How to avoid the problems of target-setting

Purpose: Advocates and critics of target-setting in the workplace seem unable to reach beyond their own well-entrenched battle lines. While the advocates of goal-directed behaviour point to what they see as demonstrable advantages, the critics of target-setting highlight equally demonstrable disadvantages. Indeed, the academic literature on this topic is currently mired in controversy, with neither side seemingly capable of envisaging a better way forward. This paper seeks to break the current deadlock and move thinking forward in this important aspect of performance measurement and management by outlining a new, more fruitful approach, based on both theory and practical experience. Design/methodology/approach: The topic was approached in three phases: assembling and reading key academic and other literature on the subject of target-setting and goal-directed behaviour, with a view to understanding, in depth, the arguments advanced by the advocates and critics of target-setting; comparing these published arguments with one's own experiential findings, in order to bring the essence of disagreement into much sharper focus; and then bringing to bear the academic and practical experience to identify the essential elements of a new, more fruitful approach offering all the benefits of goal-directed behaviour with none of the typical disadvantages of target-setting. Findings: The research led to three key findings: the advocates of goal-directed behaviour and critics of target-setting each make valid points, as seen from their own current perspectives; the likelihood of these two communities, left to themselves, ever reaching a new synthesis, seems vanishingly small (with leading thinkers in the goal-directed behaviour community already acknowledging this); and, between the three authors, it was discovered that their unusual combination of academic study and practical experience enabled them to see things differently. Hence, they would like to share their new thinking more widely. Research limitations/implications: The authors fully accept that their paper is informed by extensive practical experience and, as yet, there have been no opportunities to test their findings, conclusions and recommendations through rigorous academic research. However, they hope that the paper will move thinking forward in this arena, thereby informing future academic research. Practical implications: The authors hope that the practical implications of the paper will be significant, as it outlines a novel way for organisations to capture the benefits of goal-directed behaviour with none of the disadvantages typically associated with target-setting. Social implications: Given that increased efficiency and effectiveness in the management of organisations would be good for society, the authors think the paper has interesting social implications. Originality/value: Leading thinkers in the field of goal-directed behaviour, such as Locke and Latham, and leading critics of target-setting, such as Ordóñez et al. continue to argue with one another - much like, at the turn of the nineteenth century, proponents of the "wave theory of light" and proponents of the "particle theory of light" were similarly at loggerheads. Just as this furious scientific debate was ultimately resolved by Taylor's experiment, showing that light could behave both as a particle and wave at the same time, the authors believe that the paper demonstrates that goal-directed behaviour and target-setting can successfully co-exist. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

A 250-year periodicity in Southern Hemisphere westerly winds over the last 2600 years

Southern Hemisphere westerly airflow has a significant influence on the ocean–atmosphere system of the mid- to high latitudes with potentially global climate implications. Unfortunately, historic observations only extend back to the late 19th century, limiting our understanding of multi-decadal to centennial change. Here we present a highly resolved (30-year) record of past westerly wind strength from a Falkland Islands peat sequence spanning the last 2600 years. Situated within the core latitude of Southern Hemisphere westerly airflow (the so-called furious fifties), we identify highly variable changes in exotic pollen and charcoal derived from South America which can be used to inform on past westerly air strength. We find a period of high charcoal content between 2000 and 1000 cal. years BP, associated with increased burning in Patagonia, most probably as a result of higher temperatures and stronger westerly airflow. Spectral analysis of the charcoal record identifies a pervasive ca. 250-year periodicity that is coherent with radiocarbon production rates, suggesting that solar variability has a modulating influence on Southern Hemisphere westerly airflow. Our results have important implications for understanding global climate change through the late Holocene.

