Who Uses External Business Advice?

This paper examines factors that influence the propensity of a firm to take up external business support using random effects nominal probit regression analysis to capture sector heterogeneity. The results suggest a strong positive association between the orientation of the firm towards growth and its propensity to seek external business advice. ‘Push’ factors, including the existence of recruitment difficulties, are identified as key triggers for the seeking of business advice. These findings demonstrate the value of using advanced econometric techniques to analyse business survey data, and provide valuable guidance to public policy organisations concerned with business development and competitiveness.Business advice, business support policy, multivariate probit analysis

Methods for the improvement of power resource prediction and residual range estimation for offroad unmanned ground vehicles

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are becoming more widespread in their deployment. Advances in technology have improved not only their reliability but also their ability to perform complex tasks. UGVs are particularly attractive for operations that are considered unsuitable for human operatives. These include dangerous operations such as explosive ordnance disarmament, as well as situations where human access is limited including planetary exploration or search and rescue missions involving physically small spaces. As technology advances, UGVs are gaining increased capabilities and consummate increased complexity, allowing them to participate in increasingly wide range of scenarios. UGVs have limited power reserves that can restrict a UGV’s mission duration and also the range of capabilities that it can deploy. As UGVs tend towards increased capabilities and complexity, extra burden is placed on the already stretched power resources. Electric drives and an increasing array of processors, sensors and effectors, all need sufficient power to operate. Accurate prediction of mission power requirements is therefore of utmost importance, especially in safety critical scenarios where the UGV must complete an atomic task or risk the creation of an unsafe environment due to failure caused by depleted power. Live energy prediction for vehicles that traverse typical road surfaces is a wellresearched topic. However, this is not sufficient for modern UGVs as they are required to traverse a wide variety of terrains that may change considerably with prevailing environmental conditions. This thesis addresses the gap by presenting a novel approach to both off and on-line energy prediction that considers the effects of weather conditions on a wide variety of terrains. The prediction is based upon nonlinear polynomial regression using live sensor data to improve upon the accuracy provided by current methods. The new approach is evaluated and compared to existing algorithms using a custom ‘UGV mission power’ simulation tool. The tool allows the user to test the accuracy of various mission energy prediction algorithms over a specified mission routes that include a variety of terrains and prevailing weather conditions. A series of experiments that test and record the ‘real world’ power use of a typical small electric drive UGV are also performed. The tests are conducted for a variety of terrains and weather conditions and the empirical results are used to validate the results of the simulation tool. The new algorithm showed a significant improvement compared with current methods, which will allow for UGVs deployed in real world scenarios where they must contend with a variety of terrains and changeable weather conditions to make accurate energy use predictions. This enables more capabilities to be deployed with a known impact on remaining mission power requirement, more efficient mission durations through avoiding the need to maintain excessive estimated power reserves and increased safety through reduced risk of aborting atomic operations in safety critical scenarios. As supplementary contribution, this work created a power resource usage and prediction test bed UGV and resulting data-sets as well as a novel simulation tool for UGV mission energy prediction. The tool implements a UGV model with accurate power use characteristics, confirmed by an empirical test series. The tool can be used to test a wide variety of scenarios and power prediction algorithms and could be used for the development of further mission energy prediction technology or be used as a mission energy planning tool

A role for ARHGAP35 in regulating genomic instability in NSCLC

Genomic instability underscores intratumour heterogeneity, a prominent feature of cancer evolution that confounds treatment of cancer. Mechanisms that promote or permit increased genotypic and phenotypic diversification of tumour cells may serve to facilitate rapid evolution under strong selection pressures, such as clonal competition and therapeutic cancer treatment. In this thesis, I explore the functions of tumour suppressor driver genes mutated late during tumour evolution in NSCLC patients from the lung TRACERx study. Using a novel screening approach, I find perturbations of the DNA damage response (DDR) upon siRNA knockdown of a large number of these driver genes, not previously linked with DDR. Some of these genes were also found to disrupt tolerance to inhibition of the spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC), thus linking them to aneuploidy and CIN. DDR pathway analysis highlighted the disruptive effects of loss-of-function of those driver genes discovered in the DDR screen. Further examination one of these genes with no prior link to DDR, ARHGAP35, led to the identification of an uncharacterized link to the spliceosome, and its effect on DNA damage resolution mediated by RNA:DNA hybrids (R-loops). ARHGAP35 wasfound to affect tolerance to loss of checkpoint activity, also reflected in segregation error analysis. These observations pose interesting questions about the links between interphase damage and propagation of CIN. Altogether, the work presented here suggests that the development of function-centric biological assays is key in identifying novel features of cancer drivers and explain their mechanism of action, which may play important roles during cancer evolutio

