The Cultural Foundations of Family Business Management: Evidence from Ukraine

This study empirically examines what makes Ukrainian family-firm culture unique by comparing the values and beliefs of Ukrainian family-business members with that of professional bank managers within Ukraine. Morck and Yeung (2003) suggest that the implications of family business are especially relevant for former planned economies such as Ukraine in that government’s social policy on the encouragement or discouragement of privately-held sectors of the economy is yet to be fully formed. Ukraine’s future course in this regard is particularly sensitive as the pre-Soviet Ukrainian economy was almost entirely held in private hands while the Soviet-era economy was almost entirely state-controlled. Family-firm literature stresses the differences between family-firm and professional management in terms of culture, goal-setting, and strategy. Family-firm culture is said to be a resource leading to competitive advantage. This study is based on a survey comparing 76 family-firm members and 99 professional managers. Statistically significant differences between the culture of members of family-owned firms and professional managers were found within Ukraine. Family-firm membership had a significant effect in five culture constructs. We can conclude that differences in Power Distance, Social Cynicism, Social Flexibility, Spirituality and Fate Control describe fundamental aspects of family-firms in Ukraine and may possibly contribute to family-firm competitive advantage as discussed in management literature

Introductory lecture: Mechanochemistry, a versatile synthesis strategy for new materials.

Mechanochemistry deals with reactions induced by the input of mechanical energy - for example by impacts within a vibratory ball mill. The technique has a long history with significant contributions from Ostwald, Carey Lea and, notably, Faraday. Mechanochemistry has subsequently seen application in a variety of areas of materials science including mechanical alloying in metallurgy, the synthesis of complex organic molecules and, more recently, the discovery and development of new solid forms of active pharmaceutical ingredients. This paper overviews the broad areas of application of mechanochemistry, some key features which make it a particularly attractive approach to materials synthesis and some mechanistic aspects highlighted within the literature. A significant part, however, will focus on recent applications in the area of pharmaceuticals and its important role in exploring the rich variety of solid forms available for small, drug-like, molecules.This is the final version. It was first published by RSC at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2014/FD/C4FD00162A#!divAbstrac

K2P2^2 −- A photometry pipeline for the K2 mission

With the loss of a second reaction wheel, resulting in the inability to point continuously and stably at the same field of view, the NASA Kepler satellite recently entered a new mode of observation known as the K2 mission. The data from this redesigned mission present a specific challenge; the targets systematically drift in position on a ~6 hour time scale, inducing a significant instrumental signal in the photometric time series --- this greatly impacts the ability to detect planetary signals and perform asteroseismic analysis. Here we detail our version of a reduction pipeline for K2 target pixel data, which automatically: defines masks for all targets in a given frame; extracts the target's flux- and position time series; corrects the time series based on the apparent movement on the CCD (either in 1D or 2D) combined with the correction of instrumental and/or planetary signals via the KASOC filter (Handberg & Lund 2014), thus rendering the time series ready for asteroseismic analysis; computes power spectra for all targets, and identifies potential contaminations between targets. From a test of our pipeline on a sample of targets from the K2 campaign 0, the recovery of data for multiple targets increases the amount of potential light curves by a factor ${\geq}10$. Our pipeline could be applied to the upcoming TESS (Ricker et al. 2014) and PLATO 2.0 (Rauer et al. 2013) missions.Comment: 14 pages, 20 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal (Apj

Airborne coherent continuous wave CO2 Doppler lidars for aerosol backscatter measurement

Two focused coherent, continuous wave (CW) lidars have been developed by the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) for airborne and ground-based measurement of aerosol backscatter coefficients. The first of these instruments uses a mixture of CO2 and other gases, and measures backscatter at 10.6 m. The second lidar uses an isotope of carbon dioxide, which enables lasing at 9.1 m. The 10.6 m backscatter measurement serves as a reference to allow variations in backscatter due to aerosol concentration to be distinguished from variations due to spectral variability. The 10.6 m lidar has been used in airborne field programs since 1981. Development of the 9.1 m lidar was completed in early 1989. Recently, both lidars were flown on the NASA/Ames Research Center DC-8 research aircraft in the remote Pacific Basin as part of the NASA GLObal Backscatter Experiment (GLOBE) survey missions. The GLOBE program, of which the survey missions are the centerpieces, supports design and simulation studies for NASA's prospective Laser Atmospheric Wind Sounder (LAWS)

Multidecadal increase in plastic particles in coastal ocean sediments.

We analyzed coastal sediments of the Santa Barbara Basin, California, for historical changes in microplastic deposition using a box core that spanned 1834-2009. The sediment was visually sorted for plastic, and a subset was confirmed as plastic polymers via FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) spectroscopy. After correcting for contamination introduced during sample processing, we found an exponential increase in plastic deposition from 1945 to 2009 with a doubling time of 15 years. This increase correlated closely with worldwide plastic production and southern California coastal population increases over the same period. Increased plastic loading in sediments has unknown consequences for deposit-feeding benthic organisms. This increase in plastic deposition in the post-World War II years can be used as a geological proxy for the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene in the sedimentary record