bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Novel Protocol for Model Calibration in Biological Wastewater Treatment
Authors: Zhu Ao , Guo Jianhua , Ni Bing-Jie , Wang Shuying , Yang Qing , Peng Yongzhen 
Published: February 2015

AbstractActivated sludge models (ASMs) have been widely used for process design, operation and optimization in wastewater treatment plants. However, it is still a challenge to achieve an efficient calibration for reliable application by using the conventional approaches. Hereby, we propose a novel calibration protocol, i.e. Numerical Optimal Approaching Procedure (NOAP), for the systematic calibration of ASMs. The NOAP consists of three key steps in an iterative scheme flow: i) global factors sensitivity analysis for factors fixing; ii) pseudo-global parameter correlation analysis for non-identifiable factors detection; and iii) formation of a parameter subset through an estimation by using genetic algorithm. The validity and applicability are confirmed using experimental data obtained from two independent wastewater treatment systems, including a sequencing batch reactor and a continuous stirred-tank reactor. The results indicate that the NOAP can effectively determine the optimal parameter subset and successfully perform model calibration and validation for these two different systems. The proposed NOAP is expected to use for automatic calibration of ASMs and be applied potentially to other ordinary differential equations models.
Temperature and solids retention time control microbial population dynamics and volatile fatty acid production in replicated anaerobic digesters
Authors: Vanwonterghem Inka , Jensen Paul D. , Rabaey Korneel , Tyson Gene W. 
Published: February 2015

AbstractAnaerobic digestion is a widely used technology for waste stabilization and generation of biogas and has recently emerged as a potentially important process for the production of high value volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and alcohols. Here, three reactors were seeded with inoculum from a stably performing methanogenic digester and selective operating conditions (37°C and 55°C; 12 day and 4 day solids retention time) were applied to restrict methanogenesis while maintaining hydrolysis and fermentation. Replicated experiments performed at each set of operating conditions led to reproducible VFA production profiles which could be correlated with specific changes in microbial community composition. The mesophilic reactor at short solids retention time showed accumulation of propionate and acetate (42 ± 2% and 15 ± 6% of CODhydrolyzed, respectively) and dominance of Fibrobacter and Bacteroidales. Acetate accumulation (>50% of CODhydrolyzed) was also observed in the thermophilic reactors, which were dominated by Clostridium. Under all tested conditions, there was a shift from acetoclastic to hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis and a reduction in methane production by >50% of CODhydrolyzed. Our results demonstrate that shortening the SRT and increasing the temperature are effective strategies for driving microbial communities towards controlled production of high levels of specific volatile fatty acids.
Multidrug resistance transporters Snq2p and Pdr5p mediate caffeine efflux in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Authors: Tsujimoto Yoshiyuki , Shimizu Yoshihiro , Otake Kazuya , Nakamura Tatsuya , Okada Ryutaro , Miyazaki Toshitaka , Watanabe Kunihiko 
Published: February 2015

