Ownership versus Management Effects on Performance in Family and Founder Companies: A Bayesian Analysis

There are ongoing debates in the literature concerning the performance of family firms: some studies find superior performance among these companies, others find negative or neutral per-formance effects. In this research we employ agency theory to argue that the effects of family ownership vs. family management will be quite different: the former is expected to contribute positively to performance, the latter is argued to erode performance. Previous studies, due to problems of omitted variables or multicollinearity have been unable to distinguish these effects. Using a Bayesian approach that avoids these problems, we find that whereas family and founder ownership are associated with superior performance, the results for family management and even founder management are far more ambiguous. Our results have implications regarding the own-ership and management of lone founder and family firms.Family firms; lone founder firms; performance; Bayesian analysis; agency theory

Chemical assay of present dental gutta percha and formulation of new compositions of dental gutta percha

Partly colored photographs included.Thesis (M.Sc.D.)--Boston University, Henry M. Goldman School of Graduate Dentistry (Endodontics), 1979.Bibliography: leaves 223-239 (v.2

Dynamics of Wolbachia pipientis gene expression across the Drosophila melanogaster life cycle

Symbiotic interactions between microbes and their multicellular hosts have manifold impacts on molecular, cellular and organismal biology. To identify candidate bacterial genes involved in maintaining endosymbiotic associations with insect hosts, we analyzed genome-wide patterns of gene expression in the alpha-proteobacteria Wolbachia pipientis across the life cycle of Drosophila melanogaster using public data from the modENCODE project that was generated in a Wolbachia-infected version of the ISO1 reference strain. We find that the majority of Wolbachia genes are expressed at detectable levels in D. melanogaster across the entire life cycle, but that only 7.8% of 1195 Wolbachia genes exhibit robust stage- or sex-specific expression differences when studied in the "holo-organism" context. Wolbachia genes that are differentially expressed during development are typically up-regulated after D. melanogaster embryogenesis, and include many bacterial membrane, secretion system and ankyrin-repeat containing proteins. Sex-biased genes are often organised as small operons of uncharacterised genes and are mainly up-regulated in adult males D. melanogaster in an age-dependent manner suggesting a potential role in cytoplasmic incompatibility. Our results indicate that large changes in Wolbachia gene expression across the Drosophila life-cycle are relatively rare when assayed across all host tissues, but that candidate genes to understand host-microbe interaction in facultative endosymbionts can be successfully identified using holo-organism expression profiling. Our work also shows that mining public gene expression data in D. melanogaster provides a rich set of resources to probe the functional basis of the Wolbachia-Drosophila symbiosis and annotate the transcriptional outputs of the Wolbachia genome.Comment: 58 pages, 6 figures, 6 supplemental figures, 4 supplemental files (available at https://github.com/bergmanlab/wolbachia/tree/master/gutzwiller_et_al/arxiv

Combler le « vide institutionnel » : Le comportement social et les performances des entreprises familiales comparés à ceux des autres entreprises des marchés émergents dans le secteur des hautes technologies.

Les entreprises familiales (EF) sont réputées prendre un soin particulier de leurs employés, avec l’objectif de créer une « communauté » interne très soudée. Leurs relations et contacts avec leurs partenaires extérieurs seraient aussi plus approfondis et personnels. Ces deux attitudes favoriseraient la viabilité d’une entreprise qui doit faire vivre la famille propriétaire, ainsi que les générations suivantes. Ces liens sociaux nous paraissent pouvoir compenser le manque de capital, de produits et d’infrastructure propre aux économies émergentes dynamiques. Cette étude, menée dans un secteur très compétitif de marché émergent, les entreprises de haute technologie en Corée, examine trois points majeurs :(1) Les relations internes et les liens avec l’extérieur sont plus développés dans les EF que dans les autres. (2) Ces relations améliorent la performance des secteurs de haute technologie dans les marchés émergents, pour lesquels il est indispensable, du fait de leur nature compétitive complexe et évolutive, de disposer d’une expertise pointue et d’un capital social à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur de l’entreprise. (3) Les performances des EF sont plus dépendantes de ces relations communautaires et de ces liens avec l’extérieur que celles des autres entreprises, parce que dans ce cadre personnel et intime, les employés et les partenaires extérieurs ont généralement tendance à récompenser la générosité, ou au contraire à punir l’égoïsme, d’une famille propriétaire qu’ils voient à l’oeuvre de leurs propres yeux. Nos observations empiriques confirment la plupart de ces hypothèses de façon significative.We argue that family businesses (FBs) will tend to treat their employees with unusual consideration to form a cohesive internal “community”. They are also expected to develop deeper, more extensive “connections” or relationships with outside stakeholders. Both behaviors should increase the viability of a business intended to support an owning family and its later generations. Such social linkages, we believe, may compensate for the lack of capital, product and labor institutional infrastructures in dynamic emerging economies. This survey study of a most challenging emerging market sector, namely, Korean high technology businesses, largely supports these expectations

