Organizational climate in air traffic control Innovative preparedness for implementation of new technology and organizational development in a rule governed organization

A positive and innovative organizational climate is of great importance in order to manage and adapt to change. Such a climate seldom evolves in organizations closely governed by rules and regulations. Because of ongoing organizational and technical changes within the Swedish Air Navigation Services Provider, a study concerning the organizational climate for changes and innovations was conducted to investigate the organization's capacity to cope with changes. Study locations were the two Swedish main air traffic control centers and parts of the civil aviation administration headquarters. In the study 390 subjects took part and the CCQ questionnaire was used to measure the organizational climate. The results show that the organizational climate is quite positive despite the rule-governed work. The results also show that administrative personnel assess the organizational climate as more positive than operative personnel. Comparisons between management positions did not result in any differences.     

Clustering of high throughput gene expression data

High throughput biological data need to be processed, analyzed, and interpreted to address problems in life sciences. Bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology deal with biological problems using computational methods. Clustering is one of the methods used to gain insight into biological processes, particularly at the genomics level. Clearly, clustering can be used in many areas of biological data analysis. However, this paper presents a review of the current clustering algorithms designed especially for analyzing gene expression data. It is also intended to introduce one of the main problems in bioinformatics – clustering gene expression data – to the operations research community.     

An optimization model for storage yard management in transshipment hubs

This paper studies a yard storage allocation problem in a transshipment hub where there is a great number of loading and unloading activities. The primary challenge is to efficiently shift containers between the vessels and the storage area so that reshuffling and traffic congestion is minimized. In particular, to reduce reshuffling, a consignment strategy is used. This strategy groups unloaded containers according to their destination vessel. To reduce traffic congestion, a new workload balancing protocol is proposed. A mixed integer-programming model is then formulated to determine the minimum number of yard cranes to deploy and the location where unloaded containers should be stored. The model is solved using CPLEX. Due to the size and complexity of this model two heuristics are also developed. The first is a sequential method while the second is a column generation method. A bound is developed that allows the quality of the solution to be judged. Lastly, a numerical investigation is provided and demonstrates that the algorithms perform adequately on most cases considered.     

Effect of packaging materials and storage temperature on the quality of sour cherry nectar

The purpose of this research was to determine the effects of the packaging materials and size on the stability of monomeric anthocyanins, polyphenols, antioxidant activity, ascorbic acid, colour index and hydroxyl methyl furfural (HMF) during the 12‐month shelf life of sour cherry nectars at 4 °C and 20 °C. Sour cherry nectars were aseptically filled out into packaging of different sizes and materials. The packaging included cartons of two different sizes (200 and 1000 mL) and aluminium cans (330 mL). Results showed that the nectars were of better quality when stored at lower temperatures. HMF generally increased significantly for all nectars during storage. Conversely, the total polyphenol content and the antioxidant activity of the nectars stored in aluminium cans and the larger‐sized carton packaging decreased during storage. Lower anthocyanin loss and colour change were found in the nectars stored in aluminium cans. However, the better packaging material was found to be the large‐sized carton package when HMF was analysed.     

Removal of estrogenicity in Swedish municipal sewage treatment plants

The human estrogen receptor alpha-test, hosted in a yeast strain, was used to quantify estrogenicity in three-week composite samples of untreated and treated effluents from 20 Swedish municipal sewage treatment plants. The treatment plants were selected to represent different treatment processes regarding chemical precipitation and microbial procedures. The discharge from Swedish domestic sewage treatment plants contained estrogenic compounds corresponding to <0.1-15 ng estradiol equivalents/L. Low levels of estrogenic activity were also found in a river receiving municipal effluents, 3.5-35 km downstream the outlet from a sewage treatment works. The range of estrogenicity in untreated, raw sewage effluents was found to be 1-30 ng estradiol equivalents/L. Generally, wastewater treatment reduced the estrogenicity and extended biological treatment was most effective in its removal. Activated sludge treatment tended to be more effective than trickling filters, whereas chemical precipitation using iron or aluminium salts without biological treatment showed little effectivity. The study showed that treatment methods in current use are able to eliminate or largely reduce estrogenicity in domestic wastewater.     