Abstract
SNQ2 was identified as a caffeine-resistance gene by screening a genomic library of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in a multicopy vector YEp24. SNQ2 encodes an ATP-binding cassette transporter and is highly homologous to PDR5. Multicopy of PDR5 also conferred resistance to caffeine, while its resistance was smaller than that of SNQ2. Residual caffeine contents were analyzed after transiently exposing cells to caffeine. The ratios of caffeine contents were 21.3 ± 8.8% (YEp24-SNQ2) and 81.9 ± 8.7% (YEp24-PDR5) relative to control (YEp24, 100%). In addition, multicopies of SNQ2 or PDR5 conferred resistance to rhodamine 6G (R6G), which was widely used as a substrate for transport assay. R6G was exported by both transporters, and their efflux activities were inhibited by caffeine with half-maximal inhibitory concentrations of 5.3 ± 1.9 (YEp24-SNQ2) and 17.2 ± 9.6 mM (YEp24-PDR5). These results demonstrate that Snq2p is a more functional transporter of caffeine than Pdr5p in yeast cells.
Tropes of Branding in Forms of Life
Authors: Agha Asif 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThis article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When brand fractions like trademarks are taken up in distinct social practices around the world, their significance is routinely reanalyzed through locale-specific metasemiotic frameworks, which formulate varied forms of life in societies around the world.
Dualism at Work: The Social Circulation of Embodiment Theories in Use
Authors: Michel Alexandra 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThis thirteen-year ethnography investigates how two Wall Street banks instantiated dualism in practice and what the evolving consequences were for bankers and the organizations that they joined after their careers at the banks. The banks dualistically split visible controls that targeted the mind, such as autonomy and work-life balance narratives, from unobtrusive controls that targeted the body, bypassed the mind, and intensified the pace of work in ways that bankers experienced as self-chosen. These practices caused evolving forms of dualistic embodiment. During the first four years, bankers identified with their minds and treated their bodies as unproblematic objects. Starting with year 4, body breakdowns occurred; the body imposed itself as an antagonist. Desperate to perform, bankers pushed harder, which caused more severe breakdowns that eventually forced some to treat the body as a knowledgeable subject that can direct action. The bankers implemented the banks’ practices in the organizations they joined subsequently, intending to enhance autonomy, but unintentionally replicating indiscriminate overwork for all participants. As they experienced more severe breakdowns, some bankers followed their bodies’ guidance into new ways of living. Dualism thus followed a dialectic pattern, first intensifying the body repression until breakdowns turned passive bodies into revolutionary forces.
Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation: Recruitment to Routinized Innovation
Authors: Wilf Eitan 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThis essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.
Managing Intertextuality: Display and Discipline across Documents at a Korean Firm
Authors: Prentice Michael M. 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThis article addresses the social, material, and practical dimensions by which intertextuality is managed in a corporate setting. Managing intertextuality entails more than the circulation of entextualized fragments—it involves the everyday ways in which individuals come to negotiate with environments saturated and defined by textual objects. Based on fieldwork at a Korean brand consulting firm, I chart a range of ways that employees took different stances to intertextual practice—from how they defined relationships with their business partners to how they disciplined internal activities, even to how documents became “leaked” from within the office. This article advocates for a broader view of the practical and material dimensions of intertextuality, the diverse ways individuals can engage with texts, and the importance of considering intertextuality in the construction of managerial figures.
Symbolic Force: A Corporate Revitalization Video and Its Effects
Authors: Urban Greg 
Published: February 2015

AbstractA condensation symbol is a complex and relatively discrete bundle of icons, indices, and symbols, in the Peircean sense, that calls up affect and directs that affect toward social ends. This article analyzes a corporate motivational video produced by Harley-Davidson, Inc., an American motorcycle manufacturing company, as a condensation symbol. In addition to analyzing the formal features of the video, the article furnishes evidence, in the form of interview data, that the symbol is capable of influencing the orientations of individuals who view it. The “symbolic force” of the video is the force of interest that causes the orientation to the company carried by the symbol to be transmitted to its viewers. In this sense, the video resembles the dominant ritual symbols described by Turner. The present research also suggests, however, that the video summons distinct kinds of affect in different individuals, exerting a differentiating effect within social space.
The Semiotic Corporation: An Introduction to the Supplement Issue
Authors: Urban Greg , Koh Kyung-Nan 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThe business corporation is explored as a reflexive cultural form shaped through complex and ongoing sign processes. The concern specifically is with the dynamic whereby external representations become internal to the corporation, shaping its form and operations, and, correspondingly, internally produced representations get projected outward into the world, mingling with other representations to influence how the corporation is construed. Seven contributions to this Signs and Society supplement are organized along a continuum—from the point of what is metaphorically conceptualized as the origo to the terminus, that is, from those studying the corporation as shaped through external representations, on the one end, to those presenting a view of how the corporation emerges through representations it projects outward on the other end.
Representing Corporate Social Responsibility, Branding the Commodity as Gift, and Reconfiguring the Corporation as ‘Super-’Person
Authors: Koh Kyung-Nan 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThis paper discusses how a Hawaiian corporation planned to redevelop an existing town by using a community-based approach to urban design. It examines how local residents were enlisted into the corporate work procedures in the capacity of authors and how their ideas and beliefs expressed were semiotically transformed and inscribed into design renderings of the future town. Analyses focus on how the corporation discursively positions itself as a person relative to the locals, and how various ideas expressed linguistically regarding the town are used to visually draw specific town design features. What is shown is that in taking into account and synthesizing the views of both the corporation and the local residents (i.e., customers), a design of the future town emerges as representation of a corporate brand community. It is argued that developed in this manner, the town as a commodity is one in which it is prefigured as a sign of the corporate status and social role within the community, and also that which has the capacity to yield future returns to the corporation in both the metaphorical (i.e., brand mediation) and actual (i.e., leases and sales) sense.
Mass constraints to Sco X-1 from Bowen fluorescence and deep near-infrared spectroscopy
Authors: Mata Sánchez D. , Muñoz-Darias T. , Casares J. , Steeghs D. , Ramos Almeida C. , Acosta Pulido J. A. 
Published: February 2015

