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Widespread Practice (widespread + practice)
Selected AbstractsCapability, Quality, and Performance of Offshore IS Vendors: A Theoretical Framework and Empirical InvestigationDECISION SCIENCES, Issue 2 2010Prashant C. Palvia ABSTRACT Information systems (IS) offshoring has become a widespread practice and a strategic sourcing choice for many firms. While much has been written by researchers about the factors that lead to successful offshoring arrangements from the client's viewpoint, the vendor's perspective has been largely scarce. The vendor perspective is equally important as offshore IS vendors need to make important decisions in terms of delivering operational and strategic performance and aligning their resources and processes in order to meet or exceed targeted outcomes. In this article, we propose and test a three-level capability,quality,performance (CQP) theoretical framework to understand vendor outcomes and their antecedents. The first level of the framework represents three vendor capabilities: relationship management, contract management, and information technology management. The second level has three mediating variables representing process quality: partnership, service, and deliverable quality. The third level has three dependent variables representing vendor outcomes: operational performance, strategic performance, and satisfaction. The model was tested with 188 vendor firms from India and China, the two most popular destinations for IS offshoring. Results support the CQP framework; vendor capabilities are significant predictors of intermediate quality measures, which in turn affect vendor outcomes. Implications of the study findings to both theory development and IS offshore vendor strategic decision making are discussed. [source] Policy implications of the widespread practice of ,pre-drinking' or ,pre-gaming' before going to public drinking establishments,are current prevention strategies backfiring?ADDICTION, Issue 1 2009Samantha Wells ABSTRACT Aim To describe the research, policy and prevention implications of pre-drinking or pre-gaming; that is, planned heavy drinking prior to going to a public drinking establishment. Methods The authors describe the phenomenon of pre-drinking, motivations for pre-drinking and its associated risks using available research literature, media and popular internet vehicles. Results Heavy drinking prior to going out has emerged as a common and celebrated practice among young adults around the world. Apparent motivations are: (i) to avoid paying for high priced drinks at commercial drinking establishments; (ii) to achieve drunkenness and enhance and extend the night out; and (iii) to socialize with friends, reduce social anxiety or enhance male group bonding before going out. Limited existing research on pre-drinking suggests that it is associated with heavy drinking and harmful consequences. We argue that policies focused upon reducing drinking in licensed premises may have the unintended consequence of displacing drinking to pre-drinking environments, possibly resulting in greater harms. Conclusions Effective policy and prevention for drinking in licensed premises requires a comprehensive approach that takes into account the entire drinking occasion (not just drinking that occurs in the licensed environment), as well as the ,determined drunkenness' goal of some young people. [source] Protein,protein docking dealing with the unknownJOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY, Issue 2 2010Irina S. Moreira Abstract Protein,protein binding is one of the critical events in biology, and knowledge of proteic complexes three-dimensional structures is of fundamental importance for the biochemical study of pharmacologic compounds. In the past two decades there was an emergence of a large variety of algorithms designed to predict the structures of protein,protein complexes,a procedure named docking. Computational methods, if accurate and reliable, could play an important role, both to infer functional properties and to guide new experiments. Despite the outstanding progress of the methodologies developed in this area, a few problems still prevent protein,protein docking to be a widespread practice in the structural study of proteins. In this review we focus our attention on the principles that govern docking, namely the algorithms used for searching and scoring, which are usually referred as the docking problem. We also focus our attention on the use of a flexible description of the proteins under study and the use of biological information as the localization of the hot spots, the important residues for protein,protein binding. The most common docking softwares are described too. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010 [source] Constitution-making and the Transformation of ConflictPEACE & CHANGE, Issue 2 2001Vivien Hart A constitution has traditionally been seen as the documentary record of a settlement of conflict. This traditional constitution is an enactive document, consummating the creation of a polity. Constitution-making has been a widespread practice in the many conflicted and divided societies of the late twentieth century. The issues of recent conflicts are concerned with the recognition of identities as well as with provisions for the legitimate exercise of power. This agenda necessitates a process as important as the product, both open-ended and open to participation. I propose that we reconsider constitution-making as itself a part of the process of conflict transformation. Defining constitution-making as a forum for negotiation or a continuing conversation amid conflict and division draws attention to the distinctive characteristics of modern constitutionalism and to the ways in which this process helps or