The electrical properties of Bilirubin Rich Gallstone (BGS) were investigated by the Complex Impedance Spectroscopy (CIS) technique. The dielectric relaxation was found to be of non-Debye type. Evidences of temperature-dependent electrical relaxation phenomena as well as Negative Temperature Coefficient of Resistance (NTCR) character of the sample have been observed. The ac conductivity obeys the ...
Based on the system perspective, we develop a theoretical model for the relationship between social network (SN) ties and resource acquisition (RA) and examine how environmental dynamism (ED) moderates this relationship, then conduct empirical analysis using data of 326 new firms Jilin province of China. The result suggests that SN ties have positive effects on external RA and internal resource ...
The major aim of this research is to measure the relative efficiency of the top 100 African banks. The sensitivity of the results is also investigated. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method was used to evaluate the relative efficiency of African banks. Cross-sectional data for the year 2005 were used to conduct the analysis. The results indicate that the performance of several banks is ...
The major purpose of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis between US and Taiwanese firms for examining similarities and differences of their alliance experiences. The results indicate that first, US and Taiwanese firms have different alliance behaviours in the choice of alliance form and alliance type. Secondly, in general, the intensity of formation motive and partner interaction is ...
This paper examines whether early succession planning in Lebanese family-owned firms has an immediate impact on their financial performance and hence their continuity. We have surveyed 50 privately held Lebanese family-owned firms and conducted a statistical analysis of their responses. Our findings show that early and proper succession planning impacts future financial performance rather than ...
This paper provides a mapping of the different uses of the word multifunctionality. To explore the diversity of meanings and interpretations, a comparative analysis was conducted through five national case studies in France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Switzerland. The analysis conducted at national level makes it possible to identify eight Concept Oriented Research Clusters (CORCs), based ...
The traditional view of the innovation, which implies that companies innovate on their own, has been recently challenged by the ‘open innovation’ concept promoting the use of external knowledge. Collaboration between firms has always existed in one way or another, however, large-scale open innovation is now the next step for many companies. This article conducts a comparative analysis of the two ...
Since May 2006, the BRAC Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Programme in Bangladesh has enabled more than 30 million people to achieve hygienic sanitation, contributing to an increase in sanitation coverage from 33 to 83% in programme areas and rapid progress towards universal access. In rural areas, most families have single pit latrines that need to be emptied when full. Since 2007, BRAC ...
This paper investigates the status of the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System (EMS) standard in China and analyses key factors influencing its adoption by Chinese enterprises. It applies lessons learnt from studying the implementation of China's mandatory environmental regulations to assess the potential for using this voluntary standard to promote improved environmental performance. Our ...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between church institution and new technology in the field of communication and management of the religious tourism experience. A critical study of the institutional church use of new technology applications for the communication, management and promotion of ecclesiastic heritage is developed; an empirical phase is implemented by ...
The current body of literature offers contradictory results concerning the role of clusters and innovation networks in the commercialisation of high technology. Whereas several previous studies verify the overall beneficial effects of cluster membership for knowledge-intensive firms, others report that clusters have only little or no influence on technology firms’ economic success. The major ...
The fashion industry has stepped into the digital era. There are a great number of firms moving to be the digital companies with the major business process all being supported by the internet (Hajji et al., 2012; Bruce and Daly, 2011). A recent study from Mintel (2012) finds that online fashion purchase has increased by 152% in the UK over the last five years. The aim of this study is to ...
The purpose of this paper is to explore whether virtual worlds can provide a setting for a rewarding learning experience for college students. The paper describes a policy-making simulation conducted within a virtual world and the results of an analysis conducted to assess its learning effectiveness. Our analysis, drawn from eight 'learning principles' advanced by Gee (2003), indicates that the ...
The purpose of this study is to analyse 'how a company communicates its corporate responsibility activities through press releases' and 'how these activities are then presented by media in newspaper articles'. Our analysis is targeted at an empirical case of building a pulp mill in Uruguay. The data consist of the company's press releases and of the newspaper articles published in the biggest ...
Innovation is an important topic in the 21st century. Innovation management has become a compulsory path to sustained enterprise growth. In this research, we studied the degree of innovation implementation among domestic high-tech manufacturers and the impact of innovation management implementation on competitiveness. We considered the mediating variables of "industry type" and "enterprise ...
This paper presents the sensitivity analysis of a newly developed model which predicts microorganism concentrations in urban stormwater (MOPUS—MicroOrganism Prediction in Urban Stormwater). The analysis used Escherichia coli data collected from four urban catchments in Melbourne, Australia. The MICA program (Model Independent Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis), used to conduct this analysis, ...
In reservoir flood control operation, selection of criteria is an important part of the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) procedure. This paper proposes a method to select criteria for MCDM of reservoir flood control operation based on the back-propagation (BP) neural network. According to the concept of ideal and anti-ideal points, we propose a method to generate training samples of the ...
Based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamic theory, a general exergy transfer model is developed to describe the exergy transfer characteristics of external convection by using Black Body Approach. This model is applied to the study of fin efficiency for exergy transfer, which is defined as the ratio of the actual exergy transfer rate to the ideal exergy transfer rate. Both the analytical ...
Our study focuses on the question of what kinds of users are able to actively contribute to the development of radical innovations and what firms can learn from them to improve their innovative capability. A multiple case study analysis was conducted in the field of medical technology. The case study analysis reveals that users with a unique set of characteristics can contribute substantially to ...
In designing the HSC columns confined with Steel–Straps Tensioning Technique (SSTT), safe and economic are two important aspects. The designed member should not be too expensive but guarantee minimum safety. Generally, the effectiveness of confinement became less pronounced as the slenderness of column increased. This is mainly due to the flexure–dominated behavior of slender column and the ...