University of New South Wales

About: University of New South Wales is a education organization based out in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 51197 authors who have published 153634 publications receiving 4880608 citations. The organization is also known as: UNSW & UNSW Australia.

Competitive advantage: logical and philosophical considerations

Abstract: Strategic management theories invoke the concept of competitive advantage to explain firm performance, and empirical research investigates competitive advantage and describes how it operates. But as a performance hypothesis, competitive advantage has received surprisingly little formal justification, particularly in light of its centrality in strategy research and practice. As it happens, the core hypothesis - that competitive advantage produces sustained superior performance - finds little support in formal deductive or inductive inference, and the leading theories of competitive advantage incorporate refutation barriers that preclude meaningful empirical tests. The logical and philosophical foundations of the competitive advantage hypothesis are explored, locating its philosophical foundations in the epistemologies of Bayesian induction, abductive inference and an instrumentalist, pragmatic philosophy of science.

Bacterial community assembly based on functional genes rather than species

Abstract: for colonization of the algal surface in an attempt to explain the surprising lack of similarity in species composition across different algal samples. Here we extend the previous study by investigating the link between community structure and function in these com- munities, using metagenomic sequence analysis. Despite the high phylogenetic variability in microbial species composition on differ- ent U. australis (only 15% similarity between samples), similarity in functional composition was high (70%), and a core of functional genes present across all algal-associated communities was identi- fied that were consistent with the ecology of surface- and host- associated bacteria. These functions were distributed widely across a variety of taxa or phylogenetic groups. This observation of simi- larityinhabitat(niche)usewithrespecttofunctional genes,butnot species, together with the relative ease with which bacteria share happens to arrive there first, meaning that colonization of space is random from within a functionally equivalent group of species. In the context of a bacterial community, this model implies that there are guilds of bacterial species, whose members are func- tionally equivalent with respect to their ability to colonize a particular niche (e.g., the surface of the seaweed Ulva aus- tralis), but that the composition of species in any particular community (e.g., a single U. australis individual) is determined stochastically by recruitment from within those guilds. Impor- tantly, members of a guild can be phylogenetically related or unrelated. If this model is correct, different species from within these guilds should share functional traits, and a core suite of functional genes should be consistently present in all communi- ties of a particular habitat, independent of the taxonomic or phylogenetic composition of its species. In an earlier study (13) we characterized the bacterial phylo- genetic diversity of seawater and U. australis, a member of a common green algal family often found in tidal rock pools or shelves around the world. We found that algal-associated com- munities were highly distinct from the surrounding seawater communities, but were also highly variable among individual algal samples, with only six operational taxonomic units (of a total of 528) at a 97% sequence identity cut-off occurring on all samples (13). This finding means that each U. australis sample hosts a unique assemblage of species (as defined by 97% 16S rRNA similarity). Given that the recruitment of new community mem- bers onto U. australis is most likely to come from the seawater, theseresultsaresomewhatcontradictorywithrespecttodominant models of community assembly: the differences between seawater and algal communities imply selective mechanisms of assembly on the algal surface (niche partitioning), and the high variability be- tween algal hosts is consistent with random colonization (e.g., neutral processes). Here, we analyze the metagenomes of these communities to show that the algal-associated bacterial communities are func- tionally distinct from seawater communities, but contain a core of functional genes, which are represented across all algal sam- ples. These functions are consistent with the ecology of surface- and host-associated bacteria, and importantly are distributed across a variety of taxa in individual communities, indicating functional redundancy across taxa. This mix of functional and random processes is consistent with the predictions of the com-

Raltegravir with Optimized Background Therapy for Resistant HIV-1 Infection

Abstract: Results In the combined studies, 699 of 703 randomized patients (462 and 237 in the raltegravir and placebo groups, respectively) received the study drug. Seventeen of the 699 patients (2.4%) discontinued the study before week 16. Discontinuation was related to the study treatment in 13 of these 17 patients: 7 of the 462 raltegravir recipients (1.5%) and 6 of the 237 placebo recipients (2.5%). The results of the two studies were consistent. At week 16, counting noncompletion as treatment failure, 355 of 458 raltegravir recipients (77.5%) had HIV-1 RNA levels below 400 copies per milliliter, as compared with 99 of 236 placebo recipients (41.9%, P<0.001). Suppression of HIV-1 RNA to a level below 50 copies per milliliter was achieved at week 16 in 61.8% of the raltegravir recipients, as compared with 34.7% of placebo recipients, and at week 48 in 62.1% as compared with 32.9% (P<0.001 for both comparisons). Without adjustment for the length of follow-up, cancers were detect ed in 3.5% of raltegravir recipients and in 1.7% of placebo recipients. The overall frequencies of drug-related adverse events were similar in the raltegravir and placebo groups. Conclusions In HIV-infected patients with limited treatment options, raltegravir plus optimized background therapy provided better viral suppression than optimized background therapy alone for at least 48 weeks. (ClinicalTrials.gov numbers, NCT00293267 and NCT00293254.)

Third generation photovoltaics: Ultra‐high conversion efficiency at low cost

Abstract: Since the early days of terrestrial photovoltaics, a common perception has been that ‘first generation’ silicon wafer-based solar cells eventually would be replaced by a ‘second generation’ of lower cost thin-film technology, probably also involving a different semiconductor. Historically, cadmium sulphide, amorphous silicon, copper indium diselenide, cadmium telluride and now thin-film polycrystalline silicon have been regarded as key thin-film candidates. Any mature solar cell technology seems likely to evolve to the stage where costs are dominated by those of the constituent materials, be they silicon wafers or glass sheet. It is argued, therefore, that photovoltaics is likely to evolve, in its most mature form, to a ‘third generation’ of high-efficiency thin-film technology. By high efficiency, what is meant is energy conversion values double or triple the 15–20% range presently targeted, closer to the thermodynamic limit of 93%. Tandem cells are the best known of such high-efficiency approaches, where efficiency can be increased merely by adding more cells of different bandgap to a cell stack, at the expense of increased complexity and spectral sensitivity. However, a range of other more ‘paralleled’ approaches offer similar efficiency to an infinite stack of tandem cells. These options are reviewed together with possible approaches for practical implementation, likely to become more feasible with the evolution of materials technology over the next two decades. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Small particles, big impacts: A review of the diverse applications of nanofluids

Abstract: Nanofluids—a simple product of the emerging world of nanotechnology—are suspensions of nanoparticles (nominally 1–100 nm in size) in conventional base fluids such as water, oils, or glycols. Nanofluids have seen enormous growth in popularity since they were proposed by Choi in 1995. In the year 2011 alone, there were nearly 700 research articles where the term nanofluid was used in the title, showing rapid growth from 2006 (175) and 2001 (10). The first decade of nanofluid research was primarily focused on measuring and modeling fundamental thermophysical properties of nanofluids (thermal conductivity, density, viscosity, heat transfer coefficient). Recent research, however, explores the performance of nanofluids in a wide variety of other applications. Analyzing the available body of research to date, this article presents recent trends and future possibilities for nanofluids research and suggests which applications will see the most significant improvement from employing nanofluids.