hinders the transformation of conflict. Examples are drawn from recent constitution-making in Canada, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. [source] Personifying the State: Consequences for Attitude FormationPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2007Kathleen M. McGraw Because states are abstract entities, they often require embodiment for mass publics and elites to understand them. This embodiment often occurs as personification, where the state is associated with the most salient figure in the political system, but embodiment can also occur through political institutions and social groups. Surprisingly, there is virtually no systematic empirical work on the political and psychological consequences of state personification, or other forms of embodiment. In this experiment, we investigate how various ways of embodying the state influence attitude formation processes. Drawing on the on-line/memory-based processing and entitativity literatures, we hypothesize that personification of the state should facilitate on-line processing and stronger attitudes, whereas embodying the state as a parliamentary institution should produce weaker attitudes that are formed in a memory-based fashion. The results support these hypotheses. Embodiment as a social group produced inconsistent results. This study provides the first systematic evidence that the widespread practice of personification of the state has robust and potentially far-reaching attitudinal consequences that have meaningful implications for strategic interaction, perception and learning, and attitude change in the international realm. [source] Prenatal Sex Determination and Sex-Selective Abortion in Rural Central ChinaPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 2 2001Chu Junhong This study analyzes the practice of prenatal sex selection in rural central China. It examines the prevalence and determinants of prenatal sex determination by ultrasound scanning and subsequent sex-selective abortion. The data are derived from a survey of 820 married women aged 20,44 and from in-depth interviews with rural women and men, village leaders, family planning managers, and health providers, conducted by the author in one county in central China in 2000. Prenatal sex determination was a widespread practice, especially for second and higher-order pregnancies. Sex-selective abortion was prevalent and order of pregnancy, sex of fetus, and sex of previous children were major determinants of the practice. A female fetus representing a high-order pregnancy in a family with one or more daughters was the most likely to be aborted. Awareness among rural families that in the population at large a future marriage squeeze was likely did not diminish the demand for sex-selective abortion. [source] Taken into custody: girls and convent guardianship in Renaissance FlorenceRENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 2 2003Sharon T. Strocchia This study examines the widespread practice of placing girls in the temporary care of convents in Renaissance Florence, a practice called serbanza. During the turbulent years from 1480 to 1530, guardianship became one of the most important social services offered by female religious communities, which sheltered girls in increasing numbers. Serbanza was the major form of extrafamilial care for young girls of the middling and artisan classes, as well as for the vulnerable rich, before the advent of large-scale custodial institutions in the later sixteenth century. Based on extensive archival records, this study documents how patterns of guardianship changed in response to political turmoil and concerns over female honour. I argue that convent guardianship formed part of the institutional and experiential foundation of female culture that cut across lines of neighbourhood and class, and introduced girls to a distinctive kind of constructed community. Boarding girls on a regular basis also raised important issues for internal monastic governance and ecclesiastical supervision. Nuns balanced the financial and social benefits of guardianship against the disruption of monastic routines and the disapproval of clerical officials. These tensions were resolved only by the reorganization of convent life and the development of new custodial institutions under Cosimo I. (pp. 177,200) [source] Treatment of HCC in Patients Awaiting Liver TransplantationAMERICAN JOURNAL OF TRANSPLANTATION, Issue 8 2007M. Schwartz Liver transplantation (LT) is the treatment of choice for many patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but long waiting time due to the shortage of donor organs can result in tumor progression and drop-out from LT candidacy. Furthermore, even in candidates meeting the restrictive Milan criteria there is risk of HCC recurrence; this risk rises significantly when patients with more advanced HCC are included. In an effort to address these issues, treatment of HCC in patients awaiting LT has become widespread practice. In this review the various modalities employed in the pre-LT setting are presented, and the evidence for benefit with regard to (1) improvement of post-LT survival, (2) down-staging of advanced HCC to within Milan criteria and (3) preventing waiting list drop-out is considered. Chemoembolization, radiofrequency ablation and ethanol injection all have well-documented antitumor activity; however, there is no high level evidence that waiting list HCC treatment with these modalities is effective in achieving any of the three above-mentioned aims. Nevertheless, particularly in the United States, where continued waiting list priority depends on maintaining HCC within Milan criteria, use of nonsurgical HCC treatment will likely continue in an effort to forestall tumor progression and waiting list drop-out. [source] | |||||||||||||