The impact of immersion training on complementing organizational goals and accelerating culture change - a field study

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, a national defense laboratory with a history of working in seclusion and secrecy, scientists and engineers have received an important new mission to partner with industry. The scientists and engineers need to expand their skill base beyond science and understand the business of innovation to be successful in this new environment. An administrative field experiment of conducting intensive, immersion training about the commercialization process was piloted at Los Alamos in September, 1992. This Field Research Project addresses the following research question: {open_quotes}Does {open_quotes}immersion{close_quotes} commercialization training complement organizational goals and does the method accelerate cultural change?{close_quotes} The field experiment first began as a pilot Commercialization Workshop conducted for twelve scientists in September, 1992. The objective was to create commercialization action plans for promising environmental technologies. The immersion method was compared to the indoctrination method of training also. The indoctrination training was a one-day lecture style session conducted for one hundred and fifty scientists in July, 1993. The impact of the training was measured by perceived attitude change and the amount of subsequent industrial partnerships that followed the training. The key management question addressed on the job was, {open_quotes}With a limited budget, how do we maximize the impact of training and achieve the best results?{close_quotes

Aspects of Obesity: From aetiology to weight loss and maintenance

Introduction Obesity is a significant global health and financial issue with prevalence increasing. While the cornerstone of its management remains a combined lifestyle intervention, weight loss recidivism is high. Recent novel insights relating to dietary protein and to weight homeostasis and neuro-endocrine adaptation shed light on these important aspects of obesity. Results Experiment 1 demonstrated that in lean health adults, after 4 days of ad libitum diets followed by a standardised breakfast, the lowest %protein diet was associated with highest fasting ghrelin and lowest post-prandial cholecystokinin. Experiment 2 demonstrated that both obese and lean mice varied daily food intake by >12% when consuming low protein compared to high protein chow. Experiment 3 demonstrated in obese adults that weight loss by combined lifestyle intervention was associated with reduced fasting ghrelin and glucagon-like peptide-1. Discussion The intake for dietary protein is prioritised even at the expense of increased total energy consumption and the physiological effects of changes to gut hormones on low protein diets is to favour hunger. The secular trend of reduced energy intake by protein may be a key driver towards obesity. Weight regain after lifestyle interventions are due to changes in mediators of appetite and body weight rather than just a failure of behaviour. These results challenge the conventional understanding about obesity

Catholic Documents 101: A Theological Librarian’s Guide to Identifying, Locating, and Using the Documents of the Catholic Church

The teachings of the Catholic Church are found in numerous documents, produced by different persons or groups across centuries, whose arrangement and importance relative to each other are often hard to understand. This Listen and Learn session familiarizes librarians from non-Catholic backgrounds with the various types and features of Catholic Church document, concluding with strategies for answering a sample reference question by relying on that material. By sorting through the classification of these documents and directing attendees to the most authoritative or most easily obtainable source materials for those documents, this session makes it easier for librarians working in non-Catholic settings to help patrons with research questions concerning Catholic doctrine

Structure based inhibitor design targeting glycogen phosphorylase b. Virtual screening, synthesis, biochemical and biological assessment of novel N-acyl-β-d-glucopyranosylamines

Glycogen phosphorylase (GP) is a validated target for the development of new type 2 diabetes treatments. Exploiting the Zinc docking database, we report the in silico screening of 1888 β- D-glucopyranose-NH-CO-R putative GP inhibitors differing only in their R groups. CombiGlide and GOLD docking programs with different scoring functions were employed with the best performing methods combined in a “consensus scoring” approach to ranking of ligand binding affinities for the active site. Six selected candidates from the screening were then synthesized and their inhibitory potency was assessed both in vitro and ex vivo. Their inhibition constants’ values, in vitro, ranged from 5 to 377 µM while two of them were effective at causing inactivation of GP in rat hepatocytes at low µM concentrations. The crystal structures of GP in complex with the inhibitors were defined and provided the structural basis for their inhibitory potency and data for further structure based design of more potent inhibitors

Near-Surface Interface Detection for Coal Mining Applications Using Bispectral Features and GPR

