6,848 research outputs found
Alliance coordination effectiveness and the performance of international strategic alliances: development of the partnership and moderating role of market environment turbulence
Get PDFThe purpose of this dissertation was to investigate post-international strategic alliance (ISA) formation issues, which have been neglected in the ISA literature. The specific research questions were 1) how do ISA partners develop their relationships? 2) how does this relationship development impact effective management of resources contributed by each ISA partner? and 3) how does effective resource management influence ISA performance?
Data were collected by mail and web surveys from those who were/are involved in ISA operations. Structural equation modeling using LISREL was employed to test the conceptual model and multiple regression analysis was adopted to test the moderating effects in the model. The model was modified by introducing second order factors to correctly interpret the relationships between factors and achieve a more parsimonious model.
Results indicate that alliance partnership interactions between ISA partners (i.e., reciprocity, transparency, formal and informal communication, two-way and participative communication, and cultural sensitivity) positively influenced the development of desire for joint action between them which is based on trust and commitment. Desire for joint action positively influenced alliance coordination effectiveness (ACE: integration and utilization of resources) which underlies effective resource management between ISA partners. ACE positively affected ISA performance. Market environment turbulence (i.e., host government interference and technology turbulence), however, did not have moderating effects between ACE and ISA performance.
The first question was answered by introducing alliance partnership interaction factors which influence the building of the positive relationship between ISA partners. The introduction of ACE explained how ISA partners manage the resources provided by each partner. The significant impact of ACE on ISA performance and the nonsignificant impact of the moderating variables indicate that ACE has strong impact on ISA performance that can absorb the effects of host government interference and technology turbulence in the operation of ISAs
ISA84/IEC61511 SIS Functional Safety Compliance: It���s a Journey Worth Taking
Get PDFPresentationAchieving full functional safety compliance at a plant will not just happen; it takes a focused effort from dedicated personnel and a supporting management staff. It���s a lot of work, but the potential safety and reliability benefits are well worth the investment. This paper will walk through the steps employed at several sites in Texas and hopes to provide stimulus for others to follow suite. The first ISA 84 (ISA 84.01-1996) functional safety standard initiated the safety lifecycle; the second, internationally adapted version, ISA 84 (ISA 84.00.01-2004) refined the process through the Functional Safety Management (FSM) plan and various other vital additions. Each helped provide a sturdy framework for an expected sustainable process for the remainder of the subject facility���s life and are considered good practices by OSHA for PSM. It is fully believed that if done properly, the end result of applying the ISA84 standard to complete compliance will be a safer and more cost effectively controlled process environment
Amyloid nomenclature 2020 : update and recommendations by the International Society of Amyloidosis (ISA) nomenclature committee
No full textThe ISA Nomenclature Committee met electronically before and directly after the XVII ISA International Symposium on Amyloidosis, which, unfortunately, had to be virtual in September 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic instead of a planned meeting in Tarragona in March. In addition to confirmation of basic nomenclature, several additional concepts were discussed, which are used in scientific amyloid literature. Among such concepts are cytotoxic oligomers, protofibrils, primary and secondary nucleation, seeding and cross-seeding, amyloid signature proteins, and amyloid plaques. Recommendations for their use are given. Definitions of amyloid and amyloidosis are confirmed. Possible novel human amyloid fibril proteins, appearing as 'classical' in vivo amyloid, were discussed. It was decided to include fibulin-like extracellular matrix protein 1 (amyloid protein: AEFEMP1), which appears as localised amyloid in portal veins. There are several possible amyloid proteins under investigation, and these are included in a new Table
Mejora en los procesos administrativos para incrementar las ventas en la empresa Inversiones ISA M&D S.A.C., 2024
