The future of HRD

What organizational, technological and training developments will become crucial in the coming years, and what consequences will they have for human resource development? These questions have led to a study carried out by the faculty of Educational Science and Technology at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. The ultimate aim of the study was to create an inventory of trends and developments which professionals deem to be influential with regard to the future HRD field. One direct catalyst for the study was the report of a similar study in the United States, involving HRD executives, carried out by the American Society for Training & Development. Following a brief explanation of the research plan and methods, this article describes the findings of the Dutch study an compares these with the results of the American research. It concludes with comments regarding the implications of the information obtained through this investigation

Axiomatizations of two types of Shapley values for games on union closed systems

A situation in which a finite set of players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation can be described by a cooperative game with transferable utility, or simply a TU-game. A (single-valued) solution for TU-games assigns a payoff distribution to every TU-game. A well-known solution is the Shapley value. In the literature various models of games with restricted cooperation can be found. So, instead of allowing all subsets of the player set N to form, it is assumed that the set of feasible coalitions is a subset of the power set of N. In this paper, we consider such sets of feasible coalitions that are closed under union, i.e. for any two feasible coalitions also their union is feasible. We consider and axiomatize two solutions or rules for these games that generalize the Shapley value: one is obtained as the conjunctive permission value using a corresponding superior graph, the other is defined as the Shapley value of a modified game similar as the Myerson value for games with limited communication. © 2010 The Author(s)

Mindfulness:Een studie naar de effecten van Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy en Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

Interventies die gebaseerd zijn op oefening in mindfulness staan de laatste jaren erg in de belangstelling. De training waarin oosterse meditatie oefening samen komt met de moderne westerse psychologie neemt nog altijd toe in populariteit (Brown e.a., 2007). Grondlegger is John Kabat-Zinn; die ontwikkelde de aandachtstraining, een techniek om mensen te leren om gaan met stress, angst, pijn en ziekte (Baer, 2003). Ook bij het Centrum Integrale Psychiatrie van Lentis Groningen worden sinds januari 2006 mindfulness trainingen gegeven, aan zowel cliënten als medewerkers. Is het enthousiasme gerechtvaardigd? Dit artikel bestaat uit twee delen. In het eerste deel wordt beschreven wat onder mindfulness verstaan wordt en hoe mindfulness trainingen in zijn werk gaan. Ook wordt in dit deel een literatuuroverzicht gegeven van onderzoeken naar de effecten van op mindfulness gebaseerde trainingen. In het tweede deel worden de resultaten gepresenteerd van een evaluatiestudie naar de mindfulness trainingen die de afgelopen jaren werden gegeven bij het Centrum Integrale Psychiatrie van Lentis

Studies on mechanisms of augmentation of liver regeneration by cyclosporine and FK 506

Evidence could not be found of immune modulation of liver regeneration. The powerful immunosuppressive drug FK 506, which augments the response after partial hepatectomy in normal rats, had the same effect in T cell—deficient nude rats. The cytotoxicity of natural killer cells in treated nude rats was not significantly changed by FK 506 therapy. However, the serum of FK 506—treated nude rats increased hepatocyte proliferation when added to third‐party hepatocyte cultures, suggesting that FK 506 had induced a serum growth factor in the nude rats or had suppressed an inhibitory factor. A hypothesis was advanced that FK 506 (and cyclosporine) affects hepatic growth by nonimmunological pathways. (HEPATOLOGY 1991;14:140–143.) Copyright © 1991 American Association for the Study of Liver Disease

Exactly solvable path integral for open cavities in terms of quasinormal modes

We evaluate the finite-temperature Euclidean phase-space path integral for the generating functional of a scalar field inside a leaky cavity. Provided the source is confined to the cavity, one can first of all integrate out the fields on the outside to obtain an effective action for the cavity alone. Subsequently, one uses an expansion of the cavity field in terms of its quasinormal modes (QNMs)-the exact, exponentially damped eigenstates of the classical evolution operator, which previously have been shown to be complete for a large class of models. Dissipation causes the effective cavity action to be nondiagonal in the QNM basis. The inversion of this action matrix inherent in the Gaussian path integral to obtain the generating functional is therefore nontrivial, but can be accomplished by invoking a novel QNM sum rule. The results are consistent with those obtained previously using canonical quantization.Comment: REVTeX, 26 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Vps3 and Vps8 control integrin trafficking from early to recycling endosomes and regulate integrin-dependent functions

Recycling endosomes maintain plasma membrane homeostasis and are important for cell polarity, migration, and cytokinesis. Yet, the molecular machineries that drive endocytic recycling remain largely unclear. The CORVET complex is a multi-subunit tether required for fusion between early endosomes. Here we show that the CORVET-specific subunits Vps3 and Vps8 also regulate vesicular transport from early to recycling endosomes. Vps3 and Vps8 localise to Rab4-positive recycling vesicles and co-localise with the CHEVI complex on Rab11-positive recycling endosomes. Depletion of Vps3 or Vps8 does not affect transferrin recycling, but delays the delivery of internalised integrins to recycling endosomes and their subsequent return to the plasma membrane. Consequently, Vps3/8 depletion results in defects in integrin-dependent cell adhesion and spreading, focal adhesion formation, and cell migration. These data reveal a role for Vps3 and Vps8 in a specialised recycling pathway important for integrin trafficking

Low-frequency characterization of quantum tunneling in flux qubits

We propose to investigate flux qubits by the impedance measurement technique (IMT), currently used to determine the current--phase relation in Josephson junctions. We analyze in detail the case of a high-quality tank circuit coupled to a persistent-current qubit, to which IMT was successfully applied in the classical regime. It is shown that low-frequency IMT can give considerable information about the level anticrossing, in particular the value of the tunneling amplitude. An interesting difference exists between applying the ac bias directly to the tank and indirectly via the qubit. In the latter case, a convenient way to find the degeneracy point in situ is described. Our design only involves existing technology, and its noise tolerance is quantitatively estimated to be realistic.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Phys.Rev.