Codes of ethics in Sweden\u27s largest public sector organizations : communicating the intent of the code within the organization

The aim of the study was to examine the ways that public sector organizations in Sweden communicated the intent of their codes of ethics to their employees. Primary data was obtained via a self-administered mail questionnaire distributed to a census of the top 100 organizations. The study identified a range of methods used by organizations to integrate the ethos of codes into corporate culture. These methods included communication of the code, company induction of new staff, consequences for a breach of the code, ethical performance, an ethics ombudsman, the support of whistleblowers, a standing ethics committee, ethics education, and an ethics education committee.Whilst many organizations have instituted ethical behaviour initiatives, activities specifically targeted at exposure, education and support for staff to perform ethically were found to be underdeveloped.<br /

BASTION: Board and SoC test instrumentation for ageing and no failure found

This is an overview paper that motivates and describes performed work done in the European Commission funded research project BASTION, which focuses on two critical problems of modern electronics: the No-Fault-Found (NFF) and CMOS ageing. New defect classes contributing to NFF have been identified, including timing related faults (TRF) at board level and intermittent resistive faults (IRF) at IC level. BASTION has addressed the mechanisms of ageing and developed several techniques to improve the longevity of electronic products. Embedded Instrumentation, monitors, and IEEE 1687 standard for reconfigurable scan networks (RSN) are seen as an important leverage that helped mitigating the impact of the above listed problems by facilitating a low-latency, scalable online system health monitoring and error localization infrastructure as well as integration of all heterogeneous technologies into a homogeneous demonstration platform. This paper helps the reader to get a general overview of the work performed and provides a collection of references to publications where the respective research results are described in detail

SUMO4 M55V polymorphism affects susceptibility to type I diabetes in HLA DR3- and DR4-positive Swedish patients

SUMO4 M55V, located in IDDM5, has been a focus for debate because of its association to type I diabetes (TIDM) in Asians but not in Caucasians. The current study aims to test the significance of M55V association to TIDM in a large cohort of Swedish Caucasians, and to test whether M55V is associated in those carrying human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class II molecules. A total of 673 TIDM patients and 535 age- and sex-matched healthy controls were included in the study. PCR-RFLP was performed to identify the genotype and allele variations. Our data suggest that SUMO4 M55V is not associated with susceptibility to TIDM by itself. When we stratified our patients and controls based on heterozygosity for HLA-DR3/DR4 and SUMO4 genotypes, we found that presence of SUMO4 GG increased further the relative risk conferred by HLA-DR3/DR4 to TIDM, whereas SUMO4 AA decreased the risk. From the current study, we conclude that SUMO4 M55V is associated with TIDM in association with high-risk HLA-DR3 and DR4, but not by itself