An Assessment of the Influence of Selected on the Performance of Small to Medium Sized Family Owned Businesses in the Zimbabwe Retail Sector

Objectives: The study attempted to assess the factors that are affecting business performance of small to medium sized family owned businesses in the Zimbabwean retail sector. The objective was to establish the effect of innovation, management skills, succession planning and corporate governance on family owned SMEs in Zimbabwe. Prior Work: The study sought to complement other previous studies that were carried out in other different contexts by producing evidence on the same phenomenon from a developing country context. Approach: The study adopted a quantitative approach. A self-administered survey was conducted to collect data that was analysed using descriptive, correlation and regression analyses. Results: The results showed that the most significant factors affecting business performance in order of predictive power were innovation, proper management skills, succession planning and corporate governance. Implications: The findings have implications to family business managers and owners in Zimbabwe who are encouraged to be innovative, properly manage, practise succession planning and be guided by business morals in managing their enterprises. Value: Whilst the factors ensuring the success of Small and Medium sized enterprises have extensively been examined, there is dearth of research on family business success factors especially in a developing country like Zimbabwe. JEL: M10 SMEs, family business, innovation, succession planning, corporate governance.   &nbsp

Intercultural Interaction in architectural education

Fourteen case studies on architectural education - Intercultural Interactions is a theme that began within SCHOSA (The Standing Conference of Heads of Schools of Architecture) whilst Robert Mull was chair between 2008 and 2010. The theme and publication were then developed with the support of CEBE (The Centre for Education in the Built Environment) and the ASD Projects office at London Metropolitan University

A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz

We conducted a search for narrowband radio signals over four observing sessions in 2020-2023 with the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. We pointed the telescope in the directions of 62 TESS Objects of Interest, capturing radio emissions from a total of ~11,680 stars and planetary systems in the ~9 arcminute beam of the telescope. All detections were either automatically rejected or visually inspected and confirmed to be of anthropogenic nature. In this work, we also quantified the end-to-end efficiency of radio SETI pipelines with a signal injection and recovery analysis. The UCLA SETI pipeline recovers 94.0% of the injected signals over the usable frequency range of the receiver and 98.7% of the injections when regions of dense RFI are excluded. In another pipeline that uses incoherent sums of 51 consecutive spectra, the recovery rate is ~15 times smaller at ~6%. The pipeline efficiency affects calculations of transmitter prevalence and SETI search volume. Accordingly, we developed an improved Drake Figure of Merit and a formalism to place upper limits on transmitter prevalence that take the pipeline efficiency and transmitter duty cycle into account. Based on our observations, we can state at the 95% confidence level that fewer than 6.6% of stars within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our search (EIRP > 1e13 W). For stars within 20,000 ly, the fraction of stars with detectable transmitters (EIRP > 5e16 W) is at most 3e-4. Finally, we showed that the UCLA SETI pipeline natively detects the signals detected with AI techniques by Ma et al. (2023).Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, submitted to AJ, revise

Nutrition and the ageing brain: moving towards clinical applications

The global increases in life expectancy and population have resulted in a growing ageing population and with it a growing number of people living with age-related neurodegenerative conditions and dementia, shifting focus towards methods of prevention, with lifestyle approaches such as nutrition representing a promising avenue for further development. This overview summarises the main themes discussed during the 3 Symposium on "Nutrition for the Ageing Brain: Moving Towards Clinical Applications" held in Madrid in August 2018, enlarged with the current state of knowledge on how nutrition influences healthy ageing and gives recommendations regarding how the critical field of nutrition and neurodegeneration research should move forward into the future. Specific nutrients are discussed as well as the impact of multi-nutrient and whole diet approaches, showing particular promise to combatting the growing burden of age-related cognitive decline. The emergence of new avenues for exploring the role of diet in healthy ageing, such as the impact of the gut microbiome and development of new techniques (imaging measures of brain metabolism, metabolomics, biomarkers) are enabling researchers to approach finding answers to these questions. But the translation of these findings into clinical and public health contexts remains an obstacle due to significant shortcomings in nutrition research or pressure on the scientific community to communicate recommendations to the general public in a convincing and accessible way. Some promising programs exist but further investigation to improve our understanding of the mechanisms by which nutrition can improve brain health across the human lifespan is still required

Sensory Communication

Contains table of contents for Section 2, an introduction and reports on twelve research projects.National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00117National Institutes of Health Contract 2 P01 DC00361National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00126National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC00270U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research Contract AFOSR-90-0200National Institutes of Health Grant R29-DC00625U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-88-K-0604U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-91-J-1454U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-1814U.S. Navy - Naval Training Systems Center Contract N61339-93-M-1213U.S. Navy - Naval Training Systems Center Contract N61339-93-C-0055U.S. Navy - Naval Training Systems Center Contract N61339-93-C-0083U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-4005U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-93-1-119

DEA 4590/6500 Course Syllabus - Fall 09

DEA 4590/6500, Programming Methods in Design, Course Syllabus by Instructor Lorraine Maxwell, Fall 200

DEA 4100 Course Syllabus - Spring 10

DEA 4100, Facility Planning and Design in a Diverse Society, Course Syllabus by Instructor Lorraine Maxwell, Spring 201

DEA 4590/6500 Course Syllabus - Fall 2011

DEA 4590/6500, Programming Methods in Design, Course Syllabus by Lorraine Maxwell, Fall 201