Life after 100? A Leader’s Guide to Resilient Family Businesses

How many businesses survive more than a 100years? Of the businessesthat do survive,how many remain financially robust? If the lifespan of a company on the Standard and Poor’s (S&P)500 list is an indication of longevity,then evidence shows that ithas shrunk from 33 years in 1964 to 24 years by 2016.By 2027, itis forecast to shrink to just 12 years.1Put differently, at the current survival rate, more than 75%of thecompanies currently quoted on the S&P 500 woulddisappearin the next decade.Family-ownedbusinesses tend to mirror these survival patterns. Alargeproportion of family-ownedbusinesses struggle to survive beyond the second orthird generation.According to the Family Business Institute, only 30% of these organizations last into a second generation. Only 12% remain viable into a third anda miniscule3% continueinto the fourth generation or beyond.What have these 3% businesses and the familybusiness owners done differently that is likely to have contributed to their resilience? What can be learnt about the group that have livedbeyond 100

Performance Assessment of Six Public Health Programs in Katsina State, Nigeria

This research aimed to evaluate the performance of six ongoing public health programs through core performance indicators in Katsina State, Nigeria. The healthcare delivery in Africa is mostly program-based. This requires that such programs need to be evaluated which may in turn help to identify any existing gaps towards the improvement of patients' access and coverage to their given service. We identified all active health facilities where our programs on malaria, Routine Immunization (RI), Family Planning (FP), Tuberculosis and Leprosy (TBL), HIV/AIDS, and Free Medicare (FMC) were being carried out. After that, a representative sample was derived to obtain data regarding five key performance indicators by using a Logistics Indicators Assessment Tool. Of 1,718 facilities, a total of 983 (57.22%) were visited, In other words, by assuming a normal distribution; each facility expectedly covers only 3,371 individuals. All programs provided different and diverse results on each indicator; however, the most obvious challenge was in the stock-out and demand vs. receipt of required medications. These are particularly for malaria, FMC, FP, and HIV. For instance, the stock-out lasted 222 days for malaria and 135 days for FP. Despite this, none of the programs had a lower than gold-standard near-term availability of required products. Program-based healthcare delivery is inadequate and ineffective unless the local system gets simultaneously developed. If required medications are not becoming available, optimal access, coverage, and benefits cannot be expected to be obtained. Clearly, Nigeria experiences a push system of meeting term supplies. Nigeria needs to strengthen its pharmaceutical system

Ma-Xu quantization rule and exact WKB condition for translationally shape invariant potentials

For translationally shape invariant potentials, the exact quantization rule proposed by Ma and Xu is a direct consequence of exactness of the modified WKB quantization condition proved by Barclay. We propose here a very direct alternative way to calculate the appropriate correction for the whole class of translationally shape invariant potentials

Heuristic Backtracking Algorithms for SAT

In recent years backtrack search SAT solvers have been the subject of dramatic improvements. These improvements allowed SAT solvers to successfully replace BDDs in many areas of formal verification, and also motivated the development of many new challenging problem instances, many of which too hard for the current generation of SAT solvers. As a result, further improvements to SAT technology are expected to have key consequences in formal verification. The objective of this paper is to propose heuristic approaches to the backtrack step of backtrack search SAT solvers, with the goal of increasing the ability of the SAT solver to search different parts of the search space. The proposed heuristics to the backtrack step are inspired by the heuristics proposed in recent years for the branching step of SAT solvers, namely VSIDS and some of its improvements. The preliminary experimental results are promising, and motivate the integration of heuristic backtracking in state-of-the-art SAT solvers. 1

Energy Eigenvalues For Supersymmetric Potentials via Quantum Hamilton-Jacobi Formalism

Using quantum Hamilton-Jacobi formalism of Leacock and Padgett, we show how to obtain the exact eigenvalues for supersymmetric (SUSY) potentials.Comment: 15 pages Latex Compile twice to get cross references correct. 2 Figures not included. Requests for figures should be sent to [email protected]

Separability of drag and thrust in undulatory animals and machines

For nearly a century, researchers have tried to understand the swimming of aquatic animals in terms of a balance between the forward thrust from swimming movements and drag on the body. Prior approaches have failed to provide a separation of these two forces for undulatory swimmers such as lamprey and eels, where most parts of the body are simultaneously generating drag and thrust. We nonetheless show that this separation is possible, and delineate its fundamental basis in undulatory swimmers. Our approach unifies a vast diversity of undulatory aquatic animals (anguilliform, sub-carangiform, gymnotiform, bal- istiform, rajiform) and provides design principles for highly agile bioinspired underwater vehicles. This approach has practical utility within biology as well as engineering. It is a predictive tool for use in understanding the role of the mechanics of movement in the evolutionary emergence of morphological features relating to locomotion. For example, we demonstrate that the drag-thrust separation framework helps to predict the observed height of the ribbon fin of electric knifefish, a diverse group of neotropical fishes which are an important model system in sensory neurobiology. We also show how drag-thrust separation leads to models that can predict the swimming velocity of an organism or a robotic vehicle.Comment: 41 pages, 13 figures, 4 table