Abstract
More than 50 years after the dawn of X-ray astronomy, the dynamical parameters of the prototypical X-ray binary Sco X-1 are still unknown. We combine a Monte Carlo analysis, which includes all the previously known orbital parameters of the system, along with the K-correction to set dynamical constraints to the masses of the compact object (M1 &lt; 1.73 M⊙) and the companion star (0.28 M⊙ &lt; M2 &lt; 0.70 M⊙). For the case of a canonical neutron star mass of M1 ∼ 1.4 M⊙, the orbital inclination is found to be lower than 40°. We also present the best near-infrared spectrum of the source to date. There is no evidence of donor star features on it, but we are able to constrain the veiling factor as a function of the spectral type of the secondary star. The combination of both techniques restricts the spectral type of the donor to be later than K4 and luminosity class IV. It also constrains the contribution of the companion light to the infrared emission of Sco X-1 to be lower than 33 per cent. This implies that the accretion related luminosity of the system in the K band is larger than ∼4 × 1035 erg s−1.
Farm household level adaptation metrics for agriculture and water sectors
Authors: Nambi A. Arivudai , Bahinipati Chandra Sekhar , Raghunath Ranjini , Nagendran R. 
Published: February 2015

Purpose
– This study aims to provide a methodology for constructing farm household-level adaptation metrics for agriculture and water sectors. The livelihood of farm households is at risk now and in the foreseeable future, as both agriculture and water sectors are vulnerable to climate variability, particularly in developing nations. Adaptation is critical to protect their livelihood. Vulnerable farmers have adopted various adaptation mechanisms to counteract negative impacts of climate variability, though the extent varies temporally and spatially.

Design/methodology/approach
– It is, therefore, imperative to understand current adaptation practices for successfully implementing them. A few studies have emerged so far in this context, investigating different issues associated with micro-level adaptation strategies related to agriculture and water sectors, e.g. output and cost-effectiveness, and constraints related to farm, household and institutional levels.

Findings
– While such analysis is critical to enhance micro-level adaptation measures, there is a felt need to formulate adaptation metrics that can investigate the underlying factors in an integrated manner. For empirical assessment, 146 farmers were interviewed from different agro-ecological zones of Tamil Nadu, India, regarding seven adaptation measures, such as micro-irrigation, rainwater harvesting, resistant crops, use of bio-fertilisers, crop insurance, income diversification and community-based efforts.

Practical implications
– These adaptation measures were evaluated through an Analytical Hierarchy Process using four criteria: effective awareness, economic viability, individual and institutional compatibility and flexibility and independent benefits.

Originality/value
– The present study provides a methodology to identify barriers that limit implementation of adaptation measures, and enable target-oriented policy measures to promote appropriate adaptation strategies at the local level.
Decline in maize and beans production in the face of climate change at Hai District in Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania
Authors: Munishi Linus K. , Lema Anza A. , Ndakidemi Patrick A. 
Published: February 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to show how climatic change in Africa is expected to lead to a higher occurrence of severe droughts in semiarid and arid ecosystems. Understanding how crop productions react to such events is, thus, crucial for addressing future challenges for food security and poverty alleviation.

Design/methodology/approach
– The authors explored how temperature and rainfall patterns determined maize and beans production in Hai District in Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania.

Findings
– Annual food crops were particularly sensitive to the drought and maize and beans yields were lower than perennial crops during the years of drought. The authors also report strong and significant association between maize and beans production with temperature and rainfall patterns.

