Making it Work at Work: Mediation\u27s Impact on Employee/Employer Relationships and Mediator Neutrality

This Comment discusses the ADR process of mediation in the employment setting, specifically addressing its benefits and effects on the employer/employee relationship and the potential for a non-neutral mediator who is paid by, or has some previous tie to, one of the parties. Section IA examines judicial and legislative views of ADR and mediation. IB discusses mediation\u27s effectiveness in the workplace. Section II discusses the mediation process in an employment dispute. Section III discusses the effects of mediation on the employer and employee, empirical studies, the neutrality of mediators, and potential remedies. Section IV discusses neutrality in the mediation process. Section V concludes that mediation is a cost and time effective alternative to traditional litigation and is increasingly utilized by employers

From CAD and RP to innovative manufacturing

From CAD and Virtual Prototyping, there are already available many Rapid Prototyping (RP) techniques to produce physical, hand hold able parts. A brief overview is presented of some important aspects regarding how to get a good 3D solid model, how to transfer it to RP machines and how to produce quickly a physical prototype. The RP models could be used for different downstream applications. The paper gives some alternative tooling routes, depending on some criteria, such as: volume production, material and complexity of the parts. The RP models could be used as master models for vacuum casting, metal spraying, investment casting and other innovative manufacturing techniques

Using rapid prototyping to verify design for assembly

Design for assembly (DFA) is a well-establish technique that has proved beneficial in many companies in different manufacturing sectors. It aims to simplify the assembly of a product by reducing the number of components and by making sure that they fit together easily. Often, a DFA analysis will show a theoretical improvement in the assemblability of a product, but the re-design is not implemented because there is no way of verifying the findings of the analysis. Rapid prototyping (RP) enables physical models to be made directly from CAD data in a relatively short period of time. Using RP, it is possible to build the re-designed product and test the accuracy of the DFA analysis. This paper describes the procedure that can be followed to achieve this and demonstrates its practicality through use of a case study

Analysis of growth characteristics in short-term divergently selected Japanese quail

This study was carried out to examine the effect of short-term selection for 5-weeks of age body weight in divergent lines of Japanese quail. Growth curves for both sexes within each selection group resembled the general sigmoid shape of a typical growth curve. Gompertz model curves and the observed growth curves were very similar. In both males and females the parameter estimates of the Gompertz growth curve were obtained with a high determination coefficient (0.9898 ≥ R2 ≥ 0.9840). Sex differences in asymptotic weight were found to be significant across lines. Similarly, in both sexes a significant divergent selection effect was determined for parameter A. The growth rate in all the Japanese quail lines was significantly higher in males than in females. There was also a significant increase in growth rate of the females selected for increased 5-week body weight over the control females, as well as a significant decline in growth rate of males selected for decreased 5-week body weight compared to the unselected control group. Keywords: Gompertz model; growth curve; asymmetric response;growth rate South African Journal of Animal Sciences Vol. 35 (2) 2005: pp.83-8

Wind energy curtailment utilisation with a storage technology : applying cost-benefit base analysis in Scottish wind farms

Growing concern about global warming has been revealing its impact gradually over the last decade. Excessive use of fossil fuels has been shown as one of the most significant reason of the global warming. As a mitigation measure, deployment of renewable energy resources is appeared to be an essential energy option. In the last decade, the world witnessed the considerable deployement of the renewable energy resources to meet energy need and wind energy has a vital role within this change. However, as the use of renewable energy sources grows up, coming across some challenges having an impact on the supply and demand balance is inevitable. As the wind energy is non-dispatchable resource, minimizing wind energy curtailment is an important part to harness wind energy efficiently. Deployment of storage technologies for wind energy with supporting policies could help to use wind energy wisely

Techno-economic analysis of on-site energy storage units to mitigate wind energy curtailment : a case study in Scotland

