Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank

Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition or variety to keep workers motivated and allow them to learn. In this paper, we investigate how these two strategies may bring different benefits within the same day and across days. Additionally, we examine the impact of these strategies on both worker productivity and workers' likelihood of staying at a firm. For our empirical analyses, we use two and a half years of transaction data from a Japanese bank's home loan application processing line. We find that over the course of a single day, specialization, as compared to variety, is related to improved worker productivity. However, when we examine workers' experience across days we find that variety, or working on different tasks, helps improve worker productivity. We also find that workers with higher variety are more likely to stay at the firm. Our results identify new ways to improve operational performance through the effective allocation of work.Job Design, Learning, Productivity, Specialization, Turnover, Variety, Work Fragmentation

Botulinum toxin therapy: functional silencing of salivary disorders.

Botulinum toxin (BTX) is a neurotoxic protein produced by Clostridium botulinum, an anaerobic bacterium. BTX therapy is a safe and effective treatment when used for functional silencing of the salivary glands in disorders such as sialoceles and salivary fistulas that may have a post-traumatic or post-operative origin. BTX injections can be considered in sialoceles and salivary fistulas after the failure of or together with conservative treatments (e.g. antibiotics, pressure dressings, or serial aspirations). BTX treatment has a promising role in chronic sialadenitis. BTX therapy is highly successful in the treatment of gustatory sweating (Frey\u2019s syndrome), and could be considered the gold standard treatment for this neurological disorder

Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank

Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design-related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition and variety (i.e., working on different tasks) to keep workers motivated and provide them opportunities to learn. In this paper, we investigate how these two strategies may bring different productivity benefits over time. For our empirical analyses, we use two-and-a-half years of transaction data from a Japanese bank's home loan application-processing line. We find that over the course of a single day, specialization, as compared to variety, is related to improved worker productivity. However, when we examine workers' experience across a number of days, we find that variety helps improve worker productivity. Additionally, we show that part of this benefit results from workers' cumulative experience with changeovers. Our results highlight the need for organizations to transform specialization and variety into mutually reinforcing strategies rather than treating them as mutually exclusive. Overall, our paper identifies new ways to improve operational performance through the effective allocation of work

Compensazione Geodetica della rete siciliana UNIPA-NetGeo

Come è noto un servizio di posizionamento GNSS materializza un sistema di riferimento e distribuisce all’utenza che opera nel settore geodetico dati, prodotti e stime delle coordinate nel medesimo sistema. Per questo motivo si rende necessaria un accurata e continua stima delle coordinate, delle stazioni permanenti che compongono la rete, effettuata attraverso opportuni processi di compensazione. A tal proposito, considerato il notevole incremento delle stazioni permanenti presenti nel territorio Italiano, l’inquadramento geodetico delle reti regionali dovrebbe essere effettuato nel sistema di riferimento globale, per non incorrere nelle notevoli differenze di coordinate stimate tra le reti contigue gestite da Enti diversi. Il presente lavoro si colloca nel contesto della compensazione geodetica di una rete di stazioni permanenti regionale e il conseguente inquadramento nell’attuale sistema di riferimento globale. La rete studio è costituita da 19 stazioni permanenti materializzate nel territorio della Regione Sicilia con l’aggiunta di 3 stazioni permanenti appartenenti alla rete IGS (International GNSS Service), materializzate a Cagliari, Matera e Noto, utilizzate per l’inquadramento geodetico. In particolare, le stazioni permanenti utilizzate, appartengono alla rete Nazionale NetGEO in Sicilia della Geotop s.r.l. di Ancona e nove di queste appartengono alla rete dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo. I dati utilizzati per l’analisi e le relative procedure di elaborazione dipendono dal software utilizzato e la costruzione del grafo di rete è stata condizionata sia dai dati registrati dalle stazioni permanenti attive nel periodo considerato per l'elaborazione, sia dalle caratteristiche e metodologie di elaborazione inerenti al software

The mummy of Ferdinando Orsini, 5th Duke of Gravina (†1549): a paleopathological study

