Varicocele and the Public Services.

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How innovation survives in large corporations : a case study of Posten Norge AS

Background: Companies face a number of new challenges in today's digital and rapidly changing society. To deal with this, they need to be able to handle change and adapt to new trends faster. How companies are able to innovate affects this muscle of change, but innovation is not as easy for everyone. Large companies often encounter a number of barriers when implementing innovative methods or mindsets as they are cumbersome and have large systems. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to provide a better understanding of how large companies can handle various barriers that hinder their innovative capabilities. The thesis is based on the mapping of various barriers (Carlgren et al., 2016; Cinar et al., 2019; Clausen et al., 2019) and how individuals and leaders (Clark, 2020) can influence these. We have tried to answer our problem statement: In what way does a well-established company like Posten Norge AS face and break various barriers related to innovation and how can other companies in a similar situation learn from what they do? Method: Through a qualitative approach and the Gioia method, we have conducted a simple case study based on 15 interviews with employees at Posten Norge AS Findings and analysis: The findings in this thesis indicate that Posten Norge AS is a company that encounters many of the same barriers that the literature presents. The company’s employees all see the value of the “digital innovation” department, and what this unit has entailed. In addition, it appears that new project methods also require new performance measurements. This is a special barrier that is clarified when projects developed with agile working methods are to be transferred to a department that does not have this focus. This is how the project then often loses its value. Uncertainty among employees usually arises when they feel insecure about their position and/or lack good support from their manager. Posten Norge AS is training agile coaches in 2022 and we envisage that these can have a great positive effect if they are used where they are needed most. This can also indirectly contribute to increasing the entrepreneurial learning of the employees.Sammendrag Bakgrunn: Selskaper står overfor en rekke nye utfordringer i dagens digitale og raske endrende samfunn. For å håndtere dette må de kunne håndtere endringer raskere og tilpasse nye trender. Hvordan selskaper evner å innovere påvirker denne endringsmuskelen, men innovasjon er ikke like lett for alle. Store selskaper møter ofte på en del barrierer når de skal implementere innovative metoder eller tankesett da de er tunggrodde og har store systemer. Hensikt: Formålet med denne oppgaven er å gi en bedre forståelse av hvordan store selskaper kan håndtere ulike barrierer som hindrer deres innovative kapabiliteter. Oppgaven er basert på kartleggingen av ulike barrier (Carlgren et al., 2016 ; Cinar et al., 2019 ; Clausen et al., 2019) og hvordan enkeltindivider og ledere (Clark, 2020) kan påvirke disse. Slik har vi forsøkt å svare på vår problemstilling: På hvilken måte møter og bryter et veletablert selskap som Posten Norge AS ulike barrierer knyttet til innovasjon og hvordan kan andre selskaper i lignende situasjon ta læring fra det de gjør? Metode: Gjennom en kvalitativ tilnærming og Gioia-metoden har vi gjennomført et enkelt casestudie basert på 15 intervjuer med ansatte hos Posten. Funn og analyse: Funnene i denne oppgaven indikerer at Posten er et selskap som møter på mange av de samme barrierene som litteraturen presenterer. De ansatte hos Posten ser alle verdien av avdelingen «digital innovasjon», og hva denne opprettelsen har medført. I tillegg kommer det frem at nye prosjektmetoder også krever nye resultatmålinger. Dette er en spesiell barriere som tydeliggjøres når prosjekter utviklet med agile arbeidsmetoder skal overføres til en avdeling som ikke har dette fokuset. Ofte mister prosjektet verdien sin slik. Usikkerhet hos ansatte oppstår som regel når de føler seg utrygge på posisjonen sin og/eller mangler god støtte fra lederen. Posten utdanner agile coacher i 2022 og vi ser for oss at disse kan ha stor positiv effekt om de brukes der de trengs mest. Dette kan også indirekte bidra til å øke den entreprenørielle læringen hos de ansatte.M-E

"My husband, my hero": selling the political spouses in the 2010 general election.