ADAM: A Decentralized Parallel Computer Architecture Featuring Fast Thread and Data Migration and a Uniform Hardware Abstraction

The furious pace of Moore's Law is driving computer architecture into a realm where the the speed of light is the dominant factor in system latencies. The number of clock cycles to span a chip are increasing, while the number of bits that can be accessed within a clock cycle is decreasing. Hence, it is becoming more difficult to hide latency. One alternative solution is to reduce latency by migrating threads and data, but the overhead of existing implementations has previously made migration an unserviceable solution so far. I present an architecture, implementation, and mechanisms that reduces the overhead of migration to the point where migration is a viable supplement to other latency hiding mechanisms, such as multithreading. The architecture is abstract, and presents programmers with a simple, uniform fine-grained multithreaded parallel programming model with implicit memory management. In other words, the spatial nature and implementation details (such as the number of processors) of a parallel machine are entirely hidden from the programmer. Compiler writers are encouraged to devise programming languages for the machine that guide a programmer to express their ideas in terms of objects, since objects exhibit an inherent physical locality of data and code. The machine implementation can then leverage this locality to automatically distribute data and threads across the physical machine by using a set of high performance migration mechanisms. An implementation of this architecture could migrate a null thread in 66 cycles -- over a factor of 1000 improvement over previous work. Performance also scales well; the time required to move a typical thread is only 4 to 5 times that of a null thread. Data migration performance is similar, and scales linearly with data block size. Since the performance of the migration mechanism is on par with that of an L2 cache, the implementation simulated in my work has no data caches and relies instead on multithreading and the migration mechanism to hide and reduce access latencies.

aTrance encounter

An electronic composition in the genre of Trance . . . a synth delight with some vocals used as beats.

aTrance encounter short

An electronic composition in the genre of Trance . . . a synth delight with some vocals used as beats.

aTrance encounter stinger

An electronic composition in the genre of Trance . . . a synth delight with some vocals used as beats.

Custom essay writing : an exploration

In late 2010, three things happened. Firstly, I graded the final submission of a student who had, to date, been producing work that was, on the whole, pass/credit standard. Their last essay was outstanding. It was well organised, cleverly argued, well referenced and enjoyable to read. Turnitin assured me that the paper was not plagiarised but I remained suspicious because it seemed ‘too good to be true’. In the end, I gave it 91/100. Later in the same year, the final two events happened. I discovered that a large scale essay writing service provider from the USA was opening a ‘branch’ in Australia. Finally, a colleague from the States told me how she had become enraged to see a custom writing essay provider as a (busy) stallholder at her orientation week market day. She was furious, surely this is illegal? Interested in finding out ‘what (if anything) this might mean to Deakin?’, Toija and I approached Teaching and Learning in our faculty to see if they might fund a small experiment. They did, and the presentation will contain a record of this exploratory project. This project had a very simple premise. What would we receive if we ordered a custom written essay for one of the ALC101 assignment questions? Would it pass?

Cuando dialogan dos Antígonas : La tumba de Antígona de María Zambrano y Antígona furiosa de Griselda Gambaro

Antígona ha sido un tópico por más de 2.000 años, participando de una historia que siempre puede ser reconocida. Tanto la Guerra Civil española como la dictadura argentina vieron surgir Antígonas en busca de justicia. A partir de los trabajos de María Zambrano y Griselda Gambaro, este artículo busca rehabilitar discursivamente estas versiones. Por un lado, la filósofa española nunca regresó del exilio iniciado en 1939 y defendió hasta el final los valores republicanos. Cuando asumió que su expatriación era irreversible, ingresó en un exilio profundo del cual Antígona revela lo esencial, pasando de la "privación" a la "revelación" tanto en un modo filosófico como en el poético, tanto en sus ensayos como en su única pieza teatral, La Tumba de Antígona (1967), una significativa metáfora de la guerra fratricida y del exilio. Por otro, Antígona furiosa (1986) de Gambaro, reescribe la tragedia de Sófocles cuando denuncia el terrorismo de estado argentino en una furiosa Antígona. Gambaro, hermana y madre de desaparecidos de la guerra sucia eleva su grito por justicia en nombre de la fraternidad humana

Cuando dialogan dos Antígonas : La tumba de Antígona de María Zambrano y Antígona furiosa de Griselda Gambaro

