The Contemporary Human Resources Function

Abstract Current companies encounter important challenges day to day. Many factors such as the economic globalization, the change in the way of working, the Internet boom, and the importance that the service sector is experiencing nowadays influence the new society in which persons and businesses actually cope. Each of these contingencies obligates the Human Resource function to adapt to new organizational goals moulding their strategies and tactics to the in fashion topics. In this work we present the classical functions integrated in the Human Resources department constituting its base of performance. We also deal equally with the high performance practices and the importance that is acquiring the binomial human resources management strategies – business performance such as new tendencies applicable in this area.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Does diversity in top management teams contribute to organizational performance? The response of IBEX 35 companies

This study contributes to the spread of theoretical and empirical knowledge regarding the Upper Echelons Theory, considering the training and demographic diversity in the Top Management Team (TMT) as a singular characteristic of each company, in our case those belonging to the IBEX35 index. Taking into account the skills of the members, a greater financial performance is expected. Once we obtained the statistical results, we concluded that the inclusion of women in the TMT increased Net Sales and EBITDA. Features such as age, training and nationality are also examined in this work.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Descripción del puesto de Responsable de Calidad en el Servicio de Transfusión Hospitalaria

En este trabajo se da a conocer la formación necesaria para desarrollar el puesto de Facultativo responsable del sistema de calidad en el servicio de transfusión hospitalaria así como las funciones encomendadas al mism

A constitutive model for analyzing martensite formation in austenitic steels deforming at high strain rates

This study presents a constitutive model for steels exhibiting SIMT, based on previous seminal works, and the corresponding methodology to estimate their parameters. The model includes temperature effects in the phase transformation kinetics, and in the softening of each solid phase through the use of a homogenization technique. The model was validated with experimental results of dynamic tensile tests on AISI 304 sheet steel specimens, and their predictions correlate well with the experimental evidence in terms of macroscopic stress–strain curves and martensite volume fraction formed at high strain rates. The work shows the value of considering temperature effects in the modeling of metastable austenitic steels submitted to impact conditions. Regarding most of the works reported in the literature on SIMT, modeling of the martensitic transformation at high strain rates is the distinctive feature of the present paper.The researchers of the University Carlos III of Madrid are indebted to the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (Project CCG10-UC3M/DPI-5596)) and to the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España (Project DPI/2008-06408) for the financial support received which allowed conducting part of this work. The authors express their thanks to Mr. Philippe and Mr. Tobisch from the company Zwick for the facilities provided to perform the tensile tests at high strain rates

A constitutive model for analyzing martensite formation in austenitic steels deforming at high strain rates

This study presents a constitutive model for steels exhibiting SIMT, based on previous seminal works, and the corresponding methodology to estimate their parameters. The model includes temperature effects in the phase transformation kinetics, and in the softening of each solid phase through the use of a homogenization technique. The model was validated with experimental results of dynamic tensile tests on AISI 304 sheet steel specimens, and their predictions correlate well with the experimental evidence in terms of macroscopic stress–strain curves and martensite volume fraction formed at high strain rates. The work shows the value of considering temperature effects in the modeling of metastable austenitic steels submitted to impact conditions. Regarding most of the works reported in the literature on SIMT, modeling of the martensitic transformation at high strain rates is the distinctive feature of the present paper.The researchers of the University Carlos III of Madrid are indebted to the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (Project CCG10-UC3M/DPI-5596)) and to the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España (Project DPI/2008-06408) for the financial support received which allowed conducting part of this work. The authors express their thanks to Mr. Philippe and Mr. Tobisch from the company Zwick for the facilities provided to perform the tensile tests at high strain rates

Food Safety Management in a Global Environment: The Role of Risk Assessment Models

Quantitative risk assessment models are playing a minor role in the development of the new EU legal framework for food safety. There is a tendency of the EU institutions to apply the precautionary principle versus the predisposition of the USA institutions to rely on risk analysis. This paper provides a comparison of the role played by quantitative risk assessment models in the development of new policies on food safety in the EU and in the USA, focusing on a study case: the supply chain of shell eggs. We suggest that EU regulatory bodies should reconsider the role that quantitative risk assessment models have to play in order to design more effective food safety management systems.Food safety policy, food safety assurance, risk analysis, risk assessment, precautionary principle, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Novel metaheuristic for parameter estimation in nonlinear dynamic biological systems

