Announced inspections are being incorporated into restaurant inspection programs to support active managerial control; however, their effectiveness is unknown. The study reported here examined the results of 1314 inspections conducted from June 2001 through August 2003 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Of these, 343 were routine inspections that preceded and 157 were routine inspections that followed an announced inspection, and 501 were routine inspections of restaurants that did not undergo an announced inspection. Significant reductions in frequency of citations for critical violations in two food safety categories--(1) the person-in-charge demonstrates knowledge of foodborne-disease prevention and (2) prevention of cross-contamination--were seen in establishments that had undergone an announced inspection (relative risk [RR] of 0.7, p = .007, and RR of 0.4, p = .001, respectively). The frequency of citation for these critical violations did not decline in establishments that did not undergo an announced inspection. Announced inspections appear to be effective in supporting active managerial control and represent a promising approach to improving food safety in restaurants.
This article investigates the announced refusal to answer as a form of dispreferred and challenging response in broadcast political interviews. The aim is to study how the rightness and wrongness of conduct is dealt with in situations of announced refusal. More specifically, the paper focuses on: (1) announced refusal as a particular type of conduct; (2) the orientation to norms and accountability in situations of announced refusal; (3) how the legitimacy of politics and journalism is negotiated in broadcast interviews. The data consist of 23 cases from Swedish election campaigns, and the analysis is based on Conversation Analysis, focusing on how the participants treat themselves and others as normatively accountable. The study indicates that the politicians understand themselves as accountable and avoid hostile actions in the interviews. Their refusals are designed mainly to be understood as appropriate distancing actions without explicitly complaining about the interviewers’ conduct.
Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that when a firm gets into trouble due to lagging sales and rising costs, cutting the size of the organization to reduce fat and waste is a normal and effective response. In this study, evidence was found to suggest that just the opposite might be true. The financial performance of Fortune 100 companies was tracked over a five‐year period—two years prior to the announced layoff, the year of the layoff announcement, and two years following it. Contrary to expectations, the results indicate that financial performance worsened , rather than improved, following announced layoffs. Strategic and human resource implications for the management of corporate downsizing are provided.
The familiar model for determining the optimal ordering strategy, given an announced price increase, assumes that the buyer has an opportunity to place an order at the end of the next economic order quantity cycle before the price increase takes effect. This paper extends the price increase model by relaxing the requirement on the timing of the price increase. Specifically, we develop optimal ordering strategies for situations where the price increase becomes effective at any future specified time. We also calculate savings for alternate ordering strategies.
A new contention-based broadcast multiaccess protocol called announced retransmission random access (ARRA) is introduced and analyzed in this paper. The proposed class of protocols increases the capacity of a slotted random access channel by adding a small amount of potentially useful control information to every message transmission. In particular, the ARRA technique requires users to announce the intended location of their potential retransmission slot (to be used in the event of a collision) over a low-rate announcement subchannel, so that conflicts between new and retransmitted messages can be prevented. The proposed protocols provide significant capacity improvements over conventional contention protocols, without sacrificing the simplicity and operational convenience associated with random access. It is shown that with a modest amount of processing and storage at the terminals, capacities in the range of 0.5-0.6 can be achieved, as compared with 0.37 for slotted ALOHA and 0.4-0.5 for the more efficient tree algorithm-based collision resolution algorithms (CRA's). Specifically, the basic ARRA protocol, in which announced retransmissions take place unconditionally, has a capacity of about 0.53. An improved algorithm (called extended ARRA), which involves aborting predictably unsuccessful retransmissions, has a capacity of 0.6. In addition, because of delay considerations, the proposed ARRA protocols are well suited for operation on satellite channels.
This study examines the economic effect of information security breaches reported in newspapers on publicly traded US corporations. We find limited evidence of an overall negative stock market reaction to public announcements of information security breaches. However, further investigation reveals that the nature of the breach affects this result. We find a highly significant negative market reaction for information security breaches involving unauthorized access to confidential data, but no significant reaction when the breach does not involve confidential information. Thus, stock market participants appear to discriminate across types of breaches when assessing their economic impact on affected firms. These findings are consistent with the argument that the economic consequences of information security breaches vary according to the nature of the underlying assets affected by the breach.
