How Communication and Control Processes Improve Quality

In order to achieve excellence, an organization should use two key instruments—quality and an effi cient and effective communication process amongst all employees—so it can attain quality management. This chapter aims to examine whether organizational communication and quality are interrelated, in order to answer the following question: Is it necessary to improve communication within an organization so that quality management can be effi ciently and effectively pursued? For this purpose, data were collected through the administration of a questionnaire to the staff of a Portuguese public organization. The fi ndings showed that, in this organization, communication among employees of various sectors is satisfactory and that there is mutual help between them in order to improve the organizational performance

Strategic communication and the entrepreneurial role of the corporate communication officer

Considering the recent evolution of the communication/PR profession in large organizations both private and public, many scholars agree that a process of institutionalization is occurring. In other words, communication’s importance has been growing, reaching in recent years a strategic position as a lever for companies’ governance. A first objective of this chapter is to describe, looking at management and communication/PR literature, how and to what extent communication has become strategic. The main hypothesis is that communication has become strategic within companies’ governance in order to help each organization to develop consistently – mainly in terms of values – within its environment. A second objective is to describe, looking at the entrepreneurial organization theory and communication/PR literature, another side of the strategic evolution of communication, which is to help each organization to develop – mainly in terms of services, products and reputation – as a different, or preferably unique, entity as compared to the other organizations. The evolution of the strategic contribution of communication/PR within organizations’ decision-making has a strong impact on the role that corporate communication officers (CCOs) play in organizations both on the isomorphic and on the entrepreneurial–innovative sides of the communicational activity they carry out to support the evolution of their organizations

Caspase cleavage of the Golgi stacking factor GRASP65 is required for Fas/CD95-mediated apoptosis

GRASP65 (Golgi reassembly and stacking protein of 65 KDa) is a cis-Golgi protein with roles in Golgi structure, membrane trafficking and cell signalling. It is cleaved by caspase-3 early in apoptosis, promoting Golgi fragmentation. We now show that cleavage is needed for Fas-mediated apoptosis: expression of caspase-resistant GRASP65 protects cells, whereas expression of membrane proximal caspase-cleaved GRASP65 fragments dramatically sensitises cells. GRASP65 coordinates passage through the Golgi apparatus of proteins containing C-terminal hydrophobic motifs, via its tandem PDZ type ‘GRASP' domains. Fas/CD95 contains a C-terminal leucine–valine pairing so its trafficking might be coordinated by GRASP65. Mutagenesis of the Fas/CD95 LV motif reduces the number of cells with Golgi-associated Fas/CD95, and generates a receptor that is more effective at inducing apoptosis; however, siRNA-mediated silencing or expression of mutant GRASP65 constructs do not alter the steady state distribution of Fas/CD95. We also find no evidence for a GRASP65–Fas/CD95 interaction at the molecular level. Instead, we find that the C-terminal fragments of GRASP65 produced following caspase cleavage are targeted to mitochondria, and ectopic expression of these sensitises HeLa cells to Fas ligand. Our data suggest that GRASP65 cleavage promotes Fas/CD95-mediated apoptosis via release of C-terminal fragments that act at the mitochondria, and we identify Bcl-XL as a candidate apoptotic binding partner for GRASP65

