The role of law and ethics in developing business management as a profession

Currently, business management is far from being recognised as a profession. This paper suggests that a professional spirit should be developed which could function as a filter of commercial reasoning. Broadly, management will not be organised within the framework of a well-established profession unless formal knowledge, licensing, professional autonomy and professional codes of conduct are developed sufficiently. In developing business management as a profession, law may play a key role. Where the idea is that business management should be more professsionalised, managers must show that they are willing to adopt ethical values, while arriving at business decisions. The paper argues that ethics cannot survive without legal regulation, which, in turn, will not be supported by law unless lawyers can find alternative solutions to the large mechanisms of the official society, secured by the monopolised coercion of the nation state. From a micro perspective of law and business ethics, communities can be developed with their own conventions, rules and standards that are generated and sanctioned within the boundaries of the communities themselves

Emergency Response and Public Health in Hurricane Katrina: What Does it Mean to Be a Public Health Emergency Responder?

Since 9/11, federal funds directed toward public health departments for training in disaster preparedness have dramatically increased, resulting in changing expectations of public health workers’ roles in emergency response. This article explores the public health emergency responder role through data collected as part of an oral history conducted with the 3 health departments that responded to Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana. The data reveals a significant change in public health emergency response capacity as a result of federal funding. The role is still evolving, and many challenges remain, in particular, a clear articulation of the public health role in emergency response, the integration of the public health and emergency responder cultures, identification of the scope of training needs and strategies to maintain new public health emergency response skills, and closer collaboration with emergency response agencies

Study of the bivariate survival data using frailty models based on Lévy processes

Frailty models allow us to take into account the non-observable inhomogeneity of individual hazard functions. Although models with time-independent frailty have been intensively studied over the last decades and a wide range of applications in survival analysis have been found, the studies based on the models with time-dependent frailty are relatively rare. In this paper, we formulate and prove two propositions related to the identifiability of the bivariate survival models with frailty given by a nonnegative bivariate Lévy process. We discuss parametric and semiparametric procedures for estimating unknown parameters and baseline hazard functions. Numerical experiments with simulated and real data illustrate these procedures. The statements of the propositions can be easily extended to the multivariate case

Applying refinement to the use of mice and rats in rheumatoid arthritis research

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a painful, chronic disorder and there is currently an unmet need for effective therapies that will benefit a wide range of patients. The research and development process for therapies and treatments currently involves in vivo studies, which have the potential to cause discomfort, pain or distress. This Working Group report focuses on identifying causes of suffering within commonly used mouse and rat ‘models’ of RA, describing practical refinements to help reduce suffering and improve welfare without compromising the scientific objectives. The report also discusses other, relevant topics including identifying and minimising sources of variation within in vivo RA studies, the potential to provide pain relief including analgesia, welfare assessment, humane endpoints, reporting standards and the potential to replace animals in RA research

Evaluation of Fermi Read-out of the ATLAS Tilecal Prototype

Prototypes of the \fermi{} system have been used to read out a prototype of the \atlas{} hadron calorimeter in a beam test at the CERN SPS. The \fermi{} read-out system, using a compressor and a 40 MHz sampling ADC, is compared to a standard charge integrating read-out by measuring the energy resolution of the calorimeter separately with the two systems on the same events. Signal processing techniques have been designed to optimize the treatment of \fermi{} data. The resulting energy resolution is better than the one obtained with the standard read-out

Response of the ATLAS tile calorimeter prototype to muons

A study of high energy muons traversing the ATLAS hadron Tile calorimeter in the barrel region in the energy range between 10 and 300~GeV is presented. Both test beam experimental data and Monte Carlo simulations are given and show good agreement. The Tile calorimeter capability of detecting isolated muons over the above energy range is demonstrated. A signal to background ratio of about 10 is expected for the nominal LHC luminosity ($10^{34} cm^{-2} sec^{-1}$). The photoelectron statistics effect in the muon shape response is shown. The e/mip ratio is found to be $0.81 \pm 0.03$; the e/$\mu$ ratio is in the range 0.91 - 0.97. The energy loss of a muon in the calorimeter, dominated by the energy lost in the absorber, can be correlated to the energy loss in the active material. This correlation allows one to correct on an event by event basis the muon energy loss in the calorimeter and therefore reduce the low energy tails in the muon momentum distribution

Study of Leishmania pathogenesis in mice : experimental considerations

Although leishmaniases are endemic in 98 countries, they are still considered neglected tropical diseases. Leishmaniases are characterized by the emergence of new virulent and asymptomatic strains of Leishmania spp. and, as a consequence, by a very diverse clinical spectrum. To fight more efficiently these parasites, the mechanisms of host defense and of parasite virulence need to be thoroughly investigated. To this aim, animal models are widely used. However, the results obtained with these models are influenced by several experimental parameters, such as the mouse genetic background, parasite genotype, inoculation route/infection site, parasite dose and phlebotome saliva. In this review, we propose an update on their influence in the two main clinical forms of the disease: cutaneous and visceral leishmaniases