SUCCEEDING WITH TRANSFORMATIONAL INITIATIVES: PRACTICAL APPROACHES FOR MANAGING CHANGE PROGRAMS

According to exiting literature, most change programs fail to manage and/or meet the expectations of stakeholders; leading to the failure of larger strategic organisational and transformational initiatives. Undoubtedly, change management necessitates introspective planning and responsive implementation but a failure to acknowledge and manage the external stakeholder environment will undermine these efforts. This article presents some practical frameworks for managing the delivery of change that were used collectively in different situations and contributed to the successful implementation of change programs. It does not recommend any specific approach to yield successful outcomes, but it considers a range of approaches for practitioners to take into account to assure seamless integration of programs with the formulation of overall strategy and implementation planning. Understanding the components of each program is asserted to support organisations to better understand the people and non-technology dimensions of their projects and the need to ensure effective, consultative communications to gain and maintain support for the program of change.people Management, change Management tactics

Impaired Auditory Temporal Selectivity in the Inferior Colliculus of Aged Mongolian Gerbils

Aged humans show severe difficulties in temporal auditory processing tasks (e.g., speech recognition in noise, low-frequency sound localization, gap detection). A degradation of auditory function with age is also evident in experimental animals. To investigate age-related changes in temporal processing, we compared extracellular responses to temporally variable pulse trains and human speech in the inferior colliculus of young adult (3 month) and aged (3 years) Mongolian gerbils. We observed a significant decrease of selectivity to the pulse trains in neuronal responses from aged animals. This decrease in selectivity led, on the population level, to an increase in signal correlations and therefore a decrease in heterogeneity of temporal receptive fields and a decreased efficiency in encoding of speech signals. A decrease in selectivity to temporal modulations is consistent with a downregulation of the inhibitory transmitter system in aged animals. These alterations in temporal processing could underlie declines in the aging auditory system, which are unrelated to peripheral hearing loss. These declines cannot be compensated by traditional hearing aids (that rely on amplification of sound) but may rather require pharmacological treatment

Modeling Market Volatility in Emerging Markets: The case of Daily Data in Amman Stock Exchange 1992-2004

This paper attempts to investigate the volatility of the Jordanian emerging stock market using daily observations from Amman Stock Exchange Composite Index (ASE) for the period from January 1, 1992 through December 31, 2004. Preliminary analysis of the data shows significant departure from normality. Moreover, returns and residuals show a significant level of serial correlation which is related to the conditional heteroskedasticity due to the time varying volatility. These results suggest that ARCH and GARCH models can provide good approximation for capturing the characteristics of ASE. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis of symmetric volatility; hence, both good and bad news of the same magnitude have the same impact on the volatility level. Moreover, the volatility persists in the market for a long period of time, which makes ASE market inefficient; therefore, returns can be easily predicted and forecasted.Stock Exchange, Modeling Volatility, Emerging Markets, Jordan

The structural geology and petrology of the Mesozoic calcareous sediments west of Lac du Bourget, Savoy

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Resolving the extended stellar atmospheres of Asymptotic Giant Branch stars at (sub-)millimetre wavelengths

The initial conditions for the mass loss during the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase are set in their extended atmospheres, where, among others, convection and pulsation driven shocks determine the physical conditions. High resolution observations of AGB stars at (sub)millimetre wavelengths can now directly determine the morphology, activity, density, and temperature close to the stellar photosphere. We used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) high angular resolution observations to resolve the extended atmospheres of four of the nearest AGB stars: W Hya, Mira A, R Dor and R Leo. We interpreted the observations using a parameterised atmosphere model. We resolve all four AGB stars and determine the brightness temperature structure between $1$ and $2$ stellar radii. For W Hya and R Dor we confirm the existence of hotspots with brightness temperatures $>3000$ to $10000$~K. All four stars show deviations from spherical symmetry. We find variations on a timescale of days to weeks, and for R Leo we directly measure an outward motion of the millimetre wavelength surface with a velocity of at least $10.6\pm1.4$~km~s$^{-1}$. For all objects but W Hya we find that the temperature-radius and size-frequency relations require the existence of a (likely inhomogeneous) layer of enhanced opacity. The ALMA observations provide a unique probe of the structure of the extended AGB atmosphere. We find highly variable structures of hotspots and likely convective cells. In the future, these observations can be directly compared to multi-dimensional chromosphere and atmosphere models that determine the temperature, density, velocity, and ionisation structure between the stellar photosphere and the dust formation region. However, our results show that for the best interpretation, both very accurate flux calibration and near-simultaneous observations are essential.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, Accepted to A&A, final version after language editin

Perturbations in a non-singular bouncing Universe

We complement the low-energy gravi-dilaton effective action of string theory with a non-local, general-covariant dilaton potential, and obtain homogeneous solutions describing a non-singular (bouncing-curvature) cosmology. We then compute, both analytically and numerically, the spectrum of amplified scalar and tensor perturbations, and draw some general lessons on how to extract observable consequences from pre-big bang and ekpyrotic scenarios.Comment: 14 pages in Latex style, 5 included figure