An Exploratory Approach To e-Commerce Strategy In The 21st Century

This exploratory study analyzes the critical success antecedents that contribute to effective e-Commerce consumer sites.  Focused on key firms in selected industry sectors, the study examines factors that have enabled either failure or success in the strategies of the firms to market, sell and service products on the Web.  Important to firms eventually successful in e-Commerce is their integration of leading edge technologies to enhance business factors of site strategies.  The study imputes business model, content and design, brand image, promotion, community, customer service, traffic management, scalability, performance management and partnership as the continued critical success antecedents that enable effective commerce sites.  This study, in its closer examination of the industry sectors of the firms, will be helpful to business managers considering expanded investment in consumer sites in the increasingly improved economy.&nbsp

System of systems modeling and analysis.

This report documents the results of an LDRD program entitled 'System of Systems Modeling and Analysis' that was conducted during FY 2003 and FY 2004. Systems that themselves consist of multiple systems (referred to here as System of Systems or SoS) introduce a level of complexity to systems performance analysis and optimization that is not readily addressable by existing capabilities. The objective of the 'System of Systems Modeling and Analysis' project was to develop an integrated modeling and simulation environment that addresses the complex SoS modeling and analysis needs. The approach to meeting this objective involved two key efforts. First, a static analysis approach, called state modeling, has been developed that is useful for analyzing the average performance of systems over defined use conditions. The state modeling capability supports analysis and optimization of multiple systems and multiple performance measures or measures of effectiveness. The second effort involves time simulation which represents every system in the simulation using an encapsulated state model (State Model Object or SMO). The time simulation can analyze any number of systems including cross-platform dependencies and a detailed treatment of the logistics required to support the systems in a defined mission

Enhancing structure relaxations for first-principles codes: an approximate Hessian approach

We present a method for improving the speed of geometry relaxation by using a harmonic approximation for the interaction potential between nearest neighbor atoms to construct an initial Hessian estimate. The model is quite robust, and yields approximately a 30% or better reduction in the number of calculations compared to an optimized diagonal initialization. Convergence with this initializer approaches the speed of a converged BFGS Hessian, therefore it is close to the best that can be achieved. Hessian preconditioning is discussed, and it is found that a compromise between an average condition number and a narrow distribution in eigenvalues produces the best optimization.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, added references, expanded optimization sectio

Educational Disruption & Rising Faculty Expectations

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the landscape of higher education had been primed for upheaval. The pandemic has only accentuated the need for change. Not only have we had to scramble to provide meaningful and valuable content to our students; we have also had to reinvent how that content is delivered. Beyond these changes that have abruptly affected all of us, expectations from students, colleagues, and administrators have unilaterally risen. We are expected to publish more, and in better journals. We are expected to provide more service, internally and externally. We are expected to get better teacher evaluations from students, and to deliver up-to-date content in a way that can convince students that they are benefiting from their paid education more than they would by taking online courses (often for free). The pressure to succeed on all fronts has never been higher. In this panel discussion, seasoned scholars, who have succeeded, will share insights from their experiences navigating this new landscape and reinventing their own mindset and work habits to accommodate the increasing expectations placed on faculty. Each panelist will take the position of a key stakeholder in high education including university leaders, society, the business community, journal editors and students

Network and adaptive system of systems modeling and analysis.

This report documents the results of an LDRD program entitled ''Network and Adaptive System of Systems Modeling and Analysis'' that was conducted during FY 2005 and FY 2006. The purpose of this study was to determine and implement ways to incorporate network communications modeling into existing System of Systems (SoS) modeling capabilities. Current SoS modeling, particularly for the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, is conducted under the assumption that communication between the various systems is always possible and occurs instantaneously. A more realistic representation of these communications allows for better, more accurate simulation results. The current approach to meeting this objective has been to use existing capabilities to model network hardware reliability and adding capabilities to use that information to model the impact on the sustainment supply chain and operational availability

Suppression of the 2010 Alexandrium fundyense bloom by changes in physical, biological, and chemical properties of the Gulf of Maine

Author Posting. © American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, 2011. This article is posted here by permission of American Society of Limnology and Oceanography for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Limnology and Oceanography 56 (2011): 2411-2426, doi:10.4319/lo.2011.56.6.2411.For the period 2005–2009, the abundance of resting cysts in bottom sediments from the preceding autumn was a first-order predictor of the overall severity of spring–summer blooms of Alexandrium fundyense in the western Gulf of Maine and southern New England. Cyst abundance off mid-coast Maine was significantly higher in autumn 2009 than it was preceding a major regional bloom in 2005. A seasonal ensemble forecast was computed using a range of forcing conditions for the period 2004–2009, suggesting that a large bloom was likely in the western Gulf of Maine in 2010. This did not materialize, perhaps because environmental conditions in spring–summer 2010 were not favorable for growth of A. fundyense. Water mass anomalies indicate a regional-scale change in circulation with direct influence on A. fundyense's niche. Specifically, near-surface waters were warmer, fresher, more stratified, and had lower nutrients than during the period of observations used to construct the ensemble forecast. Moreover, a weaker-than-normal coastal current lessened A. fundyense transport into the western Gulf of Maine and Massachusetts Bay. Satellite ocean color observations indicate the 2010 spring phytoplankton bloom was more intense than usual. Early season nutrient depletion may have caused a temporal mismatch with A. fundyense's endogenous clock that regulates the timing of cyst germination. These findings highlight the difficulties of ecological forecasting in a changing oceanographic environment, and underscore the need for a sustained observational network to drive such forecasts.We gratefully acknowledge support of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (grant NA06NOS4780245 for the Gulf of Maine Toxicity (GOMTOX) program) and the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health through National Science Foundation grants OCE-0430724 and OCE-0911031 and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant 1P50- ES01274201

