A Comparative Study of the Effect of Blogs and Email on Virtual Team Performance

Virtual Teams (VTs) offer great advantages but have different challenges compared with co-located teams. This study explores using blogs and email to see if improvements can be made to virtual team effectiveness. This preliminary study is qualitative in nature and uses a quasi-experiment to compare 2 teams performing the same project; one uses email while the other uses a blog tool. Once the project was complete the participants filled out a Q-sort and a short survey. Additional analysis of the artefacts generated by the experiments also form part of the result set. The key benefits of using the blog were hoped to be; increase team trust, increase team performance and output, increase team satisfaction and realise a communication tool that could be used in a virtual team environment. The main findings were; the qualities of the output deliverable from both teams were nearly the same; those using the blog reported ‘having a sense of fun’ and ‘individual satisfaction’, while the email team reported ‘the current status of the project was easily viewed’

On maximum entropy priors and a most likely likelihood in auditing

There are two basic questions auditors and accountants must consider when developing test and estimation applications using Bayes' Theorem: What prior probability function should be used and what likelihood function should be used. In this paper we propose to use a maximum entropy prior probability function MEP with the most likely likelihood function MLL in the Quasi-Bayesian QB model introduced by McCray (1984). It is defined on an adequate parameter. Thus procedure only needs an expected value of θ0 known (in this paper the expected tainting) to obtain a MEP all an auditor or accountant need to supply are the range, as with any other prior, and the expected tainting, θ0. We will see some practical applications of the methodology proposed about internal control evaluation in auditing

Las doleritas toleiticas triasicas del sector SE de la Cordillera Ibérica : Petrología y Geoquímica

Las doleritas toleíticas aflorantes en diapiros triásicos del SE de la Cordillera Ibérica (Alfarp, Quesa y Lugar Nuevo de Fenollet, SE de Valencia) representan líquidos diferenciados (valores bajos en Ni, Cr y mg*) emplazados como sills, de escaso espesor, por debajo de sedimentos (arcillas, margas y yesos), poco consolidados, del límite Triásico superior-Hettangiense. Su composición mineral y geoquímica, con afinidad toleítica continental y similitud a MORB, evidencia el carácter menos diferenciado de las doleritas de Alfarp, respecto a las de Quesa, siendo las doleritas aflorantes en Fenollet las que presentan una composición más evolucionada. Estas doleritas son la expresión de un magmatismo poco profundo, asociado al inicio del rifting mesozoico, desarrollado en la zona de intersección del rift celtibérico y el borde NE del surco bético. Este magmatismo presenta claras diferencias respecto a las doleritas toleíticas, menos diferenciadas, de los dominios pirenaico y bético.The tholeiitic dolerites that crop out in three diapirs of the SE of the Iberian Chain (Alfarp, Quesa and Lugar Nuevo de Fenollet, Valencia), are the expression of evolved (iow Ni, Cr and mg* values) basic magmas, injected into poorly lithified sediments (iutites, marls and gypsum) which represent the Upper Triassic (Keuper facies)-Hettangian boundary, developing sills with reduced thickness. Their mineral and whole-rock geochemical compositions indicate a continental tholeiitic affinity and certain similarities to a MORB composition and, on the other hand, show that the Alfarp dolerites represent the less evolved compositions, whereas the Fenollet dolerites show a significantly greater differentiation. These rocks are the expression of a shallow magmatism, related to the initial stages of the mesozoic rifting that affected the intersection of the Celtiberian Rift with the Betic Graben. This magmatism is clearly different of the isochronous tholeiitic magmatism (dolerites) which crops out at the Pyrenees and [email protected]

Nature-inspired heuristics for the multiple-vehicle selective pickup and delivery problem under maximum profit and incentive fairness criteria

This work focuses on wide-scale freight transportation logistics motivated by the sharp increase of on-line shopping stores and the upsurge of Internet as the most frequently utilized selling channel during the last decade. This huge ecosystem of one-click-away catalogs has ultimately unleashed the need for efficient algorithms aimed at properly scheduling the underlying transportation resources in an efficient fashion, especially over the so-called last mile of the distribution chain. In this context the selective pickup and delivery problem focuses on determining the optimal subset of packets that should be picked from its origin city and delivered to their corresponding destination within a given time frame, often driven by the maximization of the total profit of the courier service company. This manuscript tackles a realistic variant of this problem where the transportation fleet is composed by more than one vehicle, which further complicates the selection of packets due to the subsequent need for coordinating the delivery service from the command center. In particular the addressed problem includes a second optimization metric aimed at reflecting a fair share of the net benefit among the company staff based on their driven distance. To efficiently solve this optimization problem, several nature-inspired metaheuristic solvers are analyzed and statistically compared to each other under different parameters of the problem setup. Finally, results obtained over a realistic scenario over the province of Bizkaia (Spain) using emulated data will be explored so as to shed light on the practical applicability of the analyzed heuristics

Climatic vulnerabilities and ecological preferences of soil invertebrates across biomes.

Unlike plants and vertebrates, the ecological preferences, and potential vulnerabilities of soil invertebrates to environmental change, remain poorly understood in terrestrial ecosystems globally. We conducted a cross-biome survey including 83 locations across six continents to advance our understanding of the ecological preferences and vulnerabilities of the diversity of dominant and functionally important soil invertebrate taxa, including nematodes, arachnids and rotifers. The diversity of invertebrates was analyzed through amplicon sequencing. Vegetation and climate drove the diversity and dominant taxa of soil invertebrates. Our results suggest that declines in forest cover and plant diversity, and reductions in plant production associated with increases in aridity, can result in reductions of the diversity of soil invertebrates in a drier and more managed world. We further developed global atlases of the diversity of these important soil invertebrates, which were cross-validated using an independent database. Our study advances the current knowledge of the ecological preferences and vulnerabilities of the diversity and presence of functionally important soil invertebrates in soils from across the globe. This information is fundamental for improving and prioritizing conservation efforts of soil genetic resources and management policies

Numerical Solution of a Complete Formulation of Flow in a Perfusion Bone-Tissue Bioreactor Using Lattice Boltzmann Equation Method

We report the key findings from numerical solutions of a model of transport within an established perfusion bioreactor design. The model includes a complete formulation of transport with fully coupled convection-diffusion and scaffold cell attachment. It also includes the experimentally determined internal (Poly-L-Lactic Acid (PLLA)) scaffold boundary, together with the external vessel and flow-port boundaries. Our findings, obtained using parallel lattice Boltzmann equation method, relate to (i) whole-device, steady-state flow and species distribution and (ii) the properties of the scaffold. In particular the results identify which elements of the problem may be addressed by coarse grained methods such as the Darcy approximation and those which require a more complete description. The work demonstrates that appropriate numerical modelling will make a key contribution to the design and development of large scale bioreactors.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure