SUPPORTING FINANCIAL DATA WAREHOUSE DEVELOPMENT: A COMMUNICATION THEORY-BASED APPROACH

Data warehouses increasingly play important roles in the information technology landscape of the financial industry. However, semantic heterogeneity is high in banking – data is defined differently by different banks, business units, and users. Therefore data integration in financial data warehouse development projects relies on the knowledge, know-how, and judgment of human experts. Up to now, methodical support is missing for the communication process among experts that determine and negotiate a shared understanding of requirements. In contrast to ontologydriven or schema-matching approaches proposing the automatic resolution of differences ex-post, we introduce an approach that addresses data integration already in early project phases. Our approach supports developing shared understanding of domain concepts and data fields in financial data warehouse projects, good communication of all participants while the project progresses, and early detection of errors within projects. This way, we prevent problems that result from the ex-post resolution of semantic heterogeneity

Co-Creative Action Research Experiments—A Careful Method for Causal Inference and Societal Impact

The rigor-versus-relevance debate in the world of academia is, by now, an old-time classic that does not seem to go away so easily. The grassroots movement Responsible Research in Business and Management, for instance, is a very active and prominent advocate of the need to change current research practices in the management domain, broadly defined. One of its main critiques is that current research practices are not apt to address day-to-day management challenges, nor do they allow such management challenges to feed into academic research. In this paper, we address this issue, and present a research design, referred to as CARE, that is aimed at building a bridge from rigor to relevance, and vice versa. In so doing, we offer a template for conducting rigorous research with immediate impact, contributing to solving issues that businesses are struggling with through a design that facilitates causal inference

Procedural Incrementalism: A Model for International Bankruptcy

From Parmalat to Yukos, the pace of cross-border bankruptcy filings has been accelerating. Scholarly attention and policy reform have increasingly focused on the financial distress of enterprises with assets and creditors dispersed throughout multiple jurisdictions. Yet despite ongoing globalization and economic integration, insolvency law has remained stubbornly resistant to treaties and other international efforts to design some form of unified, global regime for resolving private financial defaults. Part of the reason progress remains so elusive is that two competing paradigms of international bankruptcy – universalism and territorialism – continue to divide academics and policymakers alike. Proposed treaties premised on one approach have failed to attract proponents of the other. This article offers a model for how international bankruptcy efforts might find support notwithstanding the ongoing divide between universalism and territorialism. It constructs this model in part by looking at the startling success of one specific reform: the recently adopted UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency, which is already being proposed for domestic enactment as Title 15 to the United States Bankruptcy Code. By looking at what made this specific mechanism of bankruptcy reform successful in the face of so many past failures, and in the face of ongoing normative disagreement about international bankruptcy system design, the article seeks to extrapolate from the Model Law’s unique characteristics a general model for global bankruptcy reform. The principal attributes that made the Model Law able to break the international bankruptcy loggerhead, this article argues, were a modesty of scope and focus on procedural law – “procedural incrementalism.” By adopting such an approach, the drafters of the Model Law enabled skeptical territorial states a chance to acclimate to a form of proto-universalism – a system that is not universalist in the strict, traditional sense, but one that engages, this article contends, the two theoretical cores of the universalist model. Drawing on some insights of modern conflicts theory, this article further argues that the focus on low stakes, procedural matters at the periphery of bankruptcy law enabled the drafters to earn concessions of regulatory sovereignty – a necessary condition of universalism – that might otherwise have been impossible. The article tests its model of procedural incrementalism against very recent reform efforts that have built upon the growing momentum of the Model Law, such as UNCITRAL’s voluminous Draft Legislative Guide for best practices bankruptcy, and finds some preliminary support

Procedural Incrementalism: A Model for International Bankruptcy

The headline-grabbing business failures of late have brought increased attention to the relatively unresolved area of multinational bankruptcies. Parmalat, Global Crossing, and United Airlines are among the few international juggernauts that have foundered. In the financial meltdowns of these cross-border institutions, assets and creditors are dispersed throughout commercial environments that rarely end neatly at national borders. There has been heated debate, both in scholarly literature and the practical battlefield, over how best to resolve these transnational insolvencies, and there is nothing yet approaching a consensus. Reform efforts of various stripes have almost uniformly failed to gain meaningful international support. At the hub of this inability to generate international consensus is a theoretical rift. The essence of disagreement revolves around the competing theories of territorialism and universalism as the preferred normative models for resolving multinational failures. While territorialism counsels following strict sovereign borders in allocating regulatory jurisdiction among nations over globally dispersed assets, universalism embraces a one-law approach: the application of one exporting country\u27s law extraterritorially to other receiving jurisdictions. Given that this theoretical debate between territorialism and universalism remains ongoing and unresolved, we should be unsurprised at the historic inability to craft an international agreement among nations, by treaty or other means. Indeed, we should remain pessimistic in our prognosis. Nevertheless, an important and fresh development in international bankruptcy has recently defied our bearish expectations. After decades of disagreement, one recent attempt at reform has bucked the trend of failure and actually won widespread international support: the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency (Model Law). Since the Model Law, there has been an explosion of international bankruptcy reform. These efforts include UNCITRAL\u27s best practices Draft Legislative Guide, designed for countries seeking to revise their insolvency laws; the American Law Institute\u27s (ALI\u27s) Transnational Insolvency Project (TIP), a series of proposals for crossborder insolvencies in the three NAFTA countries; and the European Union\u27s Insolvency Regulation, a legal enactment covering intra- European Union multinational bankruptcies. Accordingly, these recent developments present something of a puzzle: why, in the face of so many false starts, and especially in the face of ongoing disagreement over the theoretical benefits of universalism compared to territorialism, did international bankruptcy reform finally take off? Was it simply a matter of fortuitous historical timing? Was there something specific about the mechanism of the UNCITRAL Model Law (perhaps its status as a model law, as opposed to a treaty, or perhaps its substantive content) that accounted for its ability to break the loggerhead? What makes a mechanism such as a model law effective at galvanizing reform in international bankruptcy law

Computational-designed enzyme for β-tyrosine production in lignin valorization

Lignin is an underutilized sustainable source of aromatic compounds. To valorize the low-value lignin monomers, we proposed an efficient strategy, involving enzymatic conversion from trans-p-hydroxycinnamic acids to generate valued-added canonical and non-canonical aromatic amino acids. Among them, β-amino acids are recognized as building blocks for bioactive natural products and pharmaceutical ingredients due to their attractive antitumor properties. Using computational enzyme design, the (R)-β-selective phenylalanine aminomutase from Taxus chinensis (TchPAM) was successfully mutated to accept β-tyrosine as the substrate, as well as to generate the (R)-β-tyrosine with excellent enantiopurity (ee > 99%) as the unique product from trans-p-hydroxycinnamic acid. Moreover, the kinetic parameters were determined for the reaction of four Y424 enzyme variants with the synthesis of different phenylalanine and tyrosine enantiomers. In the ammonia elimination reaction of (R)-β-tyrosine, the variants Y424N and Y424C displayed a two-fold increased catalytic efficiency of the wild type. In this work, a binding pocket in the active site, including Y424, K427, I431, and E455, was examined for its influence on the β-enantioselectivity of this enzyme family. Combining the upstream lignin depolymerization and downstream production, a sustainable value chain based on lignin is enabled. In summary, we report a β-tyrosine synthesis process from a monolignol component, offering a new way for lignin valorization by biocatalyst modification

Procedural Incrementalism: A Model for International Bankruptcy

From Parmalat to Yukos, the pace of cross-border bankruptcy filings has been accelerating. Scholarly attention and policy reform have increasingly focused on the financial distress of enterprises with assets and creditors dispersed throughout multiple jurisdictions. Yet despite ongoing globalization and economic integration, insolvency law has remained stubbornly resistant to treaties and other international efforts to design some form of unified, global regime for resolving private financial defaults. Part of the reason progress remains so elusive is that two competing paradigms of international bankruptcy – universalism and territorialism – continue to divide academics and policymakers alike. Proposed treaties premised on one approach have failed to attract proponents of the other. This article offers a model for how international bankruptcy efforts might find support notwithstanding the ongoing divide between universalism and territorialism. It constructs this model in part by looking at the startling success of one specific reform: the recently adopted UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency, which is already being proposed for domestic enactment as Title 15 to the United States Bankruptcy Code. By looking at what made this specific mechanism of bankruptcy reform successful in the face of so many past failures, and in the face of ongoing normative disagreement about international bankruptcy system design, the article seeks to extrapolate from the Model Law’s unique characteristics a general model for global bankruptcy reform. The principal attributes that made the Model Law able to break the international bankruptcy loggerhead, this article argues, were a modesty of scope and focus on procedural law – “procedural incrementalism.” By adopting such an approach, the drafters of the Model Law enabled skeptical territorial states a chance to acclimate to a form of proto-universalism – a system that is not universalist in the strict, traditional sense, but one that engages, this article contends, the two theoretical cores of the universalist model. Drawing on some insights of modern conflicts theory, this article further argues that the focus on low stakes, procedural matters at the periphery of bankruptcy law enabled the drafters to earn concessions of regulatory sovereignty – a necessary condition of universalism – that might otherwise have been impossible. The article tests its model of procedural incrementalism against very recent reform efforts that have built upon the growing momentum of the Model Law, such as UNCITRAL’s voluminous Draft Legislative Guide for best practices bankruptcy, and finds some preliminary support

Comparison of training hard copy and computer job-aids: using expert object technology

The purpose of this study was to develop a computer job-aid for industrial trainers from a hard copy version using an object-based expert-system, and to test the effectiveness of the resulting training process against the traditional paper version. The objectives allowed for this development, pilot-testing of the expert computer job-aid, and comparison of the computer job-aid for: (a.) content understanding and use, (b.) completion time, and (c.) participants\u27 satisfaction. Computer programming methods allow flow chart, and procedural development in the object paradigm. These methods closely resemble problem solving methods used for diagnostics and traditional job-aids. Training methods also allow for the use of holistic computer methods together with traditional training development. Logically, if the two methods are similar then the results of the application should be similar. A posttest only quasi-experimental design was used to compare results of the posttest to the objectives to demonstrate effectiveness of the two methods of training. Two groups of 12 professional persons were taken from industry in North East Tennessee. Twelve took the traditional paper instruction and 12 took the expert computer job-aid. The results indicate that both methods worked equally well. Neither method had an advantage. The paper method took less time to administer and the computer method was better perceived by the user

Aerospace Medicine and Biology. A continuing bibliography (Supplement 226)

This bibliography lists 129 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in November 1981