BACKGROUND: We consider the problem of parameter estimation (model calibration) in nonlinear dynamic models of biological systems. Due to the frequent ill-conditioning and multi-modality of many of these problems, traditional local methods usually fail (unless initialized with very good guesses of the parameter vector). In order to surmount these difficulties, global optimization (GO) methods have been suggested as robust alternatives. Currently, deterministic GO methods can not solve problems of realistic size within this class in reasonable computation times. In contrast, certain types of stochastic GO methods have shown promising results, although the computational cost remains large. Rodriguez-Fernandez and coworkers have presented hybrid stochastic-deterministic GO methods which could reduce computation time by one order of magnitude while guaranteeing robustness. Our goal here was to further reduce the computational effort without loosing robustness. RESULTS: We have developed a new procedure based on the scatter search methodology for nonlinear optimization of dynamic models of arbitrary (or even unknown) structure (i.e. black-box models). In this contribution, we describe and apply this novel metaheuristic, inspired by recent developments in the field of operations research, to a set of complex identification problems and we make a critical comparison with respect to the previous (above mentioned) successful methods. CONCLUSION: Robust and efficient methods for parameter estimation are of key importance in systems biology and related areas. The new metaheuristic presented in this paper aims to ensure the proper solution of these problems by adopting a global optimization approach, while keeping the computational effort under reasonable values. This new metaheuristic was applied to a set of three challenging parameter estimation problems of nonlinear dynamic biological systems, outperforming very significantly all the methods previously used for these benchmark problems

Microgels Adsorbed at Liquid-Liquid Interfaces: A Joint Numerical and Experimental Study

Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption at the interface due to the balance between surface tension and internal elasticity. Despite the existence of experimental results, a detailed theoretical understanding of this phenomenon is still lacking due to the absence of appropriate microscopic models. In this work, we propose an advanced modelling of microgels at a flat water/oil interface. The model builds on a realistic description of the internal polymeric architecture and single-particle properties of the microgel and is able to reproduce its experimentally observed shape at the interface. Complementing molecular dynamics simulations with in-situ cryo-electron microscopy experiments and atomic force microscopy imaging after Langmuir-Blodgett deposition, we compare the morphology of the microgels for different values of the cross-linking ratios. Our model allows for a systematic microscopic investigation of soft particles at fluid interfaces, which is essential to develop predictive power for the use of microgels in a broad range of applications, including the stabilization of smart emulsions and the versatile patterning of surfaces

Research Trends in Disability and Work: A Bibliometric Analysis

The aim of this study is to analyze the status, trends and future research potential areas in the literature about "disability and work". We delve into the content of the papers focused on disability and work published in any journal of a large number of interdisciplinary categories of the Social Science Citation Index during the 1991–2016 period. Bibliometric methods are used to describe the evolution of publication activity, the most representative contributors, the methodologies applied, and the content of the articles in order to explore the main themes researched. For this purpose, an innovative co-word analysis was used, using the technique applied by VOSviewer software, which allows creating knowledge maps based on data from a bibliographic nature to visualize scientific information on a specific research topic. These analyses enable the identification of potential venues for future research that could be meaningful to advance in the consolidation of the discipline.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Mujeres y sus representaciones sociales de género en el CIP Bahías de Huatulco, México

En este trabajo se exponen los resultados de un estudio que buscó conocer si la representación social de la mujer se ve modificada por el hecho de vivir o trabajar en un contexto turístico. Gracias al uso de entrevistas a profundidad, se obtuvo que el turismo proporciona a las mujeres la posibilidad de integrarse a la vida laboral remunerada y permite el contacto con hombres y mujeres cuyas conductas no se asemejan a las conductas de los habitantes de las zonas turísticas. Los roles modificados o nuevos pueden dar origen a una percepción del yo individual, que se transmite al yo colectivo y, por tanto, incide en la modificación de la memoria colectiva. Dicha resignificación de la representación social de la identidad de género implica el proceso por el cual las mujeres buscan dejar de ser cosas o seres-en-sí, para caminar hacia la posibilidad de ser sujetos.PROMEP- SE