E-supply chain integration adoption: examination of buyer–supplier relationships

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the adoption of e-supply chain integration by electrical and electronic industry suppliers. This study has integrated both the transaction cost and resource-dependence models in understanding the influence of buyer–seller relationships on e-supply chain integration. Hypotheses were developed based on the proposed model. Data were collected from 122 electrical and electronic suppliers located in Malaysia. The data was examined using multiple regression analysis. The results showed that Asset Specificity, Product Technological Uncertainty, Transaction frequency, Proportion of sales to e-supply chain integration promoter, and number of customers are able to explain suppliers’ decisions to adopt e-supply chain integrations with their buyers. Buyers that would like to improve the adoptions of e-supply chain integration will be able to formulate and plan strategies from the buyer–seller relationships perspectives

Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil-fuel assets

Several major economies rely heavily on fossil-fuel production and exports, yet current low-carbon technology diffusion, energy efficiency and climate policy may be substantially reducing global demand for fossil fuels.1-4 This trend is inconsistent with observed investment in new fossil-fuel ventures1,2, which could become stranded as a result. Here we use an integrated global economy environment simulation model to study the macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil-fuel assets (SFFA). Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether new climate policies are adopted or not; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2°C target are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell-out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of $1-4tn; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (e.g. net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (e.g. Russia, the US or Canada, which could see their fossil-fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.The authors acknowledge C-EERNG and Cambridge Econometrics for support, and funding from EPSRC (JFM, fellowship no. EP/ K007254/1); the Newton Fund (JFM, PS, JV, EPSRC grant no EP/N002504/1 and ESRC grant no ES/N013174/1), NERC (NRE, PH, HP, grant no NE/P015093/1), CONICYT (PS), the Philomathia Foundation (JV), the Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme (JV), and Horizon 2020 (HP, JFM; Sim4Nexus project)

Transbilayer Phospholipid Movements in ABCA1-Deficient Cells

Tangier disease is an inherited disorder that results in a deficiency in circulating levels of HDL. Although the disease is known to be caused by mutations in the ABCA1 gene, the mechanism by which lesions in the ABCA1 ATPase effect this outcome is not known. The inability of ABCA1 knockout mice (ABCA1−/−) to load cholesterol and phospholipids onto apoA1 led to a proposal that ABCA1 mediates the transbilayer externalization of phospholipids, an activity integral not only to the formation of HDL particles but also to another, distinct process: the recognition and clearance of apoptotic cells by macrophages. Expression of phosphatidylserine (PS) on the surface of both macrophages and their apoptotic targets is required for efficient engulfment of the apoptotic cells, and it has been proposed that ABCA1 is required for transbilayer externalization of PS to the surface of both cell types. To determine whether ABCA1 is responsible for any of the catalytic activities known to control transbilayer phospholipid movements, these activities were measured in cells from ABCA1−/− mice and from Tangier individuals as well as ABCA1-expressing HeLa cells. Phospholipid movements in either normal or apoptotic lymphocytes or in macrophages were not inhibited when cells from knockout and wildtype mice or immortalized cells from Tangier individuals vs normal individuals were compared. Exposure of PS on the surface of normal thymocytes, apoptotic thymocytes and elicited peritoneal macrophages from wildtype and knockout mice or B lymphocytes from normal and Tangier individuals, as measured by annexin V binding, was also unchanged. No evidence was found of ABCA1-stimulated active PS export, and spontaneous PS movement to the outer leaflet in the presence or absence of apoA1 was unaffected by the presence or absence of ABCA1. Normal or Tangier B lymphocytes and macrophages were also identical in their ability to serve as targets or phagocytes, respectively, in apoptotic cell clearance assays. No evidence was found to support the suggestion that ABCA1 is involved in transport to the macrophage cell surface of annexins I and II, known to enhance phagocytosis of apoptotic cells. These results show that mutations in ABCA1 do not measurably reduce the rate of transbilayer movements of phospholipids in either the engulfing macrophage or the apoptotic target, thus discounting catalysis of transbilayer movements of phospholipids as the mechanism by which ABCA1 facilitates loading of phospholipids and cholesterol onto apoA1

Improved curve fits to summary survival data: application to economic evaluation of health technologies

addresses: Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, Veysey Building, Salmon Pool Lane, Exeter, EX2 4SG, UK. [email protected]: PMCID: PMC3198983types: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't© 2011 Hoyle and Henley; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Mean costs and quality-adjusted-life-years are central to the cost-effectiveness of health technologies. They are often calculated from time to event curves such as for overall survival and progression-free survival. Ideally, estimates should be obtained from fitting an appropriate parametric model to individual patient data. However, such data are usually not available to independent researchers. Instead, it is common to fit curves to summary Kaplan-Meier graphs, either by regression or by least squares. Here, a more accurate method of fitting survival curves to summary survival data is described

