Diffusion Research with Nanoporous Material

Owing to their potential for eco-friendly matter upgrading by molecular sieving and shape-selective conversion, nanoporous materials are among the pioneers of green chemistry. The performance of their application is often controlled by diffusion, i.e. the rate of mass transfer within these materials. This mass transfer, however, is rather complex and subject to numerous influences. Unambiguous diffusion measurement has thus remained a challenge to this day with errors in the interpretation of experimental data being all too common. The present feature reports the efforts of an IUPAC initiative to overcome these limitations.

Reframing and reacting to employees’ responses to change: a focus on resistance

BackgroundA hallmark of a leader is their ability to manage change—an ever-present feature of organisational life. Indeed, all improvement requires change, and in this context navigating employees’ responses to progress change is a key part of leadership. To support this, research and leadership development have historically focused on how leaders can reduce resistance to change. This review highlights the value of reframing classic conceptions of resistance to change as something negative.ResultWidening understanding of non-acceptance responses to change supports the provision of broader, yet more meaningful advice to leaders and managers about how to engage with employees in ways that can support improvement. To do this, the article identifies why resistance is important in the contemporary context and then outlines three current broad views within research on resistance to change identified by Robyn Thomas and Cynthia Hardy. These influence how resistance is seen and therefore how it is approached. The article considers what leaders can learn and do to more effectively navigate employees’ responses to change, and how reframing resistance applies to the specific context of healthcare.

New generations of spirobifluorene regioisomers for organic electronics: tuning electronic properties with the substitution pattern

In the present feature article, we present the new generations of spirobifluorenes for organic electronics and we detail the impact of positional isomerism on the electronic properties and device performance.

Person-Centered Methodologies in the Organizational Sciences

The 2011 Organizational Research Methods Feature Topic on latent class procedures has helped to establish person-centered analyses as a method of choice in the organizational sciences. This establishment has contributed to the generation of substantive-methodological synergies leading to a better understanding of a variety of organizational phenomena and to an improvement in research methodologies. The present Feature Topic aims to provide a user-friendly introduction to these new methodological developments for applied organizational researchers. Organized around a presentation of the typological, prototypical, and methodologically exploratory nature of person-centered analyses, this introductory article introduces seven contributions aiming to: (a) clarify the meaning, advantages, and applications of person-centered analyses; (b) illustrate emerging prototypical and longitudinal cluster analytic approaches; (c) introduce researchers to multilevel person-centered analyses as well as to auxiliary approaches that will drastically increase the scope of application of these methods; and (d) describe the application of these methods for confirmatory purposes.

Divergent Oxidative Couplings between Indoles and 2,3-Dihydroxybenzoic Acid Derivatives for the Biomimetic Synthesis of Voacalgine A and Bipleiophylline

The present feature article details our endeavors towards the synthesis of the highly intricate bisindole alkaloid bipleiophylline and its biosynthetic precursor voacalgine A: from the development of a divergent oxidative coupling between indole and dihydroxybenzoic acids, to the exploration of the chemical space from natural products and culminating in the biomimetic assembly of voacalgine A and bipleiophylline.

Coordination nanosheets (CONASHs): strategies, structures and functions

The present feature article assembles recent rapid progress in the coordination nanosheet (CONASH), the interest of which traverses from basic to materials science.

Organocatalytic routes toward substituted 1,2,3-triazoles

The present feature article describes the different organocatalytic routes for the synthesis of substituted 1,2,3-triazoles.

A Probabilistic SVM Approach to Annotation of Calcification Mammograms

Due to the increasing use of digital medical images, a need exists to develop an approach for automatic image annotation, which provides textual labels for images. Thus added labels can be used to access images using textual queries. Automatic image annotation can be separated into two individual tasks: feature extraction and image classification. In this paper, the authors present feature extraction methods for calcification mammograms. The resultant features, based on BI-RADS standards, make annotated image contents represent the correct medical meaning and tag correspondent terms. Furthermore, this paper also proposes a probabilistic SVM approach to image classification. Finally, the experimental results indicate that the probabilistic SVM approach to image annotation can achieve 79.5% in the average accuracy rate.