Quantifying the pathology of neurodegenerative disorders:Quantitative measurements, sampling strategies and data analysis

The use of quantitative methods has become increasingly important in the study of neurodegenerative disease. Disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are characterized by the formation of discrete, microscopic, pathological lesions which play an important role in pathological diagnosis. This article reviews the advantages and limitations of the different methods of quantifying the abundance of pathological lesions in histological sections, including estimates of density, frequency, coverage, and the use of semiquantitative scores. The major sampling methods by which these quantitative measures can be obtained from histological sections, including plot or quadrat sampling, transect sampling, and point-quarter sampling, are also described. In addition, the data analysis methods commonly used to analyse quantitative data in neuropathology, including analyses of variance (ANOVA) and principal components analysis (PCA), are discussed. These methods are illustrated with reference to particular problems in the pathological diagnosis of AD and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).

Evaluating the evaluator:modelling systematic data analysis strategies for software selection

Developers of interactive software are confronted by an increasing variety of software tools to help engineer the interactive aspects of software applications. Not only do these tools fall into different categories in terms of functionality, but within each category there is a growing number of competing tools with similar, although not identical, features. Choice of user interface development tool (UIDT) is therefore becoming increasingly complex.

Firms’ innovation objectives and knowledge acquisition strategies:a comparative analysis

External partnerships play an important role in firms’ acquisition of the knowledge inputs to innovation. Such partnerships may be interactive – involving exploration and mutual learning by both parties – or non-interactive – involving exploitative activity and learning by only one party. Examples of non-interactive partnerships are copying or imitation. Here, we consider how firms’ innovation objectives influence their choice of interactive and/or non-interactive connections. We conduct a comparative analysis for the economies of Spain and the UK, which have contrasting innovation eco-systems and regulation burdens.

Playing catch-up with China:challenges and strategies for smaller developing countries

This paper considers how smaller developing countries can compete with China by examining the cases of two such countries; Mauritius and Morocco. In order to supplement their more traditional extractive and agro-based industries they have developed important textile and apparel sectors, supplying principally the EU. However, the textile industries in both countries have recently come under intense competitive pressure from China with its much lower production costs and huge capacity. This paper compares and contrasts the conditions under which Mauritius and Morocco have developed their textile industries as well as exploring the challenges they now face from China and the ways in which they have reacted to them. It also examines the wider industrial policy of both countries and the extent to which they have acquired the capability to meet the threats that now face them. Some specific strategies and actions are also described and evaluated with a view to providing advice and guidance for other smaller developing countries that face similar challenges in these and other industries.

Institutional antecedents and performance consequences of influence strategies in export channels to transitional economies

This study examines how the institutional environment of transitional economies impacts institutional arrangements in the form of influence strategies employed by Western exporters in managing relationships with local firms. Reflecting environmental components, a Western firm’s understanding of Eastern Europe’s regulatory volatility, foreignness, and partner’s control locus is posited to impact economic performance by affecting key coercive and non-coercive influence strategies. A model specifying the effects of the institutional environment on economic outcomes is developed and tested on data from US exporters to Eastern Europe. A structural equation analysis indicates institutional components have a differential impact on the influence strategies employed by these Western firms and on export performance. In particular, use of coercive legalistic pleas is increased by regulatory volatility but reduced by perceived foreignness while use of non-coercive recommendations is increased by the partner’s external locus of control but not by perceived foreignness. Importantly, the institutional environment’s impact on economic performance is shown to be direct as well as indirect through the influence strategies Western firms employ in Eastern Europe. The study concludes with a discussion of implications for managers and researchers.

Women, anger, and aggression an interpretative phenomenological analysis

This study reports a qualitative phenomenological investigation of anger and anger-related aggression in the context of the lives of individual women. Semistructured interviews with five women are analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. This inductive approach aims to capture the richness and complexity of the lived experience of emotional life. In particular, it draws attention to the context-dependent and relational dimension of angry feelings and aggressive behavior. Three analytic themes are presented here: the subjective experience of anger, which includes the perceptual confusion and bodily change felt by the women when angry, crying, and the presence of multiple emotions; the forms and contexts of aggression, paying particular attention to the range of aggressive strategies used; and anger as moral judgment, in particular perceptions of injustice and unfairness. The authors conclude by examining the analytic observations in light of phenomenological thinking.

Shareholder or stakeholder management:strategies for performance optimisation

This paper is based upon the findings of a CIMA research project into the way which corporate performance is affected by the performance measurement system adopted. It compares and contrasts the techniques in use in a sample of large companies that use a variety of techniques. We have classified these techniques into 3 types: • Value based management techniques • Stakeholder management techniques • Traditional accounting techniques. The analysis traces the interactions between corporate objectives, decision making criteria, performance measurement systems, and executive incentive schemes in order to develop an understanding of the effects of such techniques upon corporate performance. This paper seeks to provide some answers to the following two questions: • What approach leads to superior performance for a firm? • What is different between these approaches when they are used in practice, as distinct from theory? In doing so we have drawn upon both contingency theory and sociobiology theory to develop a framework for understanding the relationship between the choke of performance measurement system and the resulting performance.