Competitive Rationales: Beneath the Surface of Competitive Behavior

Competitive dynamics research has focused on studying whether rivals are able and likely to carry out competitive actions, typically by examining indirect reasons such as characteristics of the actions themselves, the firms involved, or the competitive context. We explore why rivals initiate a specific competitive action at a particular time and situation. Drawing from the philosophy of action literature, we introduce the concept of competitive rationales to examine the primary reasons that cause tactical actions. Given the rapid exchanges characterizing tactical competitive dynamics, we conducted an inductive, multicase study to explore the reasons behind over 800 discrete tactical decisions carried out by 9 professional basketball coaches during 15 basketball games. To garner insight, we develop a conceptual framework revealing their types and scope. Even during intense head-to-head rivalry, most rationales were not rivalrous but were instead organizational—to optimize resource use, strategic consistency, and reputation—or social—to manage relationships. Moreover, the three main types of rationales varied in scope, extending beyond immediate competitive situations and rivals to address longer term, strategic outcomes, and assorted stakeholders. Thus, our analysis reveals these rationales to be complex and potentially difficult for rivals to decipher. It also recasts each component of the dominant awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) model of rivalry, suggesting that awareness is challenged by subtle rationales, motivation drives not only action but also forbearance, and capability is both a requirement and product of action

Real-time collaborative coding in a web IDE

This paper describes Collabode, a web-based Java integrated development environment designed to support close, synchronous collaboration between programmers. We examine the problem of collaborative coding in the face of program compilation errors introduced by other users which make collaboration more difficult, and describe an algorithm for error-mediated integration of program code. Concurrent editors see the text of changes made by collaborators, but the errors reported in their view are based only on their own changes. Editors may run the program at any time, using only error-free edits supplied so far, and ignoring incomplete or otherwise error-generating changes. We evaluate this algorithm and interface on recorded data from previous pilot experiments with Collabode, and via a user study with student and professional programmers. We conclude that it offers appreciable benefits over naive continuous synchronization without regard to errors and over manual version control.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (award IIS- 0447800

The clinical- and cost-effectiveness of functional electrical stimulation and ankle-foot orthoses for foot drop in Multiple Sclerosis: a multicentre randomized trial

Objective: To compare the clinical- and cost-effectiveness of ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs) and functional electrical stimulation (FES) over 12 months in people with Multiple Sclerosis with foot drop. Design: Multicentre, powered, non-blinded, randomized trial. Setting: Seven Multiple Sclerosis outpatient centres across Scotland. Subjects: Eighty-five treatment-naïve people with Multiple Sclerosis with persistent (>three months) foot drop. Interventions: Participants randomized to receive a custom-made, AFO (n = 43) or FES device (n = 42). Outcome measures: Assessed at 0, 3, 6 and 12 months; 5-minute self-selected walk test (primary), Timed 25 Foot Walk, oxygen cost of walking, Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale-29, Multiple Sclerosis Walking Scale-12, Modified Fatigue Impact Scale, Euroqol five-dimension five-level questionnaire, Activities-specific Balance and Confidence Scale, Psychological Impact of Assistive Devices Score, and equipment and National Health Service staff time costs of interventions. Results: Groups were similar for age (AFO, 51.4 (11.2); FES, 50.4(10.4) years) and baseline walking speed (AFO, 0.62 (0.21); FES 0.73 (0.27) m/s). In all, 38% dropped out by 12 months (AFO, n = 21; FES, n = 11). Both groups walked faster at 12 months with device (P < 0.001; AFO, 0.73 (0.24); FES, 0.79 (0.24) m/s) but no difference between groups. Significantly higher Psychological Impact of Assistive Devices Scores were found for FES for Competence (P = 0.016; AFO, 0.85(1.05); FES, 1.53(1.05)), Adaptability (P = 0.001; AFO, 0.38(0.97); FES 1.53 (0.98)) and Self-Esteem (P = 0.006; AFO, 0.45 (0.67); FES 1 (0.68)). Effects were comparable for other measures. FES may offer value for money alternative to usual care. Conclusion: AFOs and FES have comparable effects on walking performance and patient-reported outcomes; however, high drop-outs introduces uncertainty

