Transaction Cost Economics and Directions for Relational Governance Research

Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) has formed the basis of interorganizational governance research for the past thirty years. This paper summarizes TCE and explores some of its criticisms, namely its restricted solution set and its ignorance of trust-based behaviors. Some of these concerns are addressed by the relational view of interorganizational governance, although a more compelling solution appears to be a hybrid of these theories. Suggestions for future research and highlights of prominent IS research utilizing these theories are included

Targeting beliefs and behaviours in misophonia: a case series from a UK specialist psychology service.

Misophonia, a disorder of decreased sound tolerance, can cause significant distress and impairment. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) may be helpful for improving symptoms of misophonia, but the key mechanisms of the disorder are not yet known. This case series aimed to evaluate individual, formulation-driven CBT for patients with misophonia in a UK psychology service. A service evaluation of one-to-one therapy for patients with misophonia ( =19) was conducted in a specialist psychology service. Patients completed an average of 13 hours of therapy with a focus on the meaning applied to their reactions to sounds and associated behaviours. Primary outcome measures were the Misophonia Questionnaire (MQ) and the Amsterdam Misophonia Scale (A-MISO-S). Repeated measures -tests were used to compare scores from pre-treatment to follow-up, and reliable and clinically significant change on the MQ was calculated. Scores significantly improved on both misophonia measures, with an average of 38% change on the MQ and 40% change on the A-MISO-S. From pre-treatment to follow-up, 78% of patients showed reliable improvement on the MQ and 61% made clinically significant change. Limitations included a lack of control group, small sample size, and the use of an outcome measure that had not been thoroughly validated for a treatment-seeking sample. These results suggest that one-to-one, formulation-driven CBT for misophonia is worth exploring further using experimental design. Potential mechanisms to explore further include feared consequences of escalating reactions, the role of safety-seeking behaviours and the impact of early memories associated with reactions to sounds

University Square Development Proposal

The University Square Development Proposal (USDP) explores the redevelopment of the underutilized University Square site (the Site) in the City of San Luis Obispo (the City.) The Sites proximity to California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), a university with significant student housing needs, makes it an ideal location for student housing. The City has also expressed interest in the Site, having identified it in the General Plan Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) update as a “Special Planning Area”. The LUCE proposes a new mixed-use typology on the Site that may include a mixture of multi-family housing, retail services, entertainment, and recreation. The USDP is an early take on redevelopment of the Site, and provides a development option that accommodates both the objectives of Cal Poly, by providing student housing, and the City, by proposing a mixed-use development typology. To this end, the USDP includes a site assessment, project program, design vision, and financial analysis. The USDP concludes with project evaluations and lessons learned

The Empirical Turn in International Legal Scholarship

This article presents and assesses a new wave of empirical research on international law. Recent scholarship has moved away from theoretical debates over whether international law “matters,” and focuses instead on exploring the conditions under which international law is created and produces effects. As this empirical research program has matured, it has allowed for new, mid-level theorizing that we call “conditional international law theory.

A distributed programming environment for Ada

Despite considerable commercial exploitation of fault tolerance systems, significant and difficult research problems remain in such areas as fault detection and correction. A research project is described which constructs a distributed computing test bed for loosely coupled computers. The project is constructing a tool kit to support research into distributed control algorithms, including a distributed Ada compiler, distributed debugger, test harnesses, and environment monitors. The Ada compiler is being written in Ada and will implement distributed computing at the subsystem level. The design goal is to provide a variety of control mechanics for distributed programming while retaining total transparency at the code level

Optimizing floating guard ring designs for FASPAX N-in-P silicon sensors

FASPAX (Fermi-Argonne Semiconducting Pixel Array X-ray detector) is being developed as a fast integrating area detector with wide dynamic range for time resolved applications at the upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS.) A burst mode detector with intended \mbox{13 MHz} image rate, FASPAX will also incorporate a novel integration circuit to achieve wide dynamic range, from single photon sensitivity to $10^{\text{5}}$ x-rays/pixel/pulse. To achieve these ambitious goals, a novel silicon sensor design is required. This paper will detail early design of the FASPAX sensor. Results from TCAD optimization studies, and characterization of prototype sensors will be presented.Comment: IEEE NSS-MIC 2015 Conference recor

An Integrative Approach to Infer Regulation Programs in a Transcription Regulatory Module Network

The module network method, a special type of Bayesian network algorithms, has been proposed to infer transcription regulatory networks from gene expression data. In this method, a module represents a set of genes, which have similar expression profiles and are regulated by same transcription factors. The process of learning module networks consists of two steps: first clustering genes into modules and then inferring the regulation program (transcription factors) of each module. Many algorithms have been designed to infer the regulation program of a given gene module, and these algorithms show very different biases in detecting regulatory relationships. In this work, we explore the possibility of integrating results from different algorithms. The integration methods we select are union, intersection, and weighted rank aggregation. Experiments in a yeast dataset show that the union and weighted rank aggregation methods produce more accurate predictions than those given by individual algorithms, whereas the intersection method does not yield any improvement in the accuracy of predictions. In addition, somewhat surprisingly, the union method, which has a lower computational cost than rank aggregation, achieves comparable results as given by rank aggregation