In spite of a record number of female parliamentary candidates, the 2010 general election campaign became notable for the intensity of coverage given to the female spouses of the three main party leaders. We find that this resulted from a combination of party communication strategy, established media discourses, and the agency and visibility of the wives themselves. First, Labour and the Conservatives were the most prominent in integrating their leaders’ wives into their campaigns, often to counter the less marketable qualities of the leaders themselves. Second, while mainstream media outlets—particularly newspapers—sought to cover all three women, they did so drawing upon established gender-based conventions, focussing on the wives’ physical appearance and apparent dedication to their husbands. Third, while the wife of the Liberal Democrat leader opted for limited and strategic contact with media, the wives of the Conservative and Labour leaders exploited a range of new media platforms, combining official party websites, personal blogs, and webcasts. We argue that any assessment of the role of the spouses of party leaders has to look at media-driven priorities only alongside the various strategies open to parties and individuals in managing media activities. We also suggest that there is room to use the coverage of leaders’ spouses to explore the development, limits, and gender politics of any shift toward presidentialism

Cutting the Lawn - Natural Burial and its Contribution to the Delivery of Ecosystem Services in Urban Cemeteries

This article investigates the impact of natural burial on the delivery of ecosystem services (ESs) in urban cemeteries in England that are owned and managed by local authorities. Local authority natural burial sites have received far less attention from researchers than independent sites developed by farmers, charitable trusts, funeral directors and land owners. Here we argue that the local authority hybrid cemeteries that combine natural burial with traditional graves may have a far greater impact in delivering regulatory and cultural ecosystem services than the much larger and frequently more environmentally ambitious natural burial grounds developed by the independent sector. The article presents three case studies of cemeteries, each of which represents a different interpretation of natural burial. Two have retrofitted natural burial into an existing cemetery landscape. The third is a new cemetery where natural burial was included with traditional burial in the original design brief and planning application. The research reveals how natural burial is transforming the traditional cemetery, with its focus on an intensively managed lawn aesthetic, towards a more habitat rich and spatially complex landscape with its own distinctive identity. The research also reveals how natural burial (within the unique constraints of UK burial culture that does not permit the recycling of burial space) is increasing the burial capacity of urban cemeteries by accessing land and grave space that might not be suitable or appropriate for more traditional forms of burial

Phenotypic and pharmacogenetic evaluation of patients with thiazide-induced hyponatremia.

Thiazide diuretics are among the most widely used treatments for hypertension, but thiazide-induced hyponatremia (TIH), a clinically significant adverse effect, is poorly understood. Here, we have studied the phenotypic and genetic characteristics of patients hospitalized with TIH. In a cohort of 109 TIH patients, those with severe TIH displayed an extended phenotype of intravascular volume expansion, increased free water reabsorption, urinary prostaglandin E2 excretion, and reduced excretion of serum chloride, magnesium, zinc, and antidiuretic hormone. GWAS in a separate cohort of 48 TIH patients and 2,922 controls from the 1958 British birth cohort identified an additional 14 regions associated with TIH. We identified a suggestive association with a variant in SLCO2A1, which encodes a prostaglandin transporter in the distal nephron. Resequencing of SLCO2A1 revealed a nonsynonymous variant, rs34550074 (p.A396T), and association with this SNP was replicated in a second cohort of TIH cases. TIH patients with the p.A396T variant demonstrated increased urinary excretion of prostaglandin E2 and metabolites. Moreover, the SLCO2A1 phospho-mimic p.A396E showed loss of transporter function in vitro. These findings indicate that the phenotype of TIH involves a more extensive metabolic derangement than previously recognized. We propose one mechanism underlying TIH development in a subgroup of patients in which SLCO2A1 regulation is altered.This work was supported by an Academy of Medical Sciences grant for clinical lecturers (to JSW and MG), British Heart Foundation grant PG/09/089 (to KMO), the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Royal Brompton Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit (to JSW and SC), the Fondation Leducq (to JSW and SC), and the British Heart Foundation (to JSW and SC). MDT holds a Medical Research Council Senior Clinical Fellowship (G0902313). This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (grant numbers G510364 and G1000861). This research used the ALICE and SPECTRE High Performance Computing Facilities at the University of Leicester

The PrPC Cl fragment derived from the ovine A(136)R(154)R(171) PRNP allele is highly abundant in sheep brain and inhibits fibrillisation of full-length PrPC protein in vitro

