Short Subjects: Athens and Sparta: The Archivist and Resource Allocators

One result of the social, economic, and technological changes and developments of the past two decades has been an increased monetary pressure on educational institutions. Rare is the academic or other nonprofit institution that has not found it necessary to mount a fund-raising campaign. Economic pressures on educational institutions are not new nor are efforts to solve them. What is new is the intensity and pervasiveness. of monetary accountability, the professionalism . employed in fund raising, and the web of involvement that affects everyone in an administrative position, no matter how minor. Fiscal responsibilities that once were confined to the province of presidents, treasurers, and governing boards now fall within the accountability of all levels of administration. Archives ·administrators are faced not with a problem but \u27with a challenge: How do archives get their share of the pie from resource allocators and through the efforts of professional institutional fund raisers

Numerical computation of an Evans function for travelling waves

We demonstrate a geometrically inspired technique for computing Evans functions for the linearised operators about travelling waves. Using the examples of the F-KPP equation and a Keller-Segel model of bacterial chemotaxis, we produce an Evans function which is computable through several orders of magnitude in the spectral parameter and show how such a function can naturally be extended into the continuous spectrum. In both examples, we use this function to numerically verify the absence of eigenvalues in a large region of the right half of the spectral plane. We also include a new proof of spectral stability in the appropriate weighted space of travelling waves of speed $c \geq 2 \sqrt{\delta}$ in the F-KPP equation.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figure

MissForest - nonparametric missing value imputation for mixed-type data

Modern data acquisition based on high-throughput technology is often facing the problem of missing data. Algorithms commonly used in the analysis of such large-scale data often depend on a complete set. Missing value imputation offers a solution to this problem. However, the majority of available imputation methods are restricted to one type of variable only: continuous or categorical. For mixed-type data the different types are usually handled separately. Therefore, these methods ignore possible relations between variable types. We propose a nonparametric method which can cope with different types of variables simultaneously. We compare several state of the art methods for the imputation of missing values. We propose and evaluate an iterative imputation method (missForest) based on a random forest. By averaging over many unpruned classification or regression trees random forest intrinsically constitutes a multiple imputation scheme. Using the built-in out-of-bag error estimates of random forest we are able to estimate the imputation error without the need of a test set. Evaluation is performed on multiple data sets coming from a diverse selection of biological fields with artificially introduced missing values ranging from 10% to 30%. We show that missForest can successfully handle missing values, particularly in data sets including different types of variables. In our comparative study missForest outperforms other methods of imputation especially in data settings where complex interactions and nonlinear relations are suspected. The out-of-bag imputation error estimates of missForest prove to be adequate in all settings. Additionally, missForest exhibits attractive computational efficiency and can cope with high-dimensional data.Comment: Submitted to Oxford Journal's Bioinformatics on 3rd of May 201

Room temperature spin relaxation in GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum wells

We have explored the dependence of electron spin relaxation in undoped GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells on well width (confinement energy) at 300 K. For wide wells, the relaxation rate tends to the intrinsic bulk value due to the D'yakonov-Perel (DP) mechanism with momentum scattering by phonons. In narrower wells, there is a strong dependence of relaxation rate on well width, as expected for the DP mechanism, but also considerable variation between samples from different sources, which we attribute to differences in sample interface morphology. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(98)02541-8].</p

Should Marketing be Cross-Functional? : Conceptual Development and International Empirical Evidence

While it has frequently been stated that decisions on marketing activities should be made cross-functionally, there is no empirical evidence that shows benefits of performing marketing activities in this way. This paper examines the link between the cross-functional dispersion of influence on marketing activities and performance at the SBU level and considers dynamism of the market which may moderate the strength of this relationship. Using data from a cross-national study in three industry sectors, the authors find that cross-functional dispersion of influence on marketing activities increases the performance of the SBU. They also find that the relationship between the cross-functional dispersion of influence on marketing activities is negatively influenced by dynamism of the market. This research thus provides empirical evidence for the positive performance implications of cross-functional interaction in the context of marketing activities

Performance impacts of strategic consensus : the role of strategy type and market-related dynamism

The authors examine the relationship between consensus on the type of SBU-level strategy among senior marketing and R&D-managers and organizational performance for a sample of 101 US and German SBUs in three industry sectors: consumer packaged goods, electrical equipment and components, and mechanical machinery. Findings indicate that consensus on the type of strategy increases the performance of the SBU in the case of a differentiation strategy while there are no performance impacts in the case of a low cost strategy. The strength of the relationship between consensus on a differentiation strategy and performance is negatively influenced by market-related dynamism

Monitoring neurotoxins in industry: development of a neurobehavioral test battery

Huguet Françoise. 104 - Elémens (Les) ou premières instructions de la jeunesse. In: , . Les Livres pour l'Enfance et la Jeunesse de Gutenberg à Guizot. Les collections de la Bibliothèque de l'Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique. Paris : Institut national de recherche pédagogique, 1997. p. 57. (Bibliothèque de l'Histoire de l'Education, 16