Industrial and organisational psychology

Industrial and organisational (I/0) psychology is concerned with people’s work-related values, attitudes and behaviours, and how these are influenced by the conditions in which they work. I/O psychologists contribute to both the effectiveness of organisations (e.g. improving productivity) and the health and well-being of people working within organisations. The field is related to other disciplines, such as organisational behaviour and human resource management, and also has close links with other sub-disciplines within psychology, especially social psychology and some aspects of human experimental psychology (e.g. cognition)

Work and society: Places, spaces and identities

The table of contents and introduction are included with kind permission of University of Chester Press.The original theoretical and empirical studies in this new edited volume, Work and Society: Places, Spaces and Identities, present a re-imagining of what work is, how it is undertaken, and the impact of work on people who engage in it. While traditional examinations of work are synonymous with discussions of labour markets, organisational functions and industrial relations, the eight contributions published here for the first time extend our conceptualisation of work to take in less commonly scrutinised activities such as care-giving, soldiering, gambling and career criminality. This intriguing approach opens up space for an exciting reconsideration of the relationships between work and society, focussing on illegitimate and unvalued occupations, the places where personal and professional identities intersect in risky or rewarding ways, and the ideological imperative on all of us – no matter our employment status – to perform as resilient, productive neoliberal subjects with the capacity for work. This innovative, interdisciplinary volume brings together established and new voices in the fields of sociology, criminology, victimology and political economy to present an accessible intervention in current debates about work in the twenty-first century

Is problem solving, or simulation model solving, mission critical?

How do we consider problems and models in the practice of simulation? It is our possibly contentious observation that simulation model solving seems to be more critical to the mission of simulation modeling than problem solving. Inspired by the theme of this year's Winter Simulation Conference, we ask the question, "Is problem solving, or simulation model solving, mission critical?" To investigate this we look at three perspectives, those of the textbook, the article and the editorial. The textbook perspective is the balance of the "traditional" view of simulation presented by the academic textbook against practical experience. The article perspective is a classification of papers published in four leading simulation journals in the year 2004 (ACM TOMACS, SIMULATION, Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, and Simulation & Gaming). The editorial perspective is a discussion of editorial policy presented by the same journals. Our findings show that our observation is not contradicted

Personalized medicine : the impact on chemistry

An effective strategy for personalized medicine requires a major conceptual change in the development and application of therapeutics. In this article, we argue that further advances in this field should be made with reference to another conceptual shift, that of network pharmacology. We examine the intersection of personalized medicine and network pharmacology to identify strategies for the development of personalized therapies that are fully informed by network pharmacology concepts. This provides a framework for discussion of the impact personalized medicine will have on chemistry in terms of drug discovery, formulation and delivery, the adaptations and changes in ideology required and the contribution chemistry is already making. New ways of conceptualizing chemistry’s relationship with medicine will lead to new approaches to drug discovery and hold promise of delivering safer and more effective therapies

Requirements Analysis for a Hardware, Discrete-Event, Simulation Engine Accelerator

An analysis of a general Discrete Event Simulation (DES), executing on the distributed architecture of an eight mode Intel PSC/2 hypercube, was performed. The most time consuming portions of the general DES algorithm were determined to be the functions associated with message passing of required simulation data between processing nodes of the hypercube architecture. A behavioral description, using the IEEE standard VHSIC Hardware Description and Design Language (VHDL), for a general DES hardware accelerator is presented. The behavioral description specifies the operational requirements for a DES coprocessor to augment the hypercube\u27s execution of DES simulations. The DES coprocessor design implements the functions necessary to perform distributed discrete event simulations using a conservative time synchronization protocol

Reconciling transport models across scales: the role of volume exclusion

Diffusive transport is a universal phenomenon, throughout both biological and physical sciences, and models of diffusion are routinely used to interrogate diffusion-driven processes. However, most models neglect to take into account the role of volume exclusion, which can significantly alter diffusive transport, particularly within biological systems where the diffusing particles might occupy a significant fraction of the available space. In this work we use a random walk approach to provide a means to reconcile models that incorporate crowding effects on different spatial scales. Our work demonstrates that coarse-grained models incorporating simplified descriptions of excluded volume can be used in many circumstances, but that care must be taken in pushing the coarse-graining process too far

Using the Man9(GlcNAc)2 – DC-SIGN pairing to probe specificity in photochemical immobilization

We demonstrate the expected preference of an immobilised oligosaccharide Man(9)(GlcNAc)(2) upon a 96-well photochemical array, for its known receptor, the cell-surface lectin Dendritic Cell-Specific ICAM3 Grabbing Nonintegrin (DC-SIGN) when compared to immobilised competing monosaccharides