Innovative Service-Based Business Concepts for the Machine Tool Building Industry

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityDuring the last decade, machine tool building companies have been forced to put innovative offers on the market. Due to the technical features of their products and the prevailing organizational structures in this sector, especially product-service systems are a promising way of creating a unique selling point. In this paper, potential new business concepts for machine tool builders will be presented which aim at fulfilling basic customer needs like the increase in quality, flexibility, productivity and the reduction of lead times, costs and risks. For the implementation of these product-service systems, practical examples are given.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Crown plasticity and neighborhood interactions of European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) in an old-growth forest

Competition for canopy space is a process of major importance in forest dynamics. Although virgin and old-growth European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forests in Europe have been studied for many years, there are to date no studies of individual-tree crown plasticity and the way this is influenced by local neighborhood interactions in these forests. In this study, we analyzed crown plasticity and local neighborhood interactions of individual trees in the upper canopy of the old-growth beech forests of Serrahn, northeast Germany. In a 2.8-ha sample plot, we measured crown radii of all upper canopy trees and analyzed the direction and extent of crown asymmetry. Size, relative position, and distance of neighboring trees were used to construct vectors of neighborhood asymmetry within different distances from target trees. The crowns of beech trees showed strong morphological plasticity. Mean absolute and relative displacement of crown centers from the stem base were 1.95 m and 0.37, respectively. Circular–circular rank correlation coefficients between the direction of crown displacement and the direction of neighborhood pressure showed that trees strongly positioned their crowns away from local neighbors. Highest correlation coefficients were obtained when basal area and relative position of neighboring trees within a radial distance of 12 m were considered. Clark and Evans index and Ripley’s K-function showed that crowns were more regularly distributed than stems. Projected canopy cover was about 10% higher than canopy cover with simulated circular crowns. We conclude that the crowns of older beech trees have a high ability to plastically respond to changes in the local canopy conditions, enabling very effective exploitation of canopy space

Demutualization and its Problems

Over the last three decades, cooperatives experienced acceleration of institutional innovation with the introduction of many variations to the reference model. It is certainly not surprising that coops changed their organizational structure over time to face the challenges of world. In the United States and in Canada they are commonly referred to as new generation cooperatives, in Italy and Spain as cooperative groups or network of cooperatives. One of the main feature of these new organizational structures is their attempt to take some advantages of the investor oriented firms (above all in capital raising activities) while retaining the mutual/cooperative status. Many of these changes have been undertaken to facilitate the growth of the enterprises both in domestic market and abroad. Due to the wideness of the phenomenon we could name the last three decades the age of hybridization. However in some cases the search for new structures went further and assumed the aspect of conversion of mutuals into stock firms. Our paper will deal with this latter part of the story, focusing on cooperatives that preferred conversion or demutualization to hybridization. The paper describes the chronology and the geography of demutualization and analyses the forces that drove it over the last decades. The main conclusion is that demutualization provided solutions for real problems, as hybridization did, however the choice between these two options seems to have been more a matter of ideology than of efficiency

Liver Allograft: Its Use in Chronic Active Hepatitis with Macronodular Cirrhosis, Hepatitis B Surface Antigen

A patient suffering from chronic active hepatitis with macronodular cirrhosis, positive for hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), was treated with an orthotopic liver allograft. The HBs antigenemia, as measured with several precipitation tests and by complement fixation, became negative after transplantation and remained so for about 2½ months. During the interval, very low titers of the antigen were detectable by radioimmunoassay. At about three months after transplantation, she had an attack of acute hepatitis, at which time HBsAg became detectable by all tests. She recovered, but progressive liver disease developed during the remaining 1½ years of her life. She died of disseminated nocardiosis and candidiasis with deteriorating hepatic function. The homograft at autopsy showed no evidence of rejection, but was the site of chronic active liver disease, although of a different pathologic pattern than that affecting her native liver. The differences in histology may reflect the influence of chronic immunosuppression on the features of chronic active hepatitis. © 1979, American Medical Association. All rights reserved

Potential Energy Surface for H_2 Dissociation over Pd(100)

The potential energy surface (PES) of dissociative adsorption of H_2 on Pd(100) is investigated using density functional theory and the full-potential linear augmented plane wave (FP-LAPW) method. Several dissociation pathways are identified which have a vanishing energy barrier. A pronounced dependence of the potential energy on ``cartwheel'' rotations of the molecular axis is found. The calculated PES shows no indication of the presence of a precursor state in front of the surface. Both results indicate that steering effects determine the observed decrease of the sticking coefficient at low energies of the H_2 molecules. We show that the topology of the PES is related to the dependence of the covalent H(s)-Pd(d) interactions on the orientation of the H_2 molecule.Comment: RevTeX, 8 pages, 5 figures in uufiles forma

The use of cyclosporin A and prednisone in cadaver kidney transplantation

Eighteen patients were treated with primary cadaveric renal transplantation using cyclosporin A therapy, and four more patients underwent cadaveric retransplantation. Eleven of the 22 recipients were conditioned with lymphoid depletion before transplantation, using thoracic duct drainage or lymphapheresis for two to eight and one-half weeks. cyclosporin A was begun a few hours before grafting. The other 11 patients were pretreated wtih cyclosporin A for from one day to 18 days. After transplantation, the majority of patients in both subgroups of 11 had rejection develop, but in most, the immunologic process was readily controlled with relatively small dosages of prednisone. After follow-up periods of two to four and one-half months, one patient has died of the complications of a coronary artery reconstruction that was not related to the transplantation. Another graft was lost from rejection, and a third organ was removed because of ureteral necrosis. Nineteen of the original 22 cadaveric kidneys are functioning, including 17 of the 18 kidneys given to patients who were undergoing transplantation for the first time. The only loss in the latter group of 18 patients was in the patient who died after an open heart operation. Results of these studies have shown that cyclosporin A is a superior and safe immunosuppressive drug but that, for optimal use in cadaveric transplantation, it usually should not be given alone. Steroid therapy greatly amplified the value of cyclosporin A. Unless major delayed morbidity develops which is not obvious so far, this drug combination should permit revolutionary advances ion the transplantation of all organs. Other adjunct to the cyclosporin A-steroid combination, including lymphoid depletion techniques, will require further investigation