Project management : learning by breaking the rules

The paper explores project management in action in a large public research organisation – NLAT which decided to change its internal organisation from team-based to project-based organisation a few years ago. A systematic and comparative analysis of 8 projects reveals that adherence to the ISO 9000’s standardized rules of project management - specific staffing and project leaders, definition of milestones ex ante, procedure manuals, and formalized learning accumulation mechanisms - had little to do with the organisations success over recent years: Looking for explanations for this success, the paper focuses on the process of transferring from one project to another, enhancing organisational learning through rules breaking. We identify three elements which encourage the accumulation of knowledge and competencies, as organisational learning: low project core staffing levels which stimulates the circulation of engineers and researchers between projects and blurs project boundaries, implementing and managing thematic projects which build on specific competencies developed in dedicated projects and encouraging ‘bricolage’ to hybridise project management with traditional hierarchical management practices.PROJECT MANAGEMENT;R&D;HIGH TECH;MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Constraining the abundances of complex organics in the inner regions of solar-type protostars

The high abundances of Complex Organic Molecules (COMs) with respect to methanol, the most abundant COM, detected towards low-mass protostars, tend to be underpredicted by astrochemical models. This discrepancy might come from the large beam of the single-dish telescopes, encompassing several components of the studied protostar, commonly used to detect COMs. To address this issue, we have carried out multi-line observations of methanol and several COMs towards the two low-mass protostars NGC1333-IRAS2A and -IRAS4A with the Plateau de Bure interferometer at an angular resolution of 2 arcsec, resulting in the first multi-line detection of the O-bearing species glycolaldehyde and ethanol and of the N-bearing species ethyl cyanide towards low-mass protostars other than IRAS 16293. The high number of detected transitions from COMs (more than 40 methanol transitions for instance) allowed us to accurately derive the source size of their emission and the COMs column densities. The COMs abundances with respect to methanol derived towards IRAS2A and IRAS4A are slightly, but not substantitally, lower than those derived from previous single-dish observations. The COMs abundance ratios do not vary significantly with the protostellar luminosity, over five orders of magnitude, implying that low-mass hot corinos are quite chemically rich as high-mass hot cores. Astrochemical models still underpredict the abundances of key COMs, such as methyl formate or di-methyl ether, suggesting that our understanding of their formation remains incomplete.Comment: 60 pages, 10 figures, 17 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap

Elastic and Raman scattering of 9.0 and 11.4 MeV photons from Au, Dy and In

Monoenergetic photons between 8.8 and 11.4 MeV were scattered elastically and in elastically (Raman) from natural targets of Au, Dy and In.15 new cross sections were measured. Evidence is presented for a slight deformation in the 197Au nucleus, generally believed to be spherical. It is predicted, on the basis of these measurements, that the Giant Dipole Resonance of Dy is very similar to that of 160Gd. A narrow isolated resonance at 9.0 MeV is observed in In.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figure

KPZ in one dimensional random geometry of multiplicative cascades

We prove a formula relating the Hausdorff dimension of a subset of the unit interval and the Hausdorff dimension of the same set with respect to a random path matric on the interval, which is generated using a multiplicative cascade. When the random variables generating the cascade are exponentials of Gaussians, the well known KPZ formula of Knizhnik, Polyakov and Zamolodchikov from quantum gravity appears. This note was inspired by the recent work of Duplantier and Sheffield proving a somewhat different version of the KPZ formula for Liouville gravity. In contrast with the Liouville gravity setting, the one dimensional multiplicative cascade framework facilitates the determination of the Hausdorff dimension, rather than some expected box count dimension.Comment: 14 page

The Value of Sex in Procreative Reasons

Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. This is an open access article distributed under the Supplemental Terms and Conditions for iOpenAccess articles published in Taylor & Francis journals, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A network approach to studying research programmes : mobilizing and coordinating public responses to HIV/AIDS

