Key factor for hastening the strategic issue diagnosis process: a within organisational model

Previous research on Strategic Issue Diagnosis (SID) had focused on the complexity and novelty associated with the decision-making process in a turbulent environment. What had not been previously addressed in the extant literature is the requirement for speed inherent within the SID process, especially that is related to the gathering of information and facts through an organisation’s environmental scanning procedures. Since proactive management techniques, nimble processes, and systems that allow an organisation to be responsive and build rapid decision-making capabilities are important determinants of success in a turbulent environment, the element of speed associated with SID is an important factor. Our paper identifi es a series of propositions focusing att ention on elements of the environmental scanning processes and management hierarchies that are intended to counteract the recursiveness and redundancy inherent in SID systems and ultimately hasten the strategic decision-making process

The rule of five should not impede anti-parasitic drug development.

The "rule of 5" has become a mainstay of decision-making in the pharmaceutical industry as well as in nonindustrial (academic and institutional) drug development. However the authors of the original paper never intended for "double cutoffs" to preclude development of new drug leads for parasitic diseases

The Developing Legal Infrastructure and the Globalization of Information: Constructing a Framework for Critical Choices in the New Millennium Internet -- Character, Content and Confusion

This paper reviews recent attempts to extend traditional property rights and other information controls and regulations into new media, such as cyberspace, primarily the World Wide Web. It reviews developments in copyright, trademark, trademark dilution, misappropriation, trespass, censorship, tort, privacy and other legal doctrines as they are reflected in recent United States case law and legislation, and to a lesser extent, in international agreements. Legal problems often arise because there is a conflict of viewpoints in how to best characterize space on the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web. Some argue that traditional ownership rights should apply, or perhaps a model of limited property rights, which assumes an implied license to trespass or move within that space, e.g., to visit or to link to another website. Others believe that private ordering systems, like contract law, should dominate the negotiation of information boundaries. Still, others see the Internet as the last open frontier, or at least, as the last green space or commons. This debate is assessed in light of several implications for information in the new millennium, i.e.,the post-national era, as it is naive to assume that simply because borders may dissolve or boundaries may expand through technology, that information access and equity will also naturally increase

Transient radiative heat transfer within a suspension of coal particles undergoing steam gasification

Transient radiative heat transfer in chemical reacting media is examined for a non-isothermal, non-gray, absorbing, emitting, and Mie-scattering suspension of coal particles, whose radiative properties vary with time as the particles undergo shrinking by endothermic gasification. A numerical model that incorporates parallel filtered collision-based Monte Carlo ray tracing, finite volume method, and explicit Euler time integration scheme is formulated for solving the unsteady energy equation that couples the radiative heat flux with the chemical kinetics. Variation of radiative properties, attenuation characteristics, temperature profiles, and extent of the chemical reaction are reported as a function of time. It is found that radiation in the visible and near IR spectrum incident on a cloud of coal particles greater than 2.5μm is more likely to be forward scattered than absorbed, but the opposite is true as the particles shrink below 1.3μm. The medium becomes optically thinner as the particles shrink and this effect is more pronounced for smaller initial coal particles because these offer higher volume fraction to particle diameter ratio and, consequently, attain higher temperatures, reaction rates, and shrinking rate

Look before You License: The Use of Public Sharing Websites in Building Co-Created Community Repositories

The legal aspects of building a co-created community repository (CCR) are explored through the examination of existing commercial web-based services. To determine whether commercial services offer a practicable option or a model for the creation of a CCR’s terms of service (TOS), we analyzed six websites. The TOS contain the rules under which content can be stored, accessed, shared, etc. This TOS assessment is based on the consideration of four attributes, applied in a legal context: functionality, integrity, provenance, and permanence. While many of the features of a successful CCR are found across the services, none possesses all of the required elements. Recommendations for preferable CCR TOS are offered

Inductive queries for a drug designing robot scientist

It is increasingly clear that machine learning algorithms need to be integrated in an iterative scientific discovery loop, in which data is queried repeatedly by means of inductive queries and where the computer provides guidance to the experiments that are being performed. In this chapter, we summarise several key challenges in achieving this integration of machine learning and data mining algorithms in methods for the discovery of Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSARs). We introduce the concept of a robot scientist, in which all steps of the discovery process are automated; we discuss the representation of molecular data such that knowledge discovery tools can analyse it, and we discuss the adaptation of machine learning and data mining algorithms to guide QSAR experiments