Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About: Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a education organization based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Laser. The organization has 116795 authors who have published 268000 publications receiving 18272025 citations. The organization is also known as: MIT & M.I.T..

Organizational Culture and Leadership

Abstract: Discusses the key role of organizational leadership in organizational culture, and the intertwining problems associated with each. Organizational culture is defined as the basic assumptions and beliefs shared by members of an organization. These are learned, operate unconsciously, and essentially define an organization's view of itself and its environment. Though cultural differences are reflected in companies, each company also has an individual culture that modifies local or national cultures. Origins of culture are discussed, especially the entrepreneur's effect on cultural formation, and mechanisms of embedding and reinforcing cultural standards as a means of guiding an evolving company. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the book analyzes the maturing research in the field of organization studies - the available ethnographic methods, participant observation, qualitative research, and clinical research. Results indicate that culture functions to solve an organization's basic problems of (a) surviving in the external environment and (b) integrating its internal processes to ensure its continued survival. Since the organizational structure and people's attitudes and perceptions constitute key artifacts of a culture, both these must be changed before the company's overarching cultural change can occur. Typically, change begins at the formative stage as a positive growth force in need of development, evolves into a complex, diverse model of culture, and finally at the point of maturation, often becomes dysfunctional. It is at this point that the leader-usually the entrepreneur - is most crucial, often turning to various change models as a means of sustaining the company. Though the leader's role in cultural formation shifts, such purposeful, foundational change in an organization only occurs rarely in mature companies and under effective leadership. In sum, cultural leadership - and especially the role of the cultural manager - needs to be assessed more clearly in light of the organization's rapidly changing internal and external environment. (CJC)

Cooperative diversity in wireless networks: Efficient protocols and outage behavior

Abstract: We develop and analyze low-complexity cooperative diversity protocols that combat fading induced by multipath propagation in wireless networks. The underlying techniques exploit space diversity available through cooperating terminals' relaying signals for one another. We outline several strategies employed by the cooperating radios, including fixed relaying schemes such as amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward, selection relaying schemes that adapt based upon channel measurements between the cooperating terminals, and incremental relaying schemes that adapt based upon limited feedback from the destination terminal. We develop performance characterizations in terms of outage events and associated outage probabilities, which measure robustness of the transmissions to fading, focusing on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Except for fixed decode-and-forward, all of our cooperative diversity protocols are efficient in the sense that they achieve full diversity (i.e., second-order diversity in the case of two terminals), and, moreover, are close to optimum (within 1.5 dB) in certain regimes. Thus, using distributed antennas, we can provide the powerful benefits of space diversity without need for physical arrays, though at a loss of spectral efficiency due to half-duplex operation and possibly at the cost of additional receive hardware. Applicable to any wireless setting, including cellular or ad hoc networks-wherever space constraints preclude the use of physical arrays-the performance characterizations reveal that large power or energy savings result from the use of these protocols.

A global reference for human genetic variation.

Abstract: The 1000 Genomes Project set out to provide a comprehensive description of common human genetic variation by applying whole-genome sequencing to a diverse set of individuals from multiple populations. Here we report completion of the project, having reconstructed the genomes of 2,504 individuals from 26 populations using a combination of low-coverage whole-genome sequencing, deep exome sequencing, and dense microarray genotyping. We characterized a broad spectrum of genetic variation, in total over 88 million variants (84.7 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), 3.6 million short insertions/deletions (indels), and 60,000 structural variants), all phased onto high-quality haplotypes. This resource includes >99% of SNP variants with a frequency of >1% for a variety of ancestries. We describe the distribution of genetic variation across the global sample, and discuss the implications for common disease studies.

Molecular classification of cancer: class discovery and class prediction by gene expression monitoring.

Abstract: Although cancer classification has improved over the past 30 years, there has been no general approach for identifying new cancer classes (class discovery) or for assigning tumors to known classes (class prediction). Here, a generic approach to cancer classification based on gene expression monitoring by DNA microarrays is described and applied to human acute leukemias as a test case. A class discovery procedure automatically discovered the distinction between acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) without previous knowledge of these classes. An automatically derived class predictor was able to determine the class of new leukemia cases. The results demonstrate the feasibility of cancer classification based solely on gene expression monitoring and suggest a general strategy for discovering and predicting cancer classes for other types of cancer, independent of previous biological knowledge.