Supply Chain Practice, Supply Chain Performance Indicators and Competitive Advantage of Australian Beef Enterprises: A Conceptual Framework

This research focuses on an Australian agribusiness supply chain, the Australian Beef Supply Chain. The definition of the Australian Beef Supply Chain is the chain or sequence of all activities from the breeding property to the domestic or overseas consumers. The beef sector in Australia is undergoing rapid change because of globalisation, a highly competitive beef market (local and export), quicker production cycle and delivery times and consequently reduced inventories, a general speed-up of the rate of change in the business environment, the trend toward more outsourcing of activities, and the rapid development of IT. In this business environment, advanced supply chain systems have the potential to provide significant contributions to Australian beef industry performance. A conceptual framework of the research project has been proposed. There are three elements of conceptual framework. Firstly, supply chain practice of Australian beef industry consists of five sub-elements such as strategic supplier partnerships, customer relationships, information sharing, information quality and a lean system. Moreover, there is an antecedent of cooperative behaviour such as trust and commitment influencing supply chain practice and supply chain performance indicators. Secondly, supply chain performance indicators include four sub-elements such as flexibility, efficiency, food quality and responsiveness. Finally, the competitive advantage framework of the Australian beef enterprises consists of price, quality, export sales growth and time to market. As a further step of the research after developing the conceptual framework, the research project focuses the analysis on how the antecedents of the sub-elements of supply chain practice affect supply chain performance in Australian beef enterprises, how trust and commitment in trading partners affect supply chain performance, how attributes such as flexibility, efficiency, food quality and responsiveness influence the sub-elements of competitive advantage. The research project leads on to further work on how Australian beef enterprises measure their supply chain performance and what the major difficulties are arising when implementing supply chain management in the Australian beef industry and what kind of changes can be made to beef supply chains to enhance their performance.Agribusiness,

Scattering of Dirac electrons by circular mass barriers: valley filter and resonant scattering

The scattering of two-dimensional (2D) massless Dirac electrons is investigated in the presence of a random array of circular mass barriers. The inverse momentum relaxation time and the Hall factor are calculated and used to obtain parallel and perpendicular resistivity components within linear transport theory. We found a non zero perpendicular resistivity component which has opposite sign for electrons in the different K and K' valleys. This property can be used for valley filter purposes. The total cross-section for scattering on penetrable barriers exhibit resonances due to the presence of quasi-bound states in the barriers that show up as sharp gaps in the cross-section while for Schr\"{o}dinger electrons they appear as peaks.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

"Any lady can do this without much trouble ...": class and gender in The dining room (1878)

Macmillan's "Art at Home" series (1876–83) was a collection of domestic advice manuals. Mentioned in every study of the late-nineteenth-century domestic interior, they have often been interpreted, alongside contemporary publications such as Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste (1868), as indicators of late 1870s home furnishing styles. Mrs Loftie's The Dining Room (1878) was the series' fifth book and it considers one of the home's principal (and traditionally masculine) domestic spaces. Recent research on middle-class cultural practices surrounding food has placed The Dining Room within the tradition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management (1861); however, it is not a cookery book and hardly mentions dinners. Drawing upon unpublished archival sources, this paper charts the production and reception of The Dining Room, aiming to unravel its relationships with other contemporary texts and to highlight the difficulties of using it as historical evidence. While it offers fascinating insights into contemporary taste, class and gender, this paper suggests that, as an example of domestic design advice literature, it reveals far more about the often expedient world of nineteenth-century publishing practices

Strain-Rate Frequency Superposition in Large-Amplitude Oscillatory Shear

In a recent work, Wyss, {\it et.al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett., {\bf 98}, 238303 (2007)] have noted a property of `soft solids' under oscillatory shear, the so-called strain-rate frequency superposition (SRFS). We extend this study to the case of soft solids under large-amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS). We show results from LAOS studies in a monodisperse hydrogel suspension, an aqueous gel, and a biopolymer suspension, and show that constant strain-rate frequency sweep measurements with soft solids can be superimposed onto master curves for higher harmonic moduli, with the {\it same} shift factors as for the linear viscoelastic moduli. We show that the behavior of higher harmonic moduli at low frequencies in constant strain-rate frequency sweep measurements is similar to that at large strain amplitudes in strain-amplitude sweep tests. We show surface plots of the harmonic moduli and the energy dissipation rate per unit volume in LAOS for soft solids, and show experimentally that the energy dissipated per unit volume depends on the first harmonic loss modulus alone, in both the linear and the nonlinear viscoelastic regime.Comment: 10 pages, 25 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review E. Incorporates referee comment

α\alpha-Scale Decoupling of the Mechanical Relaxation and Diverging Shear Wave Propagation Lengthscale in Triphenylphosphite

We have performed depolarized Impulsive Stimulated Scattering experiments to observe shear acoustic phonons in supercooled triphenylphosphite (TPP) from $\sim$10 - 500 MHz. These measurements, in tandem with previously performed longitudinal and shear measurements, permit further analyses of the relaxation dynamics of TPP within the framework of the mode coupling theory (MCT). Our results provide evidence of $\alpha$ coupling between the shear and longitudinal degrees of freedom up to a decoupling temperature $T_c$ = 231 K. A lower bound length scale of shear wave propagation in liquids verified the exponent predicted by theory in the vicinity of the decoupling temperature

