Israeli business in transition

"In den zurückliegenden Jahrzehnten hatte Israels Wirtschaft mit beträchtlicher finanzieller Unterstützung aus dem Ausland, einer starken Bildungsförderung sowie einer staatlichen Industriepolitik enorme Wachstumsraten erzielt. Seit den letzten 10-15 Jahren ist auch Israels Wirtschaft mit einer neuen weltpolitischen Situation und mit Deregulierungen im eigenen Wirtschaftssystem konfrontiert. Ob Israels wirtschaftliche Wachstumsraten der Vergangenheit erhöht oder auch nur gehalten werden können, wird stark von der Fähigkeit der einzelnen Unternehmen abhängen, sich an diese neuen Bedingungen anzupassen. Um die Lernfaktoren und Lernmechanismen in israelischen Unternehmen zu verstehen, wurden Topmanager in Firmen mit über 500 Beschäftigten befragt. Eine Analyse der Interviews ließ zwei charakteristische Lernmuster, nämlich das „zentralisierte“ und das „dezentralisierte“ Lernmuster, erkennbar werden. Diese Lernmuster definieren sich jeweils über drei charakteristische Elemente: die Ausprägung des Menschenbildes, die Ausprägung der Organisations- und Entscheidungsstruktur und die Ausprägung der Unternehmenskultur. Auffällig ist in Israel die beträchtliche Anzahl der Firmen, die Eigenschaften beider Lernformen in sich vereinen. Diese „hybriden“ Unternehmen haben in der Regel eine Vergangenheit, die vom „zentralisierten“ Lernmuster geprägt ist. Manager dieser Unternehmen äußern jedoch ein zunehmendes Interesse an einer Eigenschaften wie Flexibilität, die gewöhnlich mit Dezentralisierung und flachen Hierarchien in Unternehmen assoziiert wird. Im Rahmen dieser Studie werden auch lernförderliche und lernhinderliche Faktoren - wie etwa Krisen und Erfolg - diskutiert." [Autorenreferat]"Despite the burden of an enormous defense budget, the absorption of immigrants, its tiny size and the scarcity of natural resources, Israel's economy, albeit with considerable financial aid from abroad, was able to achieve impressive growth rates. This was to a great degree accomplished by putting a heavy emphasis an education and by rapidly achieving a high degree of industrialization through government policies and incentives. But in recent years, with increasing government deregulation and enormously altered global power structures Israel is faced with a dynamic new reality. Israel's ability to continue or even heighten its growth rate will be very much dependent an the ability of the individual businesses to adapt and adjust rapidly to these new realities. This study of organizational learning in Israel was undertaken in order to understand what factors and mechanisms are involved in Israeli companies' ability or lack thereof to successfully cope with the challenges of this rapidly changing environment. Top executives representing more than 55 percent of the companies employing 500 workers or more, were interviewed. Two distinct patterns of learning, related to three basic elements, emerged from the data. These elements are the image of the individual employee, the organizational and decision-making structure of the company, and the specific corporate culture. Of particular interest in Israel is the significant number of companies which exhibit mixed features of these two learning patterns. In these 'hybrid' companies, which tend to have a history of centralized learning characteristics, there is a growing interest in the flexibility commonly associated with decentralization and the flattening of hierarchical pyramids of decision-making. The study also discusses factors that promote or hinder organizational learning such as crises and success." (author's abstract

A radioautographic and vital staining study of formocresol on the dental pulp following pulpotemy

Thesis (M.Sc.D.)--Boston University, School of Graduate Dentistry, 1973. (Pedodontics)Bibliography included

Time and History: some approximations concerning the present in Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber

O conceito de "presente" de Martin Buber e o de Walter Benjamin parecem equivaler-se. O de Buber é referido como "Gegenwart", termo que quer dizer tanto "presente" (temporal) como "presença", e o de Benjamin com "Jetztzeit". Ambos implicam um tempo qualitativo e não linear e cronológico e consideram o presente como uma ruptura - seja na cadeia da causalidade, seja no determinismo das leis naturais e historicistas - e um entrecruzamento de temporalidades, onde o passado e o futuro se fundem.The concepts of "present" by Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin seem to be equivalent. Buber´s is refered as "Gegenwart", a word that means both "present" (in a temporal sense) and "presence". Benjamin´s is refered as "Jetztzeit". Both them implicate a qualitative time, not a linear, chronological one, and regard the present as breakthrough - as much in the chain of causality as in the determinism of natural and historicist laws - and crossroad of temporalities, where past and future join together

O Espírito do Judaísmo e o Judaísmo Sem Espírito

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A noção sufi de Ta’wil (“hermenêutica espiritual”): uma questão metodológica

