Does Green Public Procurement lead to Life Cycle Costing (LCC) adoption?

Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is rarely used in public procurement and public institutions have yet to fully understand its potential value for sustainable procurement. The new European Directive on Public Procurement is, however, designed to position LCC as central to sustainable sourcing. Although previous studies have identified positive correlations between Green Public Procurement Policies (GPP) and LCC, it is still unclear how public institutions can further adopt LCC practices by leveraging their experience of green sourcing. In this study an organizational learning theoretical perspective is taken to investigate the circumstances under which public administrations’ experience of GPP – considered as a way of integrating the dimension of environmental sustainability into the sourcing process – stimulates their LCC learning and capabilities – considered as a way to include the sustainability economic dimension. The goal is to understand if the adoption of GPP can stimulate the internalisation of LCC in public tenders. A multinomial logistic regression was conducted using a sample of 120 public administrations located in different countries. The results show that experience of GPP stimulates the internalisation of LCC at a public level, but only under specific conditions. The study contributes to the Sustainable Supply Management literature, being one of the first studies in the field adopting an organizational learning theoretical lens to review the role of experience as significant opportunity to develop capabilities. It also contributes to the organizational learning theory, by confirming that experience can aid learning but only in specific environmental contexts

Fertility Ideals of Women and Men Across the Life Course

This paper explores the stability of women’s and men’s fertility preferences across the life course. The data come from the first six waves of the German Family Panel (pairfam), which span the period from 2008/2009 until 2013/2014. In our analysis, fertility preferences are measured using the following question: “Under ideal circumstances, how many children would you like to have?” The average number cited by both women and men is 2.2. With rising age, this number declines modestly. Relying on fixed-effects modelling, we find that neither partnership status nor economic circumstances have any causal effect on fertility preferences. However, as the number of children a respondent has increases, his or her ideal number of children is also likely to grow. Thus, fertility ideals appear to undergo changes over time, and are adjusted in line with the size of the respondent’s own family

Changes in Employment Uncertainty and the Fertility Intention-Realization Link: An Analysis Based on the Swiss Household Panel.

How do changes in employment uncertainty matter for fertility? Empirical studies on the impact of employment uncertainty on reproductive decision-making offer a variety of conclusions, ranging from gender and socio-economic differences in the effect of employment uncertainty on fertility intentions and behaviour, to the effect of employment on changes in fertility intentions. This article analyses the association between a change in subjective employment uncertainty and fertility intentions and behaviour by distinguishing male and female partners' employment uncertainty, and examines the variation in these associations by education. Using a sample of men and women living in a couple from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP 2002-2011), we examine through multinomial analysis how changes in employment uncertainty and selected socio-demographic factors are related to individual childbearing decisions. Our results show strong gendered effects of changes in employment uncertainty on the revision of reproductive decisions among the highly educated population

Cystatin C: A Candidate Biomarker for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurologic disease characterized by progressive motor neuron degeneration. Clinical disease management is hindered by both a lengthy diagnostic process and the absence of effective treatments. Reliable panels of diagnostic, surrogate, and prognostic biomarkers are needed to accelerate disease diagnosis and expedite drug development. The cysteine protease inhibitor cystatin C has recently gained interest as a candidate diagnostic biomarker for ALS, but further studies are required to fully characterize its biomarker utility. We used quantitative enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to assess initial and longitudinal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma cystatin C levels in 104 ALS patients and controls. Cystatin C levels in ALS patients were significantly elevated in plasma and reduced in CSF compared to healthy controls, but did not differ significantly from neurologic disease controls. In addition, the direction of longitudinal change in CSF cystatin C levels correlated to the rate of ALS disease progression, and initial CSF cystatin C levels were predictive of patient survival, suggesting that cystatin C may function as a surrogate marker of disease progression and survival. These data verify prior results for reduced cystatin C levels in the CSF of ALS patients, identify increased cystatin C levels in the plasma of ALS patients, and reveal correlations between CSF cystatin C levels to both ALS disease progression and patient survival