Aspects of the planetary Birkhoff normal form

The discovery in [G. Pinzari. PhD thesis. Univ. Roma Tre. 2009], [L. Chierchia and G. Pinzari, Invent. Math. 2011] of the Birkhoff normal form for the planetary many--body problem opened new insights and hopes for the comprehension of the dynamics of this problem. Remarkably, it allowed to give a {\sl direct} proof of the celebrated Arnold's Theorem [V. I. Arnold. Uspehi Math. Nauk. 1963] on the stability of planetary motions. In this paper, using a "ad hoc" set of symplectic variables, we develop an asymptotic formula for this normal form that may turn to be useful in applications. As an example, we provide two very simple applications to the three-body problem: we prove a conjecture by [V. I. Arnold. cit] on the "Kolmogorov set"of this problem and, using Nehoro{\v{s}}ev Theory [Nehoro{\v{s}}ev. Uspehi Math. Nauk. 1977], we prove, in the planar case, stability of all planetary actions over exponentially-long times, provided mean--motion resonances are excluded. We also briefly discuss perspectives and problems for full generalization of the results in the paper.Comment: 44 pages. Keywords: Averaging Theory, Birkhoff normal form, Nehoro{\v{s}}ev Theory, Planetary many--body problem, Arnold's Theorem on the stability of planetary motions, Properly--degenerate kam Theory, steepness. Revised version, including Reviewer's comments. Typos correcte

Climate-carbon cycle uncertainties and the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement aims to address the gap between existing climate policies and policies consistent with ‘holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2C’. The feasibility of meeting the target has been questioned both in terms of the possible requirement for negative emissions, and ongoing debate on the sensitivity of the climate-carbon cycle system. Using a sequence of ensembles of a fully dynamic three-dimensional climate-carbon cycle model, forced by emissions from an integrated assessment model of regional-level climate policy, economy, and technological transformation, we show that a reasonable interpretation of the Paris Agreement is still technically achievable. Specifically, limiting peak (decadal) warming to less than 1.7°C, or end-century warming to less than 1.54°C, occurs in 50% of our simulations in a policy scenario without net negative emissions or excessive stringency in any policy domain. We evaluate two mitigation scenarios, with 200 GTC and 307 GTC post-2017 emissions, quantifying spatio-temporal variability of warming, precipitation, ocean acidification and marine productivity. Under rapid decarbonisation decadal variability dominates the mean response in critical regions, with significant implications for decision making, demanding impact methodologies that address non-linear spatio-temporal responses. Ignoring carbon-cycle feedback uncertainties (explaining 47% of peak warming uncertainty) becomes unreasonable under strong mitigation conditions.We acknowledge C-EERNG and Cambridge Econometrics for support, and funding from EPSRC (to J.-F.M., fellowship number EP/ K007254/1); the Newton Fund (to J.-F.M., P.S. and J.E.V., EPSRC grant number EP/N002504/1 and ESRC grant number ES/N013174/1), NERC (to N.R.E., P.H. and H.P., grant number NE/P015093/1), CONICYT (to P.S.), the Philomathia Foundation (to J.E.V.) and Horizon 2020 (to H.E.P. and J.-F.M., the Sim4Nexus project)

Spontaneous honeybee behaviour is altered by persistent organic pollutants

The effect of environmental pollutants on honeybee behaviour has focused mainly on currently used pesticides. However, honeybees are also exposed to persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The aim of this laboratory based study was to determine if exposure to sublethal field-relevant concentrations of POPs altered the spontaneous behaviour of foraging-age worker honeybees. Honeybees (Apis mellifera) were orally exposed to either a sublethal concentration of the polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) mixture Aroclor 1254 (100 ng/ml), the organochlorine insecticide lindane (2.91 ng/ml) or vehicle (0.01% DMSO, 0.00015% ethanol in 1M sucrose) for 1–4 days. The frequency of single event behaviours and the time engaged in one of four behavioural states (walking, flying, upside down and stationary) were monitored for 15 min after 1, 2, 3 and 4 days exposure. Exposure to Aroclor 1254 but not lindane increased the frequency and time engaged in honeybee motor activity behaviours in comparison to vehicle. The Aroclor 1254—induced hyperactivity was evident after 1 day of exposure and persisted with repeated daily exposure. In contrast, 1 day of exposure to lindane elicited abdominal spasms and increased the frequency of grooming behaviours in comparison to vehicle exposure. After 4 days of exposure, abdominal spasms and increased grooming behaviours were also evident in honeybees exposed to Aroclor 1254. These data demonstrate that POPs can induce distinct behavioural patterns, indicating different toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic properties. The changes in spontaneous behaviour, particularly the PCB-induced chronic hyperactivity and the associated energy demands, may have implications for colony health

