Building competitive advantage through market orientation: a strategic solution for LCSB in the new European Union banking environment.

This project focuses on the changes the Limassol Co-operative Savings Bank (LCSB) must make to become more market oriented and halt its recent performance decline. A higher level of market orientation (MO) correlates positively with sales and market share growth (Narver and Slater 1990). According to Jaworski and Kohli (1993) MO builds on three dimensions: the organisation-wide acquisition, dissemination and response to market intelligence-behaviours enabled by structures and systems called Antecedents. Thus, making LCSB more market oriented amounts to a cultural change typically influenced by individuals values. In order to assess LCSB’s current degree of MO, two sets of questionnaires were administered to LCSB’s work force (the Employee Group and the Management Group: Jaworski and Kohli’s (1993) Antecedents and Moderators and Kohli, Jiaorski and Kumar’s (1993) MARKOR on the one hand and Schwartz’ (2003)Porttrait Valuew Questionnaire (PVQ) on the other. Working on the Realism paradigm, the triangulated results show LCSB’s weak MO drive in all aspects of organisational life, so the Recommendations prioritise changes in the Antecedents’ area and advocate the creation of an Internal Customer-Supplier network. Two action plans are drawn: one for the management’s role in initiating, enforcing and monitoring structural and systematic changes and one for the employees’ role in acquiring new skills and overcoming learning anxiety. Financial constraints and the challenges of cultural change suggest the lengthly but feasible progress pf LCSB towards more MO ind improved performance

Kinetic energy functional for Fermi vapors in spherical harmonic confinement

Two equations are constructed which reflect, for fermions moving independently in a spherical harmonic potential, a differential virial theorem and a relation between the turning points of kinetic energy and particle densities. These equations are used to derive a differential equation for the particle density and a non-local kinetic energy functional.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

A Numerical Study on Micromechanical Aspects in Short Fiber Composites

This study focused on the contribution of micro-mechanical parameters on the macro-mechanical response of short fiber composites, namely polypropylene matrix reinforced by glass fibers. In the framework of this paper, an attention has been given to the glass fibers length, as micromechanical parameter influences the overall macroscopic material’s behavior. Three dimensional numerical models were developed and analyzed through the concept of a Representative Volume Element (RVE). Results of the RVE-based approach were compared with analytical Halpin-Tsai’s model

Metastable states of a ferromagnet on random thin graphs

We calculate the mean number of metastable states of an Ising ferromagnet on random thin graphs of fixed connectivity c. We find, as for mean field spin glasses that this mean increases exponentially with the number of sites, and is the same as that calculated for the +/- J spin glass on the same graphs. An annealed calculation of the number <N_{MS}(E)> of metastable states of energy E is carried out. For small c, an analytic result is obtained. The result is compared with the one obtained for spin glasses in order to discuss the role played by loops on thin graphs and hence the effect of real frustration on the distribution of metastable states.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Estimating seismic fragility of a semi-buried square RC water tank using expert judgement

The assessment of the seismic fragility of water networks is the key to characterizing their risk exposure to strong earthquakes. In the HORIZON2020 IMPROVER project, we focused our attention on the water network of Barreiro, a municipality close to Lisbon, Portugal. To determine vulnerability to ground shaking, the seismic fragility of each key component of the network needed to be determined. To exemplify our approach, we concentrate here on assessing the fragility of a semi-buried RC square water tank; previous studies have overwhelmingly focused on the seismic fragility of cylindrical (and mainly steel) water tanks. Relevant fragility parameters are inevitably uncertain, and our study made use of a sample of experts’ judgements, pooled using the Cooke’s Classical Model. This structured approach derives performance weights for experts’ abilities to quantify uncertainty in a statistically accurate sense and informatively, and then applies these weights to their uncertainty judgements on modelling parameters of concern. The unique empirical control in this procedure ensures an objective, rational consensus is obtained on the uncertainties to ascribe to different contributory factors. The main challenge in our study is to construct a suitable discrete damage scale, and to explore the possibility the tank might suffer liquefaction damage, given its proximity to the River Tagus and groundwater conditions at site. Provisional findings from the exercise are presented here and compared to existing fragility curves constructed for cylindrical RC tanks. The square tank was found to be more vulnerable than a cylindrical one

