Maximizing the good and minimizing the bad: relationships in organizations

In this chapter we introduce the complexities of relationships in organizations, and outline why they are important to study. We discuss the main themes of this book providing a brief overview of the chapters and making links between them. The chapters canvas a wide range of organizational relationships, both positive and fruitful, and dysfunctional and damaging

Bis maltolato oxovanadium (BMOV) and ischemia/reperfusion-induced acute kidney injury in rats

The aim of the present study was to test the potential protective effects of the organic vanadium salt bis (maltolato) oxovanadium (BMOV; 15 mg/kg) in the context of renal ischemia/reperfusion (30 min of ischemia) and its effects on renal oxygenation and renal function in the acute phase of reperfusion (up to 90 min post-ischemia). Ischemia was established in anesthetized and mechanically ventilated male Wistar rats by renal artery clamping. Renal microvascular and venous oxygenation were measured using phosphorimetry. Creatinine clearance rate, sodium reabsorption, and renal oxygen handling efficiency were considered markers for renal function. The main findings were that BMOV did not affect the systemic and renal hemodynamic and oxygenation variables and partially protected renal sodium reabsorption. Pretreatment with the organic vanadium compound BMOV did not protect the kidney from I/R injur

On the accuracy of language trees

Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical, phonological, syntactic) features or characters for many different languages. From this perspective the reconstruction of language trees is an example of inverse problems: starting from present, incomplete and often noisy, information, one aims at inferring the most likely past evolutionary history. A fundamental issue in inverse problems is the evaluation of the inference made. A standard way of dealing with this question is to generate data with artificial models in order to have full access to the evolutionary process one is going to infer. This procedure presents an intrinsic limitation: when dealing with real data sets, one typically does not know which model of evolution is the most suitable for them. A possible way out is to compare algorithmic inference with expert classifications. This is the point of view we take here by conducting a thorough survey of the accuracy of reconstruction methods as compared with the Ethnologue expert classifications. We focus in particular on state-of-the-art distance-based methods for phylogeny reconstruction using worldwide linguistic databases. In order to assess the accuracy of the inferred trees we introduce and characterize two generalizations of standard definitions of distances between trees. Based on these scores we quantify the relative performances of the distance-based algorithms considered. Further we quantify how the completeness and the coverage of the available databases affect the accuracy of the reconstruction. Finally we draw some conclusions about where the accuracy of the reconstructions in historical linguistics stands and about the leading directions to improve it.Comment: 36 pages, 14 figure

Two-Fermion Bound States within the Bethe-Salpeter Approach

To solve the spinor-spinor Bethe-Salpeter equation in Euclidean space we propose a novel method related to the use of hyperspherical harmonics. We suggest an appropriate extension to form a new basis of spin-angular harmonics that is suitable for a representation of the vertex functions. We present a numerical algorithm to solve the Bethe-Salpeter equation and investigate in detail the properties of the solution for the scalar, pseudoscalar and vector meson exchange kernels including the stability of bound states. We also compare our results to the non relativistic ones and to the results given by light front dynamics.Comment: 32 pages, XIII Tables, 8 figure