AbstractExpression of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) is crucial for the development of prion diseases. Resistance to prion diseases can result from reduced availability of the prion protein or from amino acid changes in the prion protein sequence. We propose here that increased production of a natural PrP α-cleavage fragment, C1, is also associated with resistance to disease. We show, in brain tissue, that ARR homozygous sheep, associated with resistance to disease, produced PrPC comprised of 25% more C1 fragment than PrPC from the disease-susceptible ARQ homozygous and highly susceptible VRQ homozygous animals. Only the C1 fragment derived from the ARR allele inhibits in-vitro fibrillisation of other allelic PrPC variants. We propose that the increased α-cleavage of ovine ARR PrPC contributes to a dominant negative effect of this polymorphism on disease susceptibility. Furthermore, the significant reduction in PrPC β-cleavage product C2 in sheep of the ARR/ARR genotype compared to ARQ/ARQ and VRQ/VRQ genotypes, may add to the complexity of genetic determinants of prion disease susceptibility

Valuing the Dead: Death, Burial, and the Body in Second World War Britain

In her work The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry discusses what she has termed ‘the referential instability’ of the human body in death. The dead of war, she argues, have a particular, historically specific, instability, in that their bodies can be of immense emotional value to their nation, but can also be fought over and disputed; the subject of competing claims from nation, family and enemy. In Second World War Britain the bodies of dead combatants, for long the subject of state regulation and familial and comradely grief, were joined by the bodies of dead civilians. This article examines the ways in which the British state attempted to regulate the disposal of the bodies of both civilians and combatants in a manner which conferred the sense of honour and sacrifice, largely successfully attached to the dead of the battlefield since the First World War, to the bodies of civilians killed in the new form of warfare, aerial bombardment. It sets this against a discussion of the treatment of the combatant dead and examines expressions of grief, and the regulation of these in both civilian and combatant contexts, arguing that in ‘total war’ the state struggled to ensure the stability of both the civilian and combatant corpse

Influence of base-excision-repair pathway enzymes on prion pathogenesis

Experimental prion disease in mice is a well-established model system for studying the pathogenesis of prion-induced neurodegeneration. The mouse-adapted Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) strain is commonly used for this purpose. With the ever-increasing catalogue of transgenic mice in which one or more genes have been invalidated, a considerable number of studies of prion disease have been performed in knockout lines, in search for genes that could influence the disease progression and presentation. The general idea behind such studies is to gain knowledge of the pathogenesis and to identify new targets for disease treatment and/or prevention. This is indeed also the foundation of the studies in this thesis. We have asked the question; do DNA repair enzymes belonging to the base-excision-repair (BER) pathway contribute cellular protection against prion-induced toxicity? To explore this, we have used three relatively newly developed lines of BER-enzyme knockouts. Although some of the physiological roles of the individual BER enzymes have been established, the full spectrum of functions are still very much under investigation. Thus, the studies in this thesis have also had this aspect in mind¬¬¬—namely that experimental prion disease in these mouse models could potentially reveal less explored functions of these enzymes. Three lines of transgenic mice with compromised BER-enzyme activity were subjected to RML prion disease, and in two of our studies (Paper II and III) samples were analyzed both at onset and end-stage of disease. The most striking observations from these studies are that the pre-clinical progression of experimental prion disease appears largely unaffected by BER-enzyme activities. However, loss of BER enzymes in all three models used resulted in a more dramatic and shortened clinical (toxic) phase of the disease, suggesting that BER-enzyme activity in various ways contributes neuronal protection in the final clinical phase. Taken together, one could, based upon our results, reach the conclusion that BER repair of oxidative DNA damage in prion disease is of moderate or minor importance. It should, however, be noted that the model we have used, with intracerebral inoculation of RML prions, is a brutally efficient disease model, resulting in a disease progression that barely is affected by any genetic or other intervention. When taking this aspect into consideration, our observations of significantly shortened clinical duration in the absence of different BER activities, to my mind, indicates that these DNA repair enzymes play a significant part in anti-prion neuroprotection.Thesis: 2017:4