Existing Empirical Fragility and Vulnerability Functions: Compendium and Guide for Selection

This document reviews existing empirical vulnerability and fragility functions worldwide collected until April 2014 in terms of their characteristics, data sources, and statistical modelling techniques. A qualitative rating system is described and applied to all reviewed functions to aid users to choose between existing functions for use in seismic risk assessments. The MS Access database developed by GEM VEM of all reviewed empirical functions and associated ratings is also described in this document. The database may be freely downloaded and includes all existing empirical vulnerability and fragility functions

Associations between home characteristics and mould levels in UK

Mould growth is governed by a complex set of factors, including among others physical characteristics of a given indoor environment, as well as how that space is used, i.e. heating, cleaning and ventilation habits, however how and to what extent these define propensity to grow mould is unclear. This study uses data from a testing scheme on 84 rooms in 18 properties to shed further light on these questions through elastic net regression analysis. The testing data includes the air and surface mould readings quantified based on the activity of β-N-acetylhexosaminidase (EC 3.2.1.52; NAHA), and particle intensity in each room

Empirical fragility curves: The effect of uncertainty in ground motion intensity

Empirical fragility curves derived from large post-disaster databases with data aggregated at municipality-level, commonly make the assumption that the ground motion intensity level is known and is determined at the centroid of each municipality from a ground motion prediction equation. A flexible Bayesian framework is applied here to the 1980 Irpinia database to explore whether more complex statistical models that account for sources of uncertainty in the intensity can significantly change the shape of the fragility curves. Through this framework the effect of explicitly modelling the uncertainty in the intensity, the spatial correlation of its intra-event component and the uncertainty due to the scatter of the buildings in the municipality are investigated. The analyses showed that the results did not change substantively with increased model complexity or the choice of prior. Nonetheless, informed decisions should be based on the defensible modelling of the significant variability in the data between municipalities

Arginine mutation alters binding of a human monoclonal antibody to antigens linked to systemic lupus erythematosus and the antiphospholipid syndrome

Objective: Previous studies have shown the importance of somatic mutations and arginine residues in the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) of pathogenic anti-double-stranded DNA (anti-dsDNA) antibodies in human and murine lupus, and in studies of murine antibodies, a role of mutations at position 53 in VH CDR2 has been demonstrated. We previously demonstrated in vitro expression and mutagenesis of the human IgG1 monoclonal antibody B3. The present study was undertaken to investigate, using this expression system, the importance of the arginine residue at position 53 (R53) in B3 VH. Methods: R53 was altered, by site-directed mutagenesis, to serine, asparagine, or lysine, to create 3 expressed variants of VH. In addition, the germline sequence of the VH3-23 gene (from which B3 VH is derived) was expressed either with or without arginine at position 53. These 5 new heavy chains, as well as wild-type B3 VH, were expressed with 4 different light chains, and the resulting antibodies were assessed for their ability to bind to nucleosomes, -actinin, cardiolipin, ovalbumin, 2-glycoprotein I (2GPI), and the N-terminal domain of 2GPI (domain I), using direct binding assays. Results: The presence of R53 was essential but not sufficient for binding to dsDNA and nucleosomes. Conversely, the presence of R53 reduced binding to -actinin, ovalbumin, 2GPI, and domain I of 2GPI. The combination B3 (R53S) VH/B3 VL bound human, but not bovine, 2GPI. Conclusion: The fact that the R53S substitution significantly alters binding of B3 to different clinically relevant antigens, but that the alteration is in opposite directions depending on the antigen, implies that this arginine residue plays a critical role in the affinity maturation of antibody B3

Covariance matrices and the separability problem

We propose a unifying approach to the separability problem using covariance matrices of locally measurable observables. From a practical point of view, our approach leads to strong entanglement criteria that allow to detect the entanglement of many bound entangled states in higher dimensions and which are at the same time necessary and sufficient for two qubits. From a fundamental perspective, our approach leads to insights into the relations between several known entanglement criteria -- such as the computable cross norm and local uncertainty criteria -- as well as their limitations.Comment: 4 pages, no figures; v3: final version to appear in PR