A severe upper respiratory tract syndrome caused by the new coronavirus has now spread to the entire world as a highly contagious pandemic. The large scale explosion of the disease is conventionally traced back to January of this year in the Chinese province of Hubei, the wet markets of the principal city of Wuhan being assumed to have been the specific causative locus of the sudden explosion of the infection. A number of findings that are now coming to light show that this interpretation of the origin and history of the pandemic is overly simplified. A number of variants of the coronavirus would in principle have had the ability to initiate the pandemic well before January of this year. However, even if the COVID-19 had become, so to say, ready, conditions in the local environment would have had to prevail to induce the loss of the biodiversity's "dilution effect" that kept the virus under control, favoring its spillover from its bat reservoir to the human target. In the absence of these appropriate conditions only abortive attempts to initiate the pandemic could possibly occur: a number of them did indeed occur in China, and probably elsewhere as well. These conditions were unfortunately present at the wet marked in Wuhan at the end of last year.
Research indices are used to measure the ability of a researcher and quality of research publications for comparison of research contribution made in a given area/subject. Research indices generally use the number of research publications and the number of citations the papers published by an author during a given observation period. There are a number of research indices commonly used to assess the ability and hence the quantity of research along with the quality of a research publication. Research indices are calculated based on either citation values of research publications of a research scholar or the number of research papers published by a research scholar for a given period. Apart from generally used citation indices like H-index, i10-index, G-index, and based on argument on why certain research publications do not attract citations initially for some years, it is found that the best method of identifying the contribution to research is calculating the annual research index for an author by considering the annual research publications. Recently, we have suggested some of the new research indices used for calculating research productivity of individuals as well as a team of people in an organization which include ARP-Index – (Annual Research Publication Index), RC-Index – (Research Continuation Index), RE-Index (Research expansion Index), Project Productivity Index, and Cost Index. In this paper, we have analysed the affecting factors on these indices by considering four determinant issues which include research organization, researcher, funding agency, and industry using objectives, productivity, and cost as three key parameters. The various factors affecting these newly proposed research indices are discussed by considering their advantages, benefits, constraints, and disadvantages.
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The ability of a researcher and quality of research publications are generally measured by the number of research publications and the number of citations they receive during a given observation period. There are a number of research indices commonly used to assess the ability and hence the quantity of research along with the quality of a research publication. Research indices are calculated based on either citation values of research publications of a research scholar or the number of research papers published by a research scholar for a given period. Apart from generally used citation indices like H-index, i10-index, G-index, and based on argument on why certain research publications do not attract citations initially for some years, it is found that the best method of identifying the contribution to research is calculating the annual research index for an author by considering the annual research publications. Recently, we have suggested some of the new research indices used for calculating research productivity of individuals as well as a team of people in an organization which include ARPIndex – (Annual Research Publication Index), RC-Index – (Research Continuation Index), RE-Index (Research Expansion Index), Project Productivity Index, and Cost Index. In this paper, we have made an attempt to study these five indices by using our own technique of qualitative analysis of a system or concept called ABCD analysis/listing.
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Comparative analysis of molecular sequence data is essential for reconstructing the evolutionary histories of species and inferring the nature and extent of selective forces shaping the evolution of genes and species. Here, we announce the release of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis version 5 (MEGA5), which is a user-friendly software for mining online databases, building sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees, and using methods of evolutionary bioinformatics in basic biology, biomedicine, and evolution. The newest addition in MEGA5 is a collection of maximum likelihood (ML) analyses for inferring evolutionary trees, selecting best-fit substitution models (nucleotide or amino acid), inferring ancestral states and sequences (along with probabilities), and estimating evolutionary rates site-by-site. In computer simulation analyses, ML tree inference algorithms in MEGA5 compared favorably with other software packages in terms of computational efficiency and the accuracy of the estimates of phylogenetic trees, substitution parameters, and rate variation among sites. The MEGA user interface has now been enhanced to be activity driven to make it easier for the use of both beginners and experienced scientists. This version of MEGA is intended for the Windows platform, and it has been configured for effective use on Mac OS X and Linux desktops. It is available free of charge from http://www.megasoftware.net.