Antígona ha sido un tópico por más de 2.000 años, participando de una historia que siempre puede ser reconocida. Tanto la Guerra Civil española como la dictadura argentina vieron surgir Antígonas en busca de justicia. A partir de los trabajos de María Zambrano y Griselda Gambaro, este artículo busca rehabilitar discursivamente estas versiones. Por un lado, la filósofa española nunca regresó del exilio iniciado en 1939 y defendió hasta el final los valores republicanos. Cuando asumió que su expatriación era irreversible, ingresó en un exilio profundo del cual Antígona revela lo esencial, pasando de la "privación" a la "revelación" tanto en un modo filosófico como en el poético, tanto en sus ensayos como en su única pieza teatral, La Tumba de Antígona (1967), una significativa metáfora de la guerra fratricida y del exilio. Por otro, Antígona furiosa (1986) de Gambaro, reescribe la tragedia de Sófocles cuando denuncia el terrorismo de estado argentino en una furiosa Antígona. Gambaro, hermana y madre de desaparecidos de la guerra sucia eleva su grito por justicia en nombre de la fraternidad humana

Cuando dialogan dos Antígonas : La tumba de Antígona de María Zambrano y Antígona furiosa de Griselda Gambaro

Antígona ha sido un tópico por más de 2.000 años, participando de una historia que siempre puede ser reconocida. Tanto la Guerra Civil española como la dictadura argentina vieron surgir Antígonas en busca de justicia. A partir de los trabajos de María Zambrano y Griselda Gambaro, este artículo busca rehabilitar discursivamente estas versiones. Por un lado, la filósofa española nunca regresó del exilio iniciado en 1939 y defendió hasta el final los valores republicanos. Cuando asumió que su expatriación era irreversible, ingresó en un exilio profundo del cual Antígona revela lo esencial, pasando de la "privación" a la "revelación" tanto en un modo filosófico como en el poético, tanto en sus ensayos como en su única pieza teatral, La Tumba de Antígona (1967), una significativa metáfora de la guerra fratricida y del exilio. Por otro, Antígona furiosa (1986) de Gambaro, reescribe la tragedia de Sófocles cuando denuncia el terrorismo de estado argentino en una furiosa Antígona. Gambaro, hermana y madre de desaparecidos de la guerra sucia eleva su grito por justicia en nombre de la fraternidad humana

Ciberdelincuencia: desarrollo y persecución tecnológica

La aparición de Internet y los sistemas informáticos supuso un antes y un después en el modo que las personas emplearían para acceder a los sistemas de información. El crecimiento exponencial seguido en los años posteriores ha llevado este hecho hasta la situación actual, donde prácticamente todos los ámbitos del día a día se encuentran reflejados en la Red. Por otro lado, a la par que la sociedad se desplazaba al ciberespacio, también comenzaban a hacerlo aquellos que buscaban obtener un rendimiento delictivo de los nuevos medios y herramientas que se ponían a su disposición. Avanzando a pasos agigantados en el desarrollo de técnicas y métodos para vulnerar unos sistemas de seguridad, aún muy inmaduros, los llamados ciberdelincuentes tomaban ventaja sobre las autoridades y su escasa preparación para abordar este nuevo problema. Poco a poco, y con el paso de los años, esta distancia ha ido reduciéndose, y pese a que aún queda mucho trabajo por hacer, y que el crecimiento de los índices de ciberdelincuencia, junto con la evolución y aparición de nuevas técnicas, sigue a un ritmo desenfrenado, los gobiernos y las empresas han tomado consciencia de la gravedad de este problema y han comenzado a poner sobre la mesa grandes esfuerzos e inversiones con el fin de mejorar sus armas de lucha y métodos de prevención para combatirla. Este Proyecto de Fin de Carrera dedica sus objetivos a la investigación y comprensión de todos estos puntos, desarrollando una visión específica de cada uno de ellos y buscando la intención final de establecer las bases suficientes que permitan abordar con la efectividad requerida el trabajo necesario para la persecución y eliminación del problema. ABSTRACT. The emergence of Internet and computer systems marked a before and after in the way that people access information systems. The continued exponential growth in the following years has taken this fact to the current situation, where virtually all areas of everyday life are reflected in the Net. On the other hand, meanwhile society moved into cyberspace, the same began to do those seeking to obtain a criminal performance of new media and tools at their disposal. Making great strides in the development of techniques and methods to undermine security systems, still very immature, so called cybercriminals took advantage over the authorities and their lack of preparation to deal with this new problem. Gradually, and over the years, this distance has been declining, and although there is still much work to do and the growth rates of cybercrime, along with the evolution and emergence of new techniques, keep increasing at a furious pace, governments and companies have become aware of the seriousness of this problem and have begun to put on the table great efforts and investments in order to upgrade their weapons to fight against this kind of crimes and prevention methods to combat it. This Thesis End of Grade Project focuses its objectives on the research and understanding of all these points, developing a specific vision of each of them and looking for the ultimate intention of establishing a sufficient basis by which to manage with the required effectiveness the type of work needed for the persecution and elimination of the problem.