No full textLa investigación tuvo como objetivo general determinar en qué medida los procesos administrativos incrementa las ventas en la empresa Inversiones ISA M&D S.A.C., 2024. Fue de tipo aplicada, enfoque cuantitativo, nivel explicativo, diseño pre - experimental ya que se realizó un pre-test y un post-test. Los resultados indicaron que las falencias en los procesos administrativos fueron: Demora en la entrega de vehículo (tiempos muertos). Re proceso (trabajo mal realizado). Mano de obra no especializada. Demora en la atención. Desconocimiento del negocio. Los ingresos pre implementación por las ventas de repuestos son de S/ 755,033.90 y por servicio de mantenimiento fue de S/ 922,819.21 teniendo un total de ingresos de S/ 1,677,853.11. Los ingresos por las ventas post implementación fue de: Por venta de repuestos fue S/ 763,738.46, por mantenimiento fue S/ 949,631.46, en total ingreso por ventas y mantenimiento S/ 1,713,369.93. Por lo tanto, se concluye que las mejoras en los procesos administrativos incrementan las ventas en la empresa Inversiones ISA M&D S.A. Esto se debe a que las ventas pasaron de S/ 1,393,373.16 (pre) a S/ 1,713,369.93 (post) el cual incremento en un 22.97%, además se corrobora con la aplicación del método estadístico prueba de muestras relacionadas donde el valor de Sig. fue de 0.000.ABSTRACT
The general objective of the research was to determine to what extent administrative processes increase sales in the company Inversiones ISA M&D S.A.C., 2024. It was applied, quantitative approach, explanatory level, pre-experimental design since a pre-test and a post-test were carried out. The results indicated that the deficiencies in the administrative processes were: Delay in vehicle delivery (dead times). Reprocessing (poorly done work). Non-specialized labor. Delay in attention. Lack of knowledge of the business. The pre-implementation income from the sale of spare parts is S/ 755,033.90 and from maintenance service it was S/ 922,819.21, having a total income of S/ 1,677,853.11. The income from post-implementation sales was: S/ 763,738.46 for spare parts sales, S/ 949,631.46 for maintenance, total income from sales and maintenance S/ 1,713,369.93. Therefore, it is concluded that improvements in administrative processes increase sales at the company Inversiones ISA M&D S.A. This is because sales went from S/ 1,393,373.16 (pre) to S/ 1,713,369.93 (post) which increased by 22.97%, and is also corroborated by the application of the statistical method related samples test where the value of Sig. was 0.000
Infectious salmon anaemia virus (ISAV) isolated from the ISA disease outbreaks in Chile diverged from ISAV isolates from Norway around 1996 and was disseminated around 2005, based on surface glycoprotein gene sequences
Get PDFBACKGROUND: Infectious salmon anaemia (ISA) virus (ISAV) is a pathogen of marine-farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar); a disease first diagnosed in Norway in 1984. For over 25 years ISAV has caused major disease outbreaks in the Northern hemisphere, and remains an emerging fish pathogen because of the asymptomatic infections in marine wild fish and the potential for emergence of new epidemic strains. ISAV belongs to the family Orthomyxoviridae, together with influenza viruses but is sufficiently different to be assigned to its own genus, Isavirus. The Isavirus genome consists of eight single-stranded RNA species, and the virions have two surface glycoproteins; fusion (F) protein encoded on segment 5 and haemagglutinin-esterase (HE) protein encoded on segment 6. However, comparison between different ISAV isolates is complicated because there is presently no universally accepted nomenclature system for designation of genetic relatedness between ISAV isolates. The first outbreak of ISA in marine-farmed Atlantic salmon in the Southern hemisphere occurred in Chile starting in June 2007. In order to describe the molecular characteristics of the virus so as to understand its origins, how ISAV isolates are maintained and spread, and their virulence characteristics, we conducted a study where the viral sequences were directly amplified, cloned and sequenced from tissue samples collected from several ISA-affected fish on the different fish farms with confirmed or suspected ISA outbreaks in Chile. This paper describes the genetic characterization of a large number of ISAV strains associated with extensive outbreaks in Chile starting in June 2007, and their phylogenetic relationships with selected European and North American isolates that are representative of the genetic diversity of ISAV. RESULTS: RT-PCR for ISAV F and HE glycoprotein genes was performed directly on tissue samples collected from ISA-affected fish on different farms among 14 fish companies in Chile during the ISA outbreaks that