In the monumental Sacristy of the Abbey of Saint Domenico Maggiore, Naples, 37 wooden sarcophagi contain the well preserved bodies of ten Aragonese kings, princes and other Neapolitan nobles who died between the 15th and 16th centuries. One of the arks revealed the natural mummy of Ferdinando Orsini, 5th Duke of Gravina, identified by an epigraph with his name and date of death (1549), in good condition, with the exception of the face, completely skeletonized. The skull suffers from an extensive destructive lesion that afflicted the medial wall of the orbit right, the root of the nose and, partly, the ethmoid without osteitic reaction. The histological examination performed on the bone showed wide lacunae with, inside, epithelial-like cells, partially necrotic, positive for the immunohistochemical stain for PanCK. The border between the bone and the surrounding neoplasia were clear; the brownish fleshy appearance mass had darker margins (like a palisade) and was separated from the bone by clefting artifacts. In our opinion, the pathology that affected Orsini 500 years ago was the basal cell carcinoma in an advanced stage, in fact it is the most frequent form of skin cancer and occurs predominantly on the sun-exposed skin of adults. Microscopically the tumour tends to infiltrate the subcutaneous tissue with a peripherical palisade surrounded by loose of stroma and cleft-like retraction spaces of artifactual nature. It grows in a slow and indolent fashion, but can ulcerate and may invade skull, nares, orbit or temporal bone with wide osteolithic lesion, enough to deserve the Latin name of ‘ulcus rodens’, i.e. erosive ulcer. Immunohistochemically, the cells are positive for keratin and distant metastases are very rare. This case is very important because it represents one of the only four cases of malignant soft tissue tumor diagnosed in paleopathology

Learning from My Successes and from Others' Failures: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in organizational learning, to date the phenomenon has received little attention at the individual level. Drawing on attribution theory in psychology, we investigate how individuals learn from their own past experiences with both failure and success and from the experiences of others. For our empirical analyses, we use ten years of data from 71 cardiothoracic surgeons who completed over 6,500 procedures using a new technology for cardiac surgery. We find that individuals learn more from their own successes than from their own failures but learn more from the failures of others than from others' successes. We also find that individuals' prior successes and others' failures can help individuals overcome their inability to learn from their own failures. Together, these findings offer both theoretical and practical insights into how individuals learn directly from their prior experience and indirectly from the experiences of others

Exploring the atomic structure and conformational flexibility of a 320 Å long engineered viral fiber using X-ray crystallography.

Protein fibers are widespread in nature, but only a limited number of high-resolution structures have been determined experimentally. Unlike globular proteins, fibers are usually recalcitrant to form three-dimensional crystals, preventing single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis. In the absence of three-dimensional crystals, X-ray fiber diffraction is a powerful tool to determine the internal symmetry of a fiber, but it rarely yields atomic resolution structural information on complex protein fibers. An 85-residue-long minimal coiled-coil repeat unit (MiCRU) was previously identified in the trimeric helical core of tail needle gp26, a fibrous protein emanating from the tail apparatus of the bacteriophage P22 virion. Here, evidence is provided that an MiCRU can be inserted in frame inside the gp26 helical core to generate a rationally extended fiber (gp26-2M) which, like gp26, retains a trimeric quaternary structure in solution. The 2.7 Å resolution crystal structure of this engineered fiber, which measures ∼320 Å in length and is only 20-35 Å wide, was determined. This structure, the longest for a trimeric protein fiber to be determined to such a high resolution, reveals the architecture of 22 consecutive trimerization heptads and provides a framework to decipher the structural determinants for protein fiber assembly, stability and flexibility

Composite fermions in Electroweak Symmetry Breaking

If the electroweak symmetry is broken by some unspecified strong dynamics, composite fermions may exist with definite transformation properties under SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R/SU(2)_{L+R} and may play a role in giving masses by mixing to all the standard quarks and leptons. Assuming this to be the case, we analyze the role of Singlets, Doublets and Triplets in the ElectroWeak Precision Tests and in Flavour Physics. Doublets and Triplets are generically disfavoured. In the Singlet case, we specify the breaking patterns of the flavour group that allow to keep the CKM picture of flavour physics and we discuss the effects of the mixing between composite and elementary fermions. These mixings affect in particular the rather peculiar LHC phenomenology of the composite fermions.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures (v2: minor modifications, published version

Soliton solutions of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili II equation

We study a general class of line-soliton solutions of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili II (KPII) equation by investigating the Wronskian form of its tau-function. We show that, in addition to previously known line-soliton solutions, this class also contains a large variety of new multi-soliton solutions, many of which exhibit nontrivial spatial interaction patterns. We also show that, in general, such solutions consist of unequal numbers of incoming and outgoing line solitons. From the asymptotic analysis of the tau-function, we explicitly characterize the incoming and outgoing line-solitons of this class of solutions. We illustrate these results by discussing several examples.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure