KM Maturity Factors Affecting High Performance in Universities

This paper aims to measure Knowledge Management Maturity (KMM) in the universities to determine the impact of knowledge management on high performance. This study was applied on Al-Quds Open University in Gaza strip, Palestine. Asian productivity organization model was applied to measure KMM. Second dimension which assess high performance was developed by the authors. The controlled sample was (306). Several statistical tools were used for data analysis and hypotheses testing, including reliability Correlation using Cronbach’s alpha, “ANOVA”, Simple Linear Regression and Step Wise Regression.The overall findings of the current study suggest that KMM is suitable for measuring high performance. KMM assessment shows that maturity level is in level three. Findings also support the main hypothesis and it is sub- hypotheses. The most important factors effecting high performance are: Processes, KM leadership, People, KM Outcomes and Learning and Innovation. Furthermore the current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first comparative study in the universities of Palestine explores the status of KMM using the Asian productivity Model

A circuit topology approach to categorizing changes in biomolecular structure

The biological world is composed of folded linear molecules of bewildering topological complexity and diversity. The topology of folded biomolecules such as proteins and ribonucleic acids is often subject to change during biological processes. Despite intense research, we lack a solid mathematical framework that summarizes these operations in a principled manner. Circuit topology, which formalizes the arrangements of intramolecular contacts, serves as a general mathematical framework to analyze the topological characteristics of folded linear molecules. In this work, we translate familiar molecular operations in biology, such as duplication, permutation, and elimination of contacts, into the language of circuit topology. We show that for such operations there are corresponding matrix representations as well as basic rules that serve as a foundation for understanding these operations within the context of a coherent algebraic framework. We present several biological examples and provide a simple computational framework for creating and analyzing the circuit diagrams of proteins and nucleic acids. We expect our study and future developments in this direction to facilitate a deeper understanding of natural molecular processes and to provide guidance to engineers for generating complex polymeric materials

Henry Ford vs. assembly line balancing

Ford’s Assembly Line at Highland Park is one of the most influential conceptualizations of a production system. New data reveal Ford’s operations were adaptable to strongly increasing and highly variable demand. These analyses show Ford’s assembly line was used differently than modern ones and their production systems were more flexible than previously recognized. Assembly line balancing theory largely ignores earlier practice. It will be shown that Ford used multiple lines flexibly to cope with large monthly variations in sales. Although a line may be optimized to yield lowest cost production, systems composed of several parallel lines may yield low cost production along with output and product flexibility. Recent research on multiple parallel lines has focussed on cost effectiveness without appreciating the flexibility such systems may allow. Given the current strategic importance of flexibility it should be included in such analyses as an explicit objective

STV-based Video Feature Processing for Action Recognition

In comparison to still image-based processes, video features can provide rich and intuitive information about dynamic events occurred over a period of time, such as human actions, crowd behaviours, and other subject pattern changes. Although substantial progresses have been made in the last decade on image processing and seen its successful applications in face matching and object recognition, video-based event detection still remains one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision research due to its complex continuous or discrete input signals, arbitrary dynamic feature definitions, and the often ambiguous analytical methods. In this paper, a Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) and region intersection (RI) based 3D shape-matching method has been proposed to facilitate the definition and recognition of human actions recorded in videos. The distinctive characteristics and the performance gain of the devised approach stemmed from a coefficient factor-boosted 3D region intersection and matching mechanism developed in this research. This paper also reported the investigation into techniques for efficient STV data filtering to reduce the amount of voxels (volumetric-pixels) that need to be processed in each operational cycle in the implemented system. The encouraging features and improvements on the operational performance registered in the experiments have been discussed at the end

Fighting Fire with Fire: Technology in Child Sex Trafficking

We map real articulation data for five Swedish phonemen sequences onto parameters of a biomechanical tongue model that produces movement and muscle activations from position data. The movement produced is broadly correct and could likely be improved by a more fine tuned mapping. The muscle activations were found to vary between simulations using the same data but matched well with previous studies on muscle activity for vowels

Air Treatment Techniques for Abatement of Emissions from Intensive Livestock Production

Intensive livestock production is connected with a number of environmental effects, including emissions of ammonia (NH3), greenhouse gases (CH4 and N2O), odour, and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). Possible strategies for emission reduction include feed management, adaptation of housing design, and, in case of mechanically ventilated animal houses, the application of end-of-pipe air treatment, viz acid scrubbers and bioscrubbers. Air treatment techniques can achieve very high emission reductions (up to 100% ammonia removal for acid scrubbers). Furthermore, air treatment offers the possibility to achieve removal of not just one compound but of a combined removal of a variety of pollutants (ammonia, odour and particulate matter) at the same time. The successful application of scrubbers is of increasing importance as intensive livestock operations have to comply with ever stricter regulations and emission limits. Research is needed to address topics such as reduction of costs (both investment and operational costs), improvement of process control to guarantee stable removal efficiencies, decrease of N2O production in bioscrubbers, and increase of odour removal efficienc

A financial analysis of born-global firms: evidence from Spain

From the beginning of the 1970s to the present day, significant changes have taken place in the competitive and organizational behavior of small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Recently, some of these factors have applied more intensively, and this has given rise to growth in the number of new companies that undertake overseas operations almost immediately (known as born globals). The phenomenon of early internationalization is relatively recent, so there are still many aspects that need to be studied. The objective of this study is to contribute to the scarce empirical literature existing in Spain on this topic, by providing evidence on the possible differences in character of the born-global firms compared with the rest of exporting companies. To this end, the focus of the study is on the analysis of variables such as the size and sector of activity of these companies, and their principal economic and financial magnitudes. A sample of 1,324 Spanish SMEs that were exporting in 2007 was surveyed; of this total approximately 12% identified themselves as having adopted early internationalization. The results obtained indicate that the born-global firms are, on average, smaller; they are classified mostly to the services sector; and they are much more leveraged than the rest of Spanish SMEs that export