Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace and Organizational Agility with People

Driven by dynamic competitive conditions, an increasing number of firms are experimenting with new, and what they hope will be, more dynamic organizational forms. This development has opened up exciting theoretical and empirical venues for students of leadership, business strategy, organizational theory, and the like. One domain that has yet to catch the wave, however, is strategic human resource management (SHRM). In an effort to catch up, we here draw on the dynamic organization (DO) and human resource strategy (HRS) literatures to delineate both a process for uncovering and the key features of a carefully crafted HRS for DOs. The logic is as follows. DOs compete through marketplace agility. Marketplace agility requires that employees at all levels engage in proactive, adaptive, and generative behaviors, bolstered by a supportive mindset. Under the right conditions, the essential mindset and behaviors, although highly dynamic, are fostered by a HRS centered on a relatively small number of dialectical, yet paradoxically stable, guiding principles and anchored in a supportive organizational infrastructure. This line of reasoning, however, rests on a rather modest empirical base and, thus, is offered less as a definitive statement than as a spur for much needed additional research

Crafting A Human Resource Strategy To Foster Organizational Agility: A Case Study

A decade ago, the CEO of Albert Einstein Healthcare Network (AEHN), anticipating a tumultuous and largely unpredictable period in its industry, undertook to convert this organization from one that was basically stable and complacent to one that was agile, “nimble, and change-hardy”. This case study briefly addresses AEHN’s approaches to business strategy and organization design, but focuses primarily on the human resource strategy that emerged over time to foster the successful attainment of organizational agility. Although exploratory, the study suggests a number of lessons for those who are, or will be, studying or trying to create and sustain this promising new organizational paradigm

Royal Coachman (41CM111) An Early Middle Archaic Site along Cordova Creek in Comal County, Texas

The Royal Coachman site, 41CM111, is bisected by FM 306 near the highway’s eastern crossing of the Guadalupe River. Archeologists from the Texas Department of Transportation conducted extensive excavations at the site in 1980 and the Center for Archaeological Research carried out fieldwork related to geomorphic assessment of the deposits in 2002. The site contains at least three archeological components, an upper zone that may be of late Middle Archaic age and two commingled lower zones that are early Middle Archaic in age and contain a mix of Nolan/ Pandale and Bell-Andice/Early Triangular points. The deeper, more strongly manifested archeological components are associated with a dense burned rock sheet midden composed of two in situ features among a dense scatter of highly disturbed burned rock. Radiocarbon assays place this zone at between 5320–5880 years BP. The lithic assemblage is suggestive of tool manufacture and retooling activities and the projectile point collection is dominated by Early Triangular points and preforms. It is the recommendation of CAR that site 41CM111 warrants designation as a State Archeological Landmark and is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places because of its significant contribution to a better understanding of the regional archeological record. We believe that these investigations have resulted in an appropriate level of work to evaluate the archeological property within the highway ROW and no further work is currently recommended. We also recommend that TxDOT consider avoidance as an option during future construction activities to avert impact to remaining deposits. In addition, if new ROW is acquired, additional work is warranted to determine the extent and significance of currently unidentified material. This work was conducted under Texas Antiquities Committee Permit No. 2807

Evidence Propagation and Consensus Formation in Noisy Environments

We study the effectiveness of consensus formation in multi-agent systems where there is both belief updating based on direct evidence and also belief combination between agents. In particular, we consider the scenario in which a population of agents collaborate on the best-of-n problem where the aim is to reach a consensus about which is the best (alternatively, true) state from amongst a set of states, each with a different quality value (or level of evidence). Agents' beliefs are represented within Dempster-Shafer theory by mass functions and we investigate the macro-level properties of four well-known belief combination operators for this multi-agent consensus formation problem: Dempster's rule, Yager's rule, Dubois & Prade's operator and the averaging operator. The convergence properties of the operators are considered and simulation experiments are conducted for different evidence rates and noise levels. Results show that a combination of updating on direct evidence and belief combination between agents results in better consensus to the best state than does evidence updating alone. We also find that in this framework the operators are robust to noise. Broadly, Yager's rule is shown to be the better operator under various parameter values, i.e. convergence to the best state, robustness to noise, and scalability.Comment: 13th international conference on Scalable Uncertainty Managemen

Adaptive-optics Optical Coherence Tomography Processing Using a Graphics Processing Unit

Graphics processing units are increasingly being used for scientific computing for their powerful parallel processing abilities, and moderate price compared to super computers and computing grids. In this paper we have used a general purpose graphics processing unit to process adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography (AOOCT) images in real time. Increasing the processing speed of AOOCT is an essential step in moving the super high resolution technology closer to clinical viability

Search for Q ∼ 0 Order near a Forbidden Bragg Position in Bi2.1Sr1.9CaCu2O8+x with Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering

