Best Practices in Diversity Management

[Excerpt] The International Personnel Management Association (IPMA) has undertaken a human resource benchmarking project with the National Association of State Personnel Executives (NASPE). IPMA is an organization representing over 1,700 organizations and 2,500 individuals involved in public sector human resource management. The Association’s mission is to optimize organizational and individual performance in the public service by providing human resource leadership, professional development, information and services. IPMA has established an International Human Resource Advisory Board to facilitate the exchange of information on international human resource developments. The International Human Resource Advisory Board has 37 members from 35 countries and international organizations. Additional information about IPMA can be obtained at http://www.ipma-hr.org

History and Unique Features of the Farm Credit System

Agricultural Finance,

THE AGE OF CONTRACT AGRICULTURE: CONSEQUENCES OF CONCENTRATION IN INPUT SUPPLY

Dramatic increases in concentration in the seed business, coupled with aggressive efforts to vertically integrate the agricultural sector and to institute contract-based production of commodities, have raised questions about the economic position of producers. Disparate positions of market power by highly concentrated input suppliers on the one hand (particularly seed suppliers because of control over germ plasm and a monopoly position over seed varieties through plant patents or plant variety protection certificates), and producers in nearly perfect competition on the other, suggest that the revenue division from production is likely to be redefined in favor of the party with the greater market and economic power. Possible solutions include aggressive antitrust oversight over further mergers and consolidations, assuring that more germ plasm is in the public domain, and collective action by producers in bargaining for inputs.agriculture, antitrust, barriers to entry, collective action, concentration, contract, seed, vertical integration, Farm Management, Industrial Organization,

Joint-space tracking of workspace trajectories in continuous time

We present a controller for a class of robotics manipulators which provides exponential convergence to a desired end-effector trajectory using gains specified in joint-space. This is accomplished without appeal to the use of discrete inverse-kinematics algorithms, allowing the controller to be posed entirely in continuous time

Regioselective reactions of 3,4-pyridynes enabled by the aryne distortion model.

The pyridine heterocycle continues to play a vital role in the development of human medicines. More than 100 currently marketed drugs contain this privileged unit, which remains highly sought after synthetically. We report an efficient means to access di- and trisubstituted pyridines in an efficient and highly controlled manner using transient 3,4-pyridyne intermediates. Previous efforts to employ 3,4-pyridynes for the construction of substituted pyridines were hampered by a lack of regiocontrol or the inability to later manipulate an adjacent directing group. The strategy relies on the use of proximal halide or sulfamate substituents to perturb pyridyne distortion, which in turn governs regioselectivities in nucleophilic addition and cycloaddition reactions. After trapping of the pyridynes generated in situ, the neighbouring directing groups may be removed or exploited using versatile metal-catalysed cross-coupling reactions. This methodology now renders 3,4-pyridynes as useful synthetic building blocks for the creation of highly decorated derivatives of the medicinally privileged pyridine heterocycle

Tracking implicit trajectories

Output tracking of implcitly defined reference trajectories is examined. A continuous-time nonlinear dynamical system is constructed that produces explicit estimates of time-varying implicit trajectories. We prove that incorporation of this "dynamic inverter" into a tracking controller provides exponential output tracking of the implicitly defined trajectory for nonlinear control systems having vector relative degree and well-behaved internal dynanmics

Characterisation of a family of neighbour transitive codes

We consider codes of length $m$ over an alphabet of size $q$ as subsets of the vertex set of the Hamming graph $\Gamma=H(m,q)$. A code for which there exists an automorphism group $X\leq Aut(\Gamma)$ that acts transitively on the code and on its set of neighbours is said to be neighbour transitive, and were introduced by the authors as a group theoretic analogue to the assumption that single errors are equally likely over a noisy channel. Examples of neighbour transitive codes include the Hamming codes, various Golay codes, certain Hadamard codes, the Nordstrom Robinson codes, certain permutation codes and frequency permutation arrays, which have connections with powerline communication, and also completely transitive codes, a subfamily of completely regular codes, which themselves have attracted a lot of interest. It is known that for any neighbour transitive code with minimum distance at least 3 there exists a subgroup of $X$ that has a $2$-transitive action on the alphabet over which the code is defined. Therefore, by Burnside's theorem, this action is of almost simple or affine type. If the action is of almost simple type, we say the code is alphabet almost simple neighbour transitive. In this paper we characterise a family of neighbour transitive codes, in particular, the alphabet almost simple neighbour transitive codes with minimum distance at least $3$, and for which the group $X$ has a non-trivial intersection with the base group of $Aut(\Gamma)$. If $C$ is such a code, we show that, up to equivalence, there exists a subcode $\Delta$ that can be completely described, and that either $C=\Delta$, or $\Delta$ is a neighbour transitive frequency permutation array and $C$ is the disjoint union of $X$-translates of $\Delta$. We also prove that any finite group can be identified in a natural way with a neighbour transitive code.Comment: 30 Page