Negotiation Stands Alone

Yes, the authors concede, “everybody” negotiates: but that’s like saying “everybody drives,” and then watching aghast when “everybody” climbs into a racing car, or an eighteen-wheeled tractor trailer. The authors draw from Tsur’s experience teaching Israeli hostage negotiators and in other high-pressure environments to argue for an entirely distinct concept of a professional negotiator, one that starts with a rather experienced “student” and builds a sharply different training regimen from there

Does Quality Make a Difference?: Employment Effects of High- and Low-Quality Start-Ups

This paper investigates the impact of new firms' quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation with sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment contribution of new firms. In particular, start-ups in manufacturing industries generate larger direct and overall growth effects than those in services. Moreover, new businesses in innovative manufacturing and in knowledge-intensive service industries make a larger direct contribution to employment than start-ups affiliated with other industries. We also find a relatively strong overall effect of new business formation in knowledge-intensive service industries. However, the impact of start-ups in innovative manufacturing industries on overall regional employment growth is not statistically significant, which may be mainly due to their rather small share in all start-ups and because they impact more on firms and employment in other regions than do start-ups in non-innovative manufacturing. Finally, we discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy that can be derived from our findings.Entrepreneurship, new business formation, innovative industries, regional development, entrepreneurship policy

Does Quality Make a Difference? Employment Effects of High- and Low-Quality Start-Ups

This paper investigates the impact of new firms' quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation with sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment contribution of new firms. In particular, start-ups in manufacturing industries generate larger direct and overall growth effects than those in services. Moreover, new businesses in innovative manufacturing and in knowledge-intensive service industries make a larger direct contribution to employment than start-ups affiliated with other industries. We also find a relatively strong overall effect of new business formation in knowledge-intensive service industries. However, the impact of start-ups in innovative manufacturing industries on overall regional employment growth is not statistically significant, which may be mainly due to their rather small share in all start-ups and because they impact more on firms and employment in other regions than do start-ups in non-innovative manufacturing. Finally, we discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy that can be derived from our findings.Entrepreneurship, new business formation, innovative industries, regional development, entrepreneurship policy

Inferring Regulatory Networks by Combining Perturbation Screens and Steady State Gene Expression Profiles

Reconstructing transcriptional regulatory networks is an important task in functional genomics. Data obtained from experiments that perturb genes by knockouts or RNA interference contain useful information for addressing this reconstruction problem. However, such data can be limited in size and/or are expensive to acquire. On the other hand, observational data of the organism in steady state (e.g. wild-type) are more readily available, but their informational content is inadequate for the task at hand. We develop a computational approach to appropriately utilize both data sources for estimating a regulatory network. The proposed approach is based on a three-step algorithm to estimate the underlying directed but cyclic network, that uses as input both perturbation screens and steady state gene expression data. In the first step, the algorithm determines causal orderings of the genes that are consistent with the perturbation data, by combining an exhaustive search method with a fast heuristic that in turn couples a Monte Carlo technique with a fast search algorithm. In the second step, for each obtained causal ordering, a regulatory network is estimated using a penalized likelihood based method, while in the third step a consensus network is constructed from the highest scored ones. Extensive computational experiments show that the algorithm performs well in reconstructing the underlying network and clearly outperforms competing approaches that rely only on a single data source. Further, it is established that the algorithm produces a consistent estimate of the regulatory network.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 6 table

The size and shape of the oblong dwarf planet Haumea

We use thermal radiometry and visible photometry to constrain the size, shape, and albedo of the large Kuiper belt object Haumea. The correlation between the visible and thermal photometry demonstrates that Haumea's high amplitude and quickly varying optical light curve is indeed due to Haumea's extreme shape, rather than large scale albedo variations. However, the well-sampled high precision visible data we present does require longitudinal surface heterogeneity to account for the shape of lightcurve. The thermal emission from Haumea is consistent with the expected Jacobi ellipsoid shape of a rapidly rotating body in hydrostatic equilibrium. The best Jacobi ellipsoid fit to the visible photometry implies a triaxial ellipsoid with axes of length 1920 x 1540 x 990 km and density 2.6 g cm^-3$, as found by Lellouch et al(2010). While the thermal and visible data cannot uniquely constrain the full non-spherical shape of Haumea, the match between the predicted and measured thermal flux for a dense Jacobi ellipsoid suggests that Haumea is indeed one of the densest objects in the Kuiper belt.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables -- Accepted for publication in Earth, Moon and Planet

High-Pressure Phase Transition of the Oxonitridosilicate Chloride Ce4[Si4O3+xN7-x]Cl1-xOx with x = 0.12 and 0.18

The high-pressure behaviour of the oxonitridosilicate chlorides Ce4[Si4O3þxN7-x]Cl1-xOx, x = 0.12 and 0.18, is investigated by in situ powder synchrotron X-ray diffraction. Pressures up to 28 GPa are generated using the diamond-anvil cell technique. A reversible phase transition of first order occurs at pressures between 8 and 10 GPa. Within this pressure range the high- and the low-pressure phases are observed concomitantly. At the phase transition the unit cell volume is reduced by about 5%, and the cubic symmetry (space group P213) is reduced to orthorhombic (space group P212121) following a translationengleiche group-subgroup relationship of index 3. A fit of a third-order Birch-Murnaghan equation of state to the p-V data results in a bulk modulus B0 = 124(5) GPa with its pressure derivative B0 = 5(1) at V0 = 1134.3(4) Å3 for the low-pressure phase and in B0 = 153(10) GPa with B0 = 3.0(6) at V0 = 1071(3) Å3 for the high-pressure phase. The orthorhombic phase shows an anisotropic axial compression with the a axis (which is the shortest axis) being more compressible (k(a) = 0.0143(4) 1/GPa) than the b and c axes (k(b) = 0.0045(2), k(c) = 0.0058(2) 1/GPa). The experimental results confirm an earlier prediction of the pressureinduced instability of isotypic Ce4[Si4O4N6]O, and also show that the bulk modulus was predicted reasonably well