Concentración y centralización del capital agrario en la región pampeana : El caso de los grandes pooles de siembra

El objetivo de este trabajo es juzgar las potencialidades del proceso de concentración del capital agrario a partir del caso de los llamados "grandes pooles de siembra". Para tal fin, se realiza un análisis de los proyectos de inversión y de producción de los pooles de siembra constituidos como Fondos Comunes Cerrados de Inversión y como Fideicomisos Financieros. Asimismo, se realiza un estudio en profundidad del caso del principal administrador de grandes pooles de siembra, la empresa Cazenave y Asociados. Se concluye que la producción agraria pampeana continúa siendo un espacio hostil para la acumulación de los capitales más concentrados de la economía.

Concentración y centralización del capital agrario en la región pampeana : El caso de los grandes pooles de siembra

El objetivo de este trabajo es juzgar las potencialidades del proceso de concentración del capital agrario a partir del caso de los llamados "grandes pooles de siembra". Para tal fin, se realiza un análisis de los proyectos de inversión y de producción de los pooles de siembra constituidos como Fondos Comunes Cerrados de Inversión y como Fideicomisos Financieros. Asimismo, se realiza un estudio en profundidad del caso del principal administrador de grandes pooles de siembra, la empresa Cazenave y Asociados. Se concluye que la producción agraria pampeana continúa siendo un espacio hostil para la acumulación de los capitales más concentrados de la economía.

Concentración y centralización del capital agrario en la región pampeana : El caso de los grandes pooles de siembra

El objetivo de este trabajo es juzgar las potencialidades del proceso de concentración del capital agrario a partir del caso de los llamados "grandes pooles de siembra". Para tal fin, se realiza un análisis de los proyectos de inversión y de producción de los pooles de siembra constituidos como Fondos Comunes Cerrados de Inversión y como Fideicomisos Financieros. Asimismo, se realiza un estudio en profundidad del caso del principal administrador de grandes pooles de siembra, la empresa Cazenave y Asociados. Se concluye que la producción agraria pampeana continúa siendo un espacio hostil para la acumulación de los capitales más concentrados de la economía.

Concentración y centralización del capital agrario en la región pampeana : El caso de los grandes pooles de siembra

El objetivo de este trabajo es juzgar las potencialidades del proceso de concentración del capital agrario a partir del caso de los llamados "grandes pooles de siembra". Para tal fin, se realiza un análisis de los proyectos de inversión y de producción de los pooles de siembra constituidos como Fondos Comunes Cerrados de Inversión y como Fideicomisos Financieros. Asimismo, se realiza un estudio en profundidad del caso del principal administrador de grandes pooles de siembra, la empresa Cazenave y Asociados. Se concluye que la producción agraria pampeana continúa siendo un espacio hostil para la acumulación de los capitales más concentrados de la economía.

Philanthropy and the arts : Harold Mitchell's review will create a bigger funding pool

Harold Mitchell's review of private sector arts support is a bit like Ian Thorpe in his swimming heyday. He's a big presence, and has dived in with a determined goal and a strategy to win 'gold' for the arts, streamlining giving from the big end of tow. But Mitchell is also chasing people's "silver and bronze", putting forward the case that the arts touches everyday Australians (think Gen Y music festivals and going to films like Red Dog).

Good governance - not just for the big boys governance in organizations in New Zealand

Good governance is recognized as a fundamental indicator of the success of a company. For a small- midsized company, this is particularly so, as such companies must be able to competitively demonstrate their flexibility in the face of market forces. This flexibility is the primary advantage they hold over larger firms (Dalton, Daily, Ellstrand and Johnson, 1998). Such companies, however, can find it difficult to attract good directors (Daum and Neff, 2003) and this makes developing improved strategies of governance a challenge. Taylor, Chait and Holland suggest top directors are not attracted to small/ medium companies because “the stakes remain low, the meetings process-driven, the outcomes ambiguous, and the deliberations insular” (Taylor, Chait and Holland, 2001). We suggest that the attraction of quality directors is a uniquely impacting situation for small and mid-size firms, as it is there where additional management resources should be needed most urgently. Directors on the boards of small-medium sized businesses are often lagging behind directors of large companies in that they are less likely to be independent external directors and are less likely to represent a diversity of attributes (Dalton, Daily, Ellstrand and Johnson, 1998). Arthur Levitt, former United States Securities and Exchange Commission Chair, describes the culture of medium sized business directorships as a “kind of a fraternity of CEOs who serve on one another's boards” (Stainburn, 2005). In addition, evidence suggests directors of small- medium businesses are often insufficiently trained for the role. Uncertain directors may, for example, be unwilling to ask crucial questions of managers before making major decisions. “Board members sometimes are made to feel that asking a thorny question or advancing an alternative opinion is disloyal to the administration” (Taylor, Chait and Holland, 2001). Small and medium businesses, however, are a growing contributor to the national economies of countries internationally. In New Zealand, small and medium-size firms recording large GDP values, ahead of many large businesses, which makes our investigation into good governance practices of SMEs relevant to suggest areas in which these firms can improve their governance policies and practices. We have reviewed more than 2,000 directors, executives and investors in New Zealand, making this one of the largest non-government surveys in governance. Supported by 16 large corporate organizations, such as KPMG, Business New Zealand, Simpson Grierson, Brook Asset Management, Porter Novelli, Sheffield and ‘Management’ Magazine, this work suggests that the current processes through which directors are selected and trained to serve on Boards of small and medium businesses needs to be altered. We are also concerned over the lack of director education and the close involvement of the Chief Executives as members of the Boards. There is a general concern over the lack of director independence and whether directors are effective in their roles. We are recommending an alternative process for SMEs to select directors, which will hopefully expand the available pool of directors in quantity and quality.

