Complete zygomatic arches in the Late Quaternary sloth Neocnus from La Altagracia province, Dominican Republic

Specimens of the extinct sloth genus Neocnus recovered from northwestern La Altagracia Province, Dominican Republic exhibit a unique zygomatic arch. The arch consists of the jugal anteriorly fused to the maxilla and the zygomatic arch ligament fully ossified between the jugal and the zygomatic process of the temporal bone. Evidence of the novel ossification is seen in adult and juvenile individuals. This occurrence is also unexpected as Neocnus individuals are 40 times smaller than the next sloth genus (e.g. Nothrotheriops) with a secondarily complete arch. No known species of Neocnus exhibits any of these jugal and zygomatic features and thus these specimens may represent a new species

Robot assisted stapedotomy ex vivo with an active handheld instrument

Micron is a fully handheld active micromanipulator that helps to improve position accuracy and precision in microsurgery by cancelling hand tremor. This work describes adaptation, tuning, and testing of the Micron system for stapedotomy, a microsurgical procedure performed in the middle ear to restore hearing that requires accurate manipulation in narrow spaces. Two end-effectors, a handle, and a brace (or rest) were designed and prototyped. The control system was adapted for the new hardware. The system was tested ex vivo in stapedotomy procedure comparing manually-performed and Micron-assisted surgical tasks. Tremor amplitude was found to be reduced significantly. Further testing is needed in order to obtain statistically significant results regarding other parameters dealing with regularity of the fenestra shap

Social Determinants of Health and Tobacco Use in Thirteen Low and Middle Income Countries: Evidence from Global Adult Tobacco Survey

BACKGROUND: Tobacco use has been identified as the single biggest cause of inequality in morbidity. The objective of this study is to examine the role of social determinants on current tobacco use in thirteen low-and-middle income countries. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We used nationally representative data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) conducted during 2008-2010 in 13 low-and-middle income countries: Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Russian Federation, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Viet Nam. These surveys provided information on 209,027 respondent's aged 15 years and above and the country datasets were analyzed individually for estimating current tobacco use across various socio-demographic factors (gender, age, place of residence, education, wealth index, and knowledge on harmful effects of smoking). Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to predict the impact of these determinants on current tobacco use status. Current tobacco use was defined as current smoking or use of smokeless tobacco, either daily or occasionally. Former smokers were excluded from the analysis. Adjusted odds ratios for current tobacco use after controlling other cofactors, was significantly higher for males across all countries and for urban areas in eight of the 13 countries. For educational level, the trend was significant in Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Philippines and Thailand demonstrating decreasing prevalence of tobacco use with increasing levels of education. For wealth index, the trend of decreasing prevalence of tobacco use with increasing wealth was significant for Bangladesh, India, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay and Viet Nam. The trend of decreasing prevalence with increasing levels of knowledge on harmful effects of smoking was significant in China, India, Philippines, Poland, Russian Federation, Thailand, Ukraine and Viet Nam. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These findings demonstrate a significant but varied role of social determinants on current tobacco use within and across countries

A Model of Vertical Oligopolistic Competition

This paper develops a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous market entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. Our analysis shows that the downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while the upstream conditions mainly affect the distribution of profits. We compare the welfare effects of upstream versus downstream deregulation policies and show that the impact of deregulation may be overvalued when ignoring feedback effects from the other market. Furthermore, we analyze how different forms of vertical restraints influence the endogenous market structure and show when they are welfare enhancing

The Impact of Online Social Networks on Decision Support Systems

Previous research on this matter had already determined that many concepts are encompassed by both online social networking and decision support systems research. Due to the large number of concepts and using clustering techniques, we were able to determine four concept clusters, namely: the technical infrastructure, online communities, network analysis and knowledge management. Then, we intended to gain further knowledge on how those concepts influenced DSS related research and the contribution of each cluster to the support of the phases of decision-making process. We also wanted to perceive the interconnections among the concept clusters themselves, for which we used structural equation modeling techniques. The obtained results evidence that not only online social networks are being used as a technical infrastructure to support the three decision making phases and to support knowledge management and online communities, but also that the other clusters only regard the intelligence phase of the decision process.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Social Media Technologies' Use for the Competitive Information and Knowledge Sharing, and Its Effects on Industrial SMEs' Innovation

The effective use of technologies supporting decision making is essential to companies? survival. Recent studies analyzed social media technologies (SMT) in the context of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), contributing to the discussion on SMT benefits from the marketing perspective. This article focuses on the effects of SMT use on innovation. Our findings provide empirical evidence on the positive effects of SMT use for acquiring external information and for sharing knowledge and innovation performance

Enterprise 2.0: Research challenges and opportunities

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Blending Web 2.0 technologies with enterprise information systems is setting up the stage for a new generation of information systems that will help enterprises open up new communication channels with their stakeholders. Contrary to traditional enterprises with top-down command flow and bottom-up feedback flow, the same flows in Enterprise 2.0 cross all levels and in all directions bringing people together in the development of creative and innovative ideas. The power of Web 2.0 technologies stems from their ability to capture real-world phenomena such as collaboration, competition, and partnership that can be converted into useful and structured information sources from which enterprises can draw information about markets’ trends, consumers’ habits, suppliers’ strategies, etc. This paper discusses the research efforts that our international research group has put into the topic of Enterprise 2.0 (aka Social Enterprise). In particular, our research group advocates that existing practices for managing enterprise information systems need to be re-visited in a way that permits to capture social relations that arise inside and outside the enterprise, to establish guidelines and techniques to assist IT practitioners integrate social relations into their design, development, and maintenance efforts of these information systems, and last but not least to identify and tackle challenges that prevent capturing social relations

Towards a synthesized critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation

During the last three decades, the arena of biodiversity conservation has largely aligned itself with the globally dominant political ideology of neoliberalism and associated governmentalities. Schemes such as payments for ecological services are promoted to reach the multiple ‘wins’ so desired: improved biodiversity conservation, economic development, (international) cooperation and poverty alleviation, amongst others. While critical scholarship with respect to understanding the linkages between neoliberalism, capitalism and the environment has a long tradition, a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation - the ideology (and related practices) that the salvation of nature requires capitalist expansion - remains lacking. This paper aims to provide such a critique. We commence with the assertion that there has been a conflation between ‘economics’ and neoliberal ideology in conservation thinking and implementation. As a result, we argue, it becomes easier to distinguish the main problems that neoliberal win-win models pose for biodiversity conservation. These are framed around three points: the stimulation of contradictions; appropriation and misrepresentation and the disciplining of dissent. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s recent ‘compositionist manifesto’, the conclusion outlines some ideas for moving beyond critique

‘We need to get together and make ourselves heard’: everyday online spaces as incubators of political action

This article examines to what extent, and how, people engaging in political talk within ‘non-political’ discussion forums – online lifestyle communities – leads to political (or personal) action or calls-to-action. The analysis is framed in the context of wider questions of citizenship, civic engagement and political mobilization. To capture everyday political talk amongst citizens requires us to move beyond the now widely analysed online spaces of formal politics. Instead, we focus on online third spaces concerning lifestyle issues such as parenting, personal finance and popular culture. Drawing on a content analysis of three popular UK-based discussion forums over the course of five years (2010–2014), we found that (for two of the three cases) such spaces were more than just talking shops. Rather they were spaces where political actions not only emerged, but where they seemed to be cultivated. Discussions embedded in the personal lives of participants often developed – through talk – into political actions aimed at government (or other) authorities. The article sheds light on the contributing factors and processes that (potentially) trigger and foster action emerging from political talk and provides insight into the mobilization potential of third spaces