5,449 research outputs found
The Role of IPO in Internationalization Process of Family Business. The Italian Case of the Burani Family. Is it a Black Swan?
Considering the growth of global economy and the high competitiveness internationalization process seems to be more important for family businesses. The internationalization theories are often related to the most appropriate tool for their feasibility. Also internationalization strategies need high financial resources that small family businesses often do not possess. The aim of this paper is to show a grey area in the intersection between the studies on family businessesâ IPO and internationalization. We try to contribute to the literature on family business discussing some propositions and highlighting which are the main advantages and the more significant costs associated to the IPO as a tool for internationalization. We argue these propositions through the use of a systematic research on literature and through the case study on the Burani family.Internationalization; Family Business; IPO
A perturbative probabilistic approach to quantum many-body systems
In the probabilistic approach to quantum many-body systems, the ground-state
energy is the solution of a nonlinear scalar equation written either as a
cumulant expansion or as an expectation with respect to a probability
distribution of the potential and hopping (amplitude and phase) values recorded
during an infinitely lengthy evolution. We introduce a perturbative expansion
of this probability distribution which conserves, at any order, a
multinomial-like structure, typical of uncorrelated systems, but includes,
order by order, the statistical correlations provided by the cumulant
expansion. The proposed perturbative scheme is successfully tested in the case
of pseudo spin 1/2 hard-core boson Hubbard models also when affected by a phase
problem due to an applied magnetic field.Comment: 39 pages, 1 picture, 5 figure
Gain assisted nanocomposite multilayers with near zero permittivity modulus at visible frequencies
We have fabricated a layered nano-composite by alternating metal and gain
medium layers, the gain dielectric consisting of a polymer incorporating
optically pumped dye molecules. Exploiting an improved version of the effective
medium theory, we have chosen the layers thicknesses for achieving a very small
value of the real part of the permittivity epsilon_\| (parallel to the layers
plane) at a prescribed visible wavelength. From standard
reflection-transmission experiments on the optically pumped sample we show
that, at a visible wavelength, both the real and the imaginary parts of the
permittivity epsilon_\ attain very small values and we measure | \epsilon_\| |
= 0.04 at lambda = 604 nm, amounting to a 21.5-percent decrease of the minimum
| \epsilon_\| | in the absence of optical pumping. Our investigation thus
proves that a medium with a dielectric permittivity with very small modulus, a
key condition which should provide efficient subwavelength optical steering,
can be actually synthesized.Comment: Submitted for publication on Applied Physics Letter
Which Conflict? Understanding Conflicts inside the Board of Directors
The analysis of previous studies oncerning corporate governance shows that some variables related to board behavior have not been properly taken into account. The paper analyses board of directors in its decision-making process highlighting the importance that a clear identification of conflict could have on board effectiveness. It emerges that conflict could be distinguished in many typologies affecting board dynamics and decision-making process. The aim of the paper is to identify the mainstream and the other borderline approaches in the existent literature in order to: (i) mark some confusions in the definition or use of the concept of conflict; (ii) point-out its potential in the study of board effectiveness in a behavioural per-spective; (iii) underline the need for operationalizing the concept for a better understanding of its impact on board effectiveness and for a robust future empirical research.Conflict; Board of Directors; Decision-making Process; Board Effetiveness
Poplar from phytoremediation as a renewable energy source:gasification properties and pollution analysis
Biomass gasification is a very efficient process to produce clean energy in the form of a fuel gas (syngas). Hazelnut shells and poplar have good energy production potential and they are abundant in nature. Hazelnut shells have the characteristics of a very good fuel and poplar is among the fastest growing trees; furthermore, poplar demonstrated the capability to absorb organic contaminants (i.e. heavy metals) from the soil in which they are cultivated. However, poplar is not usually used for biomass gasification and its potential is not fully assessed. Here, 3 types of biomass, hazelnut shells (HS), simple poplar (P) and poplar coming from a phytoremediation procedure (PHYP), were chosen as representative samples to be characterized and tested in a steam gasification process carried out on a bench scale fluidized bed gasifier. A comparison is reported on gasification results, such as gas composition, tar production and gas yield for the biomass feedstocks mentioned above. It was concluded that hazelnut shells and poplar (P and PHYP) could be easily gasified in a fluidized bed gasifier, thus producing a good quality gas with low polluting by-products. The PHYP sample showed lower tar content and higher gas yield. It is guessed that Ca and Mg, found in higher quantities in the PHYP sample, could have had a catalytic effect in tar reforming thus producing lower quantity of heavy hydrocarbons
One-dimensional chirality: strong optical activity in epsilon-near-zero metamaterials
We suggest that electromagnetic chirality, generally displayed by 3D or 2D
complex chiral structures, can occur in 1D patterned composites whose
components are achiral. This feature is highly unexpected in a 1D system which
is geometrically achiral since its mirror image can always be superposed onto
it by a 180 deg rotation. We analytically evaluate from first principles the
bi-anisotropic response of multilayered metamaterials and we show that the
chiral tensor is not vanishing if the system is geometrically one-dimensional
chiral, i.e. its mirror image can not be superposed onto it by using
translations without resorting to rotations. As a signature of 1D chirality, we
show that 1D chiral metamaterials support optical activity and we prove that
this phenomenon undergoes a dramatic non-resonant enhancement in the
epsilon-near-zero regime where the magneto-electric coupling can become
dominant in the constitutive relations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication on Physical Review
Letter
Microprocessor fault-tolerance via on-the-fly partial reconfiguration
This paper presents a novel approach to exploit FPGA dynamic partial reconfiguration to improve the fault tolerance of complex microprocessor-based systems, with no need to statically reserve area to host redundant components. The proposed method not only improves the survivability of the system by allowing the online replacement of defective key parts of the processor, but also provides performance graceful degradation by executing in software the tasks that were executed in hardware before a fault and the subsequent reconfiguration happened. The advantage of the proposed approach is that thanks to a hardware hypervisor, the CPU is totally unaware of the reconfiguration happening in real-time, and there's no dependency on the CPU to perform it. As proof of concept a design using this idea has been developed, using the LEON3 open-source processor, synthesized on a Virtex 4 FPG
Stable Facts, Relative Facts
We define and characterise two kinds of facts that play a role in quantum theory: stable and relative. We describe how stable facts emerge in a world of relative facts and then discuss the respective roles they play in connecting the theory and the world. The distinction between relative and stable facts resolves the difficulties pointed out by the no-go theorems of Frauchiger and Renner, Brukner, and Bong et. al..
Basing the ontology of the theory on relative facts clarifies the role of decoherence in bringing about the classical world and solves the apparent incompatibility between the linear evolution and projection postulates
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