Birds of a feather flock together: ownership in cross-border acquisitions by emerging multinationals

Purpose: Despite prior studies on cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) have analyzed the determinants of ownership strategies; there is still a quest for evidence on how the differences between home and host market characteristics affect the ownership percentage. Prior studies have acknowledged that entering host countries with greater uncertainty makes multinationals reluctant to acquire high levels of ownership. Nevertheless, emerging multinationals (EMNEs) are usually used to operating under greater levels of uncertainty than multinationals from advanced countries (AMNEs), which can imply different ownership strategies. The purpose of this study is to analyze the ownership percentage acquired by MNEs when designing a CBA in emerging or in advanced countries, and to analyze the extent to which the ownership strategy in emerging countries differs between EMNEs and AMNEs. Design/methodology/approach: Mobile telecommunications industry is used as research setting to provide empirical evidence of the interaction effect of the advanced versus emerging nature of the host and home countries on the ownership acquired in CBAs. Findings: Results confirm that both home and host countries' characteristics are relevant in explaining the ownership strategies of MNEs. Originality/value: The authors contribute to the strategy and IB literatures by providing empirical evidence on the recent debate on whether the internationalization strategies followed by EMNEs are similar to the traditional patterns of AMNEs, and analyze how EMNEs differ from AMNEs in their ownership strategies in emerging countries. Focusing in the mobile telecommunications industry, the authors also contribute by extending the analysis to an international and cross-cultural setting that includes 48 mobile groups that come from 35 home and 81 host countries

Parallel definition of tear film maps on distributed-memory clusters for the support of dry eye diagnosis

[Abstract] Background and objectives The analysis of the interference patterns on the tear film lipid layer is a useful clinical test to diagnose dry eye syndrome. This task can be automated with a high degree of accuracy by means of the use of tear film maps. However, the time required by the existing applications to generate them prevents a wider acceptance of this method by medical experts. Multithreading has been previously successfully employed by the authors to accelerate the tear film map definition on multicore single-node machines. In this work, we propose a hybrid message-passing and multithreading parallel approach that further accelerates the generation of tear film maps by exploiting the computational capabilities of distributed-memory systems such as multicore clusters and supercomputers. Methods The algorithm for drawing tear film maps is parallelized using Message Passing Interface (MPI) for inter-node communications and the multithreading support available in the C++11 standard for intra-node parallelization. The original algorithm is modified to reduce the communications and increase the scalability. Results The hybrid method has been tested on 32 nodes of an Intel cluster (with two 12-core Haswell 2680v3 processors per node) using 50 representative images. Results show that maximum runtime is reduced from almost two minutes using the previous only-multithreaded approach to less than ten seconds using the hybrid method. Conclusions The hybrid MPI/multithreaded implementation can be used by medical experts to obtain tear film maps in only a few seconds, which will significantly accelerate and facilitate the diagnosis of the dry eye syndrome.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TIN2013-42148-PPortugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961Portugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; UID/EEA/50014/2013Portugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; SFRH/BPD/111177/2015

Memoria final del proyecto de innovación docente “Fomento de la creatividad en el EES”

Memoria ID-336. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2013-2014.[ES] Innovación y Producción Digital, que a su vez se enmarca en el programa SP1.1 USAL 2.0 del Campus de Excelencia Internacional Studii Salamantini, el cual tiene como objetivo general consolidar a la Universidad de Salamanca como una universidad de futuro, en constante innovación. Con este proyecto se pretende incentivar una actividad más creativa entre los alumnos de la USAL, a partir del desarrollo de talleres de creatividad, como parte del trabajo práctico de determinadas asignaturas de Grados, Diplomaturas, Licenciaturas y Másteres de la Universidad de Salamanca. El fomento de la creatividad, es un área de trabajo esencial de MEDIALAB USAL. Para ello, se pone a disposición de la comunidad universitaria de forma permanente una oferta de talleres enfocados a trabajar la creatividad con los alumnos. Para favorecer el desarrollo de los talleres y el enfoque de los mismos, las actividades se organizan vinculadas a asignaturas de grado y posgrado. Los profesores, junto con el equipo de MEDIALAB USAL, marcan los objetivos del taller y los aspectos que se trabajan y posteriormente, desde MEDIALAB se diseña el programa de actividades