started in June 2007. The genes of the F and HE glycoproteins were cloned and sequenced for 51 and 78 new isolates, respectively. An extensive comparative analysis of ISAV F and HE sequence data, including reference isolates sampled from Norway, Faroe Islands, Scotland, USA, and Canada was performed. Based on phylogenetic analysis of concatenated ISAV F and HE genes of 103 individual isolates, the isolates from the ISA outbreaks in Chile grouped in their own cluster of 7 distinct strains within Genotype I (European genotype) of ISAV, with the closest relatedness to Norwegian ISAVs isolated in 1997. The phylogenetic software program, BACKTRACK, estimated the Chile isolates diverged from Norway isolates about 1996 and, therefore, had been present in Chile for some time before the recent outbreaks. Analysis of the deduced F protein sequence showed 43 of 51 Chile isolates with an 11-amino acid insert between 265N and 266Q, with 100% sequence identity with Genotype I ISAV RNA segment 2. Twenty four different HE-HPRs, including HPR0, were detected, with HPR7b making up 79.7%. This is considered a manifestation of ISAV quasispecies HE protein sequence diversity. CONCLUSION: Taken together, these findings suggest that the ISA outbreaks were caused by virus that was already present in Chile that mutated to new strains. This is the first comprehensive report tracing ISAV from Europe to South America.Source type: Electronic(1
IXIAM: ISA EXtension for Integrated Accelerator Management
Get PDFDuring the last few years, hardware accelerators have been gaining popularity thanks to their ability to achieve higher performance and efficiency than classic general-purpose solutions. They are fundamentally shaping the current generations of Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), which are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. However, despite their widespread use, a standard, general solution to manage them while providing speed and consistency has not yet been found. Common methodologies rely on OS mediation and a mix of user-space and kernel-space drivers, which can be inefficient, especially for fine-grained tasks. This paper addresses these sources of inefficiencies by proposing an ISA eXtension for Integrated Accelerator Management (IXIAM), a cost-effective HW-SW framework to control a wide variety of accelerators in a standard way, and directly from the cores. The proposed instructions include reservation, work offloading, data transfer, and synchronization. They can be wrapped in a high-level software API or even integrated into a compiler. IXIAM features also a user-space interrupt mechanism to signal events directly to the user process. We implement it as a RISC-V extension in the gem5 simulator and demonstrate detailed support for complex accelerators, as well as the ability to specify sequences of memory transfers and computations directly from the ISA and with significantly lower overhead than driver-based schemes. IXIAM provides a performance advantage that is more evident for small and medium workloads, reaching around 90x in the best case. This way, we enlarge the set of workloads that would benefit from hardware acceleration
The Co-Design of a Counter-Narrative Social Campaign: Second Generation Youths Against Radicalization
No full textThis paper deals with the OLTRE project (ISF - DG Migration and Home Affairs, EU) funded for preventing the radicalization of the second-generation of migrants in Italy. This essay aims to study the production of an online communication campaign
co-designed by second-generation youths. The four Universities engaged in the project, in order to collect the issues for the campaign made an in-depth sociological research and an interdisciplinary social network analysis. We will present the results of the non-standard field research. Starting from the different dimensions of the risk of radicalization proposed by the kaleidoscopic overview of risk factors (Sieckelinck and Gielen 2018: 5; Ranstorp 2016), we created a topic
guide for the in-depth qualitative interviews, then we collected 42 interviews of second generation youths (18-30 years) in 7 Italian towns. Furthermore, we studied the theater performances taped during the laboratories made by second generation
youths collecting narratives, representations, stories and emotions about their representation of the radicalization risk and protection factors. This corpus was used for the social communication campaign to prevent radicalization, engaging
the research participants as key players, co-designing the counter-narrative contents (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2015). The paper study also the viral dissemination of the social communication campaign on the social network and
the role of the moderators.
