Physical aspects of soil fertility - the response of roots to mechanical impedance.

Penetrability of soil by roots is reviewed. Roots of barley did not decrease in diameter in order to penetrate small pores. Where substrates were selected with pores smaller than the diameter of root axes but larger than that of laterals, axes were impeded but lateral roots proliferated, indicating that an appreciable reduction in root extension caused by mechanical stress would not necessarily reduce crop yield. Where barley root axes were forced to bend, lateral root initials typically developed on the convex side. (Abstract retrieved from CAB Abstracts by CABI’s permission

Faculty Research Incentives and Business School Health: A New Perspective for Marketing

Prior research has heavily debated the value of academic research of faculty to the business schools that employ them. We study, conceptually and empirically (by surveying faculty and interviewing (associate) deans), the role of the faculty research incentive system in business school health. We find that higher research health is congruent with higher teaching quality, stronger resource support, and stronger external stakeholder support. R-quality of research (i.e., rigor) contributes more strongly to research health than research quantity, while q-quality of research (i.e., relevance) contributes positively to teaching quality and external stakeholder support. We also find that research task incentives are misaligned: (1) in faculty evaluations, the number of publications receives too much weight, while creativity, literacy, practical relevance, and awards receive too little weight; and (2) the faculty feels that they are insufficiently compensated, while (associate) deans feel faculty is compensated too much for its research. These incentive misalignments are largest in schools that perform the worst on research and business school health overall. We explore improvements that business schools and faculty can introduce

Implementation of a healthcare process in four different workflow systems

Currently, many hospitals are investigating the use of a work-flow management system in order to provide support for care processes. However, today's workflow management systems fall short in supporting care processes as exibility is required for its execution. In this paper, we investigate the exibility requirements that need to be satisfied in orderto support healthcare processes having various characteristics. An evaluation shows that different systems need to be used in conjunction with each other in order to fully support the various types of care processes

Geophysical Exploration of Vesta

Dawn’s year-long stay at Vesta allows comprehensive mapping of the shape, topography, geology, mineralogy, elemental abundances, and gravity field using it’s three instruments and highprecision spacecraft navigation. In the current Low Altitude Mapping Orbit (LAMO), tracking data is being acquired to develop a gravity field expected to be accurate to degree and order ~20 [1, 2]. Multi-angle imaging in the Survey and High Altitude Mapping Orbit (HAMO) has provided adequate stereo coverage to develop a shape model accurate to ~10 m at 100 m horizontal spatial resolution. Accurate mass determination combined with the shape yields a more precise value of bulk density, albeit with some uncertainty resulting from the unmeasured seasonally-dark north polar region. The shape and gravity of Vesta can be used to infer the interior density structure and investigate the nature of the crust, informing models for Vesta’s formation and evolution

Towards a taxonomy of process flexibility (extended version)

Effective business processes must be able to accommodate changes to the environment in which they operate, e.g., new laws, changes in business strategy. The ability to encompass such changes is termed process flexibility. In this paper, we take a deeper look into the various ways in which flexibility can be achieved and propose a comprehensive taxonomy of these methods which identifies both the manner in which each of them is facilitated, and also the various configuration options and alternatives that exist in each case. This taxonomy is subsequently used to evaluate a selection of process-aware information systems and identify their potential to deploy flexible business processes

Fermionic Molecular Dynamics for nuclear dynamics and thermodynamics

A new Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) model based on a Skyrme functional is proposed in this paper. After introducing the basic formalism, some first applications to nuclear structure and nuclear thermodynamics are presentedComment: 5 pages, Proceedings of the French-Japanese Symposium, September 2008. To be published in Int. J. of Mod. Phys.

Academic Research in Marketing and Business School Health

Academic research in marketing is of key importance to the health of business schools. However, there has been considerable debate in recent years whether academic research in marketing, and business in general, delivers enough on this promise. Our goal is to add a coherent and novel faculty management perspective to this debate. We identify three limiters in the faculty management system that restrict the impact academic research in marketing may have on business school health: (1) the imperfect metrics used to evaluate marketing academics that focus primarily on quantity, (2) the weak professional alignment betwee

Actor-Critic Policy Learning in Cooperative Planning

In this paper, we introduce a method for learning and adapting cooperative control strategies in real-time stochastic domains. Our framework is an instance of the intelligent cooperative control architecture (iCCA)[superscript 1]. The agent starts by following the "safe" plan calculated by the planning module and incrementally adapting its policy to maximize the cumulative rewards. Actor-critic and consensus-based bundle algorithm (CBBA) were employed as the building blocks of the iCCA framework. We demonstrate the performance of our approach by simulating limited fuel unmanned aerial vehicles aiming for stochastic targets. In one experiment where the optimal solution can be calculated, the integrated framework boosted the optimality of the solution by an average of %10, when compared to running each of the modules individually, while keeping the computational load within the requirements for real-time implementation.Boeing Scientific Research LaboratoriesUnited States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA9550-08-1-0086

Extreme State Aggregation Beyond MDPs

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement learning is concerned with mapping histories/raw-states to reduced/aggregated states. The idea behind both is that the resulting reduced process (approximately) forms a small stationary finite-state MDP, which can then be efficiently solved or learnt. We considerably generalize existing aggregation results by showing that even if the reduced process is not an MDP, the (q-)value functions and (optimal) policies of an associated MDP with same state-space size solve the original problem, as long as the solution can approximately be represented as a function of the reduced states. This implies an upper bound on the required state space size that holds uniformly for all RL problems. It may also explain why RL algorithms designed for MDPs sometimes perform well beyond MDPs.Comment: 28 LaTeX pages. 8 Theorem

Faculty Research Incentives and Business School Health: A New Perspective from and for Marketing

Grounded in sociological agency theory, the authors study the role of the faculty research incentive system in the academic research conducted at business schools and business school health. The authors surveyed 234 marketing professors and completed 22 interviews with 14 (associate) deans and 8 external institution stakeholders. They find that research quantity contributes to the research health of the school, but not to other aspects of business school health. r-quality of research (i.e., rigor) contributes more strongly to the research health of the school than research quantity. q-quality (i.e., practical importance) of research does not contribute to the research health of the school but contributes positively to teaching health and several other dimensions of business school health. Faculty research incentives are misaligned: (1) when monitoring research faculty, the number of publications receives too much weight, while creativity, literacy, relevance, and awards receive too little weight; and (2) on average, faculty feels that they are insufficiently compensated for their research, while (associate) deans feel they are compensated too much for their research. These incentive misalignments are largest in schools that perform the worst on research (r- and q-) quality. The authors explore how business schools and faculty can remedy these misalignments