Discursive resources: top managers' identities and the long-term survival of their organisations

This paper represents an attempt to understand the dynamics of the identity work in the context of the challenges top managers have to address. Managers' discursive resources influence what they notice and also the interpretation of what is noticed. Their ability to understand and challenge their discursive resources is crucial because the persistence of categories and metaphors that depicts a globalized world where they do not have capacity to react may explain the decline of their organizations. The stories they tell ground their emotions and their identities and then they see the world and themselves through them. Hence, their discursive resources and their emotions impact on the long-term survival of their organizations through the strategic exchange between top managers and organizations. The paper raises queries about the discursive resources that top managers use to define their identities, and how these identities may affect the long-term survival of organizations. The findings from this study add to the theoretical knowledge of the sense-making literature. They have practical consequences for the textile sector in Portugal and how strategic issues are addressed. This is in allowing an understanding of the influence that discursive resources have in managers' identity construction and the effects of their identities on the long-term survival of their organizations

Taming the resistive switching in Fe/MgO/V/Fe magnetic tunnel junctions: An ab initio study

A possible mechanism for the resistive switching observed experimentally in Fe/MgO/V/Fe junctions is presented. Ab initio total energy calculations within the local density approximation and pseudopotential theory shows that by moving the oxygen ions across the MgO/V interface one obtains a metastable state. It is argued that this state can be reached by applying an electric field across the interface. In addition, the ground state and the metastable state show different electric conductances. The latter results are discussed in terms of the changes of the density of states at the Fermi level and the charge transfer at the interface due to the oxygen ion motion

A Uniform Approximation for the Coherent State Propagator using a Conjugate Application of the Bargmann Representation

We propose a conjugate application of the Bargmann representation of quantum mechanics. Applying the Maslov method to the semiclassical connection formula between the two representations, we derive a uniform semiclassical approximation for the coherent state propagator which is finite at phase space caustics.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

A New Form of Path Integral for the Coherent States Representation and its Semiclassical Limit

The overcompleteness of the coherent states basis leads to a multiplicity of representations of Feynman's path integral. These different representations, although equivalent quantum mechanically, lead to different semiclassical limits. Two such semiclassical formulas were derived in \cite{Bar01} for the two corresponding path integral forms suggested by Klauder and Skagerstan in \cite{Klau85}. Each of these formulas involve trajectories governed by a different classical representation of the Hamiltonian operator: the P representation in one case and the Q representation in other. In this paper we construct a third representation of the path integral whose semiclassical limit involves directly the Weyl representation of the Hamiltonian operator, i.e., the classical Hamiltonian itself.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments

Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process. This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Complications of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy in dogs and cats receiving corticosteroid treatment

BACKGROUND: Corticosteroid treatment is commonly required in veterinary patients for treatment of inflammatory, immune‐mediated, neurologic, and neoplastic diseases, which also may require assisted enteral nutrition via percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG). OBJECTIVE: To evaluate complications associated with PEG use in dogs and cats receiving corticosteroid treatment. ANIMALS: Forty‐two animals were included in the study: 12 dogs and 2 cats in the steroid group and 26 dogs and 2 cats in the control group. METHODS: Medical records, between January 2006 and March 2015, were reviewed. Patients were included if the PEG tube was in use for at least 24 hours and if complete medical records were available. Patients were assigned to the control group if they were not treated with corticosteroids during PEG use or to the steroid group if they had received corticosteroids during PEG tube use. Complications were classified as minor, moderate, and major in severity. Maximum severity complication rate was compared between groups. RESULTS: The general prevalence of complications was found to be similar between groups (P = .306), but in the steroid group, 43% of the cases developed a major severity complication compared with 18% of the control group (P = .054). CONCLUSION AND CLINICAL IMPORTANCE: Owners of dogs and cats receiving corticosteroids, in which PEG is planned, should be counseled about possible complications beyond those associated with PEG tube usage alone