Tomorrow’s Digital Worker : A Critical Review and Agenda for Building Digital Competency Models

In competency management studies, scholars call for the importance of digital savviness to hire, train, and develop new digital workers. Yet, the knowledge about the development of such a competence is still scarce. For this endeavor, we followed a systematic literature review to identify a sample of 103 published scientific articles and book chapters dealing with the development and implementation of competency tools in the past 10 years. To our surprise, our review suggests that the landscape of competency tools is surprisingly obsolete and that contemporary requirements of digitization have not yet been incorporated into updated usable competency tools. Through this review our hope is to provide competency managers and researchers with a framework to advance and upgrade their competency tools to address the gap between existing know how and the needed expertise of the digital world.© 2020 Springer. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Advances in Human Factors, Business Management and Leadership Proceedings of the AHFE 2020 Virtual Conferences on Human Factors, Business Management and Society, and Human Factors in Management and Leadership, July 16-20, 2020, USA. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50791-6_14fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Evidence for the h_b(1P) meson in the decay Upsilon(3S) --> pi0 h_b(1P)

Using a sample of 122 million Upsilon(3S) events recorded with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy e+e- collider at SLAC, we search for the $h_b(1P)$ spin-singlet partner of the P-wave chi_{bJ}(1P) states in the sequential decay Upsilon(3S) --> pi0 h_b(1P), h_b(1P) --> gamma eta_b(1S). We observe an excess of events above background in the distribution of the recoil mass against the pi0 at mass 9902 +/- 4(stat.) +/- 2(syst.) MeV/c^2. The width of the observed signal is consistent with experimental resolution, and its significance is 3.1sigma, including systematic uncertainties. We obtain the value (4.3 +/- 1.1(stat.) +/- 0.9(syst.)) x 10^{-4} for the product branching fraction BF(Upsilon(3S)-->pi0 h_b) x BF(h_b-->gamma eta_b).Comment: 8 pages, 4 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. D (Rapid Communications

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente

Jet energy measurement with the ATLAS detector in proton-proton collisions at root s=7 TeV

The jet energy scale and its systematic uncertainty are determined for jets measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 7TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 38 pb-1. Jets are reconstructed with the anti-kt algorithm with distance parameters R=0. 4 or R=0. 6. Jet energy and angle corrections are determined from Monte Carlo simulations to calibrate jets with transverse momenta pT≥20 GeV and pseudorapidities {pipe}η{pipe}<4. 5. The jet energy systematic uncertainty is estimated using the single isolated hadron response measured in situ and in test-beams, exploiting the transverse momentum balance between central and forward jets in events with dijet topologies and studying systematic variations in Monte Carlo simulations. The jet energy uncertainty is less than 2. 5 % in the central calorimeter region ({pipe}η{pipe}<0. 8) for jets with 60≤pT<800 GeV, and is maximally 14 % for pT<30 GeV in the most forward region 3. 2≤{pipe}η{pipe}<4. 5. The jet energy is validated for jet transverse momenta up to 1 TeV to the level of a few percent using several in situ techniques by comparing a well-known reference such as the recoiling photon pT, the sum of the transverse momenta of tracks associated to the jet, or a system of low-pT jets recoiling against a high-pT jet. More sophisticated jet calibration schemes are presented based on calorimeter cell energy density weighting or hadronic properties of jets, aiming for an improved jet energy resolution and a reduced flavour dependence of the jet response. The systematic uncertainty of the jet energy determined from a combination of in situ techniques is consistent with the one derived from single hadron response measurements over a wide kinematic range. The nominal corrections and uncertainties are derived for isolated jets in an inclusive sample of high-pT jets. Special cases such as event topologies with close-by jets, or selections of samples with an enhanced content of jets originating from light quarks, heavy quarks or gluons are also discussed and the corresponding uncertainties are determined. © 2013 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS collaboration