A red tide of Alexandrium fundyense in the Gulf of Maine

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 103 (2014): 174-184, doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2013.05.011.In early July 2009, an unusually high concentration of the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium fundyense occurred in the western Gulf of Maine, causing surface waters to appear reddish brown to the human eye. The discolored water appeared to be the southern terminus of a large-scale event that caused shellfish toxicity along the entire coast of Maine to the Canadian border. Rapid-response shipboard sampling efforts together with satellite data suggest the water discoloration in the western Gulf of Maine was a highly ephemeral feature of less than two weeks in duration. Flow cytometric analysis of surface samples from the red water indicated the population was undergoing sexual reproduction. Cyst fluxes downstream of the discolored water were the highest ever measured in the Gulf of Maine, and a large deposit of new cysts was observed that fall. Although the mechanisms causing this event remain unknown, its timing coincided with an anomalous period of downwelling-favorable winds that could have played a role in aggregating upward-swimming cells. Regardless of the underlying causes, this event highlights the importance of short-term episodic phenomena on regional population dynamics of A. fundyense.The R/V Tioga sampling effort was facilitated by event response funding from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Ocean Service, Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research, through NOAA Cooperative Agreement NA17RJ1223. Additional support for follow-up analysis and synthesis was provided by NOAA grant NA06NOS4780245 for the Gulf of Maine Toxicity (GOMTOX) program and the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health through National Science Foundation grants OCE- 0430724 and OCE-0911031 and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant 1P50-ES01274201

Orbiter Return-To-Flight Entry Aeroheating

The Columbia accident on February 1, 2003 began an unprecedented level of effort within the hypersonic aerothermodynamic community to support the Space Shuttle Program. During the approximately six month time frame of the primary Columbia Accident Investigation Board activity, many technical disciplines were involved in a concerted effort to reconstruct the last moments of the Columbia and her crew, and understand the critical events that led to that loss. Significant contributions to the CAIB activity were made by the hypersonic aerothermodynamic community(REF CAIB) in understanding the re-entry environments that led to the propagation of an ascent foam induced wing leading edge damage to a subsequent breech of the wing spar of Columbia, and the subsequent breakup of the vehicle. A core of the NASA hypersonic aerothermodynamics team that was involved in the CAIB investigation has been combined with the United Space Alliance and Boeing Orbiter engineering team in order to position the Space Shuttle Program with a process to perform in-flight Thermal Protection System damage assessments. This damage assessment process is now part of the baselined plan for Shuttle support, and is a direct out-growth of the Columbia accident and NASAs response. Multiple re-entry aeroheating tools are involved in this damage assessment process, many of which have been developed during the Return To Flight activity. In addition, because these aeroheating tools are part of an overall damage assessment process that also involves the thermal and stress analyses community, in addition to a much broader mission support team, an integrated process for performing the damage assessment activities has been developed by the Space Shuttle Program and the Orbiter engineering community. Several subsets of activity in the Orbiter aeroheating communities support to the Return To Flight effort have been described in previous publications (CFD?, Cavity Heating? Any BLT? Grid Generation?). This work will provide a description of the integrated process utilized to perform Orbiter tile damage assessment, and in particular will seek to provide a description of the integrated aeroheating tools utilized to perform these assessments. Individual aeroheating tools will be described which provide the nominal re-entry heating environment characterization for the Orbiter, the heating environments for tile damage, heating effects due to exposed Thermal Protection System substrates, the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics for the description of tile cavity heating, and boundary layer transition prediction. This paper is meant to provide an overall view of the integrated aeroheating assessment process for tile damage assessment as one of a sequence of papers on the development of the boundary layer transition prediction capability in support of Space Shuttle Return To Flight efforts

The future of evapotranspiration : global requirements for ecosystem functioning, carbon and climate feedbacks, agricultural management, and water resources

The fate of the terrestrial biosphere is highly uncertain given recent and projected changes in climate. This is especially acute for impacts associated with changes in drought frequency and intensity on the distribution and timing of water availability. The development of effective adaptation strategies for these emerging threats to food and water security are compromised by limitations in our understanding of how natural and managed ecosystems are responding to changing hydrological and climatological regimes. This information gap is exacerbated by insufficient monitoring capabilities from local to global scales. Here, we describe how evapotranspiration (ET) represents the key variable in linking ecosystem functioning, carbon and climate feedbacks, agricultural management, and water resources, and highlight both the outstanding science and applications questions and the actions, especially from a space-based perspective, necessary to advance them

Babesia microti, Upstate New York

Five cases of human babesiosis were reported in the Lower Hudson Valley Region of New York State in 2001. An investigation to determine if Babesia microti was present in local Ixodes scapularis ticks yielded 5 positive pools in 123 pools tested, the first detection of B. microti from field-collected I. scapularis in upstate New York