Telecommunications and Internet Services: The digital side of the TTIP. Paper No. 8 in the CEPS-CTR project ‘TTIP in the Balance’ and CEPS Special Report No. 112/July, 17 July 2015

In the overall negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the digital chapter appears to be growing in importance. This is due to several factors, including the recent Datagate scandal that undermined trust between the negotiating parties and led to calls to suspend the US-EU Safe Harbour agreement as well as the furious debate currently ongoing in both legal systems on key issues such as policies to encourage broadband infrastructure deployment, network neutrality policies and the application of competition policy in cyberspace. This paper explores the current divergences between the two legal systems on these key issues and discusses possible scenarios for the ultimate agreement to be reached in the TTIP: from a basic, minimal agreement (which would essentially include e-labelling and e-accessibility measures) to more ambitious scenarios on network neutrality, competition rules, privacy and interoperability measures.

Globalisation and security in the Taiwan Straits

Only recently the Sino-Taiwanese issue has again been in the headlines of the international media. On Saturday, 3 August 2002, Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian insisted in a passionate speech that there is 'one country on each side' of the Taiwan Strait. He went even further by calling for new legislation that would allow a referendum to be held on changing the island's current international status, saying that this would be a 'basic human right'. Chen's remarks resulted in a furious response from the mainland. Although the conflict between Beijing and Taipei can be interpreted as a legacy of the Chinese Civil War, the tensions intensified during the 1990s. The following article suggests that the linkages and dynamics between the globalization process and international security are increasingly important for a better understanding of the development of relations at the international level in general and in the China-Taiwan conflict in particular.

Novel Purification of Archaeal Rnase P Protein, Pfu Rpp38, for Nmr Studies

Dr. Kenneth Murray, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Biology Ribonuclease P (RNase P) is an essential and ubiquitous ribonucleoprotein enzyme primarily responsible for cleaving 5' leader sequences during tRNA maturation. RNase P comprises one essential RNA, and one protein subunit in eubacteria, five proteins in archaea, and ten in humans. Due to its homology to human RNase P, its higher stability, and simpler structure; extensive studies have been conducted utilizing the enzyme from the archaeal hyperthermophile, Pyrococcus furious (Pfu). Previous studies identified only four protein subunits associated with the archaeal RNase P. This fourprotein reconstituted particle, however, had an optimal temperature of 55°C, compared to the optimal 70°C of the wild type RNase P. Additional probing of the organism's genome database revealed a fifth RNase P protein subunit, RPP38. To facilitate further investigations of Pfu RNase complexes, we sought to develop a protocol for the purification ofRPP38. Our results, presented herein, represent the first known expression.purification protocol developed for RPP38. Briefly, we synthesized an N-terminal6x-His RPP38 fusion construct, reengineered to contain a Tobacco Etch Virus (TEV) protease cleavage site. Purification was achieved via immobilized metal affinity chromatography and reversed phase high performance liquid chromatography. Following purification the 6X-His affinity tag was removed via TEV cleavage, thus regenerating the native RPP38 protein. Purity and identity of RPP38 were confirmed by sodium dodecylsulfate - polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and mass spectrometry, respectively. Our work is expected to contribute to our understanding ofRNase P function and tRNA maturation by providing an efficient, facile technique to express and purify Pfu RNase protein RPP38 as a means to facilitate structural and functional analyses.