Clustering strategies for object databases

When object databases arrived on the scene some ten years ago, they provided database capabilities for previously neglected, complex applications, such as CAD, but were burdened with one inherent teething problem, poor performance. Physical database design is one tool that can provide performance improvements and it is the general area of concern for this thesis. Clustering is one fruitful design technique which can provide improvements in performance. However, clustering in object databases has not been explored in depth and so has not been truly exploited. Further, clustering, although a physical concern, can be determined from the logical model. The object model is richer than previous models, notably the relational model, and so it is anticipated that the opportunities with respect to clustering are greater. This thesis provides a thorough analysis of object clustering strategies with a view to highlighting any links between the object logical and physical model and improving performance. This is achieved by considering all possible types of object logical model construct and the implementation of those constructs in terms of theoretical clusterings strategies to produce actual clustering arrangements. This analysis results in a greater understanding of object clustering strategies, aiding designers in the development process and providing some valuable rules of thumb to support the design process.

Statnote 9: The one-way analysis of variance (random effects model)

There is an alternative model of the 1-way ANOVA called the 'random effects' model or ‘nested’ design in which the objective is not to test specific effects but to estimate the degree of variation of a particular measurement and to compare different sources of variation that influence the measurement in space and/or time. The most important statistics from a random effects model are the components of variance which estimate the variance associated with each of the sources of variation influencing a measurement. The nested design is particularly useful in preliminary experiments designed to estimate different sources of variation and in the planning of appropriate sampling strategies.

The dynamics of organizational change : an analysis of power, professions and new managerialism in the case of CoastElectric

It is widely accepted that the Thatcher years and their immediate aftermath were associated with substantive social and organizational change. The privatisation programme, 'the rolling back of the State', prosecuted by the successive Conservative Governments from 1979-1997 was a central pillar of Governmental policy. This thesis seeks to engage with privatization through the of CoastElectric, a newly privatised Regional Electricity Company. This thesis contributes to the extant understanding of the dynamics of organizational change in four major ways. Firstly, the study into CoastElectric addresses the senior management decision making within the organization: in particular, it will attempt to make sense of 'why' particular decisions were made. The theoretical backdrop to this concern will draw on the concepts of normalization, cultural capital and corporate fashion. The argument presented in this thesis is that the decision-making broadly corresponded with that which could be considered to be at the vanguard of mangerialist thought. However, a detailed analysis suggested that at different junctures in CoastElectric's history there were differences in the approach to decision making that warranted further analysis. The most notable finding was that the relative levels of new managerialist cultural capital possessed by the decision-making elite had an important bearing upon whether the decision was formulated either endogenously or exogenously, with the assistance of cultural intermediaries such as management consultants. The thesis demonstrates the importance of the broader discourse of new managerialism in terms of shaping what is considered to be a 'commonsensical, rational' strategy. The second concern of this thesis is that of the process of organizational change. The study of CoastElectric attempts to provide a rich account of the dynamics of organizational change. This is realized through, first, examining the pre-existing context of the organization; second, through analyzing the power politics of change interventions. The master concepts utilised in this endeavour are that of: dividing practices, the establishment of violent hierarchies between competing discourses; symbolic violence; critical turning points; recursiveness; creative destruction; legitimation strategies and the reconstitution of subjects in the workplace.

An econometric analysis of international tourism demand in Hong Kong : a cointegration and error correction approach

