Understanding Management Accounting Changes in a Family-Owned Company: A Greek Case Study

This study seeks to understand the changes to management accounting controls in a large Greek company in the context of the rapidly changing socio-economic environment. The paper investigates the case of FA (here anonymised), a Greek dairy company, as it has been transformed from a small family-run firm to one of the biggest companies in Greece. Familial and informal management controls have been transformed into a relatively formal and professional form of control over the years. The dynamics and nature of management accounting changes are understood by drawing on critical realism, a theoretical framework pioneered by Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1979). Our analysis revealed that a changed wider structural environment, changed control needs of owners and ?politics of control within capital? between competing management positions (Armstrong, 1989) precipitated the changes in the management control practices of the organization

High-Throughput Process Development for the Chromatographic Purification of Viral Antigens

Chromatography is a widely used method in the biotechnology industry and functions to separate the desired product from process and product related impurities. There is a multitude of resins available based on different modalities (such as charge, hydrophobicity, and affinity) to provide a spectrum of approaches to meet the separation challenges of the diverse products. The challenge of developing viral antigen purification processes is addressed in this method. A unique feature of this product class is that in order to protect against more than one strain of an antigen, vaccines are often multivalent. This entails multiple production processes for each antigen, all of which will require separate development and validation. Ideally, a universal purification method is sought, but differences in the protein subunits (frequently used as the antigens) make this challenging and often-bespoke purification steps are required. This means process development for the chromatographic stages of these products can be particularly challenging and labour intensive. With the numerous choices available, making critical process decisions that are usually unique to each product, process, and strain, can be costly and time-consuming. To address this, scale down purification at <1.0 mL column volume and automation approaches are increasingly applied to increase throughput. In this work, a method is described wherein a Tecan Freedom EVO® automated liquid handler is deployed for the evaluation of different resin chemistries and buffer conditions to find a suitable purification strategy. This method allows for the rapid evaluation of the separation viral antigens where limited information on chromatography behavior is known at the early stages of process development. Here, we demonstrate the methodology firstly by explaining the automated purification script and secondly by applying the script for an efficient purification development for different serotypes of rotavirus antigens

The s=1/2s=1/2 Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Model on Fullerene-Type Symmetry Clusters

The $s_{i}={1/2}$ nearest neighbor antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model is considered for spins sitting on the vertices of clusters with the connectivity of fullerene molecules and a number of sites $n$ ranging from 24 to 32. Using the permutational and spin inversion symmetries of the Hamiltonian the low energy spectrum is calculated for all the irreducible representations of the symmetry group of each cluster. Frustration and connectivity result in non-trivial low energy properties, with the lowest excited states being singlets except for $n=28$. Same hexagon and same pentagon correlations are the most effective in the minimization of the energy, with the $n=32-D_{3h}$ symmetry cluster having an unusually strong singlet intra-pentagon correlation. The magnetization in a field shows no discontinuities unlike the icosahedral $I_h$ fullerene clusters, but only plateaux with the most pronounced for $n=28$. The spatial symmetry as well as the connectivity of the clusters appear to be important for the determination of their magnetic properties.Comment: Extended to include low energy spectra, correlation functions and magnetization data of clusters up to 32 site

Direct NN-body code on low-power embedded ARM GPUs

This work arises on the environment of the ExaNeSt project aiming at design and development of an exascale ready supercomputer with low energy consumption profile but able to support the most demanding scientific and technical applications. The ExaNeSt compute unit consists of densely-packed low-power 64-bit ARM processors, embedded within Xilinx FPGA SoCs. SoC boards are heterogeneous architecture where computing power is supplied both by CPUs and GPUs, and are emerging as a possible low-power and low-cost alternative to clusters based on traditional CPUs. A state-of-the-art direct $N$-body code suitable for astrophysical simulations has been re-engineered in order to exploit SoC heterogeneous platforms based on ARM CPUs and embedded GPUs. Performance tests show that embedded GPUs can be effectively used to accelerate real-life scientific calculations, and that are promising also because of their energy efficiency, which is a crucial design in future exascale platforms.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in the Computing Conference 2019 proceeding

Spin Polaron Effective Magnetic Model for La_{0.5}Ca_{0.5}MnO_3

The conventional paradigm of charge order for La_{1-x}Ca_xMnO_3 for x=0.5 has been challenged recently by a Zener polaron picture emerging from experiments and theoretical calculations. The effective low energy Hamiltonian for the magnetic degrees of freedom has been found to be a cubic Heisenberg model, with ferromagnetic nearest neighbor and frustrating antiferromagnetic next nearest neighbor interactions in the planes, and antiferromagnetic interaction between planes. With linear spin wave theory and diagonalization of small clusters up to 27 sites we find that the behavior of the model interpolates between the A and CE-type magnetic structures when a frustrating intraplanar interaction is tuned. The values of the interactions calculated by ab initio methods indicate a possible non-bipartite picture of polaron ordering differing from the conventional one.Comment: 21 pages and 8 figures (included), Late

The Simplex Algorithm for the Rapid Identification of Operating Conditions During Early Bioprocess Development: Case Studies in FAb' Precipitation and Multimodal Chromatography

This study describes a data-driven algorithm as a rapid alternative to conventional Design of Experiments (DoE) approaches for identifying feasible operating conditions during early bioprocess development. In general, DoE methods involve fitting regression models to experimental data, but if model fitness is inadequate then further experimentation is required to gain more confidence in the location of an optimum. This can be undesirable during very early process development when feedstock is in limited supply and especially if a significant percentage of the tested conditions are ultimately found to be sub-optimal. An alternative approach involves focusing solely upon the feasible regions by using the knowledge gained from each condition to direct the choice of subsequent test locations that lead towards an optimum. To illustrate the principle, this study describes the application of the Simplex algorithm which uses accumulated knowledge from previous test points to direct the choice of successive conditions towards better regions. The method is illustrated by two case studies; a two variable precipitation example investigating how salt concentration and pH affect FAb' recovery from E. coli homogenate and a three-variable chromatography example identifying the optimal pH and concentrations of two salts in an elution buffer used to recover ovine antibody bound to a multimodal cation exchange matrix. Two-level and face-centered central composite regression models were constructed for each study and statistical analysis showed that they provided a poor fit to the data, necessitating additional experimentation to confirm the robust regions of the search space. By comparison, the Simplex algorithm identified a good operating point using 50% and 70% fewer conditions for the precipitation and chromatography studies, respectively. Hence, data-driven approaches have significant potential for early process development when material supply is at a premium

Parallelism and Epistasis in Skeletal Evolution Identified through Use of Phylogenomic Mapping Strategies

The identification of genetic mechanisms underlying evolutionary change is critical to our understanding of natural diversity, but is presently limited by the lack of genetic and genomic resources for most species. Here, we present a new comparative genomic approach that can be applied to a broad taxonomic sampling of nonmodel species to investigate the genetic basis of evolutionary change. Using our analysis pipeline, we show that duplication and divergence of fgfr1a is correlated with the reduction of scales within fishes of the genus Phoxinellus. As a parallel genetic mechanism is observed in scale-reduction within independent lineages of cypriniforms, our finding exposes significant developmental constraint guiding morphological evolution. In addition, we identified fixed variation in fgf20a within Phoxinellus and demonstrated that combinatorial loss-of-function of fgfr1a and fgf20a within zebrafish phenocopies the evolved scalation pattern. Together, these findings reveal epistatic interactions between fgfr1a and fgf20a as a developmental mechanism regulating skeletal variation among fishes