References
Ranstorp, M. The root causes of violent extremism. RAN issue paper, 4 January
2016.
Sieckelinck S. and Gielen Amy-Jane, Protective and promotive factors building
resilience against violent, RAN issue paper, April 2018.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Counter Narratives and Alternative Narratives.
The role of counter- and alternative narratives in prevention
of radicalisation, RAN, 2015
General Method for Uncertainty Evaluation of Safety Integrity Level (SIL) Calculations
Get PDFPresentationThe IEC 61511 standard requires a verification calculation that a proposed design for a safety instrumented function (SIF) achieves the desired safety integrity level (SIL). The evaluation of the safety integrity level of a new or existing safety instrumented system requires detailed calculations based on the failure rates of the device and the planned maintenance/testing cycle for the system. The failure rates of the devices are often taken from standard failure rate tabulations of equipment. The maintenance and testing plans are developed based on plant experience. All of the data used in the SIL calculations are uncertain. This paper develops a general method for uncertainty analysis of the SIL calculations. The general method is based on the application of probability theory - variance contribution analysis (VCA) ��� to the equations presented in ISA TR 84.00.02-2115. An example is worked to demonstrate the methodology
Targeting CD38 and PD-1 with isatuximab plus cemiplimab in patients with advanced solid malignancies: results from a phase I/II open-label, multicenter study
Get PDF\ua9 Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. BACKGROUND: Preclinical data suggest that concurrent treatment of anti-CD38 and antiprogrammed death 1 (PD-1)/programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) antibodies substantially reduce primary tumor growth by reversing T-cell exhaustion and thus enhancing anti-PD-1/PD-L1 efficacy. METHODS: This phase I/II study enrolled patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) or advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The primary objectives of phase I were to investigate the safety and tolerability of isatuximab (anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody)+cemiplimab (anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody, Isa+Cemi) in patients with mCRPC (na\uefve to anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy) or NSCLC (progressed on anti-PD-1/PD-L1-containing therapy). Phase II used Simon\u27s two-stage design with response rate as the primary endpoint. An interim analysis was planned after the first 24 (mCRPC) and 20 (NSCLC) patients receiving Isa+Cemi were enrolled in phase II. Safety, immunogenicity, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and antitumor activity were assessed, including CD38, PD-L1, and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in the tumor microenvironment (TME), and peripheral immune cell phenotyping. RESULTS: Isa+Cemi demonstrated a manageable safety profile with no new safety signals. All patients experienced ≥1 treatment-emergent adverse event. Grade≥3 events occurred in 13 (54.2%) patients with mCRPC and 12 (60.0%) patients with NSCLC. Based on PCWG3 criteria, assessment of best overall response with Isa+Cemi in mCRPC revealed no complete responses (CRs), one (4.2%) unconfirmed partial response (PR), and five (20.8%) patients with stable disease (SD). Per RECIST V.1.1, patients with NSCLC receiving Isa+Cemi achieved no CR or PR, and 13 (65%) achieved SD. In post-therapy biopsies obtained from patients with mCRPC or NSCLC, Isa+Cemi treatment resulted in a reduction in median CD38+ tumor-infiltrating immune cells from 40% to 3%, with no consistent modulation of PD-L1 on tumor cells or T regulatory cells in the TME. The combination triggered a significant increase in peripheral activated and cytolytic T cells but, interestingly, decreased natural killer cells. CONCLUSIONS: The present study suggests that CD38 and PD-1 modulation by Isa+Cemi has a manageable safety profile, reduces CD38+ immune cells in the TME, and activates peripheral T cells; however, such CD38 inhibition was not associated with significant antitumor activity. A lack of efficacy was observed in these small cohorts of patients with mCRPC or NSCLC. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBERS: NCT03367819
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