The NMR restraints grid at BMRB for 5,266 protein and nucleic acid PDB entries

Several pilot experiments have indicated that improvements in older NMR structures can be expected by applying modern software and new protocols (Nabuurs et al. in Proteins 55:483–186, 2004; Nederveen et al. in Proteins 59:662–672, 2005; Saccenti and Rosato in J Biomol NMR 40:251–261, 2008). A recent large scale X-ray study also has shown that modern software can significantly improve the quality of X-ray structures that were deposited more than a few years ago (Joosten et al. in J. Appl Crystallogr 42:376–384, 2009; Sanderson in Nature 459:1038–1039, 2009). Recalculation of three-dimensional coordinates requires that the original experimental data are available and complete, and are semantically and syntactically correct, or are at least correct enough to be reconstructed. For multiple reasons, including a lack of standards, the heterogeneity of the experimental data and the many NMR experiment types, it has not been practical to parse a large proportion of the originally deposited NMR experimental data files related to protein NMR structures. This has made impractical the automatic recalculation, and thus improvement, of the three dimensional coordinates of these structures. We here describe a large-scale international collaborative effort to make all deposited experimental NMR data semantically and syntactically homogeneous, and thus useful for further research. A total of 4,014 out of 5,266 entries were ‘cleaned’ in this process. For 1,387 entries, human intervention was needed. Continuous efforts in automating the parsing of both old, and newly deposited files is steadily decreasing this fraction. The cleaned data files are available from the NMR restraints grid at http://restraintsgrid.bmrb.wisc.edu

Drivers of Bornean orangutan distribution across a multiple-use tropical landscape

Logging and conversion of tropical forests in Southeast Asia have resulted in the expansion of landscapes containing a mosaic of habitats that may vary in their ability to sustain local biodiversity. However, the complexity of these landscapes makes it difficult to assess abundance and distribution of some species using ground-based surveys alone. Here we deployed a combination of ground-transects and aerial surveys to determine drivers of the Critically Endangered Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) distribution across a large multiple-use landscape in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Ground-transects and aerial surveys using drones were conducted for orangutan nests and strangler fig trees (an important food resource) in 48 survey areas across 76 km2, within a study landscape of 261 km2 Orangutan nest count data were fitted to models accounting for variation in land use, above-ground carbon density (ACD; a surrogate for forest quality), strangler fig density, and elevation (between 117 and 675 m). Orangutan nest counts were significantly higher in all land uses possessing natural forest cover, regardless of degradation status, than in monoculture plantations. Within these natural forests, nest counts increased with higher ACD and strangler fig density, but not with elevation. In logged forest (ACD 14 – 150 Mg ha-1), strangler fig density had a significant, positive relationship with orangutan nest counts, but this relationship disappeared in forest with higher carbon content (ACD 150- 209 Mg ha-1). Based on an area-to-area comparison, orangutan nest counts from ground transects were higher than from counts derived from aerial surveys, but this did not constitute a statistically significant difference. Although the difference in nest counts was not significantly different, this analysis indicates that both methods under-sample the total number of nests present within a given area. Aerial surveys are therefore a useful method for assessing orangutan habitat use over large areas, however the under-estimation of nest counts by both methods suggests that a small number of ground surveys should be retained in future surveys using this technique, particularly in areas with dense understory vegetation. This study shows that even highly degraded forests may be suitable orangutan habitat as long as strangler fig trees remain intact after areas of forest are logged. Enrichment planting of strangler figs may therefore be a valuable tool for orangutan conservation in these landscapes

A global optimisation approach to range-restricted survey calibration

Survey calibration methods modify minimally unit-level sample weights to fit domain-level benchmark constraints (BC). This allows exploitation of auxiliary information, e.g. census totals, to improve the representativeness of sample data (addressing coverage limitations, non-response) and the quality of estimates of population parameters. Calibration methods may fail with samples presenting small/zero counts for some benchmark groups or when range restrictions (RR), such as positivity, are imposed to avoid unrealistic or extreme weights. User-defined modifications of BC/RR performed after encountering non-convergence allow little control on the solution, and penalization approaches modelling infeasibility may not guarantee convergence. Paradoxically, this has led to underuse in calibration of highly disaggregated information, when available. We present an always-convergent flexible two-step Global Optimisation (GO) survey calibration approach. The feasibility of the calibration problem is assessed, and automatically controlled minimum errors in BC or changes in RR are allowed to guarantee convergence in advance, while preserving the good properties of calibration estimators. Modelling alternatives under different scenarios, using various error/change and distance measures are formulated and discussed. The GO approach is validated by calibrating the weights of the 2012 Health Survey for England to a fine age-gender-region cross-tabulation (378 counts) from the 2011 Census in England and Wales