Explaining Variation in Organizational Change: The Reform of Human Resource Management in the European Commission and the OECD

In this article we investigate the reforms of human resource management in the European Commission and the OECD by analyzing comparatively to what extent both organizations have adjusted their respective structures towards the ideal type of the so-called New Public Management (NPM). The empirical findings show that reforms towards NPM are more pronounced in the Commission than in the OECD. These findings are surprising for two reasons: First, it seems rather paradoxical that the OECD as central promoter of NPM at the international level lags behind the global trend when it comes to reforming its own structures. Second, this result is in contradiction with theoretical expectations, as they can be derived from theories of institutional isomorphism. To nevertheless account for the surprising results, it is necessary to modify and complement existing theories especially with regard to the scope conditions of their causal mechanisms.

Sexual dimorphism in resource acquisition and deployment: both size and timing matter.

Background and Aims The males and females of many dioecious plant species differ from one another in important life-history traits, such as their size. If male and female reproductive functions draw on different resources, for example, one should expect males and females to display different allocation strategies as they grow. Importantly, these strategies may differ not only between the two sexes, but also between plants of different age and therefore size. Results are presented from an experiment that asks whether males and females of Mercurialis annua, an annual plant with indeterminate growth, differ over time in their allocation of two potentially limiting resources (carbon and nitrogen) to vegetative (below-and above-ground) and reproductive tissues.Methods Comparisons were made of the temporal patterns of biomass allocation to shoots, roots and reproduction and the nitrogen content in the leaves between the sexes of M. annua by harvesting plants of each sex after growth over different periods of time.Key Results and Conclusions Males and females differed in their temporal patterns of allocation. Males allocated more to reproduction than females at early stages, but this trend was reversed at later stages. Importantly, males allocated proportionally more of their biomass towards roots at later stages, but the roots of females were larger in absolute terms. The study points to the important role played by both the timing of resource deployment and the relative versus absolute sizes of the sinks and sources in sexual dimorphism of an annual plant.

Relay-assisted transmission and radio resource management for wireless networks

The following paper presents an overview of the Ph.D Thesis1 presented in [1], which compiles all the research done during the period of time between 2004-2007. In that dissertation the relay-assisted transmission with half-duplex relays is analyzed from different points of view. This study is motivated by the necessity of finding innovative solutions to cope with the requirements of next generation wireless services, and with current radio technology. The use of relayed communications represents a change of paradigm of conventional communications, and requires the definition and evaluation of protocols to be applied to single or multiple-user relay communication. With the two fold goal of enhancing spectral efficiency and homogenize service in cellular communications, system design is investigated at physical (type of transmissions of the relay, decoding mode, ..) and upper layers (resource allocation, dynamic link control).

The Political Economy of Resource Rent Distribution

I model the link between political regime and level of diversification following a windfall of natural resource revenues. The explanatory variables I make use of are the political support functions embedded within each type of regime and the disparate levels of discretion, openness, transparency, and accountability of government. I show that a democratic government seeks to maximize the long-term consumption path of the representative consumer, in order to maximize its chances of re-election, while an authoritarian government, in the absence of any electoral mechanism of accountability, seeks to buy off and entrench a group of special interests loyal to the government and potent enough to ensure its short-term survival. Essentially the contrast in the approaches towards resource rent distribution comes down to a variation in political weights on aggregate welfare and rentierist special interests endogenized by distinct political support functions.

EuroDia: a beta-cell gene expression resource.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a major disease affecting nearly 280 million people worldwide. Whilst the pathophysiological mechanisms leading to disease are poorly understood, dysfunction of the insulin-producing pancreatic beta-cells is key event for disease development. Monitoring the gene expression profiles of pancreatic beta-cells under several genetic or chemical perturbations has shed light on genes and pathways involved in T2DM. The EuroDia database has been established to build a unique collection of gene expression measurements performed on beta-cells of three organisms, namely human, mouse and rat. The Gene Expression Data Analysis Interface (GEDAI) has been developed to support this database. The quality of each dataset is assessed by a series of quality control procedures to detect putative hybridization outliers. The system integrates a web interface to several standard analysis functions from R/Bioconductor to identify differentially expressed genes and pathways. It also allows the combination of multiple experiments performed on different array platforms of the same technology. The design of this system enables each user to rapidly design a custom analysis pipeline and thus produce their own list of genes and pathways. Raw and normalized data can be downloaded for each experiment. The flexible engine of this database (GEDAI) is currently used to handle gene expression data from several laboratory-run projects dealing with different organisms and platforms. Database URL: http://eurodia.vital-it.ch.

Differential species-specific ectoparasitic mite intensities in two intimately coexisting sibling bat species: resource-mediated host attractiveness or parasite specialization?

1. The mechanisms underlying host choice strategies by parasites remain poorly understood. We address two main questions: (i) do parasites prefer vulnerable or well-fed hosts, and (ii) to what extent is a parasite species specialized towards a given host species? 2. To answer these questions, we investigated, both in the field and in the lab, a host-parasite system comprising one ectoparasitic mite (Spinturnix myoti) and its major hosts, two sibling species of bats (Myotis myotis and M blythii), which coexist intimately in colonial nursery roosts. We exploited the close physical associations between host species in colonial roosts as well as naturally occurring annual variation in food abundance to investigate the relationships between parasite intensities and (i) host species and (ii) individual nutritional status. 3. Although horizontal transmission of parasites was facilitated by the intimate aggregation of bats within their colonial clusters, we found significant interspecific differences in degree of infestation throughout the 6 years of the study, with M. myotis always more heavily parasitized than M. blythii. This pattern was replicated in a laboratory experiment in which any species-specific resistance induced by exploitation of different trophic niches in nature was removed. 4. Within both host species, S. myoti showed a clear preference for individuals with higher nutritional status. In years with high resource abundance, both bat hosts harboured more parasites than in low-resource years, although the relative difference in parasite burden across species was maintained. This pattern of host choice was also replicated in the laboratory. When offered a choice, parasites always colonized better-fed individuals. 5. These results show first that host specialization in our study system occurred. Second, immediate parasite choice clearly operated towards the selection of hosts in good nutritional state.

Elevated resource availability sufficient to turn opportunistic into virulent fish pathogens.

There is mounting evidence that organic or inorganic enrichment of aquatic environments increases the risk of infectious diseases, with disease agents ranging from helminth parasites to fungal, bacterial, and viral pathogens. The causal link between microbial resource availability and disease risk is thought to be complex and, in the case of so-called "opportunistic pathogens," to involve additional stressors that weaken host resistance (e.g., temperature shifts or oxygen deficiencies). In contrast to this perception, our experiment shows that the link between resource levels and infection of fish embryos can be very direct: increased resource availability can transform benign microbial communities into virulent ones. We find that embryos can be harmed before further stresses (e.g., oxygen depletion) weaken them, and treatment with antibiotics and fungicides cancels the detrimental effects. The changed characteristics of symbiotic microbial communities could simply reflect density-dependent relationships or be due to a transition in life-history strategy. Our findings demonstrate that simple microhabitat changes can be sufficient to turn "opportunistic" into virulent pathogens.

Paraphrasing : scope and typology : a computational approach

This PhD project aims to study paraphrasing, initially understood as the different ways in which the same content is expressed linguistically. We will go into that concept in depth trying to define and delimit its scope more accurately. In that sense, we also aim to discover which kind of structures and phenomena it covers. Although there exist some paraphrasing typologies, the great majority of them only apply to English, and focus on lexical and syntactic transformations. Our intention is to go further into this subject and propose a paraphrasing typology for Spanish and Catalan combining lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge. We apply a bottom-up methodology trying to collect evidence of this phenomenon from the data. For this purpose, we are initially using the Spanish Wikipedia as our corpus. The internal structure of this encyclopedia makes it a good resource for extracting paraphrasing examples for our investigation. This empirical approach will be complemented with the use of linguistic knowledge, and by comparing and contrasting our results to previously proposed paraphrasing typologies in order to enlarge the possible paraphrasing forms found in our corpus. The fact that the same content can be expressed in many different ways presents a major challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Thus, research on paraphrasing has recently been attracting increasing attention in the fields of NLP and Computational Linguistics. The results obtained in this investigation would be of great interest in many of these applications.

Multi-level SLA-driven resource management on Cloud Providers

Nowadays, service providers in the Cloud offer complex services ready to be used as it was a commodity like water or electricity to their customers with any other extra effort for them. However, providing these services implies a high management effort which requires a lot of human interaction. Furthermore, an efficient resource management mechanism considering only provider's resources is, though necessary, not enough, because the provider's profit is limited by the amount of resources it owns. Dynamically outsourcing resources to other providers in response to demand variation avoids this problem and makes the provider to get more profit. A key technology for achieving these goals is virtualization which facilitates provider's management and provides on-demand virtual environments, which are isolated and consolidated in order to achieve a better utilization of the provider's resources. Nevertheless, dealing with some virtualization capabilities implies an effort for the user in order to take benefit from them. In order to avoid this problem, we are contributing the research community with a virtualized environment manager which aims to provide virtual machines that fulfils with the user requirements. Another challenge is sharing resources among different federated Cloud providers while exploiting the features of virtualization in a new approach for facilitating providers' management. This project aims for reducing provider's costs and at the same time fulfilling the quality of service agreed with the customers while maximizing the provider's revenue. It considers resource management at several layers, namely locally to each node in the provider, among different nodes in the provider, and among different federated providers. This latter layer supports the novel capabilities of outsourcing when the local resources are not enough to fulfil the users demand, and offering resources to other providers when the local resources are underused.

Dried blood spots collected on filter paper: an international resource for the diagnosis and genetic characterization of human immunodeficiency virus Type-1

The collection of dried blood spots (DBS) on filter paper provides a powerful approach for the development of large-scale, population-based screening programs. DBS methods are particularly valuable in developing countries and isolated rural regions where resources are limited. Large numbers of field specimens can be economically collected and shipped to centralized reference laboratories for genetic and (or) serological analysis. Alternatively, the dried blood can be stored and used as an archival resource to rapidly establish the frequency and distribution of newly recognized mutations, confirm patient identity or track the origins and emergence of newly identified pathogens. In this report, we describe how PCR-based technologies are beginning to interface with international screening programmes for the diagnosis and genetic characterization of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). In particular, we review recent progress using DBS specimens to resolve the HIV-1 infection status of neonates, monitor the genetic evolution of HIV-1 during early infancy and establish a sentinel surveillance system for the systematic monitoring of HIV-1 genetic variation in Asia.

The InterPro database, an integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites.

Signature databases are vital tools for identifying distant relationships in novel sequences and hence for inferring protein function. InterPro is an integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites, which amalgamates the efforts of the PROSITE, PRINTS, Pfam and ProDom database projects. Each InterPro entry includes a functional description, annotation, literature references and links back to the relevant member database(s). Release 2.0 of InterPro (October 2000) contains over 3000 entries, representing families, domains, repeats and sites of post-translational modification encoded by a total of 6804 different regular expressions, profiles, fingerprints and Hidden Markov Models. Each InterPro entry lists all the matches against SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL (more than 1,000,000 hits from 462,500 proteins in SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL). The database is accessible for text- and sequence-based searches at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/. Questions can be emailed to interhelp@ebi.ac.uk.

arrayMap 2014: an updated cancer genome resource.

Somatic copy number aberrations (CNA) represent a mutation type encountered in the majority of cancer genomes. Here, we present the 2014 edition of arrayMap (http://www.arraymap.org), a publicly accessible collection of pre-processed oncogenomic array data sets and CNA profiles, representing a vast range of human malignancies. Since the initial release, we have enhanced this resource both in content and especially with regard to data mining support. The 2014 release of arrayMap contains more than 64,000 genomic array data sets, representing about 250 tumor diagnoses. Data sets included in arrayMap have been assembled from public repositories as well as additional resources, and integrated by applying custom processing pipelines. Online tools have been upgraded for a more flexible array data visualization, including options for processing user provided, non-public data sets. Data integration has been improved by mapping to multiple editions of the human reference genome, with the majority of the data now being available for the UCSC hg18 as well as GRCh37 versions. The large amount of tumor CNA data in arrayMap can be freely downloaded by users to promote data mining projects, and to explore special events such as chromothripsis-like genome patterns.

Un cop d’ull a Resource description & acces (RDA) i al seu futur

Es tracta d’una sessió introductòria que se centra en els aspectes més generals de la nova normativa: el marc conceptual en el qual es fonamenta la RDA (els models FRBR i FRAD), els objectius, l’organització de les normes, el nou vocabulari, la continuïtat amb les AACR2 i els punts de divergència, els beneficis que s’espera obtenir del nou codi, etc. El seu objectiu principal és fer una primera introducció de les regles per sensibilitzar els catalogadors dels canvis que tindran lloc a mig termini.