Living well with pain while seeing an osteopath: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Background: In the United Kingdom 8 million people are living with chronic pain and health practitioners are encouraged to move towards a biopsychosocial framework to account for the unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with pain. Those experiencing pain can seek the advice of an osteopath to help manage their pain experience. Methods: This research sought to explore, analyse, and interpret the lived experience of those who self-identify as living well with pain and the role of the osteopath. Three male and two female participants were interviewed in a semi-structured format. These accounts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to understand how participants live well with pain and the role of osteopathy in their experience. Results: There were four main experiential statements derived from the IPA analysis: i) Living with pain is exhausting – The participants described an exhausting battle as they learn to live with pain; ii) Osteopathy reconnects me to life – The osteopaths gave them the freedom to live with pain and the participants felt accepted for who they were; iii) Managing pain is like developing a skill – The participants adopted a problem-solving, trial and error approach to manage their pain; iv) Living well has its ups and downs – The participants had experienced living well through a process of acceptance and used previous suffering as a form of gratitude as they felt they had been given a new life, one in pain.Conclusion: The participants in this study explained living with pain as a process leading to a point of change. They saw osteopathy primarily as a form of support and encouragement enabling them to engage in their own positive health behaviours. Fundamentally, the participants had learnt to live-well despite pain

A genomic analysis of meiosis in Drosophila melanogaster

Meiosis is a specialized form of cell division in which a single diploid cell undergoes one round of genome duplication followed by two rounds of cell division to produce four haploid gametes. In most organisms, including Drosophila melanogaster, programmed double-strand breaks (DSBs) are created during meiosis that are typically repaired by one of two mechanisms: crossing over, which involves the exchange of flanking markers, or noncrossover gene conversion (NCO), which copies short segments of DNA from a homologous chromosome to repair the break. Crossing over is necessary for the proper segregation of homologous chromosomes at the first meiotic division, a process facilitated by the synaptonemal complex (SC), a large, multi-protein structure that holds homologs together during meiosis. Chromosomes that fail to crossover may not segregate properly, resulting in aneuploid gametes. In many organisms, including humans, two forces primarily control the distribution of crossovers along the chromosome arm. The strongly polar centromere effect functions to reduce the frequency of centromere-proximal crossovers, while interference ensures that crossovers occurring on the same chromosome arm are widely spaced. It is unknown if these forces control the distribution of NCOs as well. In addition, while it is known that Drosophila mutants that fail to construct SC cannot repair DSBs by crossing over, it is unknown if these breaks can be repaired as NCOs. Finally, the forces that prevent crossing over are of interest as well. In Drosophila, multiply inverted balancer chromosomes are used either to suppress recombination or to prevent the recovery of recombinant chromosomes. While it is known that inversion breakpoints themselves suppress nearby crossover events it is unclear over what distance they act. In this work, I used whole-genome sequencing to investigate recombination in D. melanogaster. First, I precisely positioned CO and NCO events after a single round of meiosis in 196 individual wild-type males. While I found that CO distribution appears to be controlled, as expected, by the centromere effect and interference, NCOs surprisingly do not seem to respond to these same controls. In addition, I looked for evidence of NCOs in SC-deficient flies and recovered a single NCO event, suggesting that while rare, repair by NCO is possible in these mutants. These data also allowed me to identify novel meiotic events such as transposable element (TE)-mediated copy-number variations, which included evidence of recurrent CNV formation, which is known to contribute to disease in humans. Finally, I identified the precise genomic location of the majority of the inversion breakpoints of several of the most commonly used X and 3rd chromosome balancers in Drosophila. This knowledge allows us to understand over what distance these breakpoints suppress crossing over. This analysis also allowed me to identify several instances of double crossovers, demonstrating that the mechanism by which balancers suppress exchange with their normal-sequence homologs is incomplete

SAIDE: a Semi-Automated interface for Hydrogen/Deuterium Exchange Mass Spectrometry

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