965 research outputs found
Human Resources and the Resource Based View of the Firm
The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has influenced the field of strategic human resource management (SHRM) in a number of ways. This paper explores the impact of the RBV on the theoretical and empirical development of SHRM. It explores how the fields of strategy and SHRM are beginning to converge around a number of issues, and proposes a number of implications of this convergence
The compositional and evolutionary logic of metabolism
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of
modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This
renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the
order in which layers of that system emerged. Metabolism also serves as the
foundation in other hierarchies, at least up to cellular integration including
bioenergetics and molecular replication, and trophic ecology. The
recapitulation of patterns first seen in metabolism, in these higher levels,
suggests metabolism as a source of causation or constraint on many forms of
organization in the biosphere.
We identify as modules widely reused subsets of chemicals, reactions, or
functions, each with a conserved internal structure. At the small molecule
substrate level, module boundaries are generally associated with the most
complex reaction mechanisms and the most conserved enzymes. Cofactors form a
structurally and functionally distinctive control layer over the small-molecule
substrate. Complex cofactors are often used at module boundaries of the
substrate level, while simpler ones participate in widely used reactions.
Cofactor functions thus act as "keys" that incorporate classes of organic
reactions within biochemistry.
The same modules that organize the compositional diversity of metabolism are
argued to have governed long-term evolution. Early evolution of core
metabolism, especially carbon-fixation, appears to have required few
innovations among a small number of conserved modules, to produce adaptations
to simple biogeochemical changes of environment. We demonstrate these features
of metabolism at several levels of hierarchy, beginning with the small-molecule
substrate and network architecture, continuing with cofactors and key conserved
reactions, and culminating in the aggregation of multiple diverse physical and
biochemical processes in cells.Comment: 56 pages, 28 figure
Signaling in Secret: Pay-for-Performance and the Incentive and Sorting Effects of Pay Secrecy
Key Findings: Pay secrecy adversely impacts individual task performance because it weakens the perception that an increase in performance will be accompanied by increase in pay; Pay secrecy is associated with a decrease in employee performance and retention in pay-for-performance systems, which measure performance using relative (i.e., peer-ranked) criteria rather than an absolute scale (see Figure 2 on page 5); High performing employees tend to be most sensitive to negative pay-for- performance perceptions; There are many signals embedded within HR policies and practices, which can influence employees’ perception of workplace uncertainty/inequity and impact their performance and turnover intentions; and When pay transparency is impractical, organizations may benefit from introducing partial pay openness to mitigate these effects on employee performance and retention
Comparison of Positive and Negative Verbal Cueing on Muscular Endurance in College - Aged Females
poste
Accentuating institutional brands: A multimodal analysis of the homepages of selected South African universities
In seeking to disentangle themselves from the constraints of apartheid, South African
universities have immersed themselves in an identity modification process in which they not only
seek to redress the past, but also to reposition their identities as equal opportunity and non-racial
institutions. In this paper, we investigate how the University of the Western Cape, the University
of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University have used visual and verbal semiotics to re-design
their identities on their homepages to appeal to diverse national and international clients. Using
Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), we show how the multi-semiotic choices work together on
the homepages to give the universities differentiated, competitive, powerful and attractive brands.