Predicting psychological and subjective well-being from personality: incremental prediction from 30 facets over the Big 5

This study investigated the relationship between the Big 5, measured at factor and facet levels, and dimensions of both psychological and subjective well-being. Three hundred and thirty-seven participants completed the 30 Facet International Personality Item Pool Scale, Satisfaction with Life Scale, Positive and Negative Affectivity Schedule, and Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Well-Being. Cross-correlation decomposition presented a parsimonious picture of how well-being is related to personality factors. Incremental facet prediction was examined using double-adjusted r2 confidence intervals and semi-partial correlations. Incremental prediction by facets over factors ranged from almost nothing to a third more variance explained, suggesting a more modest incremental prediction than presented in the literature previously. Examination of semi-partial correlations controlling for factors revealed a small number of important facet-well-being correlations. All data and R analysis scripts are made available in an online repository.

A general communication cost optimization framework for big data stream processing in geo-distributed data centers

With the explosion of big data, processing large numbers of continuous data streams, i.e., big data stream processing (BDSP), has become a crucial requirement for many scientific and industrial applications in recent years. By offering a pool of computation, communication and storage resources, public clouds, like Amazon's EC2, are undoubtedly the most efficient platforms to meet the ever-growing needs of BDSP. Public cloud service providers usually operate a number of geo-distributed datacenters across the globe. Different datacenter pairs are with different inter-datacenter network costs charged by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). While, inter-datacenter traffic in BDSP constitutes a large portion of a cloud provider's traffic demand over the Internet and incurs substantial communication cost, which may even become the dominant operational expenditure factor. As the datacenter resources are provided in a virtualized way, the virtual machines (VMs) for stream processing tasks can be freely deployed onto any datacenters, provided that the Service Level Agreement (SLA, e.g., quality-of-information) is obeyed. This raises the opportunity, but also a challenge, to explore the inter-datacenter network cost diversities to optimize both VM placement and load balancing towards network cost minimization with guaranteed SLA. In this paper, we first propose a general modeling framework that describes all representative inter-task relationship semantics in BDSP. Based on our novel framework, we then formulate the communication cost minimization problem for BDSP into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and prove it to be NP-hard. We then propose a computation-efficient solution based on MILP. The high efficiency of our proposal is validated by extensive simulation based studies.

Jon Urbanchek, UM Men's Swimming Coach at 2000 Big Ten meet

[Urbanchek dives into pool after U-M victory]

Jon Urbanchek, UM Men's Swimming Coach at 2000 Big Ten meet

[Urbanchek interviewed in pool after U-M victory]

Why the “Big Deal” continues to persist

The advantages of bundling e-journals together into publisher collections include increased access to information for the subscribing institution’s clients, purchasing cost-effectiveness and streamlined workflows. Whilst cataloguing a consortial e-journal collection has its advantages, there are also various pitfalls and the author outlines efforts by the CAUL (Council of Australian University Libraries) Consortium libraries to further streamline this process, working in conjunction with major publishers. Despite the advantages that publisher collections provide, pressures to unbundle existing packages continue to build, fuelled by an ever-increasing selection of available electronic resources; decreases in, and competing demands upon, library budgets; the impact of currency fluctuations; and poor usage for an alarmingly high proportion of collection titles. Consortial perspectives on bundling and unbundling titles are discussed, including options for managing the addition of new titles to the bundle and why customising consortial collections currently does not work. Unbundling analyses carried out at Queensland University of Technology during 2006 to 2008 prior to the renewal of several major publisher collections are presented as further case studies which illustrate why the “big deal” continues to persist.

Factors affecting ICT diffusion in Australian construction organisations – the storey from the big end

Our survey findings confirm that 11 factors influence information and communication technology (ICT) diffusion for experienced ICT users. We offer a model that consists of 4 groups of categories: management (M); individual (I); technology (T); and environment (E). Our conclusions reinforce the importance of a coherent ICT diffusion strategy and supportive environment. This requires substantial investment in training and collegial learning support mechanisms. This paper provides an overview of the work undertaken and an analysis of its implications for the construction industry and we provide useful insights that a wide range of construction industry professionals and contractors may find useful.