E-Business in Ukraine: Peculiarities, Tendencies, Prospects

Introduction. It is evident that the electronic business plays a central role in the economy development, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services, and payments. We feel very strongly that entrepreneurs who understand the role and significance of e-business and are ready to meet the sharply expanding scale of cross-border e-commerce will be the winners of tomorrow in the world market. An initial point to underline in connection with these tendencies is that business which does not give some attention to e-business and e-marketing promotion could very easily loose its place on the market. This explains the hyper attention to the e-business nowadays and as a result the necessity of studying this question. The purpose of the article is to study the characteristic features of e-business in Ukraine, to determine the latest tendencies of its development and to propose the certain steps to increase its growth. Results. Recent researches support the view that organizations can have a significant benefit of using e-business tools in their everyday operations. The article examines the benefits, problems and limitations of e-business in Ukraine. It has been distinguished that Ukraine is an attractive market for the development of e-commerce. It has a large potential for e-business and its related activities. In 2018 Ukraine ranked the 2nd place in the turnover growth of online usage among European countries. A major factor stimulating Internet growth is the drastic improvement of the telecommunications infrastructure in the country. Advantages and risks of new electronic marketing techniques were considered in the article. The main strengths of online marketing system are high quality customer service, greater reach, time saving customer loyalty, easy access to information, 24 hours access and personal contact with the customer. Considering the risks, it was admitted that e-marketing requires considerable time investment to get the results and it takes a long time to generate meaningful interactions. Conditions that should be arranged for successful e-business model implementation were determined. It was pointed out that in order to increase the development of e-business in Ukraine that certain steps such as harmonizing of essential laws and standards to the European ones, enhancing the use of web analytics tools, providing an appropriate choice of communication channels and improving administrative regulations regarding e-business procedures should be taken. In this regard, Ukrainian businesses need all the support they can get from policymakers and regulators in order to be able to grow in an increasingly competitive global market. In conclusion, in order to stay effective, to improve operational efficiency, profitability, and to strengthen their competitive position business organizations should definitely adopt e-business model. It is not enough to have high quality products or services to operate successfully in the market; productive introduction of new e-business models is vital in a computerised electronic environment. In this regard, if Ukrainian government wants its companies to fully play their role in a globalized world, it needs to create a harmonized market and a favourable environment where domestic e-business companies can flourish. Prospects for further research can be seen in the analysis of the methods of measuring the effectiveness of different e-business models

Long-Period Building Response to Earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area

This article reports a study of modeled, long-period building responses to ground-motion simulations of earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area. The earthquakes include the 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 7.8 simulation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and two hypothetical magnitude 7.8 northern San Andreas fault earthquakes with hypocenters north and south of San Francisco. We use the simulated ground motions to excite nonlinear models of 20-story, steel, welded moment-resisting frame (MRF) buildings. We consider MRF buildings designed with two different strengths and modeled with either ductile or brittle welds. Using peak interstory drift ratio (IDR) as a performance measure, the stiffer, higher strength building models outperform the equivalent more flexible, lower strength designs. The hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake with hypocenter north of San Francisco produces the most severe ground motions. In this simulation, the responses of the more flexible, lower strength building model with brittle welds exceed an IDR of 2.5% (that is, threaten life safety) on 54% of the urban area, compared to 4.6% of the urban area for the stiffer, higher strength building with ductile welds. We also use the simulated ground motions to predict the maximum isolator displacement of base-isolated buildings with linear, single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) models. For two existing 3-sec isolator systems near San Francisco, the design maximum displacement is 0.5 m, and our simulations predict isolator displacements for this type of system in excess of 0.5 m in many urban areas. This article demonstrates that a large, 1906-like earthquake could cause significant damage to long-period buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area

Assessing brand image through communalitites and asymmetries brand-to-attribute and attribute-to-brand associations.

