O presente artigo tem como pergunta norteadora: Quais sao os aspectos peculiares das empresas familiares? O objetivo principal da pesquisa e identificar na bibliografia eletronica publicacoes entre o ano de 2010 a 2016 que apresentem as peculiaridades da cultura organizacional nas empresas familiares. A pesquisa foi realizada por meio de uma revisao sistematica e seus dados analisados segundo a metodologia da metassintese. Foram selecionados artigos nas bases de dados academicos SCIELO, BDTD E PEPSIC, utilizando-se os descritores: Empresa familiar e sucessao; valores organizacionais em empresas familiares; empresa familiar e cultura; empreendimentos familiares; empresa familiar. A escolha do tema ocorreu por notar que trabalhos nesta tematica predominam nas producoes cientificas de administradores.  Alguns pontos como lealdade, confianca entre as relacoes familiares, o baixo custo de transacao, o respeito mutuo, o menor custo com recrutamento, a linguagem familiar, valores, hereditariedade, sucessao, gestao familiar, sao caracteristicas que segundo os autores podem se tornar vantagens competitivas quando potencializadas. Os aspectos peculiares identificados foram: influencia da familia na tomada de decisoes; transmissao de valores pessoais do fundador; relacoes tradicionais; sucessao familiar; gestao familiar. A cultura organizacional esta relacionada com a tradicao e a historia da organizacao.

Manifold calculus of functors has in recent years been successfully used in the study of the topology of various spaces of embeddings of one manifold in another. Given a space of embeddings, the theory produces a Taylor tower whose purpose is to approximate this space in a suitable sense. Central to the story are deep theorems about the convergence of this tower. We provide an exposition of the convergence results in the special case of embeddings into $\mathbb R^n$, which has been the case of primary interest in applications. We try to use as little machinery as possible and give several improvements and restatements of existing arguments used in the proofs of the main results.

The growing field of metabolomics has opened up new opportunities for prediction of type 2 diabetes (T2D) going beyond the classical biochemistry assays. We aimed to identify markers from different pathways which represent early metabolic changes and test their predictive performance for T2D, as compared to the performance of traditional risk factors (TRF). We analyzed 2776 participants from the Erasmus Rucphen Family study from which 1571 disease free individuals were followed up to 14-years. The targeted metabolomics measurements at baseline were performed by three different platforms using either nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy or mass spectrometry. We selected 24 T2D markers by using Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection operator (LASSO) regression and tested their association to incidence of disease during follow-up. The 24 markers i.e. high-density, low-density and very low-density lipoprotein sub-fractions, certain triglycerides, amino acids, and small intermediate compounds predicted future T2D with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.81. The performance of the metabolic markers compared to glucose was significantly higher among the young (age < 50 years) (0.86 vs. 0.77, p-value <0.0001), the female (0.88 vs. 0.84, p-value =0.009), and the lean (BMI < 25 kg/m2) (0.85 vs. 0.80, p-value =0.003). The full model with fasting glucose, TRFs, and metabolic markers yielded the best prediction model (AUC = 0.89). Our novel prediction model increases the long-term prediction performance in combination with classical measurements, brings a higher resolution over the complexity of the lipoprotein component, increasing the specificity for individuals in the low risk group.

Abstract: The paper’s practical objective is to provide those developing community-scale food systems with an implementable model. Its theoretical objective is to examine the ways to effectively design post-capitalist models for food systems. In providing a testable model for food systems design, the paper advances concept formation in the field. The case study approach recognizes that local food systems design cannot depend on abstract, formalized models due to the specificity of each project. The crucial role for designers include the involvement of end-users in everyday life in the research process, experimentation in everyday life, building relationships, as well as prototyping, policy making and implementation of services to be delivered by public agencies. People-led food systems can engage agencies and citizens in a co-production process whereby users design and implement their own service program that can be enabled by public agencies. Design-led food strategies illustrate an approach to create eco-acupuncture points that will ultimately start to change the dominant industrial agriculture system into a new social and economic paradigm.

Background: Therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) is an extracorporeal blood purification technique that is designed to remove substances with a large molecular weight. The TPE procedure includes removal of antibodies, alloantibodies, immune complexes, monoclonal protein, toxins or cytokines, and involves the replenishment of a specific plasma factor. The aim of the study was to describe the clinical response to TPE in various neurological patients, and to assess the clinical response to this therapy. Methods: The study was retrospective. We analyzed the medical records of 77 patients who were treated at the Department of Neurology, University Clinical Center (UCC) Tuzla from 2011 to 2016. Results: 83 therapeutic plasma exchanges were performed in the 77 patients. There was a slight predominance of male patients (54.5%), with an average age of 51±15.9 years. The most common underlying neurological diseases were Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS) (37.7%), then chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) (23.4%), multiple sclerosis (MS) (11.7%) and myasthenia gravis (10.4%). Less frequent neurological diseases that were encountered were paraneoplastic polyneuropathies (5.2%), neuromyelitis optica (also known as Devic’s disease) (3.9%), motor neuron disease (3.9%), polymyositis (2.6%) and multifocal motor neuropathy (1.2%). Conclusions: Six years experience of therapeutic plasma exchange in neurological patients in our department have shown that, following evidence-based guidelines for plasmapheresis, the procedure was most effective in patients with GBS, CIDP and myasthenia gravis.