Fenomena Kemiskinan Nelayan: Perspektif Teori Strukturasi

Tulisan ini merupakan hasil studi lapangan yang menggambarkan realitas kemiskinan nelayan di Desa Teluk, Kecamatan Labuan, Kabupaten Pandeglang-Banten. Dengan menggunakan teori Strukturasi Giddens, kemiskinan nelayan dijelaskan sebagai produk dari dinamika relasi agen dan struktur yang melembagakan praktik sosial dalam kehidupan masyarakat nelayan. Lewat metode studi kasus, maka, tampak dengan jelas betapa proses strukturasi yang berlangsung bukannya membebaskan kaum nelayan dari perangkap kemiskinan, sebaliknya justru melanggengkan kemiskinan yang ada. Dengan kata lain, struktur juga bisa bersifat constraint (unenabling), sehingga Perubahan struktural yang terjadi bukan memberdayakan melainkan bersifat mereproduksi dan melanggengkan kemiskinan kaum nelayan. This paper is the result of field studies that illustrate the reality of poverty in the fishing village of Teluk, District of Labuan, Pandeglang, Banten. By using the theory of Structuration Giddens, poverty fisherman explained as a product of the dynamics of relations agents and structures that institutionalize social practices in the life of the fishing community. Through the case study method, then, appears clearly how the structuration process that takes place instead of freeing the fishermen of the poverty trap, instead perpetuate the poverty that exists. In other words, the structure can also be constraints (unenabling), so that the structural changes taking place not empowering but rather reproduce and restless-gengkan poverty of the fishermen

Nano-wires with surface disorder: Giant localization lengths and quantum-to-classical crossover

We investigate electronic quantum transport through nano-wires with one-sided surface roughness. A magnetic field perpendicular to the scattering region is shown to lead to exponentially diverging localization lengths in the quantum-to-classical crossover regime. This effect can be quantitatively accounted for by tunneling between the regular and the chaotic components of the underlying mixed classical phase space.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; final version (including added references

Penerapan Konsep Arsitektur Post Modern Pada Pengembangan Bangunan Universitas Dumoga Di Kotamobagu

Perkembangan pembangunan pendidikan di Kota Kotamobagu sangat pesat seiring dengan perkembangan ekonomi. Pengembangan Bangunan Universitas Dumoga Kotamobagu (UDK) menjadi sangat penting bagi penyediaan sarana pendidikan untuk masyarakat Kota Kotamobagu dan sekitarnya. Kondisi bangunan UDK saat ini sangat tidak layak untuk menampung jumlah mahasiswa yang kian tahun bertambah. Lokasi UDK yang berada di pusat kegiatan kota, juga menjadi penting untuk membentuk estetika kawasan pusat kota, sehingga sangat penting juga untuk mengembangkan bentuk bangunan UDK menjadi bentuk bangunan yang memiliki nilai estetika. Arsitektur Post Modern adalah Arsitektur yang berkembang setelah era Arsitektur modern dimana aliran Arsitektur yang baru ini mempunyai tujuan menolak menyempurnakan, dan mengkoreksi terhadap kesalahan yang telah terjadi pada arsitektur modern dimasa yang sebelumnya

Viscoelasticity and metastability limit in supercooled liquids

A supercooled liquid is said to have a kinetic spinodal if a temperature Tsp exists below which the liquid relaxation time exceeds the crystal nucleation time. We revisit classical nucleation theory taking into account the viscoelastic response of the liquid to the formation of crystal nuclei and find that the kinetic spinodal is strongly influenced by elastic effects. We introduce a dimensionless parameter \lambda, which is essentially the ratio between the infinite frequency shear modulus and the enthalpy of fusion of the crystal. In systems where \lambda is larger than a critical value \lambda_c the metastability limit is totally suppressed, independently of the surface tension. On the other hand, if \lambda < \lambda_c a kinetic spinodal is present and the time needed to experimentally observe it scales as exp[\omega/(\lambda_c-\lambda)^2], where \omega is roughly the ratio between surface tension and enthalpy of fusion

Plasticization and antiplasticization of polymer melts diluted by low molar mass species

An analysis of glass formation for polymer melts that are diluted by structured molecular additives is derived by using the generalized entropy theory, which involves a combination of the Adam-Gibbs model and the direct computation of the configurational entropy based on a lattice model of polymer melts that includes monomer structural effects. Antiplasticization is accompanied by a "toughening" of the glass mixture relative to the pure polymer, and this effect is found to occur when the diluents are small species with strongly attractive interactions with the polymer matrix. Plasticization leads to a decreased glass transition temperature T_g and a "softening" of the fragile host polymer in the glass state. Plasticization is prompted by small additives with weakly attractive interactions with the polymer matrix. The shifts in T_g of polystyrene diluted by fully flexible short oligomers are evaluated from the computations, along with the relative changes in the isothermal compressibility at T_g to characterize the extent to which the additives act as antiplasticizers or plasticizers. The theory predicts that a decreased fragility can accompany both antiplasticization and plasticization of the glass by molecular additives. The general reduction in the T_g and fragility of polymers by these molecular additives is rationalized by analyzing the influence of the diluent's properties (cohesive energy, chain length, and stiffness) on glass formation in diluted polymer melts. The description of glass formation at fixed temperature that is induced upon change the fluid composition directly implies the Angell equation for the structural relaxation time as function of the polymer concentration, and the computed "zero mobility concentration" scales linearly with the inverse polymerization index N.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figure