Global Shipbuilding, Who Will be the Leader? South Korea or China?

Shipbuilding is an industry that most developing countries strategically choose as a long term development plan. South Korea has also developed the shipbuilding industry as a part of governmental plan. Since 2000, South Korea has kept the leading position in the industry and seems to be dominant until in the middle of the 2010’s. South Korea’s biggest strength is design capability and technological superiority which should enable them to promptly reflect customer needs. In addition, a relatively abundant workforce, openness to innovation, strong R&D investment and the development of the related industries will also play key roles to remaining competitive in the industry. Meanwhile, China has become the second largest shipbuilder in the industry since 2006. A China’s soaring economic growth has been a big push for the shipbuilding and related industries as well. As of January 2007, China has 51% of orders place worldwide, which includes an 81% share of the low end vessel market. China is now threatening not only South Korea but also all shipbuilding countries with its price competitiveness, aggressive capacity expansion and technological cooperation with western countries. However, there are factors that may impact the two countries in a severe manner. World shipbuilding overcapacity is clearly forecast which may cause fierce price competition and a lack of a skilled workforce is expected to be a negative impact in the future. In spite of this, the future outlook for the industry is still positive. An expected boom in the LNG market is a good sign for both South Korea and China. The cruise ship market is another opportunity for South Korea to remain competitive in the future. Consequently, South Korea and China may have bright futures. The intense competition may start from the middle of the 2010’s and the key to survive and to be more competitive through technology development. A country with superior technology will be more likely to lead the shipbuilding industry in the future

Vulnerability-attention analysis for space-related activities

Techniques for representing and analyzing trouble spots in structures and processes are discussed. Identification of vulnerable areas usually depends more on particular and often detailed knowledge than on algorithmic or mathematical procedures. In some cases, machine inference can facilitate the identification. The analysis scheme proposed first establishes the geometry of the process, then marks areas that are conditionally vulnerable. This provides a basis for advice on the kinds of human attention or machine sensing and control that can make the risks tolerable

Precise Request Tracing and Performance Debugging for Multi-tier Services of Black Boxes

As more and more multi-tier services are developed from commercial components or heterogeneous middleware without the source code available, both developers and administrators need a precise request tracing tool to help understand and debug performance problems of large concurrent services of black boxes. Previous work fails to resolve this issue in several ways: they either accept the imprecision of probabilistic correlation methods, or rely on knowledge of protocols to isolate requests in pursuit of tracing accuracy. This paper introduces a tool named PreciseTracer to help debug performance problems of multi-tier services of black boxes. Our contributions are two-fold: first, we propose a precise request tracing algorithm for multi-tier services of black boxes, which only uses application-independent knowledge; secondly, we present a component activity graph abstraction to represent causal paths of requests and facilitate end-to-end performance debugging. The low overhead and tolerance of noise make PreciseTracer a promising tracing tool for using on production systems

Cooling a micro-mechanical resonator by quantum back-action from a noisy qubit

We study the role of qubit dephasing in cooling a mechanical resonator by quantum back-action. With a superconducting flux qubit as a specific example, we show that ground-state cooling of a mechanical resonator can only be realized if the qubit dephasing rate is sufficiently low.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Nondeterminstic ultrafast ground state cooling of a mechanical resonator

We present an ultrafast feasible scheme for ground state cooling of a mechanical resonator via repeated random time-interval measurements on an auxiliary flux qubit. We find that the ground state cooling can be achieved with \emph{several} such measurements. The cooling efficiency hardly depends on the time-intervals between any two consecutive measurements. The scheme is also robust against environmental noises.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Foreign entry strategies: strategic adaptation to various facets of the institutional environment

In this paper we develop a comprehensive model of MNEs' foreign entry strategies and theorize how and how much the entry strategy is likely to be determined in the interface between internal and external pressures for both conformity and legitimacy. We develop an adaptation argument, in contrast to a selection rationale, through which we enhance our understanding of the various facets of the institutional environment and the constraints international managers encounter in their internationalization strategies.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - Portugal (grant SFRH/BD/880/2000

Thoughts on Intervention in HIV/AIDS with Traditional Chinese Medicine

AbstractsHIV/AIDS has become a worldwide pandemic and highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) is the only generally recognized effective therapy at present. However, various unresolvable problems appear with the widespread use of HAART. Traditional Chinese Medicine shows good efficacy for intervention in HIV/AIDS and could become an effective treatment option