PEMANTAUN KONDISI INVERTEBRATA MENGGUNAKAN METODE REEF CHECK, DI PERAIRAN SELAT SEMPU, KABUPATEN MALANG

Reef Check merupakan sebuah organisasi yang didedikasikan untuk konservasi ekosistem terumbu karang dengan menggunakan metode pemantauan ekosistem terumbu karang dan lingkungan. Teknik yang digunakan sangat sederhana serta datanya dapat dipastikan kuat secara ilmiah. Data yang didapat berupa perhitungan penutupan jenis substrat, ikan, invertebrata, spesies langka dan dampak kerusakan. Invertebrata merupakan hewan bertulang belakang yang memiliki peranan penting dalam ekosistem terumbu karang. Data invertebrata yang diambil di lapang merupakan spesies ekonomis penting yang ada di Perairan Sendang Biru. Lokasi penelitian berada di wilayah Perairan Sendang Biru, Malang Selatan. Dilakukan pengambilan data di 4 stasiun pengamatan yakni, Teluk Semut 1, Teluk Semut 2, Fish Apartment, dan Watu Meja agar dapat dilakukan adanya perbandingan kelimpahan. Metode penelitian dengan menggunakan metode transek sabuk  sejauh 100 m pada 4 stasiun, dilakukan pengamatan dengan pola zig-zag dengan 5 kali pengulangan. Hasil dari monitoring 4 stasiun ini terdapat 2 ekor invertebrata Diadema urchin pada stasiun Teluk Semut 1 dan Teluk Semut 2, 3 ekor invertebrata Pencil urchin pada stasiun 3Fish Apartment, dan 2 ekor Kima dengan besar 10-20 cm pada stasiun Fish Apartment dan Watu Meja. Ketiga spesies invertebrata diatas mewakili semua invertebrata yang ditemukan di lokasi penelitian. Sedikitnya jumlah kelimpahan invertebrata yang ditemukan tersebut sebanding dengan kondisi kesehatan terumbu karang yang kurang baik dan rendahnya jumlah biota pada lokasi tersebut. Kondisi kesehatan karang yang rusak diakibatkan adanya aktivitas perikanan, bleaching, dan penyakit karang. Kegiatan monitoring mengenai invertebrata di daerah tersebut perlu dilakukan kembali secara berkala agar dapat mengetahui kondisi perairan tersebut dengan adanya kelimpahan pada invertebrata.  Kata kunci: Invertebrata, Reef Check, Selat Sempu  INVERTEBRATE MONITORING USING REEF CHECK METHOD IN SELAT SEMPU WATERS, MALANG ABSTRACTReef Check is an organization which dedicated to the conservation of coral reef ecosystems by using monitoring coral reef ecosystems and the environment method. The technique was simple and can be done by every one who had scientific. The data collected is the calculation of the cover substrates, fish, invertebrates, rare species and damage Invertebrates are vertebrates that have an important role in the ecosystem of coral reefs. invertebrates data which taken in the field is an economically important species in Sendang Biru. The data collected is the calculation of the closing type of substrates, fish, invertebrates, rare species and impacts that occur by looking at the research site conditions. The research location is in the area of Sendang Biru, South Malang. The data collection is done in four station in order to compare and get a calculation of the observations. The research method using belt transect as far as 100m on 4 stations, the observation done with a zig-zag pattern and visually observe the coral reff. Data collection was performed in five repetitions. The Result oh the monitoring in 4 stations, show 2 individual Diadema urchin on the Teluk Semut 1 and 2, 3 Individual of Pencil urchin on Fish Apartment station, and 2 Kima with a size 10-20cm on Fish Apartment and Watu Meja station. The least amount of invertebrate discovered show the ecological balance between the coral cover and fish populayion. The ecological condition of corals were damaged due to their fishing activities, bleaching and coral disease. Monitoring activities of the invertebrates in the area needs to be continue in order to determine the condition of these area.  Keywords : Invetebrate, Reef Check, Selat Semp

Negotiating the Meaning of Team Expertise: A Firefighter Team’s Epistemic Denial

In this case study, we report how a team of firefighters critiqued one of its member’s decisions to facilitate learning and process improvement. The study is supported by 500+ hr of ethnographic observations, documents, and 11 retrospective interviews, which captured how the team’s talk about the member’s decision shaped their interpretations of their own and others’ expertise—interpretations that ironically undermined learning. Constant comparative analysis revealed that these firefighters positioned themselves as experts by crediting either personal experience or technical knowledge and then discrediting the alternative way of knowing. We labeled this process epistemic denial. The process of epistemic denial was rooted in identity concern; specifically, veteran team members relied on personal experience and newer members relied on technical information gained from training to assert their expertise, and to devalue others’ expertise. The article concludes with recommendations for avoiding problems associated with epistemic denial in high-reliability teams.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

PALADIN: PALADIN: A one step process for actinides(iii)/ fission products separation

International audienceIn the frame of the French SPIN program, PALADIN is a one partition cycle process able to separate directly americium and curium from lanthanides(III) and other fission products mixed in concentrated nitric acid (similar to a PUREX raffinate). Batch experiments allowed us to choose and optimize every organic and aqueous reagent. Solvent is composed of a mixture of malonamide and alkyphosphoric acid. Aqueous solutions contain only incinerable reagents (hydroxycarboxylic acids, polyaminocarboxylic acids...). An inactive mixer-settlers test was carried out in order to study the behavior of some fission products. Hydrodynamics and performances were good for the main steps of the process, in particular very few fission products were found in actinides(III) aqueous outflow solution

Non-linear Label Ranking for Large-scale Prediction of Long-Term User Interests

We consider the problem of personalization of online services from the viewpoint of ad targeting, where we seek to find the best ad categories to be shown to each user, resulting in improved user experience and increased advertisers ’ revenue. We propose to address this problem as a task of ranking the ad categories depending on a user’s preference, and introduce a novel label ranking approach capable of efficiently learning non-linear, highly accurate models in large-scale settings. Ex-periments on real-world advertising data set with more than 3.2 million users show that the proposed algorithm outper-forms the existing solutions in terms of both rank loss and top-K retrieval performance, strongly suggesting the benefit of using the proposed model on large-scale ranking problems

Preliminary results on the effect of power ultrasound on nitrogen oxide and dioxide atmosphere in nitric acid solutions

International audienc