Wind energy plays a major role in decarbonisation of the electricity sector and supports achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Over the last decade, the wind energy deployments have grown steadily, accounting for more than one fourth of the annual electricity generation in countries like the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany. However, as the share of wind energy increases, system operators face challenges in managing excessive wind generation due to its nondispatchable nature. Currently, the most common practice is wind energy curtailment in which wind farm operators receive constraint payments to reduce their renewable energy production. This practice not only leads to wastage of large volumes of renewable energy, but also the associated financial cost is reflected to rate payers in the form of increased electricity bills. On-site energy storage technologies come to the forefront as a technology option to minimise wind energy curtailment and to harness wind energy in a more efficient way. To that end, this paper, first, systematically evaluates different energy storage options for wind energy farms. Second, a depth analysis of curtailment and constraint payments of major wind energy farms in Scotland are presented. Third, using actual wind and market datasets, a techno-economic analysis is conducted to examine the relationship between on-site energy storage size and the amount of curtailment. The results show that, similar to recent deployments, lithium-ion technology is best suited for on-site storage. As case studies, Whitelee and Gordon bush wind farms in Scotland are chosen. The most suitable storage capacities for 20 years payback period is calculated as follows: (i) the storage size for the Gordonbush wind farm is 100 MWh and almost 19% of total curtailment can be avoided and (ii) the storage size for the Whitlee farm is 125 MWh which can reduce the curtailment by 20.2%. The outcomes of this study will shed light into analysing curtailment reduction potential of future wind farms including floating islands, seaports, and other floating systems

Mejora en el proceso de desarrollo de software en una compañia de seguros

El proyecto tiene por finalidad proponer cambios en la gesti?n de los proyectos solicitados tanto del Planeamiento Estrat?gico anual as? como los requerimientos no programados a la unidad de Inform?tica de la compa??a de seguros Precavidos Peru a fin de mejorar su eficiencia. El mercado de servicios enfrenta un desaf?o ante sus clientes, ya que se trata de un ?intangible? que se ?materializara? en la ocurrencia de un evento no deseado (siniestro). Por ello, el esfuerzo de la empresa se enfoca en reformular procesos, basados en la satisfacci?n del cliente. Mediante la implementaci?n del enfoque de Gesti?n de Procesos de negocio se han agrupado e identificado el campo de acci?n de la unidad de Inform?tica a fin de proponer mejoras a nivel de cambios en el flujo de procesos y la inclusi?n de indicadores de gesti?n que permitan el seguimiento. En el Cap?tulo 1, mostraremos el an?lisis resultante del enfoque BPM, a trav?s del uso de la notaci?n BPMN y diagramas desarrollados mediante la herramienta BIZAGI Asimismo, los resultados de la simulaci?n de escenarios a fin de medir el impacto de las soluciones propuestas. En el Cap?tulo 2, se analiza e identifica problemas bas?ndose en el modelo CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) y las ?reas de procesos PP y PMC. As? mismo, se proponen las soluciones a la problem?tica detectada. En el Cap?tulo 3, se muestra la implementaci?n del sistema de gesti?n de calidad, pol?tica y objetivos de la unidad de inform?tica. Tambi?n se muestran los formatos dise?ados de acuerdo a la norma ISO 9001:2000 ac?pite 4.2.4 que permitir?n el control de los registros y proveer? mecanismos de control de costo y tiempo de los recursos externos.Tesi

On acceptance conditions for membrane systems: characterisations of L and NL

In this paper we investigate the affect of various acceptance conditions on recogniser membrane systems without dissolution. We demonstrate that two particular acceptance conditions (one easier to program, the other easier to prove correctness) both characterise the same complexity class, NL. We also find that by restricting the acceptance conditions we obtain a characterisation of L. We obtain these results by investigating the connectivity properties of dependency graphs that model membrane system computations

AutoCoEv-A High-Throughput In Silico Pipeline for Predicting Inter-Protein Coevolution

Protein-protein interactions govern cellular processes via complex regulatory networks, which are still far from being understood. Thus, identifying and understanding connections between proteins can significantly facilitate our comprehension of the mechanistic principles of protein functions. Coevolution between proteins is a sign of functional communication and, as such, provides a powerful approach to search for novel direct or indirect molecular partners. However, an evolutionary analysis of large arrays of proteins in silico is a highly time-consuming effort that has limited the usage of this method for protein pairs or small protein groups. Here, we developed AutoCoEv, a user-friendly, open source, computational pipeline for the search of coevolution between a large number of proteins. By driving 15 individual programs, culminating in CAPS2 as the software for detecting coevolution, AutoCoEv achieves a seamless automation and parallelization of the workflow. Importantly, we provide a patch to the CAPS2 source code to strengthen its statistical output, allowing for multiple comparison corrections and an enhanced analysis of the results. We apply the pipeline to inspect coevolution among 324 proteins identified to be located at the vicinity of the lipid rafts of B lymphocytes. We successfully detected multiple coevolutionary relations between the proteins, predicting many novel partners and previously unidentified clusters of functionally related molecules. We conclude that AutoCoEv, can be used to predict functional interactions from large datasets in a time- and cost-efficient manner