Marketing technologically advanced products

This paper calls for a merger of technology and marketing under a customer value perspective; for an enhancement of the traditional technological innovation orientation of the technology-based firm with a market thrust. It establishes technology-based products as product-service offerings that are derived from technological innovation. The aim in marketing technology-based products is an improved understanding of how an organization can combine a technology orientation with a customer value thrust that is common to the firm. In combining this technology and market orientation, the technology-based firm must strive to create and recreate differential customer value through product, process, service, and organizational innovation

Simulation of granular soil behaviour using the bullet physics library

A physics engine is computer software which provides a simulation of certain physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics and fluid dynamics. Physics engines were firstly developed for using in animation and gaming industry ; nevertheless, due to fast calculation speed they are attracting more and more attetion from researchers of the engineering fields. Since physics engines are capable of performing fast calculations on multibody rigid dynamic systems, soil particles can be modeled as distinct rigid bodies. However, up to date, it is not clear to what extent they perform accurately in modeling soil behaviour from a geotechnical viewpoint. To investigate this, examples of pluviation and vibration-induced desification were simulated using the physics engine called Bullet physics library. In order to create soil samples, first, randomly shaped polyhedrons, representing gravels, were generated using the Voronoi tessellation approach. Then, particles were pluviated through a funnel into a cylinder. Once the soil particles settled in a static state, the cylinder was subjected to horizontal sinusoidal vibration for a period of 20 seconds. The same procedure for sample perparation was performed in the laboratory. The results of pluviation and vibration tests weere recorded and compared to those of simulations. A good agreement has been found between the results of simulations and laboratory tests. The findings in this study reinforce the idea that physics engines can be employed as a geotechnical engineering simulation tool

Spatially resolved spectroscopy of Coma cluster early-type galaxies IV. Completing the dataset

The long-slit spectra obtained along the minor axis, offset major axis and diagonal axis are presented for 12 E and S0 galaxies of the Coma cluster drawn from a magnitude-limited sample studied before. The rotation curves, velocity dispersion profiles and the H_3 and H_4 coefficients of the Hermite decomposition of the line of sight velocity distribution are derived. The radial profiles of the Hbeta, Mg, and Fe line strength indices are measured too. In addition, the surface photometry of the central regions of a subsample of 4 galaxies recently obtained with Hubble Space Telescope is presented. The data will be used to construct dynamical models of the galaxies and study their stellar populations.Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ

Low Income Housing Development in Bogota

Paper by Stephen O. Bende

On the eigenproblems of PT-symmetric oscillators

We consider the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian H= -\frac{d^2}{dx^2}+P(x^2)-(ix)^{2n+1} on the real line, where P(x) is a polynomial of degree at most n \geq 1 with all nonnegative real coefficients (possibly P\equiv 0). It is proved that the eigenvalues \lambda must be in the sector | arg \lambda | \leq \frac{\pi}{2n+3}. Also for the case H=-\frac{d^2}{dx^2}-(ix)^3, we establish a zero-free region of the eigenfunction u and its derivative u^\prime and we find some other interesting properties of eigenfunctions.Comment: 21pages, 9 figure

Cross-Document Pattern Matching

We study a new variant of the string matching problem called cross-document string matching, which is the problem of indexing a collection of documents to support an efficient search for a pattern in a selected document, where the pattern itself is a substring of another document. Several variants of this problem are considered, and efficient linear-space solutions are proposed with query time bounds that either do not depend at all on the pattern size or depend on it in a very limited way (doubly logarithmic). As a side result, we propose an improved solution to the weighted level ancestor problem

A preliminary evaluation of LANDSAT-4 thematic mapper data for their geometric and radiometric accuracies

Some LANDSAT thematic mapper data collected over the eastern United States were analyzed for their whole scene geometric accuracy, band to band registration and radiometric accuracy. Band ratio images were created for a part of one scene in order to assess the capability of mapping geologic units with contrasting spectral properties. Systematic errors were found in the geometric accuracy of whole scenes, part of which were attributable to the film writing device used to record the images to film. Band to band registration showed that bands 1 through 4 were registered to within one pixel. Likewise, bands 5 and 7 also were registered to within one pixel. However, bands 5 and 7 were misregistered with bands 1 through 4 by 1 to 2 pixels. Band 6 was misregistered by 4 pixels to bands 1 through 4. Radiometric analysis indicated two kinds of banding, a modulo-16 stripping and an alternate light dark group of 16 scanlines. A color ratio composite image consisting of TM band ratios 3/4, 5/2, and 5/7 showed limonitic clay rich soils, limonitic clay poor soils, and nonlimonitic materials as distinctly different colors on the image

The stellar populations of the central region of M31

We continue the analysis of the dataset of our spectroscopic observation campaign of M31, by deriving simple stellar population properties (age metallicity and alpha-elements overabundance) from the measurement of Lick/IDS absorption line indices. We describe their two-dimensional maps taking into account the dust distribution in M31. 80\% of the values of our age measurements are larger than 10 Gyr. The central 100 arcsec of M31 are dominated by the stars of the classical bulge of M31. They are old (11-13 Gyr), metal-rich (as high as [Z/H]~0.35 dex) at the center with a negative gradient outwards and enhanced in alpha-elements ([alpha/Fe]~ 0.28+- 0.01 dex). The bar stands out in the metallicity map, where an almost solar value of [Z/H] (~0.02+-0.01 dex) with no gradient is observed along the bar position angle (55.7 deg) out to 600 arcsec from the center. In contrast, no signature of the bar is seen in the age and [alpha/Fe] maps, that are approximately axisymmetric, delivering a mean age and overabundance for the bar and the boxy-peanut bulge of 10-13 Gyr and 0.25-0.27 dex, respectively. The boxy/peanut-bulge has almost solar metallicity (-0.04+- 0.01 dex). The mass-to-light ratio of the three components is approximately constant at M/LV ~ 4.4-4.7 Msol/Lsol. The disk component at larger distances is made of a mixture of stars, as young as 3-4 Gyr, with solar metallicity and smaller M/LV (~3+-0.1 Msol/Lsol). We propose a two-phase formation scenario for the inner region of M31, where most of the stars of the classical bulge come into place together with a proto-disk, where a bar develops and quickly transforms it into a boxy-peanut bulge. Star formation continues in the bulge region, producing stars younger than 10 Gyr, in particular along the bar, enhancing its metallicity. The disk component appears to build up on longer time-scales.Comment: Language-edited version, Accepted for publication in A&