Examples of coupled irreversible processes like the thermoelectric phenomena, the transference phenomena in electrolytes and heat conduction in an anisotropic medium are considered. For certain cases of such interaction reciprocal relations have been deduced by earlier writers, e.g., Thomson's theory of thermoelectric phenomena and Helmholtz' theory for the e.m.f. of electrolytic cells with liquid junction. These earlier derivations may be classed as quasi-thermodynamic; in fact, Thomson himself pointed out that his argument was incomplete, and that his relation ought to be established on an experimental basis. A general class of such relations will be derived by a new theoretical treatment from the principle of microscopic reversibility. (\textsection{}\textsection{}1-2.) The analogy with a chemical monomolecular triangle reaction is discussed; in this case a a simple kinetic consideration assuming microscopic reversibility yields a reciprocal relation that is not necessary for fulfilling the requirements of thermodynamics (\textsection{}3). Reciprocal relations for heat conduction in an anisotropic medium are derived from the assumption of microscopic reversibility, applied to fluctuations. (\textsection{}4.) The reciprocal relations can be expressed in terms of a potential, the dissipation-function. Lord Rayleigh's "principle of the least dissipation of energy" is generalized to include the case of anisotropic heat conduction. A further generalization is announced. (\textsection{}5.) The conditions for stationary flow are formulated; the connection with earlier quasi-thermodynamic theories is discussed. (\textsection{}6.) The principle of dynamical reversibility does not apply when (external) magnetic fields or Coriolis forces are present, and the reciprocal relations break down. (\textsection{}7.)
We announce the release of the fourth version of MEGA software, which expands on the existing facilities for editing DNA sequence data from autosequencers, mining Web-databases, performing automatic and manual sequence alignment, analyzing sequence alignments to estimate evolutionary distances, inferring phylogenetic trees, and testing evolutionary hypotheses. Version 4 includes a unique facility to generate captions, written in figure legend format, in order to provide natural language descriptions of the models and methods used in the analyses. This facility aims to promote a better understanding of the underlying assumptions used in analyses, and of the results generated. Another new feature is the Maximum Composite Likelihood (MCL) method for estimating evolutionary distances between all pairs of sequences simultaneously, with and without incorporating rate variation among sites and substitution pattern heterogeneities among lineages. This MCL method also can be used to estimate transition/transversion bias and nucleotide substitution pattern without knowledge of the phylogenetic tree. This new version is a native 32-bit Windows application with multi-threading and multi-user supports, and it is also available to run in a Linux desktop environment (via the Wine compatibility layer) and on Intel-based Macintosh computers under the Parallels program. The current version of MEGA is available free of charge at (http://www.megasoftware.net).
Since its introduction in 2001, MrBayes has grown in popularity as a software package for Bayesian phylogenetic inference using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. With this note, we announce the release of version 3.2, a major upgrade to the latest official release presented in 2003. The new version provides convergence diagnostics and allows multiple analyses to be run in parallel with convergence progress monitored on the fly. The introduction of new proposals and automatic optimization of tuning parameters has improved convergence for many problems. The new version also sports significantly faster likelihood calculations through streaming single-instruction-multiple-data extensions (SSE) and support of the BEAGLE library, allowing likelihood calculations to be delegated to graphics processing units (GPUs) on compatible hardware. Speedup factors range from around 2 with SSE code to more than 50 with BEAGLE for codon problems. Checkpointing across all models allows long runs to be completed even when an analysis is prematurely terminated. New models include relaxed clocks, dating, model averaging across time-reversible substitution models, and support for hard, negative, and partial (backbone) tree constraints. Inference of species trees from gene trees is supported by full incorporation of the Bayesian estimation of species trees (BEST) algorithms. Marginal model likelihoods for Bayes factor tests can be estimated accurately across the entire model space using the stepping stone method. The new version provides more output options than previously, including samples of ancestral states, site rates, site d(N)/d(S) rations, branch rates, and node dates. A wide range of statistics on tree parameters can also be output for visualization in FigTree and compatible software.
President Obama has announced a research initiative that aims to accelerate progress toward a new era of precision medicine, with a near-term focus on cancers and a longer-term aim to generate knowledge applicable to the whole range of health and disease.