Pioneer organisations

For improving the quality of science learning in non-formal system of education, Vikram Sarabhai Community Centre was established in Ahmedabad in 1963. The Centre is one of the pioneer organisations in the country providing a variety of out-of-school activities in science for students, teachers and community. It has a team of highly skilled staff which acts as a nucleus and catalyst for various programmes undertaken by the Centre. 

One of the pioneer organisations, which made serious efforts towards standardisation of biodegradation, is the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which published a first series of standardised tests in 1981 with the OECD Guidelines for the Testing of Chemicals [3]. Besides biodegradation tests, these guidelines include various other test procedures such as physico-chemical properties, effects on biotic systems, bioaccumulation and health effects. 

These three were the originals, with CROPP being the first to pioneer national and international distribution. In 1993, Horizon Organic Dairy began purchasing milk from CROPP, and eventually built an 800-cow dairy herd, now expanded to 3000 cows in Idaho. Horizon was joined in the market by various other start-up organisations, but none has yet developed the national distribution that the leaders CROPP/Organic Valley and Horizon have developed. 

In a sense, CES was not a paradigm shift, but a natural development of the concerns of the early pioneers at MIT. Their goal had been to develop and illustrate those principles of science upon which chemical engineering operations are based [34] the chemical engineering science movement sought to develop and organise those principles, but in a more general context than unit operations. 

Using several years experience, as a laboratory scientist pioneering speci-ation analyses and latterly as a scientist in DGXII of the European Union leading the campaign to improve the quality and credibility of speciation measurements, Dr Quevauviller has written a masterly text. No-one is better qualified to write a text critically evaluating the performance of different methods for speciation analysis. Carefully organised and authoritatively written, I am sure this book will be an essential reference for all those who perform or use speciation analysis. 

At the same time Vernadsky was begirming to work in the field of radioactivity. In 1908 Vernadsky took part in the corrference sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (he was a member of this Association since 1889) where he met John Joly, one of the pioneers of the radioactivity research. Vernadsky was deeply impressed by the report of Joly and already in 1909 organised the first radiological laboratory in Russia. 

In our opinion these are self-organising systems that spontaneously form dissipative structures above certain characteristic volume concentrations. Such structures form in non-isolated systems far removed from thermodynamic equilibrium, where the determining variables satisfy non-linear dynamic laws. (For his pioneering work in this field the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1977.) Furthermore, the conductivity of the polymers that form the structures can in our opinion be explained better by the assumption that freely mobile electrons are present within particle structures only a few nanometres in size. 

Inhetveen, H. (1998) Women pioneers in farming — a gendered history of agricultural progress. Sociologia Ruralis 38 (3). Special Issue Farm Women, Empowerment, and Organisational Change, 265-284. 

The use of systems and procedural control of specific functions within an organisation was first developed around quality management, specifically quality assurance. The pioneering system was developed by the British Standards Institute or BSI. The system for quality assurance was known by its BSI reference code of 5750. It was later transferred to a European standard in the form of EN 2900 and recognised on an international basis as ISO (International Standards Organisation) 9000. The fundamental procedures first conceived under BS 5750 have now been adapted to encompass environmental issues. This new standard is again... 

The Manhattan Project in itself, the vast organisation and concentration of technical effort required to realise an atomic weapon, was an unprecedented effort. Management techniques pioneered to coordinate the diversity of research, systems theory and mathematical programming that was required became industry staples. Their widespread adoption has shaped subsequent scientific, industrial and commercial enterprises. 

In spite of his necessary pre-occupation with administrative and organisational matters Donald pioneered research in the then novel area of biochemical engineering. During the 1950s exciting advances were being made in the... 

The theoretical basis of the different causal models becomes more obvious at the upper management level. MORT was the first comprehensive model to include organisational and individual factors at the top management level. At this level, it draws from quality assurance management principles. The SMORT and ILCI models have been influenced by this pioneering work and represent variations on the same theme. The concept of root causes originates from the MORT model. The checklist above shows the different items of a root-cause analysis. 

---