The purpose of this study is to develop econometric models to better understand the economic factors affecting inbound tourist flows from each of six origin countries that contribute to Hong Kong’s international tourism demand. To this end, we test alternative cointegration and error correction approaches to examine the economic determinants of tourist flows to Hong Kong, and to produce accurate econometric forecasts of inbound tourism demand. Our empirical findings show that permanent income is the most significant determinant of tourism demand in all models. The variables of own price, weighted substitute prices, trade volume, the share price index (as an indicator of changes in wealth in origin countries), and a dummy variable representing the Beijing incident (1989) are also found to be important determinants for some origin countries. The average long-run income and own price elasticity was measured at 2.66 and – 1.02, respectively. It was hypothesised that permanent income is a better explanatory variable of long-haul tourism demand than current income. A novel approach (grid search process) has been used to empirically derive the weights to be attached to the lagged income variable for estimating permanent income. The results indicate that permanent income, estimated with empirically determined relatively small weighting factors, was capable of producing better results than the current income variable in explaining long-haul tourism demand. This finding suggests that the use of current income in previous empirical tourism demand studies may have produced inaccurate results. The share price index, as a measure of wealth, was also found to be significant in two models. Studies of tourism demand rarely include wealth as an explanatory forecasting long-haul tourism demand. However, finding a satisfactory proxy for wealth common to different countries is problematic. This study indicates with the ECM (Error Correction Models) based on the Engle-Granger (1987) approach produce more accurate forecasts than ECM based on Pesaran and Shin (1998) and Johansen (1988, 1991, 1995) approaches for all of the long-haul markets and Japan. Overall, ECM produce better forecasts than the OLS, ARIMA and NAÏVE models, indicating the superiority of the application of a cointegration approach for tourism demand forecasting. The results show that permanent income is the most important explanatory variable for tourism demand from all countries but there are substantial variations between countries with the long-run elasticity ranging between 1.1 for the U.S. and 5.3 for U.K. Price is the next most important variable with the long-run elasticities ranging between -0.8 for Japan and -1.3 for Germany and short-run elasticities ranging between – 0.14 for Germany and -0.7 for Taiwan. The fastest growing market is Mainland China. The findings have implications for policies and strategies on investment, marketing promotion and pricing.

Strategy and control systems:a framework for analysis

This research explores the links between the strategies adopted by companies and the mechanisms used to control the organisation. This is not seen as a one way process with the control system following from the strategy but rather as an interactive process between the control systems, the environment and the business strategy. The main proposition of the research, derived from a review of the relevant literature, is that the dimensions of Business Pro-Activity and Environmental Change provide a plausible explanation of the reasons why companies need to adopt different strategies in order to be successful in different markets. A model is proposed which links these dimensions with the business strategy, organisational structure, strategic planning system and management control systems. The model is used as a framework for analysing four companies in order to further our understanding of these interactions and the mechanisms which act to both promote and resist change. Whilst it is not suggested that the model in its present form is a perfect instrument it has, during the course of this research, proved to be an appropriate framework for analysing the various mechanisms used by four companies to formulate and implement their strategies. The research reveals that these should not be viewed independently but as a balanced system.

A sociological analysis of four police consultative committees in Birmingham

Consultation between the police and the community was a recommendation of Lord Scarman in his report into the Brixton riots in 1981. By 1982 the West Midlands Police Authority had established local consultative committees on each police sub-division. This thesis is a study of four Police Consultative Committees in Birmingham, using qualitative methods of attendance at committee meetings and interviews with committee members. The research was carried out between 1990 and 1992 - ten years after formal consultation was established, and aimed to examine the relationship between the micro social processes of the committees and key sociological theoretical concepts. The analysis of the four committees contextualises them within the social and political parameters of urban policing in the late 1980s. Each committee is taken as a case study to highlight the following aspects of consultation:- relations between the police and black communities; membership, representation and accountability; responding to community conflict; crime prevention agencies and networks of social control. The findings are then generalised to the sociological theoretical concepts of hegemony, legitimation, community conflict and social control. The central proposition of this thesis is that, whilst these committees are not fulfilling the role Lord Scarman envisaged for them (of involving local community representatives in policing strategies and policies), they do have important policing and political roles. It is argued that they offer a platform from which senior police officers can engage local people into supporting policing objectives without actually involving them in determining those objectives. Furthermore, such committees have political symbolism in that they enable the government to be seen to be responding to the issues of accountability and relations between the police and black communities following the urban disorders, without actually devolving any statutory powers to the community.

Simulation of robot manipulator control strategies

The high capital cost of robots prohibit their economic application. One method of making their application more economic is to increase their operating speed. This can be done in a number of ways e.g. redesign of robot geometry, improving actuators and improving control system design. In this thesis the control system design is considered. It is identified in the literature review that two aspects in relation to robot control system design have not been addressed in any great detail by previous researchers. These are: how significant are the coupling terms in the dynamic equations of the robot and what is the effect of the coupling terms on the performance of a number of typical independent axis control schemes?. The work in this thesis addresses these two questions in detail. A program was designed to automatically calculate the path and trajectory and to calculate the significance of the coupling terms in an example application of a robot manipulator tracking a part on a moving conveyor. The inertial and velocity coupling terms have been shown to be of significance when the manipulator was considered to be directly driven. A simulation of the robot manipulator following the planned trajectory has been established in order to assess the performance of the independent axis control strategies. The inertial coupling was shown to reinforce the control torque at the corner points of the trajectory, where there was an abrupt demand in acceleration in each axis but of opposite sign. This reduced the tracking error however, this effect was not controllable. A second effect was due to the velocity coupling terms. At high trajectory speeds it was shown, by means of a root locus analysis, that the velocity coupling terms caused the system to become unstable.