55 research outputs found
SECONDARY EMISSION PRODUCED BY NEUTRAL MERCURY ATOMS
No full textRights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author
La Vie Dans Les Plis
No full textLa vie dans les plis was premiered at The Firehouse Space (Brooklyn, NY) on June 9, 2014, by violinist Karen Rostron and pianist Mirna Lekić. The piece\u27s title is a reference to an eponimous collection of texts by Belgian author Henri Michaux. There is no direct connection between Michaux\u27s text and the structure of the piece. This choice of title, in addition to its great poetic beauty, is meant as an acknowledgement of my indebtedness to Henri Michaux\u27s writings, and, more generally, to Surrealist - and Surrealist-influenced - poetry, for revealing to me the artistic value of a bold exploration of the self
A method to support Leadership Effectiveness in a Construction Project Organisation in Nigeria
No full textAbstract
Title: A method to support Leadership effectiveness in a construction project organisation in Nigeria
Author: Ahmed M. Ibrahim, Doctor of Business Administration, University of Liverpool
Background: The leaders of a construction project organisation live and work in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. These leaders are the participants of this research and desire to improve their effectiveness. Why? The current recession in the Nigerian economy has adversely affected their organisation by drastically slowing down operations. The critical situation signifies the importance of this study which focuses on a $10m (ten million USD) project that involves conceiving, designing, developing and selling of seventy-one houses. The planned lifespan of the project was thirty-five months but has seen an extension of another eighteen months. The extension came directly from the scarcity of funds. The challenge has called for the concerned group or the leaders of the organisation to rethink from an individualistic to a more collaborative approach (Raelin, 2015): an internal response to an external business challenge.
Research question and objectives of the study: The main research question is: How can a method be developed to improve leadership effectiveness in the construction project organisation? The objectives of the study are 1) Developing mutual collaborative behaviour, 2) Value creation from analogical reasoning, 3) Effective decision making from critical reflection. These objectives came from the three organisational issues that make up the organisational problem.
Methodology and methods of inquiry: The action research methodology was used to work on the organisational problem. A social constructionist perspective and the positive note of appreciative inquiry were used to define the challenge collectively, take action, and evaluate the action. The aim was to develop an ethical process to dealing with messy problems not by solving situations but by making them significantly better.
Outcomes: The result was the development of actionable knowledge for the participants from the three areas of collaboration, value creation and effective decision making. While these areas were developed from the three organisational issues, a collective action inquiry phase together with an individual template analysis by the researcher revealed three other thought-provoking areas. These findings were 1) Integrative, 2) Questioning, and 3) Development and Learning approach to leadership effectiveness. There was also methodological significance as the action inquiry process highlighted leadership effectiveness as appreciative, developmental and as a continuously evolving process. Finally, there was the continuous application of critical reflexive practice as personal development for the researcher. Alternatively, there was a challenge of managing organisational politics which was confirmed as the most complex process in researching one's organisation.
Limitations: Although there were several limitations in this study the ones that stand out are: firstly, the action inquiry phase was majorly within the leadership team. Hence there was a limitation in the exploration with external stakeholders. Secondly, the participants were used to facts and figures to confirm the impact of inquiries like this one. As a result, a mixed-method study could have provided additional evidence on the findings of the study.
Keywords: Leadership effectiveness, project management, action research, case study research, template analysi
Beyond Market Share Liability: Theory of Proportional Share Liability for Nonfungible Products
No full textTwenty-five years have passed since courts first adopted market share liability, a theory under which a plaintiff unable to identify the manufacturer of the product that caused his injury can recover on a proportional basis from each manufacturer that might have made the product. Courts have severely restricted the reach of this potentially powerful theory by insisting that it can apply only to products that are perfectly fungible. Most products vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, posing different levels of risk, and therefore do not satisfy the fungibility requirement. As a result, courts have applied market share liability to a very small number of products.
