The Roles of Standardization, Certification and Assurance Services in Global Commerce

In this article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of standardized product and process frameworks and a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe may increasingly be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce. This infrastructure is provided by a proliferation of performance codes and standards, many of which define acceptable social and environmental behavior, and a rapidly-growing number of privately-trained and authorized inspectors and certifiers that we call the third-party assurance industry. We offer reasons for this development, evidence of its scope and scale, and then describe the phenomenon in more detail by examining supply chain arrangements in two industries, food products and apparel, where the use of third-party standards and assurance services has expanded especially rapidly. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for the make or buy decision at the core of the theory of the firm. We argue that as quasi-regulatory standards are developed within various industries, and as performance to these standards can be systematically evaluated using third-party inspectors and certifiers, the costs of moving production outside of vertical firm hierarchies drop. We believe this may be an important factor in accelerating the shift to outsourcing that has been observed over the last two decades

The New Look pMSSM with Neutralino and Gravitino LSPs

The pMSSM provides a broad perspective on SUSY phenomenology. In this paper we generate two new, very large, sets of pMSSM models with sparticle masses extending up to 4 TeV, where the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) is either a neutralino or gravitino. The existence of a gravitino LSP necessitates a detailed study of its cosmological effects and we find that Big Bang Nucleosynthesis places strong constraints on this scenario. Both sets are subjected to a global set of theoretical, observational and experimental constraints resulting in a sample of \sim 225k viable models for each LSP type. The characteristics of these two model sets are briefly compared. We confront the neutralino LSP model set with searches for SUSY at the 7 TeV LHC using both the missing (MET) and non-missing ET ATLAS analyses. In the MET case, we employ Monte Carlo estimates of the ratios of the SM backgrounds at 7 and 8 TeV to rescale the 7 TeV data-driven ATLAS backgrounds to 8 TeV. This allows us to determine the pMSSM parameter space coverage for this collision energy. We find that an integrated luminosity of \sim 5-20 fb^{-1} at 8 TeV would yield a substantial increase in this coverage compared to that at 7 TeV and can probe roughly half of the model set. If the pMSSM is not discovered during the 8 TeV run, then our model set will be essentially void of gluinos and lightest first and second generation squarks that are \lesssim 700-800 GeV, which is much less than the analogous mSUGRA bound. Finally, we demonstrate that non-MET SUSY searches continue to play an important role in exploring the pMSSM parameter space. These two pMSSM model sets can be used as the basis for investigations for years to come.Comment: 54 pages, 22 figures; typos fixed, references adde

Gene and repetitive sequence annotation in the Triticeae

The Triticeae tribe contains some of the world’s most important agricultural crops (wheat, barley and rye) and is perhaps, one of the most challenging for genome annotation because Triticeae genomes are primarily composed of repetitive sequences. Further complicating the challenge is the polyploidy found in wheat and particularly in the hexaploid bread wheat genome. Genomic sequence data are available for the Triticeae in the form of large collections of Expressed Sequence Tags (>1.5 million) and an increasing number of bacterial artificial chromosome clone sequences. Given that high repetitive sequence content in the Triticeae confounds annotation of protein-coding genes, repetitive sequences have been identified, annotated, and collated into public databases. Protein coding genes in the Triticeae are structurally annotated using a combination of ab initio gene finders and experimental evidence. Functional annotation of protein coding genes involves assessment of sequence similarity to known proteins, expression evidence, and the presence of domain and motifs. Annotation methods and tools for Triticeae genomic sequences have been adapted from existing plant genome annotation projects and were designed to allow for flexibility of single sequence annotation while allowing a whole community annotation effort to be developed. With the availability of an increasing number of annotated grass genomes, comparative genomics can be exploited to accelerate and enhance the quality of Triticeae sequences annotation. This chapter provides a brief overview of the Triticeae genomes features that are challenging for genome annotation and describes the resources and methods available for sequence annotation with a particular emphasis on problems caused by the repetitive fraction of these genomes