AN ESSENTIAL CONVERSATION FROM TODAY'S LEADING VOICES ON EFFECTING CHANGE IN HEALTH AND SOCIETY "The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has changed the conversation about health in the United States." --Jo Ivey Boufford, President, New York Academy of Medicine In a society where a person's zip code is a stronger predictor of health status than their genetic profile, every public health challenge is also a challenge of equity, implementation, and policy. For better or worse, improving health requires societal change, and the scale of today's societal challenges can have a stifling effect on even the most well-intended efforts. Assembled by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and featuring today's most prominent voices from diverse sectors, Knowledge to Action is a collection of short conversations focused on the idea of meaningful change -- its definition, its impediments, and exploring how we can transition from research to action in health, well-being, and equity. Steeped in honesty and benefiting from the diverse experiences of an extraordinary assembly of academics, journalists, policymakers, public health practitioners, and researchers, this book offers provocative yet actionable perspectives that will benefit anyone who reads it.

Specifying and implementing dynamical systems with the situation calculus. Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificial intelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many other disciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematical logic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community. This book presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas, basing its theoretical and implementation foundations on the situation calculus, a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework, it develops many features of dynamical systems modeling, including time, processes, concurrency, exogenous events, reactivity, sensing and knowledge, probabilistic uncertainty, and decision theory. It also describes and implements a new family of high-level programming languages suitable for writing control programs for dynamical systems. Finally, it includes situation calculus specifications for a wide range of examples drawn from cognitive robotics, planning, simulation, databases, and decision theory, together with all the implementation code for these examples. This code is available on the book's Web site.

The market for business knowledge is booming as companies looking to improve their performance pour millions of pounds into training programmes, consultants, and executive education. Why then, are there so many gaps between what firms know they should do and waht they actual do? This volume confronts the challenge of turning knowledge about how to improve performance into actions that produce measurable results. The authors identify the causes of this gap and explain how to close it.

This volume explores interdependencies between knowledge, action, and space from different interdisciplinary perspectives. Some of the contributors discuss knowledge as a social construct based on collective action, while others look at knowledge as an individual capacity for action. The chapters contain theoretical frameworks as well as experimental outcomes. Readers will gain insight into key questions such as: How does knowledge function as a prerequisite for action? Why are knowledge gaps growing and not diminishing in a knowledge society? How much knowledge is necessary for action? How do various types of knowledge influence the steps from cognition to action? How do different representations of knowledge shape action? What impact have spatial conditions for the formation of knowledge? What is the relationship between social and geographical space? The contributors consider rationality in social and economic theories as well as in everyday life. Attention is also given to action theoretic approaches and rationality from the viewpoints of psychology, post-structuralism, and human geography, making this an attractive book for students, researchers and academics of various backgrounds. This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The science of climate change is a complex subject that balances the physical record and scientific fact with politics, policy, and ethics - and is of particular importance to the geosciences. This thoughtfully crafted new text and accompanying media encourage non-science majors to practice critical thinking, analysis, and discourse about climate change themes. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, acclaimed educator and researcher, David Kitchen, examines not only the physical science, but the social, economic, political, energy, and environmental issues surrounding climate change. His goal: to turn knowledge into action, equipping students with the knowledge and critical skills to make informed decisions, separate facts from fiction, and participate in the public debate.

Health services can and should be improved by applying research findings about best practice. Yet, in Knolwedge to Action?, the authors explore why it nevertheless proves notoriously difficult to implement change based on research evidence in the face of strong professional views and complex organizational structures.The book draws on a large body of evidence acquired in the course of nearly fifty in-depth case studies, following attempts to introduce evidence-based practice in the UK NHS over more than a decade. Using qualitative methods to study hospital and primary care settings, they are able to shed light on why some of these attempts succeeded where others faltered. By opening up the intricacies and complexities of change in the NHS, they reveal the limitations of the simplistic approaches toimplementing research or introducing evidence-based health care.A unique synthesis of evidence, the book brings together data from 1,400 interviews with doctors, nurses, and managers, as well as detailed observations and documentary analysis. The authors provide an analysis, rooted in a range of theoretical perspectives, that underlines the intimate links between organizational structures and cultures and the utilization of knowledge, and draws conclusions which will be of significance for other areas of public management. Their findings have implicationsfor the utlization of knowledge in situations where there is a professional tradition working within a politically sensitive blend of public service, managerial accountability, and technical expertise.Knowledge to Action? will be of interest to Academics, Researchers, and Advanced Students of Organizational Behaviour, Public and Health Management, and Evidence-Based Medicine; and also of particular interest to Practitioners, Clinicians, and Public Health Managers concerned with implementing change to clinical practice.

John Hyman explores central problems in philosophy of action and the theory of knowledge, and connects these areas of enquiry in a new way. His approach to the dimensions of human action culminates in an original analysis of the relation between knowledge and rational behaviour, which provides the foundation for a new theory of knowledge itself.

University-Community engagement is an important part of a nation's social and economic development. An increasing focus on how knowledge is exchanged has encouraged many universities to consider their relationship and engagement with local communities. More than ever, universities are developing strategies for engaging with business, industry, government, and community, and recognise the role that they can play in the exchange of knowledge. With authorship drawn from community partners and un...

Improve learning transfer in your organisation with this book which provides a step-by-step methodology for facilitating genuine behavioural change and accountability back in the workplace.

Knowledge management (KM) is about managing the lifecycle of knowledge consisting of creating, storing, sharing and applying knowledge. Two main approaches towards KM are codification and personalization. The first focuses on capturing knowledge using technology and the latter on the process of socializing for sharing and creating knowledge. Social media are becoming very popular as individuals and also organizations learn how to use it. The primary applications of social media in a business context are marketing and recruitment. But there is also a huge potential for knowledge management in these organizations. For example, wikis can be used to collect organizational knowledge and social networking tools, which leads to exchanging new ideas and innovation. The interesting part of social media is that, by using them, one immediately starts to generate content that can be useful for the organization. Hence, they naturally combine the codification and personalisation approaches to KM. This book aims to provide an overview of new and innovative applications of social media and to report challenges that need to be solved. One example is the watering down of knowledge as a result of the use of organizational social media (Von Krogh, 2012).