An empirical study of the effect of a merger on organisational climate.

Thesis (MBA)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.The issue of mergers and, in particular, the effect of mergers on employees is an important one due to the alarming number of mergers taking place at present both globally and in South Africa. Only recently have researchers begun to study the impact of mergers on employees. Many authors argue that this element is critical in determining the success or failure of a merger. The study examines a company, which recently experienced a merger and attempts to establish whether or not the merger had a detrimental effect on organisational climate. The study achieves it's aim by reviewing the literature and administering a self-completion questionnaire to the entire operational staff at three hierarchical levels, namely; store manager, sales administrator and sales person of the organisation in the KwaZulu Natal region. The study thus constitutes a census of all employees at the aforementioned three levels. The questionnaire administered includes both an organisational climate measuring instrument (an existing eighteen item scale was used) and an attitude to mergers measuring instrument, made up of twelve items, which was constructed for this study. The data was then analysed utilising both descriptive and inferential statistics

Population pharmacokinetics of lopinavir and ritonavir in combination with rifampicin-based antitubercular treatment in HIV-infected children

Children with HIV associated tuberculosis often require co-formulated lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/RTV)-based antiretroviral treatment with rifampicin-based antitubercular treatment (ATT). Rifampicin (RIF), a potent inducer of drug-metabolizing systems, profoundly reduces the bioavailability of LPV. The aims of this study were to develop an integrated population pharmacokinetic (PK) model describing LPV and RTV PK in children with and without concomitant ATT using two different dosing approaches and to estimate doses of LPV/RTV achieving target exposures during ATT in young children

Steady-state pharmacokinetics of Nevirapine in HIV-1 infected adults in India

Background and Objectives: A variety of demographic factors, sex, and degree of immunosuppression can influence antiretroviral drug concentratians. The authors studied the influence of immune status, sex, and body mass index (BMI) on the steady-state pharmacokinetics of nevirapine delivered as a fixed-dose combination in HIV-1-infected patients in India. Methods: Twenty-six HIV-l-infected adult patients undergoing treatment with nevirapine-based highly active antiretroviral therapy regimens participated in the study. Pharmacokinetic variables were compared between patients divided based an CD4 cell counts, sex, and BMI. Results: Patients with higher BMI had lower peak and trough concentration and exposure of nevirapine than those with lower BMI; none of the differences in the pharmacokinetic variables of nevirapine between the various patient groups was statistically significant. Conclusions: Patients' immune status, sex, or BMI had no impact on the pharmacokinetics of nevirapine. Plasma nevirapine concentrations were maintained within the therapeutic range of the drug in the majority of the patients

Social movements, the European crisis, and EU political opportunities

Social movements in the wake of the financial crisis have shifted from the counter-summits and world social forums of the global justice movement to the camps of the anti-austerity mobilizations, and from a clear focus on building ‘another Europe’ to more domestically embedded issues. Among other reasons, this turn away from the EU can be linked to contracting political opportunities for social justice movements at the European level. This article addresses the closure of opportunities at the EU level for the work of social movement groups campaigning on specific EU policies. We reflect on the complexity of the EU’s political opportunity structure prior to the financial crisis, before examining changes to the EU’s architecture effected through responses to the crises and outlining arguments on how EU level opportunities around socio-economic issues in particular have shrunk as a result. We then show how the perception of other political opportunities at the EU level is affected by the austerity response by drawing on campaigns that sought to exploit new opportunities included in the Lisbon Treaty and designed to increase citizens’ input. Opportunities introduced by changes made in the Lisbon Treaty are perceived through the prism of contracted opportunities flowing from power shifts caused by the response to the financial crisis

HerMES: the rest-frame UV emission and a lensing model for the z= 6.34 luminous dusty starburst galaxy HFLS3