Practical implications
– This study highlights how severe droughts can dramatically affect yields of annual crops and suggests that extreme climatic events might act as a major factor affecting agriculture production and food security, delaying or preventing the realization of the Millennium Development Goals.

Originality/value
– This is the first study that highlights how severe droughts can dramatically affect yields of annual crops in Hai District contributing to other climate studies done elsewhere in Tanzania and the world at large.
Crossing the threshold from founder management to professional management in Russian firms
Authors: Shirokova Galina , Vega Gina , Knatko Dmitri 
Published: February 2015

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to bring together a strategic choice perspective and an institutional perspective in order to address the key research questions: how do Russian founder-CEOs perceive the institutional environment when succession issues are taken into consideration?; how do the perceived characteristics of different formal and informal institutions affect the founder-CEO’s decision to delegate authority to a professional CEO?; and what are the main barriers to founder-CEO succession in threshold firms in emerging markets such as Russia?Design/methodology/approach– Using a data set of 500 entrepreneurial companies from fast growing industries in Russia, the paper defines and studies threshold firms and analyses how various perceived characteristics of the institutional environment in emerging markets influence the likelihood of transition from founder management to professional management.Findings– Institutional factors such as poor security of property rights and dependence of the business on relationships with government officials have a negative impact on the likelihood of founder-CEO succession in threshold firms in emerging markets. At the same time, the perception of contract law as insecure increases the likelihood of transition from founder management to professional management.Originality/value– Most research on initial succession deals with internal organisational factors and does not consider external environments and their influence on founder-CEO departure and willingness to exit from company management. This study is unique in its focus on the external environment and institutional factors and their impact on management transitions in threshold firms in emerging economies.
Top management team characteristics and firm growth
Authors: Colombelli Alessandra 
Published: February 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting the growth of companies listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the London Stock Exchange market for young and growing companies.

Design/methodology/approach
– The author investigates post-initial public offering (IPO) growth for a panel of 665 companies listed on the AIM between 1995 and 2006. The empirical model uses the generalized method of moment-System (GMM-SYS) estimator.

Findings
– The findings confirm that small companies listed on the AIM grow more quickly after the IPO. It seems that both human capital and firm characteristics are important determinants of their rapid growth.

Practical implications
– The results of this study have some implications for policy. Policy makers should take account of the relevance of an efficient financial system. It is important also to consider the process of transformation of the cultural and behavioural attitudes of various countries towards entrepreneurship.

Originality/value
– This paper analyses the determinants of firm growth in a particular entrepreneurial setting, that is, IPO on the AIM, the sub-market of the London Stock Exchange.
Initiating nascent entrepreneurial activities
Authors: Bayon Manoj Chandra , Vaillant Yancy , Lafuente Esteban 
Published: February 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct effect of two individual-level resources, one subjective and the other objective, and their interaction in influencing the business entry decision. By distinguishing perceived ability from actual ability and using theoretical underpinnings from the human capital theory and self-efficacy theory, the proposed hypotheses are tested on a data set comprising respondents from the adult population.

Design/methodology/approach
– Using 20,046 observations from the adult population survey (APS) collected according to the global entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) methodology, a logistic regression analysis controlling for robust interaction term is used to determine the direct and interaction effect of perceived entrepreneurial ability and actual ability in influencing the decision to initiate nascent entrepreneurial activities.

Findings
– The results reveal that perceived entrepreneurial ability has a distinct positive influence on the decision to initiate entrepreneurial activities and its impact is greater than that of actual abilities. Furthermore, the authors find evidence of a positive interaction effect suggesting that perceived entrepreneurial ability is a key determinant of entrepreneurial initiatives among those with high actual ability.

Originality/value
– The main contribution of the study is to highlight the role of subjective judgements of ability in influencing entrepreneurial behaviour. Whereas prior research has found that actual ability influences new venture performance, its influence on new business entry was inconclusive. By including perceived entrepreneurial ability to the model the authors not only establish a link between objective (observable) abilities and subjective (unobservable) abilities of individuals but also suggest the mechanism through which subjective ability perception drive the business entry decisions of individuals.