The use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) for detecting the presence of near-surface interfaces is a scenario of special interest to the underground coal mining industry. The problem is difficult to solve in practice because the radar echo from the near-surface interface is often dominated by unwanted components such as antenna crosstalk and ringing, ground-bounce effects, clutter, and severe attenuation. These nuisance components are also highly sensitive to subtle variations in ground conditions, rendering the application of standard signal pre-processing techniques such as background subtraction largely ineffective in the unsupervised case. As a solution to this detection problem, we develop a novel pattern recognition-based algorithm which utilizes a neural network to classify features derived from the bispectrum of 1D early time radar data. The binary classifier is used to decide between two key cases, namely whether an interface is within, for example, 5 cm of the surface or not. This go/no-go detection capability is highly valuable for underground coal mining operations, such as longwall mining, where the need to leave a remnant coal section is essential for geological stability. The classifier was trained and tested using real GPR data with ground truth measurements. The real data was acquired from a testbed with coal-clay, coal-shale and shale-clay interfaces, which represents a test mine site. We show that, unlike traditional second order correlation based methods such as matched filtering which can fail even in known conditions, the new method reliably allows the detection of interfaces using GPR to be applied in the near-surface region. In this work, we are not addressing the problem of depth estimation, rather confining ourselves to detecting an interface within a particular depth range

The Signal Value of Crowdfunded Products

Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative means of financing new ventures by utilizing the financial support of a large group of individual investors. In this research, we ask a novel question: does being crowdfunded carry any signal value for the broader market of observing consumers? Seven studies reveal a consumer preference for “crowdfunded products”, even after controlling for a product’s objective product characteristics. We identify two inferences that help explain this effect: (1) consumers perceive crowdfunded products to be of higher quality, and (2) they believe that supporting crowdfunding reduces inequality in the marketplace. We further document an important boundary condition of the first inference: our identified effect reverses in high risk domains (e.g., products that involve high physical risk), due to consumer perceptions that the crowdfunding model lacks sufficient professionalism to mitigate risk. With regard to the second inference, we find that the positive crowdfunding effect is particularly strong among consumers who value social equality. Taken together, our work sheds new light on consumer perceptions of crowdfunding, elucidates why and when consumers prefer crowdfunded products, and offers actionable implications for managers

Association between statin use after diagnosis of esophageal cancer and survival: a population-based cohort study

Background & Aims: Statins (3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors), commonly prescribed to prevent cardiovascular disease, promote apoptosis and limit proliferation of esophageal cancer cell lines. We investigated whether statin use following diagnosis of esophageal cancer is associated with reduced esophageal cancer-specific and all-cause mortality.  Methods: We identified a cohort of 4445 men and women in the United Kingdom diagnosed with esophageal cancer from January 2000 through November 2009 using the General Practice Research Database. The National Cancer Registry and Office of National Statistics datasets respectively established the histologic subtype and cancer-specific mortality. Cox proportional hazard regression analysis with time-dependent exposures estimated the association between statin use after diagnosis and esophageal cancer-specific and all-cause mortality.  Results: The median survival time of the entire cohort was 9.2 months (inter-quartile range [IQR], 3.7–23.2 months). Among subjects who used statins after diagnosis of esophageal cancer, the median survival time was 14.9 months (IQR, 7.1–52.3) compared to 8.1 months for non-users (IQR, 3.3–20). In the entire cohort, statin use after diagnosis was associated with a decreased risk of esophageal cancer-specific mortality (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 0.62; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.44–0.86) and all-cause mortality (HR, 0.67; 95% CI, 0.58–0.77). In patients with esophageal adenocarcinoma, statin use after diagnosis was associated with decreased risk of esophageal cancer-specific mortality (HR, 0.61; 95% CI 0.38–0.96) and all-cause mortality (HR, 0.63; 95% 0.43–0.92). This effect was not observed in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. There was no evidence for effect modification of these associations with statin use before cancer diagnosis.  Conclusions: In a large population-based cohort, statin use after diagnosis of esophageal adenocarcinoma, but not esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, was associated with reduced esophageal cancer-specific and all-cause mortality

Gender and Leadership Aspiration: Supervisor Gender, Support, and Job Control

Understanding the role of leadership aspiration in the under-representation of female leaders is important, because aspiration is a key predictor of hierarchical advancement. A neglected perspective in the relationship between gender and leadership aspiration is the gender of the individual's supervisor. Supervisors can play an important role in providing support and in engendering a sense of control, and both support and control are precurs

Search for tau -> e gamma decay at Belle

We have searched for the lepton-flavor-violating decay tau -> e gamma using a data sample of 86.7/fb collected with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric e^+ e^- collider. No evidence for a signal is obtained, and we set an upper limit for the branching fraction Br(tau -> e gamma) < 3.9 x 10^-7 at the 90% C.L.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, ReVTeX4, eps