The Effect of Contractual Complexity on Technology Sourcing Agreements

Most research on strategic alliances ignores the underlying contracts that govern the terms of the relationship. This is problematic since it is how these contracts are structured that determines how firms will benefit from a relationship. We present a novel method to analyze contractual complexity in a multi-dimensional framework in an attempt to link together the contractual complexity and control rights literatures. We find that the stage of development, age and prevalence of the underlying technology most influence complexity. Contractual complexity also influences the allocation of control rights. We also explore the importance of prior relationships on the underlying contract.Contractual complexity; Control rights; Strategic alliances; Biopharmaceutical industry; Contractual design

Asylum Policy in the West: Past Trends, Future Possibilities

asylum, deterrence, welfare, Western states

The effect of temporally variable environmental stimuli and group size on emergence behavior

How animals trade-off food availability and predation threats is a strong determinant of animal activity and behavior; however, the majority of work on this topic has been on individual animals, despite the modulating effect the presence of conspecifics can have on both foraging and predation risk. Although these environmental factors (food and predation threat) vary spatially within habitats, they also vary temporally, and in marine habitats, this can be determined by not only the diel cycle but also the tidal cycle. Humbug damselfish, Dascyllus aruanus, live in small groups of unrelated individuals within and around branching coral heads, which they collectively withdraw into to escape a predation threat. In this study, we measured the proportion of individuals in the colony that were outside the coral head before and after they were scared by a fright stimulus and compared the responses at high tide (HT) and low tide (LT). We found that a greater proportion of the shoal emerged after the fright stimulus at HT and in larger groups than at LT or in smaller groups. We also quantified the pattern of emergence over time and discovered the rate of emergence was faster in larger shoals as time progressed. We show that shoals of fish change their behavioral response to a predation threat in accordance with the tide, exemplifying how temporally variable environmental factors can shape group movement decisions

“O brave new world”: Service-Learning and Shakespeare

Community-engaged learning is a rising feature of a wide variety of higher education institutions, from community colleges to private liberal arts colleges to large public universities. Everyone, it seems, is getting in on the act, and as a result, the amount of scholarship published on service-learning continues to multiply. There remains, however, curiously little scholarship published on the intersection of service-learning and literary studies. Almost no published scholarship exists on how courses on Shakespeare – a staple of nearly every college English department – might engage with the community through service-learning that provides a genuine community benefit while simultaneously deepening undergraduate students’ engagement with and understanding of Shakespeare. This essay seeks to address that absence by describing a program for utilizing service-learning in a Shakespeare course and offering a discussion of the learning outcomes of the project for its central constituencies

Movement Decisions and Foraging Behaviour in Shoals of Fish The influence of internal and external stimuli

This thesis explores the mechanisms and functions of decision-making in groups, specifically in the context of social foraging in fish shoals. While many animal groups may seem homogeneous to the naked-eye, closer inspection reveals considerable heterogeneity, as they are composed of individuals with different phenotypes and different motivations living in stochastic, complex environments. The question then, is how do individual behavioural decisions change under varying internal and external conditions and what effect does this have on group level decision-making? How do animals address conflicts of interest and competition effects whilst ensuring benefits of group living are maintained? The approach taken in this thesis has been to address these questions from many angles, using a range of freshwater and marine species and employing an array of novel experimental set-ups. Of particular importance has been the utilization of automated, multi agent tracking software, which has allowed for the description of the movement and interaction of individually identified fish at a much finer scale than in the past. This project has direct significance to our understanding of the individual and group dynamics of social species, which is a central theme in behavioural ecology, and will inform researchers in a variety of fields from theoretical biology to sociological studies of human grouping patterns. The inclusion of internal nutritional state and external environmental factors into studies of group movement and decision-making in a foraging context is a practical way of linking the mechanistic forces behind individual behaviour to functional group-level responses. This will help expand our understanding of the evolutionary causes of group living and its ecological consequences, influencing conservation management plans and strategies to improve fisheries and aquacultural practices

Forest Development and Carbon Dynamics After Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreaks

Mountain pine beetles periodically infest pine forests in western North America, killing many or most overstory pine stems. The surviving secondary stand structure, along with recruited seedlings, will form the future canopy. Thus, even-aged pine stands become multiaged and multistoried. The species composition of affected stands will depend on the presence of nonpines and outbreak severity, among other factors, and can range from continued dominance by pines to hastened conversion to more shade-tolerant species. The loss of mature host trees results in reductions of ecosystem carbon productivity. The surviving and recruited stems, however, grow more quickly in response to the reduced competition, and carbon productivity and live basal area recover to preoutbreak levels within a few years or decades. Infestations may result in system carbon storage reductions, relative to storage among undisturbed developmental trajectories, mostly because of the temporary decrease in carbon productivity. Carbon losses in infested stands are slow as a result of recalcitrance of snags and coarse woody debris. Recalcitrant dead pools combined with recovering live pools results in fairly stable total ecosystem carbon storage among infested stands. Infested stands may switch from net carbon sinks to net carbon sources but typically recover within 5–20 years

Lyman Alpha Radiative Transfer in a Multi-Phase Medium

Hydrogen Ly-alpha is our primary emission-line window into high redshift galaxies. Surprisingly, despite an extensive literature, Ly-alpha radiative transfer in the most realistic case of a dusty, multi-phase medium has not received detailed theoretical attention. We investigate resonant scattering through an ensemble of dusty, moving, optically thick gas clumps. We treat each clump as a scattering particle and use Monte Carlo simulations of surface scattering to quantify continuum and Ly-alpha surface scattering angles, absorption probabilities, and frequency redistribution, as a function of the gas dust content. This atomistic approach speeds up the simulations by many orders of magnitude, making possible calculations which are otherwise intractable. With these surface scattering results, we develop an analytic framework for estimating escape fractions and line widths as a function of gas geometry, motion, and dust content. We show that the key geometric parameter is the average number of surface scatters for escape in the absence of absorption. We consider two interesting applications: (i) Equivalent widths. Ly-alpha can preferentially escape from a dusty multi-phase ISM if most of the dust lies in cold neutral clouds, possibly explaining anomalously high EWs seen in many high redshift/submm sources. (ii) Multi-phase galactic outflows. We show the characteristic profile is asymmetric with a broad red tail, and relate the profile features to the outflow speed and gas geometry. Many future applications are envisaged. [Abridged]Comment: Submitted to MNRAS. 27 pages, 25 figure