Suchergebnisse

In 2011, after nearly forty years of federal protection, gray wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List in Montana and their management entrusted to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. For some, wolves are critical to ecosystem health and an essential part of nature, for others they are a symbol of government overreach threatening their livelihoods and cultural values. The implementation of annual trapping seasons as a method to reduce perceived negative impacts from a growing wolf population has further inflamed an already embroiled debate. The purpose of this research was to investigate various meanings of wolves and wolf trapping being constructed in western Montana. A discourse analysis of reader-contributed newspaper texts in Missoula and Hamilton was conducted. Data between 5/9/2012 and 2/8/2014 were gathered from letters to the editor, guest columns, and online comments from the Missoulian and the Ravalli Republic and imported into NVivo. Following Potter and Wetherell's (1987) guidelines to discourse analysis, these data were thematically coded and analyzed for patterns. Results reveal a significant range of themes across both study sites with the most prominent themes relating to ecological concerns and ungulates. Various meanings of wolves were identified such as the 'ecological wolf', the 'endangered wolf', the 'predatory wolf', and the 'cold blooded killer wolf', and various meanings of wolf trapping such as 'trapping as public hazard' and 'trapping as management tool'. While it is no surprise that people have different perceptions, these finding suggest that, beyond perceptions, people are constructing vastly different realities about wolves and wolf trapping in a manner that encumbers the possibility for productive dialogue. This highlights an imperative need to reframe the debate over wolf management not as a competition of opposing values, but rather as an exercise in communicating across cultures.

In recent years, the Federal Government has attempted to utilize strategic sourcing to reduce acquisitions expenses. Currently accepted best practices for strategic sourcing developed in the private sector fail to account for the diverse and unique set of objectives present in public sector acquisitions. Value Focused Thinking was used to develop a hierarchy of values and objectives for the Air Force Civil Engineer Commodity Council (CECC) strategic sourcing program. This hierarchy represents the full range of program objectives, and was used to develop a value function useful for systematically evaluating service and commodity contract areas for strategic sourcing potential.

Weakly consistent data stores have become popular because they enable highly available, scalable distributed applications. However, some data needs strong consistency. For applications that mix accesses to strongly and weakly consistent data, programmers must currently choose between bad performance and possible data corruption. We instead introduce a safe mixed-consistency programming model in which programmers choose the consistency level on a per-object basis. Further, they can use atomic, isolated transactions to access both strongly consistent (e.g., linearizable) data and weakly consistent (e.g., causally consistent) data within the same transaction. Compile-time checking ensures that mixing consistency levels is safe: the guarantees of each object's consistency level are enforced. Programmers avoid being locked into one consistency level; they can make an application-specific tradeoff between performance and consistency. We have implemented this programming model as part of a new system called MyriaStore. MyriaStore demonstrates that safe mixed consistency can be implemented on top of off-the-shelf data stores with their own native, distinct consistency guarantees. Our performance measurements demonstrate that significant performance improvements can be obtained for geodistributed applications that need strong consistency for some critical operations but that also need the high performance and low latency possible with causally consistent data. ; This research was conducted with government support under and awarded by DoD, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, 32 CFR 168a and by National Science Foundation grant CCF-0964409.

PurposeThe objective of this study is to explore the types of innovation that are predominant in UK SMEs, whether they are predominantly radical or incremental, and to investigate the impact of these innovations on performance.Design/methodology/approachA web‐based survey instrument was used to administer survey questionnaires to a sample of UK SMEs in manufacturing, engineering, electronics, information technology and telecommunications industries. The response rate was 13.8 percent. Relevant statistical analytical techniques including regression for analysis was then used.FindingsIt is found that the SMEs tend to focus more on incremental than radical innovations and that this focus is related to growth in sales turnover.Practical implicationsIt is not such a bad idea for SMEs, particularly those operating in high technological industries, to focus on incremental innovations as these are actually related positively to sales turnover growth.Originality/valueAn investigation of the types of innovation that SMEs pursue is pioneering in the field as previous studies of this type have been based on large firms. The contention that the raison d'etre of SMEs is to develop radical innovations is not supported empirically, at least for the sample of SMEs. In addition, it is found that the age of an SME is not related to its focus on either incremental or radical innovation. These are the contributions of this paper.

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the interactions of innovation strategy execution and innovation‐focused human resource (HR) policy adoption on innovation performance and revenue growth. In addition, we investigate the moderating role of environmental uncertainty on the effects of innovation strategy execution and innovation‐focused HR policy on innovation performance. Results show that the interaction of innovation strategy execution and innovation‐focused HR policy is positively related to innovation performance. Results also show that environmental uncertainty positively moderates the innovation strategy execution–innovation performance relationship. Finally, innovation performance mediates the interaction of innovation strategy execution and environmental uncertainty on firms' revenue growth. Implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.