Perspectives of Overage Graduates: Issues that Affected their Schooling

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the perspectives of overage graduates who completed years of schooling as an overage student. The following research question guided this inquiry: From the perspective of graduates who were two-or-three years overage for grade, what social, emotional, academic or other issues affected their schooling? Sequential qualitative interviewing of four participants that completed school overage for grade provided data for this study. The data was analyzed with the use of the constant comparative method and synthesized into emergent themes. The participants reported their perceptions in the context of four specific areas: Interactions with peers, teachers, and administration during their years of schooling; Interactions with family during their years of schooling; description of the times they were retained in grade; a time they may have wanted to drop out of school; description of any other occurrences of events they wanted to share in light of the topic being overage for grade. The findings provided narrative insight into what it was like to experience schooling two or more years overage for grade. There is a lack of research in the area of overage students; therefore, this study seeks to help fill some of the gaps in current research

pH dependent polymer micelles

The present invention relates to the use of poly(vinyl N-heterocycle)-block-poly(alkylene oxide) copolymers in micelle containing pharmaceutical formulations. The copolymers advantageously respond to pH differences in the environment to which they are exposed forming micelles at higher pH values. The micelles, which comprise a therapeutic compound and a copolymer, deliver drug in a pH dependent manner.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste

Econometrics models for diagnostics of bank stability

The banking system - is one of the main parts of the market. Development of the commercial banks andthe banking system plays a major role in the financial life of the State [1]. We do analysis of the currentoperational state of the bank on a monthly, quarterly, annual balance sheets. It allows us to allocate risk. Ourprimary objective is to create automatic procedures for making comprehansive econometric analysis of bankstability. The nesessity of solving to this problem lies in the fact that such analysis optimizes bankers' work. Thatin turn will help to accelerate a putting into operation Basel III new reqirements. The econometric model we usecan serve us as an alarming system. In this work we focus on developing methods for determining the stability of the banks and constructing econometric model based on public information with multidimensional scaling [2]

A Nonhomologous End-Joining Mutant for Neurospora sitophila Research

Disruption of the nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway has been shown to increase the efficiency of transgene integration into targeted genomic locations of Neurospora crassa and other fungi. Here, we report that a similar phenomenon occurs in a second Neurospora species: N. sitophila. Specifically, we show that deletion of N. sitophila mus-51 increases the efficiency of targeted-transgene integration, presumably by disrupting NHEJ. Researchers interested in obtaining the N. sitophila mus-51∆ strains described in this study can obtain them from the Fungal Genetics Stock Center (FGSC, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS)

Pair distribution function and structure factor of spherical particles

The availability of neutron spallation-source instruments that provide total scattering powder diffraction has led to an increased application of real-space structure analysis using the pair distribution function. Currently, the analytical treatment of finite size effects within pair distribution refinement procedures is limited. To that end, an envelope function is derived which transforms the pair distribution function of an infinite solid into that of a spherical particle with the same crystal structure. Distributions of particle sizes are then considered, and the associated envelope function is used to predict the particle size distribution of an experimental sample of gold nanoparticles from its pair distribution function alone. Finally, complementing the wealth of existing diffraction analysis, the peak broadening for the structure factor of spherical particles, expressed as a convolution derived from the envelope functions, is calculated exactly for all particle size distributions considered, and peak maxima, offsets, and asymmetries are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure