A reflection on the future of the quality management paradigm in the EU

In recent years, the Quality Management Paradigm has successfully taken root in the European Union’s business environment. Quality management besides being a multivariate issue including matters from management and economics till engineering may be called a global knowledge in permanent bubbling. This theoretical article is an eclectic effort to analyse the evolution of the Quality Management Paradigm. More specifically, the article deals with this management Paradigm evolution and change according to the present and future expected business environments.

The Kaipara story: a closer look at the benefits of working together, the evolution of a federation of aquaculture self-help groups and a one-stop aqua shop in rural West Bengal

What is special about Kaipara is that most recently, they have founded a federation of Self-Help Groups that work together to develop their own support network and to draw in the support of others. This is a sophisticated ‘home-grown’ support infrastructure that is the subject of this story. (Pdf contains 8 pages).

Networking for Rural Development: a closer look at the evolution of communications in the STREAM Initiative

What began as a general desire to share messages about processes, technologies, lives and opportunities – among farming and fishing communities and those who work with them – has evolved into a network that shares meanings and lessons learnt. Now instead of relying on core funding or catalytic support, the STREAM Initiative is self-funded through the services its network provides to academic, development and other organizations. (Pdf contains 8 pages).

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.)

MANAGEMENT: Historia y tendencias de la administración de empresas desde sus orígenes hasta el nuevo estilo de relaciones de Koldo Saratxaga.

[ES]Este trabajo presenta la evolución de la administración de empresas desde sus primeras manifestaciones y recopila las teorías y enfoques surgidos desde el siglo XIX hasta nuestros días, así como las últimas tendencias en este ámbito y el nuevo estilo de relaciones de Koldo Saratxaga.

The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries

Fishing was America's first industry, and turtling played an important role in the nation's developing fisheries. However, before the European settlers arrived in the New World, Native Americans had already developed spiritual and gastronomic relationships with sea turtles. There are indications that ancient Florida tribes had eaten sea turtles and then placed the skulls in burial mounds (Johnson, 1952).

Modelling the evolution of uncertainty levels during design

Design work involves uncertainty that arises from, and influences, the progressive development of solutions. This paper analyses the influences of evolving uncertainty levels on the design process. We focus on uncertainties associated with choosing the values of design parameters, and do not consider in detail the issues that arise when parameters must first be identified. Aspects of uncertainty and its evolution are discussed, and a new task-based model is introduced to describe process behaviour in terms of changing uncertainty levels. The model is applied to study two process configuration problems based on aircraft wing design: one using an analytical solution and one using Monte-Carlo simulation. The applications show that modelling uncertainty levels during design can help assess management policies, such as how many concepts should be considered during design and to what level of accuracy. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Large Gene Family Expansions and Adaptive Evolution for Odorant and Gustatory Receptors in the Pea Aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum

Gaining insight into the mechanisms of chemoreception in aphids is of primary importance for both integrative studies on the evolution of host plant specialization and applied research in pest control management because aphids rely on their sense of smell

Evolution of the tilapia fishery with specific reference to the Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus Linne)

As a fishery, the immensely large (c. 68,800 km2 ) Lake Victoria is a unique ecosystem which together with a riverine connection to the Lake Kyoga basin share a common endemic "Victorian" fish fauna (Greenwood 1966). Until the 1950s, the single socio economically most important species of fish in these two lakes was the native Oreochromis esculentus Graham (Graham 1929) even though the lake also contained a second native tilapiine, 0reochromis variabilis , and over 300 other fish species (Beauchamp, 1956).