In the first instance this article proposes phenomenology and hermeneutics as methods to approach phenomena which are not understood through the scientific method without changing into something else, such as, for example, literature, spirituality and philosophy. Husserl and Heidegger are invited here to explain the methods they propose. In a second instance Corbin presents the hermeneutics he has found in Sufi literature: spiritual hermeneutics (ta’wil). In a context where literature, mysticism and philosophy are undissociated, the Sufi concept of ta’wil deals with the phenomenon in order to understand not only the phenomenon itself but what it symbolises.Este artigo pretende, num primeiro momento, a fenomenologia e a hermenêutica como métodos para a abordagem de fenômenos que não se permitem apreender pelo método científico sem deixar de ser o que são, como por exemplo a literatura, a espiritualidade e a filosofia. Husserl e Heidegger são aqui convidados para explicar esses métodos que propõem. Em um segundo momento, Corbin vem apresentar a hermenêutica que encontrou na literatura sufi: a hermenêutica espiritual (ta’wil). Num contexto em que literatura, mística e filosofia encontram-se indissociadas, o conceito sufi de ta’wil serve-se do fenômeno para a compreensão não só do fato como do que este simboliza

Um Novo Dispositivo Para O Estudo Da Escavação Em Pequenos Roedores:: Seu Uso Para Investigar Efeitos De Privação

A low-cost apparatus for the study of rodent digging behaviorwhich simplifies experimental manipulations and offers a precise wayof assessing amount of material dug is described. The results of a studywith golden hamsters, using the apparatus, suggest that at least one kindof digging - probably a defensive response - is controlled more by environmentalevents than by a mechanism of deprivation/satiation.RESUMO - Descreve-se, neste artigo, um dispositivo de baixo custo para o estudo da escavação em roedores. O dispositivo simplifica as operações experimentais e permite uma avaliação precisa da quantidade de material escavada. Os resultados de um estudo com hamsters dourados levam a crer que existe uma forma de escavação - provavelmente de natureza defensiva - controlada mais por eventos ambientais do que por um mecanismo de privação/saciação

The single-nucleotide polymorphism (GPX4c718t) in the glutathione peroxidase 4 gene influences endothelial cell function : Interaction with selenium and fatty acids

© 2013 The Authors. Molecular Nutrition & Food Research published by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Novel Bayes Factors That Capture Expert Uncertainty in Prior Density Specification in Genetic Association Studies.

Bayes factors (BFs) are becoming increasingly important tools in genetic association studies, partly because they provide a natural framework for including prior information. The Wakefield BF (WBF) approximation is easy to calculate and assumes a normal prior on the log odds ratio (logOR) with a mean of zero. However, the prior variance (W) must be specified. Because of the potentially high sensitivity of the WBF to the choice of W, we propose several new BF approximations with logOR ∼N(0,W), but allow W to take a probability distribution rather than a fixed value. We provide several prior distributions for W which lead to BFs that can be calculated easily in freely available software packages. These priors allow a wide range of densities for W and provide considerable flexibility. We examine some properties of the priors and BFs and show how to determine the most appropriate prior based on elicited quantiles of the prior odds ratio (OR). We show by simulation that our novel BFs have superior true-positive rates at low false-positive rates compared to those from both P-value and WBF analyses across a range of sample sizes and ORs. We give an example of utilizing our BFs to fine-map the CASP8 region using genotype data on approximately 46,000 breast cancer case and 43,000 healthy control samples from the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS) Consortium, and compare the single-nucleotide polymorphism ranks to those obtained using WBFs and P-values from univariate logistic regression

Exome sequencing of 20,791 cases of type 2 diabetes and 24,440 controls

Protein-coding genetic variants that strongly affect disease risk can yield relevant clues to disease pathogenesis. Here we report exome-sequencing analyses of 20,791 individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and 24,440 non-diabetic control participants from 5 ancestries. We identify gene-level associations of rare variants (with minor allele frequencies of less than 0.5%) in 4 genes at exome-wide significance, including a series of more than 30 SLC30A8 alleles that conveys protection against T2D, and in 12 gene sets, including those corresponding to T2D drug targets (P = 6.1 × 10−3) and candidate genes from knockout mice (P = 5.2 × 10−3). Within our study, the strongest T2D gene-level signals for rare variants explain at most 25% of the heritability of the strongest common single-variant signals, and the gene-level effect sizes of the rare variants that we observed in established T2D drug targets will require 75,000–185,000 sequenced cases to achieve exome-wide significance. We propose a method to interpret these modest rare-variant associations and to incorporate these associations into future target or gene prioritization efforts