Big Data Big Impact: How Firms are Using Social Media for Innovation and Better Performance

© 2018 the Authors. Firms continuously attempt to find new sources of information to innovate and achieve a superior performance. Big data present on social media platforms represents one of the new sources of information that firms are starting to rely on. This paper is an exploratory study to examine how firms are making use of social media and what kind of impact the social media use have. An online questionnaire was used to collect data from 75 firms in the United States. Our findings suggest that Big Data, in the form of social media data, has an impact on the firm’s innovativeness and performance, and that IT capability potentially plays a mediator role in this relation

The diverse nature of island isolation and its effect on land bridge insular faunas

Aim: Isolation is a key factor in island biology. It is usually defined as the distance to the geographically nearest mainland, but many other definitions exist. We explored how testing different isolation indices affects the inference of impacts of isolation on faunal characteristics. We focused on land bridge islands and compared the relationships of many spatial and temporal (i.e., through time) isolation indices with community‐, population‐ and individual‐level characteristics (species richness, population density and body size, respectively). Location: Aegean Sea islands, Greece. Time period: Current. Taxon: Many animal taxa. Methods: We estimated 21 isolation indices for 205 islands and recorded species richness data for 15 taxa (invertebrates and vertebrates). We obtained body size data for seven lizard species and population density data for three. We explored how well indices predict each characteristic, in each taxon, by conducting a series of ordinary least squares regressions (controlling for island area when needed) and a meta‐analysis. Results: Isolation was significantly (and negatively) associated with species richness in 10 of 15 taxa. It was significantly (and positively) associated with body size in only one of seven species and was not associated with population density. The effect of isolation on species richness was much weaker than that of island area, regardless of the index tested. Spatial indices generally out‐performed temporal indices, and indices directly related to the mainland out‐performed those related mainly to neighbouring islands. No index was universally superior to others, including the distance to the geographically nearest mainland. Main conclusions: The choice of index can alter our perception of the impacts of isolation on biological patterns. The nearly automatic, ubiquitous use of distance to the geographically nearest mainland misrepresents the complexity of the effects of isolation. We recommend the simultaneous testing of several indices that represent different aspects of isolation, in order to produce more constructive and thorough investigations and avoid imprecise inference

An invariant-based method for the analysis of declarative model-to-model transformations

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87875-9_3Proceedings of 11th International Conference, MoDELS 2008, Toulouse, France, September 28 - October 3, 2008In this paper we propose a method to derive OCL invariants from declarative specifications of model-to-model transformations. In particular we consider two of the most prominent approaches for specifying such transformations: Triple Graph Grammars and QVT. Once the specification is expressed in the form of invariants, the transformation developer can use such description to verify properties of the original transformation (e.g. whether it defines a total, surjective or injective function), and to validate the transformation by the automatic generation of valid pairs of source and target models.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, projects MOSAIC (TSI2005-08225-C07-06), MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678) and TIN2005-06053, and an UOC-IN3 research gran

From Lever to Club?: conditionality in the European Union during the financial crisis

How did the European Union come to develop so many instruments of conditionality during the Eurozone debt crisis, despite the well-documented limitations of such measures in other contexts? This article argues that major EU actors–Council, Commission, and Central Bank–were influenced by their own recent and positive experiences with conditionality, especially in the EU’s enlargement in the early 2000s and the early phase of the global financial crisis. However, despite the promise of conditional instruments in these two earlier episodes, further EU reliance on conditional policies has not brought the positive outcomes the main European institutions had hoped for. As EU institutions turned to harder and harder forms of conditionality in the Euro crisis, they relearned many of the familiar negative lessons of conditionality and ultimately had to concede that the apparent success of its conditionality tools in the two earlier phases was exceptional. The article documents the evolution of conditionality over these periods, showing how EU conditionality instruments changed over time, beginning as a ‘lever’ to assist the accession of candidate states in the enlargement period, and evolving into a ‘club’ used to impose macroeconomic discipline in the late 2000s. It shows why this approach to the Euro crisis failed and was ultimately downgraded as Eurozone policy shifted in favour of monetary measures in which conditionality played only a marginal role

Clinical Profile of Cardiac Involvement in Danon Disease: A Multicenter European Registry

Background: The X-linked Danon disease manifests by severe cardiomyopathy, myopathy, and neuropsychiatric problems. We designed this registry to generate a comprehensive picture of clinical presentations and outcome of patients with Danon disease in cardiomyopathy centers throughout Europe. Methods: Clinical and genetic data were collected in 16 cardiology centers from 8 European countries. Results: The cohort comprised 30 male and 27 female patients. The age at diagnosis was birth to 42 years in men and 2 to 65 in women. Cardiac involvement was observed in 96%. Extracardiac manifestations were prominent in men but not in women. Left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy was reported in 73% of male and 74% of female patients. LV systolic dysfunction was reported in 40% of men (who had LV ejection fraction, 34±11%) and 59% of women (LV ejection fraction, 28±13%). The risk of arrhythmia and heart failure was comparable among sexes. The age of first heart failure hospitalization was lower in men (18±6 versus 28±17 years; P<0.003). Heart failure was the leading cause of death (10 of 17; 59%), and LV systolic dysfunction predicted an adverse outcome. Eight men and 8 women (28%) underwent heart transplantation or received an LV assist device. Our cohort suggests better prognosis of female compared with male heart transplant recipients. Conclusions: Danon disease presents earlier in men than in women and runs a malignant course in both sexes, due to cardiac complications. Cardiomyopathy features, heart failure and arrhythmia, are similar among the sexes. Clinical diagnosis and management is extremely challenging in women due to phenotypic diversity and the absence of extracardiac manifestations

A review on development and application of plant-based bioflocculants and grafted bioflocculants

Flocculation is extensively employed for clarification through sedimentation. Application of eco-friendly plant-based bioflocculants in wastewater treatment has attracted significant attention lately with high removal capability in terms of solids, turbidity, color, and dye. However, moderate flocculating property and short shelf life restrict their development. To enhance the flocculating ability, natural polysaccharides derived from plants are chemically modified by inclusion of synthetic, nonbiodegradable monomers (e.g., acrylamide) onto their backbone to produce grafted bioflocculants. This review is aimed to provide an overview of the development and flocculating efficiencies of plant-based bioflocculants and grafted bioflocculants for the first time. Furthermore, the processing methods, flocculation mechanism, and the current challenges are discussed. All the reported studies about plant-derived bioflocculants are conducted under lab-scale conditions in wastewater treatment. Hence, the possibility to apply natural bioflocculants in food and beverage, mineral, paper and pulp, and oleo-chemical and biodiesel industries is discussed and evaluated

Anaerobic digestion and gasification of seaweed

The potential of algal biomass as a source of liquid and gaseous biofuels is a highly topical theme, with over 70 years of sometimes intensive research and considerable financial investment. A wide range of unit operations can be combined to produce algal biofuel, but as yet there is no successful commercial system producing such biofuel. This suggests that there are major technical and engineering difficulties to be resolved before economically viable algal biofuel production can be achieved. Both gasification and anaerobic digestion have been suggested as promising methods for exploiting bioenergy from biomass, and two major projects have been funded in the UK on the gasification and anaerobic digestion of seaweed, MacroBioCrude and SeaGas. This chapter discusses the use of gasification and anaerobic digestion of seaweed for the production of biofuel