Brand image is a key component of customer-based brand equity, and refers to the associations a consumer holds in memory. Such associations are often directional; one should distinguish between brand-to-attribute and attribute-to-brand associations. Information on these associations arise from two ways of collecting data respectively: brand-by-brand evaluations of all attributes and attribute-by-attribute evaluations of all brands. In this paper, the authors present a methodological approach, namely correspondence analysis of matched matrices, to assess the communalitites as well as asymmetries between brand-to-attribute and attribute-to-brand associations. The methodology results in perceptual maps visualizing brand image. The approach is illustrated in an empirical market research project in which two samples of consumers evaluated ten brands of deodorants and eleven attributes

Optimizing intermittent water supply in urban pipe distribution networks

In many urban areas of the developing world, piped water is supplied only intermittently, as valves direct water to different parts of the water distribution system at different times. The flow is transient, and may transition between free-surface and pressurized, resulting in complex dynamical features with important consequences for water suppliers and users. Here, we develop a computational model of transition, transient pipe flow in a network, accounting for a wide variety of realistic boundary conditions. We validate the model against several published data sets, and demonstrate its use on a real pipe network. The model is extended to consider several optimization problems motivated by realistic scenarios. We demonstrate how to infer water flow in a small pipe network from a single pressure sensor, and show how to control water inflow to minimize damaging pressure gradients

AN ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF COTTON AND PEANUT RESEARCH IN SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES

The purpose of this study was to utilize the economic surplus framework for evaluating the impact of investment in agricultural research. The economic impact measures used in this study were the total benefits and distribution of those benefits associated with investment in agricultural research. These results were used to calculate an internal rate of return on the investments. The focus of the research was on cotton and peanuts in the Southeast region of the United States. Two equations were estimated to determine the impacts of the money being spent on the research efforts of these two commodities. The results revealed positive benefits to consumers and producers exceeded the investment amount in each year for both commodities in the period. The total social benefits averaged about 201 million (1982) dollars annually for cotton research. Peanut research averaged about 191 million (1982) dollars resulting form research investment. The internal rates of return were 23.87 percent for cotton and 53.58 percent for peanuts, suggesting that past research investments produced a high return to society. This result does not conflict the results of other similar studies as those mentioned in the literature review.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Space-time renormalization in phase transition dynamics

When a system is driven across a quantum critical point at a constant rate its evolution must become non-adiabatic as the relaxation time $\tau$ diverges at the critical point. According to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM), the emerging post-transition excited state is characterized by a finite correlation length $\hat\xi$ set at the time $\hat t=\hat \tau$ when the critical slowing down makes it impossible for the system to relax to the equilibrium defined by changing parameters. This observation naturally suggests a dynamical scaling similar to renormalization familiar from the equilibrium critical phenomena. We provide evidence for such KZM-inspired spatiotemporal scaling by investigating an exact solution of the transverse field quantum Ising chain in the thermodynamic limit.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures; 1 figure added, version accepted in Phys. Rev.

Difficulties in estimating the human burden of canine rabies

Current passive surveillance data for canine rabies, particularly for the regions where the burden is highest, are inadequate for appropriate decision making on control efforts. Poor enforcement of existing legislation and poor implementation of international guidance reduce the effectiveness of surveillance systems, but another set of problems relates to the fact that canine rabies is an untreatable condition which affects very poor sectors of society. This results in an unknown, but potentially large proportion of rabies victims dying outside the health system, deaths that are unlikely to be recorded by surveillance systems based on health center records. This article critically evaluates the potential sources of information on the number of human deaths attributable to canine rabies, and how we might improve the estimates required to move towards the goal of global canine rabies elimination

On some new approaches to practical Slepian-Wolf compression inspired by channel coding

This paper considers the problem, first introduced by Ahlswede and Körner in 1975, of lossless source coding with coded side information. Specifically, let X and Y be two random variables such that X is desired losslessly at the decoder while Y serves as side information. The random variables are encoded independently, and both descriptions are used by the decoder to reconstruct X. Ahlswede and Körner describe the achievable rate region in terms of an auxiliary random variable. This paper gives a partial solution for the optimal auxiliary random variable, thereby describing part of the rate region explicitly in terms of the distribution of X and Y