Based on the analysis of the Medical and Public Health Research programme (Commission of the European Communities), the paper shows how new scientific communities are created in response to the HIV/AIDS problem. We analyze how actors are mobilized (three mobilization modes : public impetus, scientists'initiative, scientists' initiative with public networking) and how their work is coordinated. We defend the hypothesis that these new scientific communities are flexible cooperation networks. In the case of AIDS research, there are only a limited number of network types (the data collection structure, the forum, the thematic partition with harmonization of research practices, the starred around a central facility). The coordination of these scientific cooperative networks passes through fixed and circulating intermediaries. The management of these intermediaries is a major activity for involved actors. thus, our aim is not to study the wider social context, but to analyze networking in response to policy initiatives. (Résumé d'auteur

A spectral line survey in the 2 mm and 1.3 mm windows toward the carbon rich envelope of IRC +10216

We present the results of our spectral line surveys in the 2 mm and 1.3 mm windows toward the carbon rich envelope of IRC +10216. Totally 377 lines are detected, among which 360 lines are assigned to 57 known molecules (including 29 rare isotopomers and 2 cyclic isomers). Only 17 weak lines remain unidentified. Rotational lines of isotopomers 13CCH and HN13C are detected for the first time in IRC +10216. The detection of the formaldehyde lines in this star is also confirmed. Possible abundance difference among the three 13C substituted isotopic isomers of HC3N is reported. Isotopic ratios of C and O are confirmed to be non-solar while those of S and Si to be nearly solar. Column densities have been estimated for 15 molecular species. Modified spectroscopic parameters have been calculated for NaCN, Na13CN, KCN and SiC2. Transition frequencies from the present observations were used to improve the spectroscopic parameters of Si13CC, 29SiC2 and 30SiC2.Comment: 17 pages of text, 18 pages of 14 tables, 35 pages of 4 figures, a typo corrected in Abstrac

Shedding light on the formation of the pre-biotic molecule formamide with ASAI

Formamide (NH2CHO) has been proposed as a pre-biotic precursor with a key role in the emergence of life on Earth. While this molecule has been observed in space, most of its detections correspond to high-mass star-forming regions. Motivated by this lack of investigation in the low-mass regime, we searched for formamide, as well as isocyanic acid (HNCO), in 10 low- and intermediate-mass pre-stellar and protostellar objects. The present work is part of the IRAM Large Programme ASAI (Astrochemical Surveys At IRAM), which makes use of unbiased broadband spectral surveys at millimetre wavelengths. We detected HNCO in all the sources and NH2CHO in five of them. We derived their abundances and analysed them together with those reported in the literature for high-mass sources. For those sources with formamide detection, we found a tight and almost linear correlation between HNCO and NH2CHO abundances, with their ratio being roughly constant -between 3 and 10- across 6 orders of magnitude in luminosity. This suggests the two species are chemically related. The sources without formamide detection, which are also the coldest and devoid of hot corinos, fall well off the correlation, displaying a much larger amount of HNCO relative to NH2CHO. Our results suggest that, while HNCO can be formed in the gas phase during the cold stages of star formation, NH2CHO forms most efficiently on the mantles of dust grains at these temperatures, where it remains frozen until the temperature rises enough to sublimate the icy grain mantles. We propose hydrogenation of HNCO as a likely formation route leading to NH2CHO.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures. Accepted by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ

Lognormal scale invariant random measures

In this article, we consider the continuous analog of the celebrated Mandelbrot star equation with lognormal weights. Mandelbrot introduced this equation to characterize the law of multiplicative cascades. We show existence and uniqueness of measures satisfying the aforementioned continuous equation; these measures fall under the scope of the Gaussian multiplicative chaos theory developed by J.P. Kahane in 1985 (or possibly extensions of this theory). As a by product, we also obtain an explicit characterization of the covariance structure of these measures. We also prove that qualitative properties such as long-range independence or isotropy can be read off the equation.Comment: 31 pages; Probability Theory and Related Fields (2012) electronic versio