Best Practices in Diversity Management

[Excerpt] The International Personnel Management Association (IPMA) has undertaken a human resource benchmarking project with the National Association of State Personnel Executives (NASPE). IPMA is an organization representing over 1,700 organizations and 2,500 individuals involved in public sector human resource management. The Association’s mission is to optimize organizational and individual performance in the public service by providing human resource leadership, professional development, information and services. IPMA has established an International Human Resource Advisory Board to facilitate the exchange of information on international human resource developments. The International Human Resource Advisory Board has 37 members from 35 countries and international organizations. Additional information about IPMA can be obtained at http://www.ipma-hr.org

History and Unique Features of the Farm Credit System

Agricultural Finance,

Stein's Method for the Single Server Queue in Heavy Traffic

Following recent developments in the application of Stein's method in queueing theory, this paper is intended to be a short treatment showing how Stein's method can be developed and applied to the single server queue in heavy traffic. Here we provide two approaches to this approximation: one based on equilibrium couplings and another involving comparison of generators.Comment: 11 pages. To appear in Statistics and Probability Letters, 2019

Control for an Autonomous Bicycle

The control of nonholonomic and underactuated systems with symmetry is illustrated by the problem of controlling a bicycle. We derive a controller which, using steering and rear-wheel torque, causes a model of a riderless bicycle to recover its balance from a near fall as well as converge to a time parameterized path in the ground plane. Our construction utilizes new results for both the derivation of equations of motion for nonholonomic systems with symmetry, as well as the control of underactuated robotic systems

Regioselective reactions of 3,4-pyridynes enabled by the aryne distortion model.

The pyridine heterocycle continues to play a vital role in the development of human medicines. More than 100 currently marketed drugs contain this privileged unit, which remains highly sought after synthetically. We report an efficient means to access di- and trisubstituted pyridines in an efficient and highly controlled manner using transient 3,4-pyridyne intermediates. Previous efforts to employ 3,4-pyridynes for the construction of substituted pyridines were hampered by a lack of regiocontrol or the inability to later manipulate an adjacent directing group. The strategy relies on the use of proximal halide or sulfamate substituents to perturb pyridyne distortion, which in turn governs regioselectivities in nucleophilic addition and cycloaddition reactions. After trapping of the pyridynes generated in situ, the neighbouring directing groups may be removed or exploited using versatile metal-catalysed cross-coupling reactions. This methodology now renders 3,4-pyridynes as useful synthetic building blocks for the creation of highly decorated derivatives of the medicinally privileged pyridine heterocycle

Tracking implicit trajectories

Output tracking of implcitly defined reference trajectories is examined. A continuous-time nonlinear dynamical system is constructed that produces explicit estimates of time-varying implicit trajectories. We prove that incorporation of this "dynamic inverter" into a tracking controller provides exponential output tracking of the implicitly defined trajectory for nonlinear control systems having vector relative degree and well-behaved internal dynanmics

Joint-space tracking of workspace trajectories in continuous time

We present a controller for a class of robotics manipulators which provides exponential convergence to a desired end-effector trajectory using gains specified in joint-space. This is accomplished without appeal to the use of discrete inverse-kinematics algorithms, allowing the controller to be posed entirely in continuous time

Dynamic inversion and polar decomposition of matrices

Using the recently introduced concept of a "dynamic inverse" of a map, along with its associated analog computational paradigm. we construct continuous-time nonlinear dynamical systems which produce both regular and generalized inverses of time-varying and fixed matrices, as well as polar decompositions

Management of Widespread Pain and Fibromyalgia

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Twisted Permutation Codes

We introduce twisted permutation codes, which are frequency permutation arrays analogous to repetition permutation codes, namely, codes obtained from the repetition construction applied to a permutation code. In particular, we show that a lower bound for the minimum distance of a twisted permutation code is the minimum distance of a repetition permutation code. We give examples where this bound is tight, but more importantly, we give examples of twisted permutation codes with minimum distance strictly greater than this lower bound.Comment: 20 page