Identifying what broken symmetries are present in the cuprates has become a major area of research. Many authors have reported evidence for so-called "Q ∼ 0"order that involves broken inversion, mirror, chiral, or time-reversal symmetry that is uniform in space. Not all these observations are well understood and new experimental probes are needed. Here we use resonant soft x-ray scattering (RSXS) to search for Q ∼ 0 order in Bi2.1Sr1.9CaCu2O8+x (Bi-2212) by measuring the region of a forbidden Bragg peak, 0; 0; 3 , which is normally extinguished by symmetry but may become allowed on resonance if valence band order is present. Using circularly polarized light, we found that this reflection becomes allowed on the Cu L3 resonance for temperatures Tc < T < T+, though remains absent in linear polarization and at other temperatures. This observation suggests the existence of spatially uniform valence band order near the pseudogap temperature. In addition, we observed periodic oscillations in the specular reflectivity from the sample surface that resemble thin film interference fringes, though no known film is present. These fringes are highly resonant, appear in all polarizations, and exhibit a period that depends on the location where the beam strikes the sample surface. We speculate that these fringes arise from interaction between some intrinsic valence band instability and extrinsic structural surface morphologies of the material. Our study supports the existence of some kind of Q ∼ 0 broken symmetry state in Bi-2212 at intermediate temperatures. Further studies using a microfocused beam, which could disentangle microscopic effects from macroscopic heterogeneities, are needed to ascertain the universality of the effect

Intermediate scale as a source of lepton flavor violation in SUSY SO(10)

In supersymmetric SO(10) grand unified models, we examine the lepton flavor violation process $\mu \rightarrow e\gamma$ from having the SU(2)$_R\times$U(1)$_{B-L}$ gauge symmetry broken at an intermediate scale $M_I$ below the SO(10) grand unification scale $M_G$. Even in the case that supersymmetry is broken by universal soft terms introduced at the scale $M_G$, we find significant rates for $\mu\rightarrow e\gamma$ with $M_I \sim 10^{12}$ GeV or less. These rates are further enhanced if the universal soft terms appear at a scale greater than $M_G$.Comment: 12 pages (Latex), 3 PS Figures (uuencoded, epsf.tex), small addition to discussion in the text, as to appear in Phys. Rev. D Rapid Communication

High-Tc Superconductivity and Antiferromagnetism in Multilayered Copper Oxides - A New Paradigm of Superconducting Mechanism -

High-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) in copper oxides emerges on a layered CuO2 plane when an antiferromagnetic Mott insulator is doped with mobile hole carriers. We review extensive studies of multilayered copper oxides by site-selective nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which have uncovered the intrinsic phase diagram of antiferromagnetism (AFM) and HTSC for a disorder-free CuO2 plane with hole carriers. We present our experimental findings such as the existence of the AFM metallic state in doped Mott insulators, the uniformly mixed phase of AFM and HTSC, and the emergence of d-wave SC with a maximum Tc just outside a critical carrier density, at which the AFM moment on a CuO2 plane disappears. These results can be accounted for by the Mott physics based on the t-J model. The superexchange interaction J_in among spins plays a vital role as a glue for Cooper pairs or mobile spin-singlet pairs, in contrast to the phonon-mediated attractive interaction among electrons established in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. We remark that the attractive interaction for raising the $T_c$ of HTSC up to temperatures as high as 160 K is the large J_in (~0.12 eV), which binds electrons of opposite spins to be on neighboring sites, and that there are no bosonic glues. It is the Coulomb repulsive interaction U(> 6 eV) among Cu-3d electrons that plays a central role in the physics behind high-Tc phenomena. A new paradigm of the SC mechanism opens to strongly correlated electron matter.Comment: 20 pages, 25 figures, Special topics "Recent Developments in Superconductivity" in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn., Published December 26, 201

The Hubbard model within the equations of motion approach

The Hubbard model has a special role in Condensed Matter Theory as it is considered as the simplest Hamiltonian model one can write in order to describe anomalous physical properties of some class of real materials. Unfortunately, this model is not exactly solved except for some limits and therefore one should resort to analytical methods, like the Equations of Motion Approach, or to numerical techniques in order to attain a description of its relevant features in the whole range of physical parameters (interaction, filling and temperature). In this manuscript, the Composite Operator Method, which exploits the above mentioned analytical technique, is presented and systematically applied in order to get information about the behavior of all relevant properties of the model (local, thermodynamic, single- and two- particle ones) in comparison with many other analytical techniques, the above cited known limits and numerical simulations. Within this approach, the Hubbard model is shown to be also capable to describe some anomalous behaviors of the cuprate superconductors.Comment: 232 pages, more than 300 figures, more than 500 reference