Reframing the university as an emergent organization: implications for strategic management and leadership in higher education

For the most part, the organisational forms that are currently being adopted by higher education institutions are grounded in the traditional corporate models of organisation that take a rational approach to organisational design and change management. Underlying this account is an assumption of organisational autonomy and the capacity of designated leaders to direct change processes to better align their institutions with societal demands or goals. However, a case is now being made for the consideration of alternative organisational theories or models that offer a different perception on the sources and patterns of organisational change in higher education. These theories perceive organisations more as emergent entities in which change is continuous, often unpredictable and arising mainly from local interactions. The paper surveys the implications that acceptance of the alternative paradigm might have for strategising and change leadership in higher education institutions. It suggests that the accommodation of these alterative paradigms of institutional development in higher education may itself be an emergent process and considers how future research and policy formulation relating to strategic management and leadership might facilitate positive outcomes in that process

Size Doesn't Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology

notes: As the primary author, O’Malley drafted the paper, and gathered and analysed data (scientific papers and talks). Conceptual analysis was conducted by both authors.publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticlePhilosophers of biology, along with everyone else, generally perceive life to fall into two broad categories, the microbes and macrobes, and then pay most of their attention to the latter. ‘Macrobe’ is the word we propose for larger life forms, and we use it as part of an argument for microbial equality. We suggest that taking more notice of microbes – the dominant life form on the planet, both now and throughout evolutionary history – will transform some of the philosophy of biology’s standard ideas on ontology, evolution, taxonomy and biodiversity. We set out a number of recent developments in microbiology – including biofilm formation, chemotaxis, quorum sensing and gene transfer – that highlight microbial capacities for cooperation and communication and break down conventional thinking that microbes are solely or primarily single-celled organisms. These insights also bring new perspectives to the levels of selection debate, as well as to discussions of the evolution and nature of multicellularity, and to neo-Darwinian understandings of evolutionary mechanisms. We show how these revisions lead to further complications for microbial classification and the philosophies of systematics and biodiversity. Incorporating microbial insights into the philosophy of biology will challenge many of its assumptions, but also give greater scope and depth to its investigations

A comparison between two maintenance session protocols

International audienceThe paper presents a comparison between two maintenance session protocols. The first one, already known and used, is the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP). The second is a new one, called managed session protocol (MSP). SCTP has some similar functionalities to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and, as additional services, it provides multi-streaming and multi-homing. On the other hand, MSP is a novel maintenance session protocol that operates on top of TCP. Rather than re-implementing some TCP functionalities, MSP enhances the TCP layer with some missing services, such as automatic transport restart and preservation of messages boundaries. Besides, MSP is implemented in user space instead of having to handle all kernel complexities. In order to provide services like multi-session and broadcasting, a sub-protocol is provided, called multiple managed session protocol (MMSP). MMSP operates on top of MSP and offers services such as multi-homing, multi-streaming and multi-session. It is shown that MSP/MMSP is a good alternative to SCTP

Implementation Analysis of MSP

International audienceA basic function of a Session Maintenance Protocol (SMP) is to keep sessions alives amongst two or more nodes as far as possible. However, a SMP should provide other essential services to its mission critical applications such as multi-session, multihoming, failure detection mechanism and graceful automatic restart of transport session. It has been proposed a new SMP so-called Managed Session Protocol (MSP), and a sub-protocol that operates on top of MSP so-called Multiple Managed Session Protocol (MMSP). Together MSP/MMSP provide services such as graceful automatic restart of transport session, preservation of application message boundaries, multi-session and multi-homing. In this paper, it is presented an implementation and performance analysis of MSP/MMSP. They have been implemented using a C++ based open-source router platform called eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP). Two approaches are presented in order to implement MSP/MMSP. Aiming to compare these two approaches and validate the behaviors of MSP/MMSP, some experiments have been carried out using a real-life case study: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Furthermore, a performance analysis is presented that provide some insight, not only about the two MSP implementation approaches, but also the effectiveness of MSP/MMSP

An improved high-performance liquid chromatography system for the analysis of basic dyes in forensic casework

Acrylic fibres are frequently encountered as physical evidence in casework in the Northern Ireland Forensic Science Laboratory. Separation and analysis of the basic dyes, used in the garment industry for the dyeing of acrylic fibres, was carried out by isocratyic HPLC with a narrow bore column. The HPLC eluent used was a mixture of methanol and aqueous ammonium acetate solution (pH 9.76) in a ratio of 9:1. The sensitivity of the system is such that the dyes extracted from 0.2 cm of a black acrylic fibre could be detected using three injections on a single channel detector at wavelengths of 400, 500 and 600 nm (for yellow, red and blue dye components respectively)