This Article argues that courts should eliminate the fungibility requirement by recognizing that market share liability is just one variant of a broader concept that the author calls proportional share liability. Rather than deny recovery in cases involving products that pose varying degrees of danger, courts should consider whether proportional share liability can be imposed by using information other than market share data to make a reasonable and fair allocation of liability among the defendants. This Article examines the potential application of proportional share liability in a wide variety of contexts, including vaccines or lead paint causing brain damage, violence fueled by negligent distribution and sales of firearms, disease resulting from exposure to asbestos or tobacco, and damage to spacecraft from collisions with orbital debris
Protecting Gun Rights and Improving Gun Control after District of Columbia v. Heller
No full textThe Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, rejecting the narrow interpretation of the Second Amendment that most courts previously embraced, might seem to be a significant setback for gun control supporters and a major victory for gun rights advocates. Challenging that conventional wisdom, the author contends that Heller ultimately will help rather than hinder the push toward strong, sensible gun control laws. Justice Scalia’s opinion for the majority in Heller ultimately backs away from the most drastic implications of its reasoning and instead steers toward a more moderate approach under which virtually all existing gun laws should be upheld. Developments since Heller, including the continuing controversy over gun laws in the District of Columbia and the lower courts’ reactions to a wave of post-Heller challenges to the constitutionality of various federal and state gun laws, suggest that the ultimate effects of the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller will be far less dramatic than many initially expected. In the long run, the Heller decision’s most important effect may be to reduce the intensity and bitterness of the nation’s political and cultural debate over guns. By confirming that reasonable gun regulations will not lead to extreme measures like prohibition of all guns, Heller may turn out to be an important victory for both gun control and gun rights
Shooting Stories: The Creation of Narrative and Melodrama in Real and Fictional Litigation Against the Gun Industry
No full textIn recent years, gun manufacturers and dealers have faced a wave of tort litigation in courts across the country. Shooting victims and their families have sued, claiming that they suffered injuries attributable to gun companies designing and distributing firearms in unreasonably dangerous ways. Dozens of major cities and counties have sued as well, seeking to recover costs for law enforcement, medical, and other public services allegedly incurred as a result of gun industry practices that foster criminal possession and misuse of guns. Patterned after the lawsuits by state attorneys general that shattered the tobacco industry\u27s aura of legal invulnerability several years earlier, these government suits received widespread attention and generated predictions of a similar breakthrough against the gun companies.
As these cases made their way through the courts, they caught the attention of writers and producers of various forms of popular entertainment. Stories about litigation against gun manufacturers and dealers became the basis for episodes of two of the most popular television courtroom dramas, a Hollywood star-studded legal thriller, a novel by a best-selling author, and an investigative journalist\u27s account of the legal and political controversy surrounding guns.
This Article examines these dramatic portrayals of litigation against gun companies, looks at the messages and information they conveyed to audiences, and considers what they reveal about the real legal battles that inspired them. The creators of these dramatic works used real litigation as source material. They drew facts, events, and arguments from actual cases and wove them into stories. Some strived to portray the gun litigation realistically and others relied more heavily on artistic license and imagination. While varying widely in the extent to which they aimed for realism, they shared several core goals. First and foremost, each sought to tell a compelling story that people would want to watch or read. In addition, for a mix of ideological and dramatic reasons, each strived to present a strong and convincing case against the defendant gun companies. To accomplish those goals, the creators of these works relied on techniques of melodrama. They simplified and personalized the issues, ratcheting up the pathos of plaintiffs and villainy of defendants to create a stark conflict between moral extremes.
That process of developing narratives and using dramatic techniques to enhance their impact is similar in many ways to what lawyers inevitably do in litigation. They select and arrange facts to tell stories that judges and juries will find more coherent, credible, and convincing than the competing stories created by the adversaries. Narrative and melodrama play vital roles in real litigation just as in the depictions of litigation that appear on screen and in print.
A review of popular entertainment\u27s portrayal of lawsuits against gun manufacturers thus provides an illuminating way of approaching the real litigation and thinking about what types of claims and strategies did, or did not, work. In particular, it suggests explanations for one of the central puzzles of the gun litigation: the relatively weak results achieved by the most potentially potent litigation. Lawsuits brought by cities and counties initially appeared to pose the greatest threat to the gun industry. They were aggregative in nature, asserting claims based on a broad swath of incidents and an immense accumulation of injuries, rather than just a single event as in a conventional lawsuit brought by one, or a few, individuals. At least to date, these government lawsuits have not achieved the breakthrough results for which their proponents hoped, confounding expectations that the aggregative approach would prove more powerful than conventional, individualized claims. Examining television, film, and literary portrayals of gun litigation provides insight into what occurred in the real litigation, shedding light on significant but overlooked shortcomings of the aggregative litigation approach. The cities\u27 and counties\u27 lawsuits addressed the issue of gun violence in an unusually comprehensive, but abstract, way. While that initially seemed like an advantage, it ultimately undermined the cases.
In analyzing and comparing the construction of narratives in real cases and their dramatic counterparts, this Article crosses through the intersection of several subjects that have been the focus of intense academic interest and extensive writing in recent years. Scholars have lavished attention on the significance of narrative in law. In addition, scholars have begun to pay substantial attention to the relationship between law and popular culture, looking carefully at law\u27s reflection in movies, television, and books. Popular culture not only has a profound influence on how millions of Americans view the legal system and legal issues, but constitutes a valuable cultural record of ideas and attitudes about lawyers and law.