We conclude that the homepages blended cultural semiotic artefacts, historical, global and transformational
discourses, and architectural landscapes to construct different brand identities that, in turn,
rebrand the universities from edifices of apartheid education to equal opportunity institutions
Facilitated Variation: How Evolution Learns from Past Environments To Generalize to New Environments
One of the striking features of evolution is the appearance of novel structures in organisms. Recently, Kirschner and Gerhart have integrated discoveries in evolution, genetics, and developmental biology to form a theory of facilitated variation (FV). The key observation is that organisms are designed such that random genetic changes are channeled in phenotypic directions that are potentially useful. An open question is how FV spontaneously emerges during evolution. Here, we address this by means of computer simulations of two well-studied model systems, logic circuits and RNA secondary structure. We find that evolution of FV is enhanced in environments that change from time to time in a systematic way: the varying environments are made of the same set of subgoals but in different combinations. We find that organisms that evolve under such varying goals not only remember their history but also generalize to future environments, exhibiting high adaptability to novel goals. Rapid adaptation is seen to goals composed of the same subgoals in novel combinations, and to goals where one of the subgoals was never seen in the history of the organism. The mechanisms for such enhanced generation of novelty (generalization) are analyzed, as is the way that organisms store information in their genomes about their past environments. Elements of facilitated variation theory, such as weak regulatory linkage, modularity, and reduced pleiotropy of mutations, evolve spontaneously under these conditions. Thus, environments that change in a systematic, modular fashion seem to promote facilitated variation and allow evolution to generalize to novel conditions
Group space scan of flavor symmetries for nearly tribimaximal lepton mixing
We present a systematic group space scan of discrete Abelian flavor
symmetries for lepton mass models that produce nearly tribimaximal lepton
mixing. In our models, small neutrino masses are generated by the type-I seesaw
mechanism. The lepton mass matrices emerge from higher-dimension operators via
the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism and are predicted as powers of a single
expansion parameter \epsilon that is of the order of the Cabibbo angle
\theta_C\simeq 0.2. We focus on solutions that can give close to tribimaximal
lepton mixing with a very small reactor angle \theta_{13}\approx 0 and find
several thousand explicit such models that provide an excellent fit to current
neutrino data. The models are rather general in the sense that large leptonic
mixings can come from the charged leptons and/or neutrinos. Moreover, in the
neutrino sector, both left- and right-handed neutrinos can mix maximally. We
also find a new relation \theta_{13}\lesssim\epsilon^3 for the reactor angle
and a new sum rule \theta_{23}\approx\pi/4+\epsilon/\sqrt{2} for the
atmospheric angle, allowing the models to be tested in future neutrino
oscillation experiments.Comment: 18 pages, 2 tables, 2 figures, references added, final version to
appear in JHE
SABRE: A bio-inspired fault-tolerant electronic architecture
As electronic devices become increasingly complex, ensuring their reliable, fault-free operation is becoming correspondingly more challenging. It can be observed that, in spite of their complexity, biological systems are highly reliable and fault tolerant. Hence, we are motivated to take inspiration for biological systems in the design of electronic ones. In SABRE (self-healing cellular architectures for biologically inspired highly reliable electronic systems), we have designed a bio-inspired fault-tolerant hierarchical architecture for this purpose. As in biology, the foundation for the whole system is cellular in nature, with each cell able to detect faults in its operation and trigger intra-cellular or extra-cellular repair as required. At the next level in the hierarchy, arrays of cells are configured and controlled as function units in a transport triggered architecture (TTA), which is able to perform partial-dynamic reconfiguration to rectify problems that cannot be solved at the cellular level. Each TTA is, in turn, part of a larger multi-processor system which employs coarser grain reconfiguration to tolerate faults that cause a processor to fail. In this paper, we describe the details of operation of each layer of the SABRE hierarchy, and how these layers interact to provide a high systemic level of fault tolerance. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd
Pre-M Phase-promoting Factor Associates with Annulate Lamellae in Xenopus Oocytes and Egg Extracts
We have used complementary biochemical and in vivo approaches to study the compartmentalization of M phase-promoting factor (MPF) in prophase Xenopus eggs and oocytes. We first examined the distribution of MPF (Cdc2/CyclinB2) and membranous organelles in high-speed extracts of Xenopus eggs made during mitotic prophase. These extracts were found to lack mitochondria, Golgi membranes, and most endoplasmic reticulum (ER) but to contain the bulk of the pre-MPF pool. This pre-MPF could be pelleted by further centrifugation along with components necessary to activate it. On activation, Cdc2/CyclinB2 moved into the soluble fraction. Electron microscopy and Western blot analysis showed that the pre-MPF pellet contained a specific ER subdomain comprising "annulate lamellae" (AL): stacked ER membranes highly enriched in nuclear pores. Colocalization of pre-MPF with AL was demonstrated by anti-CyclinB2 immunofluorescence in prophase oocytes, in which AL are positioned close to the vegetal surface. Green fluorescent protein-CyclinB2 expressed in oocytes also localized at AL. These data suggest that inactive MPF associates with nuclear envelope components just before activation. This association may explain why nuclei and centrosomes stimulate MPF activation and provide a mechanism for targeting of MPF to some of its key substrates
- …