Subcritical water extraction of essential oils and plant oils

Subcritical water extraction is a green technology with interesting advantages in relation to the possibility of processing fresh raw materials to sustainably obtain natural valuable products. The potential of this technology for the aqueous extraction of lipophilic fractions from plant biomass is well known and has recently attracted renewed interest. This review presents an update of the advances on the extraction of two valuable types of lipophilic products, essential oils and vegetal lipids from various plant biomasses. It also emphasizes the effect of process variables as particle size, time, liquid to solid ratio, pressure and temperature as well as the operation tunability to select optimal conditions for different solutes. The optimal operation conditions play a key role to efficiently recover these natural products with potential applications in cosmetic, food, agricultural and pharmaceutical/medical industries

Adolescencia e identidades LGBT en el cine español: evolución, personajes y significados

Sea como sujeto o como objeto de deseo; aislado en su soledad esencial o vinculado a otros en relaciones simétricas o asimétricas, depositarios de la mayor ingenuidad o lúcidos manipulado-res, víctimas o verdugos, cuando no ambas cosas, los personajes homosexuales en su tránsito por la adolescencia constituyen una categoría en sí mismos. Por otra parte el modo en el que han ido siendo representados dice mucho de la evolución del imaginario colectivo en relación con la cuestión homosexual. En este artículo se aborda el desarrollo de las representaciones de los adolescentes homosexua-les en el cine español desde las primeras representaciones hasta la actualidad, analizando los personajes que han ido apareciendo en las pantallas de la cinematografía española, así como la evolución de los roles y de los significados que se han ido vinculando a cada uno de ellos. [ABSTRACT]Either as a subject or as an object of desire, isolated in his essential loneliness or related to others through symmetrical or asymmetrical relation-ships, innocent or manipulative, victim or culprit (or often both), the teenage homosexual character forms a category itself. Furthermore, the way in which characters functioning in this category have been portrayed speaks clearly about the evolution of the discourse, and consequently the social imaginary, around homosexuality. This paper analyzes the evolution of teenage homosexual characters in Spanish cinema, from early represen-tations to contemporary ones, examining the characters in terms of both the roles and the meanings attached to them

A clasificación semantica

Conferencia presentada no III Congresso Internacional de Dialectologia e Sociolinguística. Londrina (Brasil), 7-10 outubro 2014Secretaría Xeral de Universidades (Xunta de Galicia – Fondo Europeo de Desenvolvemento Rexional

Intensification and biorefinery approaches for the valorization of kitchen wastes – A review

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade de Vigo/CISUGKitchen wastes (KW) are post-consumption residues from household and food service sector, heterogenous in composition and highly variable depending on the particular origin, which are often treated as municipal. There is a need to improve the management of these continuously produced and worldwidely available resources and their valorization into novel and commercially interesting products will aid in the development of bioeconomy. The successful implementation of such approach requires cooperation between academia, industrial stakeholders, public and private institutions, based on the different dimensions, including social, economic, ecologic and technological involved. This review aims at presenting a survey of technological aspects, regarding current and potential management strategies of KW, following either a single or multiproduct processing according to the biorefineries scheme. Emphasis is given to intensification tools, designed to enhance process efficiency

A strain of Bacillus thuringiensis containing a novel cry7Aa2 gene that is toxic to Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Say) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)

The genome of the Bacillus thuringiensis BM311.1 strain was sequenced and assembled in 359 contigs containing a total of 6,390,221 bp. The plasmidic ORF of a putative cry gene from this strain was identified as a potential novel Cry protein of 1138 amino acid residues with a 98% identity compared to Cry7Aa1 and a predicted molecular mass of 129.4 kDa. The primary structure of Cry7Aa2, which had eight conserved blocks and the classical structure of three domains, differed in 28 amino acid residues from that of Cry7Aa1. The cry7Aa2 gene was amplified by PCR and then expressed in the acrystalliferous strain BMB171. SDS-PAGE analysis confirmed the predicted molecular mass for the Cry7Aa2 protein and revealed that after in vitro trypsin incubation, the protein was degraded to a toxin of 62 kDa. However, when treated with digestive fluids from Leptinotarsa decemlineata larvae, one major proteinase-resistant fragment of slightly smaller size was produced. The spore and crystal mixture produced by the wild-type BM311.1 strain against L. decemlineata neonate larvae resulted in a LC50 value of 18.8 mu g/mL, which was statistically similar to the estimated LC50 of 20.8 mu g/mL for the recombinant BMB17-Cry7Aa2 strain. In addition, when this novel toxin was activated in vitro with commercial trypsin, the LC50 value was reduced 3.8-fold to LC50 = 4.9 mu g/mL. The potential advantages of Cry7Aa2 protoxin compared to Cry7Aa1 protoxin when used in the control of insect pests are discussed.This research was funded by the Programa Nacional de España (No. AGL2015-70584-C2-2-R) and the Gobierno de Navarra (No. IIQ14065: RI1)