Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia’s Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe

Book review of Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia’s Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe

Strategies for Small Business Restaurant Sustainability Beyond the First 5 Years

Ineffective leadership strategies can negatively affect the sustainability of small business restaurants. Leaders of small business restaurants who do not implement effective leadership strategies may face challenges sustaining their business in the first 5 years of operation. Grounded in entrepreneurship theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore leadership strategies that successful small business restaurant managers employ to help sustain their businesses beyond the first 5 years of operation. The participants of this study included three individuals who successfully managed small business restaurants in the Midwestern United States. Data collection procedures included semistructured interviews and a collection of company documentation such as business mission statements, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Data were analyzed using coding, theme development, member checking, and methodological triangulation. Four themes emerged: maintaining good customer relationships, quality of product, employee satisfaction, and importance of community involvement. A key recommendation is for small business restaurant owners to build honest relationships both within the company and with suppliers. Small business owners may engage directly with customers and employees while working alongside their staff and being hands-on with the business operations. Implications for positive social change include information that can support small businesses to remain successful. In return, a successful small restaurant business may lead to more job opportunities, encourage employee advancement, and increase local business-to-business transactions

d-Fold Partition Diamonds

In this work we introduce new combinatorial objects called $d$--fold partition diamonds, which generalize both the classical partition function and the partition diamonds of Andrews, Paule and Riese, and we set $r_d(n)$ to be their counting function. We also consider the Schmidt type $d$--fold partition diamonds, which have counting function $s_d(n).$ Using partition analysis, we then find the generating function for both, and connect the generating functions $\sum_{n= 0}^\infty s_d(n)q^n$ to Eulerian polynomials. This allows us to develop elementary proofs of infinitely many Ramanujan--like congruences satisfied by $s_d(n)$ for various values of $d$, including the following family: for all $d\geq 1$ and all $n\geq 0,$ $s_d(2n+1) \equiv 0 \pmod{2^d}.$Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures; v2: added a new result concerning Eulerian polynomials and several subsequent congruences for $s_{d}(n)$, and corrected a mistake in the proof of Proposition 1.

The United States of America and the International Criminal Court

THIS IS AN APPEAL FROM A GUILTY VERDICT AT A NON-JURY TRIAL ON THE CHARGES OF SPEEDING, A CLASS B MISDEMEANOR, IN VIOLATION OF UTAH CODE ANNOTATED, § 41-6-46, AND DRIVING ON SUSPENSION, A CLASS C MISDEMEANOR, IN VIOLATION OF § 41-2-136, IN THE FIFTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT COURT OF BEAVER COUNTY, STATE OF UTAH, THE HONORABLE J. PHILIP EVES PRESIDING

Combining dispersion modelling with synoptic patterns to understand the wind-borne transport into the UK of the bluetongue disease vector

Bluetongue, an economically important animal disease, can be spread over long distances by carriage of insect vectors (Culicoides biting midges) on the wind. The weather conditions which influence the midge’s flight are controlled by synoptic scale atmospheric circulations. A method is proposed that links wind-borne dispersion of the insects to synoptic circulation through the use of a dispersion model in combination with principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis. We illustrate how to identify the main synoptic situations present during times of midge incursions into the UK from the European continent. A PCA was conducted on high-pass-filtered mean sea-level pressure data for a domain centred over north-west Europe from 2005 to 2007. A clustering algorithm applied to the PCA scores indicated the data should be divided into five classes for which averages were calculated, providing a classification of the main synoptic types present. Midge incursion events were found to mainly occur in two synoptic categories; 64.8% were associated with a pattern displaying a pressure gradient over the North Atlantic leading to moderate south-westerly flow over the UK and 17.9% of the events occurred when high pressure dominated the region leading to south-easterly or easterly winds. The winds indicated by the pressure maps generally compared well against observations from a surface station and analysis charts. This technique could be used to assess frequency and timings of incursions of virus into new areas on seasonal and decadal timescales, currently not possible with other dispersion or biological modelling methods

Investigating global tropical cyclone activity with a hierarchy of AGCMs: the role of model resolution

