The internet: strategy and boundaries of the firm

Many advantages have been ascribed to the Internet. Although it lacks the necessary elements to be regarded as a strategic resource, the Internet seems to be a useful tool to provide support for business strategies.In this work we discuss how the Internet can be used to support the development of capabilities and define firm boundaries. Using a sample of Spanish firms, empirically analysed, we find positive relationships between the use of the Internet and product differentiation, as well as the introduction of organizational changes. In addition, we present evidence that the Internet reduces both internal coordination costs and transaction costs as a result of the positive relationships found between the use of the Internet, the degree of vertical integration and the establishment of technological agreements with suppliers and customers

Confession and complicity: Margarita de Austria, Richard Haller, S.J., and the court of Philip III.

Sin resume

Featured Piece

This year the General Editors continued the tradition started last year by creating a feature piece to show our appreciation for the History Department. We selected four professors from the faculty to answer a question about history: what figure/event/idea inspires your interest in history? Reading their responses helped give us insight into the thoughts of these brilliant minds and further help us understand their passion for the subject we all share a common love and interest in. We hope that you enjoy reading their responses as much as we did. The four members of the faculty we spoke with are Dr. Abou Bamba, Dr. William Bowman, Dr. David Hadley, and Magdalena Sánchez

Design & Construction of a truly continuous and fully automated process skid for the production and purification of a monoclonal antibody

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Studying protein-protein interactions in budding yeast using co-immunoprecipitation

Understanding protein-protein interactions and the architecture of protein complexes in which they work is essential to identify their biological role. Protein co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP) is an invaluable technique used in biochemistry allowing the identification of protein interactors. Here, we describe in detail an immunoaffinity purification protocol as a one step or two-step immunoprecipitation from budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells to subsequently detect interactions between proteins involved in the same biological process

Matemáticas en grupo diferenciado artes y humanidades nivel medio

Al ser la matemática una ciencia cuyo objeto de estudio mantiene un orden e interdependencia, posee en sí misma una dinámica que diferencia su proceso de aprendizaje de otras asignaturas. A esto, debemos añadir el nivel de dificultad que provoca en los estudiantes el conceptualizar los objetos matemáticos, el tener que ver con la "mente" lo que tal vez todavía no ha visto en la realidad. Esto influye en la percepción que tienen los estudiantes de esta ciencia y en el resultado de su aprendizaje. Como consecuencia, se afecta la autoestima y percepción del propio desempeño. El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar la experiencia realizada con un grupo diferenciado de educación media. Luego de ver los resultados podemos concluir que el uso de ciertas estrategias facilitan el aprendizaje y ciertas competencias

Methods and Tools for Objective Assessment of Psychomotor Skills in Laparoscopic Surgery

Training and assessment paradigms for laparoscopic surgical skills are evolving from traditional mentor–trainee tutorship towards structured, more objective and safer programs. Accreditation of surgeons requires reaching a consensus on metrics and tasks used to assess surgeons’ psychomotor skills. Ongoing development of tracking systems and software solutions has allowed for the expansion of novel training and assessment means in laparoscopy. The current challenge is to adapt and include these systems within training programs, and to exploit their possibilities for evaluation purposes. This paper describes the state of the art in research on measuring and assessing psychomotor laparoscopic skills. It gives an overview on tracking systems as well as on metrics and advanced statistical and machine learning techniques employed for evaluation purposes. The later ones have a potential to be used as an aid in deciding on the surgical competence level, which is an important aspect when accreditation of the surgeons in particular, and patient safety in general, are considered. The prospective of these methods and tools make them complementary means for surgical assessment of motor skills, especially in the early stages of training. Successful examples such as the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery should help drive a paradigm change to structured curricula based on objective parameters. These may improve the accreditation of new surgeons, as well as optimize their already overloaded training schedules

A Built-In-Test Circuit for Functional Verification & PVT Variations Monitoring of CMOS RF Circuits

Built-In-Test (BIT) for Radio Frequency (RF) integrated circuits can reduce the testing cost, especially with the increase of integration level and operating frequency. A fully integrated CMOS BIT detection circuit is presented in this work. This BIT detection circuit is rectifier-based and low threshold voltage diode-connected MOS transistor with substrate positively-biased is used to improve the detecting sensitivity. As an example, a 2.4GHz LNA is used, the high frequency small signal gain is extracted and the gain fluctuation due to Process, supply Voltage and Temperature (PVT) variations is also investigated. The simulation results show that this BIT detection circuit can realize on-chip functional verification of RF circuits and also monitor the influence of PVT variations on the performance of the circuit without affecting the high frequency performance of the measured RF circuits