Magnetic Properties of Zn1?x Ni x O (0.25≤x≤ 0.50) Prepared by Solid-State Reactions

In this study the origin of ferromagnetism in ZnO-based bulk systems has been investigated using Ni-doped ZnO samples, Zn_1−x Ni _x O with 0.25≤x≤0.50, prepared by solid-state reactions. The structural characterizations indicated that the Ni²⁺ ions almost uniformly distributed in all the samples, and the samples have hexagonal wurtzite structure; however, when x is increased toward 0.50, a new NiO phase is formed. A ferromagnetism (FM) has been observed for all the samples at and below the room temperature. In other words, the room temperature results of (M–H) curves show that the FM observed is intrinsic for all the Ni-doped ZnO samples. However, the saturated magnetizations decrease gradually with increasing Ni concentration. This indicates that, in addition to FM, the excessive doping of Ni in ZnO also causes an antiferromagnetic (AFM) contribution which increases with increasing Ni amount. This result is also supported by the magnetization against temperature measurements. Furthermore, the trend of the ac-susceptibility (χ) versus temperature curves, measured under an ac-magnetic field of 100 Oe, also support our conclusion about the antiferromagnetic contribution to ferromagnetism in our samples.     

Electronic structure calculations of vacancies and their influence on materials properties

We provide two examples to illustrate how electronic structure calculations contribute to our understanding of vacancies and their role in determining materials properties. Diffusion and electromigration in aluminium are known to depend strongly on vacancies. Electronic structure calculations show that the vacancy-impurity interaction oscillates with distance, and this leads to an explanation for both the increased electromigration resistance and the slow impurity diffusion for copper in aluminium. Calculations of vacancies in plutonium have been used in conjunction with positron annihilation lifetime measurements to identify the presence of helium-filled vacancies. Helium stabilization of vacancies can provide the precursor for subsequent vacancy-related changes in materials properties.     

Adrenergic and Cholinergic Nerves of the Human Urethra and Urinary Bladder. A histochemical study

The occurrence and distribution of adrenergic and acetylcholine esterase (AChE) positive nerves in the human urethra and urinary bladder were studied histochemically with the fluorescence method of Falck and Hillarp, and the copper thiocholine method of Koelle and Friedenwald. Both types of nerves were mainly confined to the layers of smooth muscle cells in the walls of the organs. In all parts of the urethra, there was a scanty supply of adrenergic nerves. Few adrenergic nerves were also found in the urinary bladder, except in the trigone area, where they were abundant. AChE-positive nerves were uniformly and richly distributed in the urinary bladder. Throughout the urethra the distribution of AChE-positive nerve fibres was uniform, but the number was clearly less than in the urinary bladder. No intrmurally located adrenergic or AChE-Positive ganglion cells could be demonstrated.     

Dynamic determination of vessel speed and selection of bunkering ports for liner shipping under stochastic environment

In this work, we study a liner shipping operational problem which considers how to dynamically determine the vessel speed and refueling decisions, for a single vessel in one service route. Our model is a multi-stage dynamic model, where the stochastic nature of the bunker prices is represented by a scenario tree structure. Also, we explicitly incorporate the uncertainty of bunker consumption rates into our model. As the model is a large-scale mixed integer programming model, we adopt a modified rolling horizon method to tackle the problem. Numerical results show that our framework provides a lower overall cost and more reliable schedule compared with the stationary model of a related work.     

Effect of refrigerant charge on the performance of air conditioning systems

An air conditioning system operates in an optimal condition if the system is fully charged with a specified amount of refrigerant. Poor field maintenance or refrigerant leakage causes low level of charge resulting in a lower thermal performance and higher operating cost. An experimental investigation was conducted to study the effect of low charge level of R‐22 on the performance of a 3‐ton residential air conditioning system. The experimental results show that if a system is undercharged to 90 per cent then the effect is small: a 3.5 per cent reduction in cooling capacity and a 2 per cent increase in the coefficient of performance (COP). However, the system performance suffers serious degradation if the level of charge drops below 80 per cent. An ice layer formed on the outer surface of the cooling coil impedes the heat transfer between the warm air and cold refrigerant vapour. An economic analysis shows that the cost of properly charging an under‐charged system which is at an 85 per cent charge level, can pay for itself in savings in a short period of 3–4 months. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.