The ability to run General Circulation Models (GCMs) at ever-higher horizontal resolutions has meant that tropical cyclone simulations are increasingly credible. A hierarchy of atmosphere-only GCMs, based on the Hadley Centre Global Environmental Model (HadGEM1), with horizontal resolution increasing from approximately 270km to 60km (at 50N), is used to systematically investigate the impact of spatial resolution on the simulation of global tropical cyclone activity, independent of model formulation. Tropical cyclones are extracted from ensemble simulations and reanalyses of comparable resolutions using a feature-tracking algorithm. Resolution is critical for simulating storm intensity and convergence to observed storm intensities is not achieved with the model hierarchy. Resolution is less critical for simulating the annual number of tropical cyclones and their geographical distribution, which are well captured at resolutions of 135km or higher, particularly for Northern Hemisphere basins. Simulating the interannual variability of storm occurrence requires resolutions of 100km or higher; however, the level of skill is basin dependent. Higher resolution GCMs are increasingly able to capture the interannual variability of the large-scale environmental conditions that contribute to tropical cyclogenesis. Different environmental factors contribute to the interannual variability of tropical cyclones in the different basins: in the North Atlantic basin the vertical wind shear, potential intensity and low-level absolute vorticity are dominant, while in the North Pacific basins mid-level relative humidity and low-level absolute vorticity are dominant. Model resolution is crucial for a realistic simulation of tropical cyclone behaviour, and high-resolution GCMs are found to be valuable tools for investigating the global location and frequency of tropical cyclones

How to Exploit the Digitalization Potential of Business Processes

Process improvement is the most value-adding activity in the business process management (BPM) lifecycle. Despite mature knowledge, many approaches have been criticized to lack guidance on how to put process improvement into practice. Given the variety of emerging digital technologies, organizations not only face a process improvement black box, but also high uncertainty regarding digital technologies. This paper thus proposes a method that supports organizations in exploiting the digitalization potential of their business processes. To achieve this, action design research and situational method engineering were adopted. Two design cycles involving practitioners (i.e., managers and BPM experts) and end-users (i.e., process owners and participants) were conducted. In the first cycle, the method’s alpha version was evaluated by interviewing practitioners from five organizations. In the second cycle, the beta version was evaluated via real-world case studies. In this paper, detailed results of one case study, which was conducted at a semiconductor manufacturer, are included

A Role for the Retinoblastoma Protein As a Regulator of Mouse Osteoblast Cell Adhesion: Implications for Osteogenesis and Osteosarcoma Formation

The retinoblastoma protein (pRb) is a cell cycle regulator inactivated in most human cancers. Loss of pRb function results from mutations in the gene coding for pRb or for any of its upstream regulators. Although pRb is predominantly known as a cell cycle repressor, our data point to additional pRb functions in cell adhesion. Our data show that pRb regulates the expression of a wide repertoire of cell adhesion genes and regulates the assembly of the adherens junctions required for cell adhesion. We conducted our studies in osteoblasts, which depend on both pRb and on cell-to-cell contacts for their differentiation and function. We generated knockout mice in which the RB gene was excised specifically in osteoblasts using the cre-lox P system and found that osteoblasts from pRb knockout mice did not assemble adherens junction at their membranes. pRb depletion in wild type osteoblasts using RNAi also disrupted adherens junctions. Microarrays comparing pRb-expressing and pRb-deficient osteoblasts showed that pRb controls the expression of a number of cell adhesion genes, including cadherins. Furthermore, pRb knockout mice showed bone abnormalities consistent with osteoblast adhesion defects. We also found that pRb controls the function of merlin, a well-known regulator of adherens junction assembly, by repressing Rac1 and its effector Pak1. Using qRT-PCR, immunoblots, co-immunoprecipitation assays, and immunofluorescent labeling, we observed that pRb loss resulted in Rac1 and Pak1 overexpression concomitant with merlin inactivation by Pak1, merlin detachment from the membrane, and adherens junction loss. Our data support a pRb function in cell adhesion while elucidating the mechanism for this function. Our work suggests that in some tumor types pRb inactivation results in both a loss of cell cycle control that promotes initial tumor growth as well as in a loss of cell-to-cell contacts, which contributes to later stages of metastasis