We discuss the rest-frame ultraviolet emission from the starbursting galaxy HFLS3 at a redshift of 6.34. The galaxy was discovered in Herschel/SPIRE data due to its red color in the submillimeter wavelengths from 250 to 500 μm. Keck/NIRC2 K s -band adaptive optics imaging data showed two potential near-IR counterparts near HFLS3. Previously, the northern galaxy was taken to be in the foreground at z = 2.1, while the southern galaxy was assumed to be HFLS3's near-IR counterpart. The recently acquired Hubble/WFC3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) imaging data show conclusively that both optically bright galaxies are in the foreground at z < 6. A new lensing model based on the Hubble imaging data and the millimeter-wave continuum emission yields a magnification factor of 2.2 ± 0.3, with a 95% confidence upper limit on the magnification of 3.5. When corrected for lensing, the instantaneous star formation rate is 1320 M ☉ yr–1, with the 95% confidence lower limit around 830 M ☉ yr–1. The dust and stellar masses of HFLS3 from the same spectral energy distribution (SED) models are at the level of 3 × 108 M ☉ and ~5 × 1010 M ☉, respectively, with large systematic uncertainties on assumptions related to the SED model. With Hubble/WFC3 images, we also find diffuse near-IR emission about 0.5 arcsec (~3 kpc) to the southwest of HFLS3 that remains undetected in the ACS imaging data. The emission has a photometric redshift consistent with either z ~ 6 or a dusty galaxy template at z ~ 2

“A few sparks of inspiration”?: Analysing the outcomes of European Union cultural policy coordination

This article examines the outcomes of cultural policy coordination in the European Union using a case study of one policy priority in the 2011–2014 Work Plan for Culture. The Open Method of Coordination brings Member States together to exchange and cooperate on key policy priorities. Drawing on interviews with key actors as well as participant observation material, the article demonstrates the limited influence of the culture OMC on domestic policy, showing that domestic usage tends to be on the scale of individuals and organisations rather than Member State-wide. The article finishes by contextualising the outcomes, highlighting the constraints and challenges of intergovernmental coordination in fields where the EU holds a supporting competence

Computing Fresnel integrals via modified trapezium rules

In this paper we propose methods for computing Fresnel integrals based on truncated trapezium rule approximations to integrals on the real line, these trapezium rules modified to take into account poles of the integrand near the real axis. Our starting point is a method for computation of the error function of complex argument due to Matta and Reichel (J Math Phys 34:298–307, 1956) and Hunter and Regan (Math Comp 26:539–541, 1972). We construct approximations which we prove are exponentially convergent as a function of N , the number of quadrature points, obtaining explicit error bounds which show that accuracies of 10−15 uniformly on the real line are achieved with N=12 , this confirmed by computations. The approximations we obtain are attractive, additionally, in that they maintain small relative errors for small and large argument, are analytic on the real axis (echoing the analyticity of the Fresnel integrals), and are straightforward to implement

Pharmacological screening using an FXN-EGFP cellular genomic reporter assay for the therapy of Friedreich ataxia

Copyright @ 2013 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by neurodegeneration and cardiomyopathy. The presence of a GAA trinucleotide repeat expansion in the first intron of the FXN gene results in the inhibition of gene expression and an insufficiency of the mitochondrial protein frataxin. There is a correlation between expansion length, the amount of residual frataxin and the severity of disease. As the coding sequence is unaltered, pharmacological up-regulation of FXN expression may restore frataxin to therapeutic levels. To facilitate screening of compounds that modulate FXN expression in a physiologically relevant manner, we established a cellular genomic reporter assay consisting of a stable human cell line containing an FXN-EGFP fusion construct, in which the EGFP gene is fused in-frame with the entire normal human FXN gene present on a BAC clone. The cell line was used to establish a fluorometric cellular assay for use in high throughput screening (HTS) procedures. A small chemical library containing FDA-approved compounds and natural extracts was screened and analyzed. Compound hits identified by HTS were further evaluated by flow cytometry in the cellular genomic reporter assay. The effects on FXN mRNA and frataxin protein levels were measured in lymphoblast and fibroblast cell lines derived from individuals with FRDA and in a humanized GAA repeat expansion mouse model of FRDA. Compounds that were established to increase FXN gene expression and frataxin levels included several anti-cancer agents, the iron-chelator deferiprone and the phytoalexin resveratrol.Muscular Dystrophy Association (USA), the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia), the Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance (USA), the Brockhoff Foundation (Australia), the Friedreich Ataxia Research Association (Australasia), Seek A Miracle (USA) and the Victorian Government’s Operational Infrastructure Support Program