pleasing qualities of a product that might provide a marketing edge. This idea has been sketched by the Kano model, shown in Fig. 23.15. 

Few people realize the widespread application of electrochemistry in modern life. All batteries and fuel cells can be understood in terms of electrochemistry. Any oxidation-reduction process can be considered in electrochemical terms. Corrosion of metals, nonmetals, and ceramics is electrochemistry. Many vitally important biochemical reactions involve the transfer of charge, which is electrochemistry. As the thermodynamics of charged particles are developed in this chapter, realize that these principles are widely applicable to many systems and reactions. 

Road networks represent one of the areas. Road networks have a number of features in common with additional networks (telecommunication networks, power grid). Some features are completely different, however. The first one is that road networks are of vital importance for all of society. It is almost impossible to supply people with food and medication without roads. The second one is the relative sparsity of networks when compared, for instance, with the World Wide Web. The number of road links outgoing from a node is rarely higher than 5. This means that the interruption of a small number of links can have a major impact on the functioning of human society... 

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