Northwestern University

About: Northwestern University is a education organization based out in Evanston, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 75430 authors who have published 188857 publications receiving 9463252 citations. The organization is also known as: Northwestern & NU.

When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies

Abstract: Employees in many contemporary organizations work with flexible routines and flexible technologies. When those employees find that they are unable to achieve their goals in the current environment, how do they decide whether they should change the composition of their routines or the materiality of the technologies with which they work? The perspective advanced in this paper suggests that the answer to this question depends on how human and material agencies-the basic building blocks common to both routines and technologies-are imbricated. Imbrication of human and material agencies creates infrastructure in the form of routines and technologies that people use to carry out their work. Routine or technological infrastructure used at any given moment is the result of previous imbrications of human and material agencies. People draw on this infrastructure to construct a perception that a technology either constrains their ability to achieve their goals, or that the technology affords the possibility of achieving new goals. The case of a computer simulation technology for automotive design used to illustrate this framework suggests that perceptions of constraint lead people to change their technologies while perceptions of affordance lead people to change their routines. This imbrication metaphor is used to suggest how a human agency approach to technology can usefully incorporate notions of material agency into its explanations of organizational change.

Gate Dielectrics for Organic Field‐Effect Transistors: New Opportunities for Organic Electronics

Abstract: In this contribution we review the motivations for, and recent advances in, new gate dielectric materials for incorporation into organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) for organic electronics. After a general introduction to OTFT materials, operating principles, and processing requirements for optimizing low-cost organic electronics, this review focuses on three classes of OTFT-compatible dielectrics: i) inorganic (high-k) materials; ii) polymeric materials; and iii) self-assembled mono- and/multilayer materials. The principal goals in this active research area are tunable and reduced OTFT operating voltages, leading to decreased device power consumption while providing excellent dielectric/insulator properties and efficient low-cost solution-phase processing characteristics.

Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes Associated with a Trial of Labor after Prior Cesarean Delivery

Abstract: background The proportion of women who attempt vaginal delivery after prior cesarean delivery has decreased largely because of concern about safety The absolute and relative risks associated with a trial of labor in women with a history of cesarean delivery, as compared with elective repeated cesarean delivery without labor, are uncertain

An interior algorithm for nonlinear optimization that combines line search and trust region steps

Abstract: An interior-point method for nonlinear programming is presented It enjoys the flexibility of switching between a line search method that computes steps by factoring the primal-dual equations and a trust region method that uses a conjugate gradient iteration Steps computed by direct factorization are always tried first, but if they are deemed ineffective, a trust region iteration that guarantees progress toward stationarity is invoked To demonstrate its effectiveness, the algorithm is implemented in the Knitro [6,28] software package and is extensively tested on a wide selection of test problems