Part I of this Article provides a brief overview of the real lawsuits against the gun industry and, in doing so, notes a key distinction between traditional individual cases which focus on one incident, and broader, aggregative cases brought by local governments and other entities. Part II describes how gun litigation has been depicted on the television programs Law & Order and The Practice, in the film Runaway Jury, in Richard North Patterson\u27s novel Balance of Power, and in a non-fiction account entitled Outgunned: Up Against the NRA -- The First Complete Insider Account of the Battle over Gun Control. Part III compares the creation of narratives and the use of melodrama in the dramatic portrayals of gun litigation with the same phenomena in the real litigation. The analysis suggests that the absence of crucial melodramatic narrative features has been a fundamental deficiency in the government lawsuits and similarly expansive forms of litigation against the gun industry.
In the interests of full disclosure, I emphasize that I am by no means an impartial observer of lawsuits concerning firearms, whether the litigation is real or fictional. As a staff attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, I helped represent plaintiffs or amici curiae in many of the cases discussed here. In addition, I provided information and ideas to two writers, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, at an early stage of their work on adapting John Grisham\u27s book Runaway Jury into a screenplay. Whatever one thinks about their ultimate merits, lawsuits against gun makers provide a revealing opportunity to look at the relationships between one of the most controversial types of litigation in recent years and its fictional reflections in the realm of popular culture
SIMMER: Software and Systems Integration Modelling Metrics and Risks (Getting to Level 4)
No full textThis article documents the mid-term progress and provisional conclusions of SIMMER; an ESSI funded Process Improvement Experiment. The overall objective of the experiment is to produce a more effective means of planning and controlling complex software and systems integration projects. In order to remain competitive, ICL (as well as many other companies) needs to continually improve its predictability of costs and schedules for integration projects, to reduce time to market and to reduce costs without detriment to the quality of the products. The developments of our complex software and systems rely more and more on using commodity components and collaborations as a way to meet these business objectives. The ability to accurately predict effort and time scales and the ability to keep within budget is becoming increasingly difficult in such projects. The specific purposes of the experiment are to demonstrate the applicability of the "Cellular Manufacturing Process Model" (CMPM) technology to a business critical, live software and systems development Chapter <Nr> <Title> 2 / 23/11/98/simgot.doc Version <Nr> / <Author-Acronyme>
Prolonged CD8+ T-cell expansions after adoptive transfer of syngeneic lymphocytes between HIV-discordant identical twins.
No full textAuthor Correction: Hypoxia shapes the immune landscape in lung injury and promotes the persistence of inflammation (Nature Immunology, (2022), 23, 6, (927-939), 10.1038/s41590-022-01216-z)
No full text\ua9 The Author(s) 2022. In the version of this article originally published, in the Methods section “Mouse LPS ALI model,” the second sentence needed clarification of wording and dosage (mg kg–1, not mg g–1) and has been amended to read “Mice were treated daily (days 1–4 post-LPS), by subcutaneous injection, with PBS or 0.75 mg kg–1 of porcine CSF-1 fused to the Fc region of porcine IgG1a (generated by David Hume), prior to cull on day 5” in the HTML and PDF versions of the article
Rapid screening for resistance to Sitobion avenae (F.) and Rhopalosiphum padi (L.) in winter wheat seedlings and selection of efficient assessment methods
No full textBACKGROUND: Sitobion avenae (F.) and Rhopalosiphum padi (L.) are harmful pests of wheat [Triticum aestivum (L.)]. No genetic resistance against the aphids has been identified in commercial wheat varieties and resistance phenotyping can be time‐consuming and laborious. Here, we tested a high‐throughput phenotyping method to screen 29 commercial winter wheat varieties for alate antixenosis and antibiosis. We validated this method using comprehensive behavioural analyses, including alate attraction to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and a feeding bioassay using an electrical penetration graph (EPG), subsequently highlighting possible sources of resistance. RESULTS: We observed differences in alate behaviour upon assessing alate settlement on wheat seedlings and attraction towards VOCs, revealing the importance of visual and early post‐alighting cues for alate host selection. Aphid settlement was four times higher on the most preferred variety than on the least preferred variety. Using an EPG bioassay, we identified phloem feeding and stylet derailment parameters linked to resistance. We found antibiosis assessment on detached leaves to be an inadequate screen because it produced results inconsistent with intact leaves assessment. Alate and nymph mortality were identified as key traits signifying antibiosis, showing significant positive relationships with alate reproduction and nymph mean relative growth rate. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, antixenosis and antibiosis varietal responses were consistent for both aphid species. Alate settlement on wheat seedlings was a more efficient antixenosis screen than an olfactometer assay using VOCs. In addition to assessing alate and nymph survival for antibiosis, this allows for more rapid phenotyping of large numbers of genotypes to identify novel aphid resistance genes for varietal improvement. © 2024 The Author(s). Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry
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