Becoming The Boss: Discretion And Postsuccession Success In Family Firms

Family firms can enjoy substantial longevity. Ironically, however, they are often imperiled by the very process that is essential to this longevity. Using the concept of managerial discretion as a starting point, we use a human agency lens to introduce the construct of successor discretion as a factor that affects the family business succession process. While important in general, successor discretion is positioned as a particularly relevant factor for productively managing organizational renewal in family businesses. This study represents a foundation for future empirical research investigating the role of agency in entrepreneurial action in the family business context, which consequently can contribute to the larger research literature on succession and change

Association of Cardiac Baroreflex Sensitivity with Blood Pressure Transients: Influence of Sex and Menopausal Status

The magnitude of decrease in blood pressure (BP) during a vasoactive drug bolus may be associated with the calculated baroreflex sensitivity (BRS). The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether sympathetic and/or cardiac BRS relates to the extent of change in BP and whether this was altered by sex hormones. Fifty-one young women (27 ± 1 years), 14 older women (58 ± 1 years), and 36 young men (27 ± 1 years) were studied. Heart rate, BP, and muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) were monitored. Sympathetic BRS was analyzed using the slope of the MSNA-diastolic blood pressure (DBP) relationship and cardiac BRS was analyzed using the R–R interval-systolic blood pressure (SBP) relationship. Young women and men had similar mean arterial pressures (MAP, 91 ± 1 vs. 90 ± 1 mmHg), cardiac BRS (19 ± 1 vs. 21 ± 2 ms/mmHg), and sympathetic BRS (−6 ± 1 vs. −7 ± 1 AU/beat/mmHg), respectively. Older women had higher MAP (104 ± 4 mmHg, p < 0.05) and lower cardiac BRS (7 ± 1 ms/mmHg, p < 0.05), but similar sympathetic BRS (−8 ± 1 AU/beat/mmHg). There was no association between BP transients with either cardiac or sympathetic BRS in young women. In the older women, the drop in SBP, DBP, and MAP were associated with cardiac BRS (r = 0.60, r = 0.59, and r = 0.70, respectively; p < 0.05), but not sympathetic BRS. The decrease in SBP was positively related to cardiac BRS in young men (r = 0.41; p < 0.05). However, there was no relationship between the decrease in BP and sympathetic BRS. This indicates that older women and young men with low cardiac BRS have larger transients in BP during nitroprusside. This suggests a more prominent role for cardiac (as opposed to sympathetic) BRS in responding to acute BP changes in young men and older women. The fact that these relationships do not exist in young women suggest that the female sex hormones influence baroreflex responses

Use of partial-wave decomposition to identify resonant interference effects in the photoionization–excitation of argon

We have studied simultaneous photoionization and excitation of Ar in the range of incident photon energies between 36.00 and 36.36 eV, where the resonant production of doubly excited neutral Ar states imbedded in the ionization continuum is dominant. By measuring the relative Stokes parameters of the fluorescence from residual Ar+∗ (3p4 [3P] 4p) ions (2P1/2, 465.8 nm transition; 2P3/2, 476.5 nm; 2D3/2, 472.7 nm; 2D5/2, 488.0 nm; 4P5/2, 480.6 nm; 4D5/2, 514.5 nm) we demonstrate a technique for determining individual partial-wave cross sections in photoionizing collisions. This procedure is shown to be important in sorting out competing dynamical ionization mechanisms, particularly with regard to resonant production of intermediate doubly excited autoionizing states. Comparison with theoretical photoionization cross sections demonstrates that spin–orbit coupling between different states of Ar II needs to be accounted for in the calculations

Arctic experiment for ICESat/GLAS ground validation with a Micro-Pulse Lidar at Ny-Alesund, Svalbard

A Micro-Pulse Lidar (MPL) has been operated in Ny-Alesund, Svalbard (78°55\u27N, 11°56\u27E, 0.010 km msl) to collect zenith scattering profiles of aerosols and clouds since 1998. The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) was launched by NASA in January 2003 with a single payload instrument, the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS), designed for active remote sensing of the atmosphere as well as ice sheet height change in the cryosphere. Overpass experiments for ground validation of the ICESat/GLAS atmospheric measurements were performed in 2003 and 2004. Two case-studies comparing lidar measurements from space-borne GLAS and ground-based MPL in the Arctic are described here for a geometrically thick but optically thin cloud and a geometrically thin but optically thick cloud. The result validates the basic procedure for cloud signal processing and attenuation correction of the GLAS data

A comprehensive analysis of normal variation and disease-causing mutations in the human DSPP gene

Within nine dentin dysplasia (type II) and dentinogenesis imperfecta (type II and III) patient/families, seven have one of four net −1 deletions within the ~2kb coding repeat domain of the DSPP gene while the remaining two patients had splice-site mutations. All frameshift mutations are predicted to change the highly soluble DSPP protein into proteins with long hydrophobic amino acid repeats that could interfere with processing of normal DSPP and/or other secreted matrix proteins. We propose that all previously reported missense, nonsense, and splice-site DSPP mutations (all associated with exons 2 and 3) result in dominant phenotypes due to disruption of signal peptide-processing and/or related biochemical events that also result in interference with protein processing. This would bring the currently known dominant forms of the human disease phenotype in agreement with the normal phenotype of the heterozygous null Dspp (−/+) mice. A study of 188 normal human chromosomes revealed a hypervariable DSPP repeat domain with extraordinary rates of change including 20 slip-replication indel events and 37 predominantly C-to-T transition SNPs. The most frequent transition in the primordial 9-bp DNA repeat was a sense-strand CpG site while a CpNpG (CAG) transition was the second most frequent SNP. Bisulfite-sequencing of genomic DNA showed that DSPP repeat can be methylated at both motifs. This suggests that, like plants and some animals, human methylate some CpNpG sequences. Analysis of 37 haplotypes of the highly variable DSPP gene from geographically diverse people suggests it may be a useful autosomal marker in human migration studies

Moisture transport by Atlantic tropical cyclones onto the North American continent

Tropical Cyclones (TCs) are an important source of freshwater for the North American continent. Many studies have tried to estimate this contribution by identifying TC-induced precipitation events, but few have explicitly diagnosed the moisture fluxes across continental boundaries. We design a set of attribution schemes to isolate the column-integrated moisture fluxes that are directly associated with TCs and to quantify the flux onto the North American Continent due to TCs. Averaged over the 2004–2012 hurricane seasons and integrated over the western, southern and eastern coasts of North America, the seven schemes attribute 7 to 18 % (mean 14 %) of total net onshore flux to Atlantic TCs. A reduced contribution of 10 % (range 9 to 11 %) was found for the 1980–2003 period, though only two schemes could be applied to this earlier period. Over the whole 1980–2012 period, a further 8 % (range 6 to 9 % from two schemes) was attributed to East Pacific TCs, resulting in a total TC contribution of 19 % (range 17 to 22 %) to the ocean-to-land moisture transport onto the North American continent between May and November. Analysis of the attribution uncertainties suggests that incorporating details of individual TC size and shape adds limited value to a fixed radius approach and TC positional errors in the ERA-Interim reanalysis do not affect the results significantly, but biases in peak wind speeds and TC sizes may lead to underestimates of moisture transport. The interannual variability does not appear to be strongly related to the El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomenon