Seminar on criminal appeals in the United Kingdom

Conference Report

Seminar on criminal appeals in the United Kingdom     

The role of ISO 9000 in improving the quality of service delivery of Hong Kong's public housing programs

This paper reports on research undertaken in Hong Kong on the impact of IS0 9000 (International Standards Organization 9000 series standards for Quality Management Systems) quality management standards in the improvement and assurance of quality service and products. The Hong Kong Housing Authority provides an appropriate context and database for this research as it has undertaken to implement the IS0 9000 quality management standards across its range of public housing construction and maintenance services and is able to provide the researchers with “before” and “after” scenarios which facilitate measurement of the impact of the standards on service quality.     

Implantation of radio frequency identification device (RFID) microchip in disaster victim identification (DVI)

The tsunami catastrophe of December 2004 left more than 200,000 dead. Disaster victim identification (DVI) teams were presented with the unprecedented challenge of identifying thousands of mostly markedly putrefied and partially skeletised bodies. To this end, an adequate body tagging method is essential. Conventional body bag tagging in terms of writing on body bags and placing of tags inside body bags proved unsatisfactory and problem prone due to consequences of cold storage, formalin (formaldehyde) embalming and body numbers inside storage facilities. The placement of radio frequency identification device (RFID) microchips inside victim bodies provided a practical solution to problems of body tagging and attribution in the DVI setting encountered by the Austrian DVI team in Thailand in early 2005.