Marketing in SMEs: a '4Ps' self-branding model

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which traditional marketing theory and practice can be applied in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and consider how owner-managers perceive their own role in marketing within a small business setting. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative exploratory approach using semi-structured in-depth interviews amongst owner-managers of SMEs in the UK. Findings – SME marketing is effective in that it embraces some relevant concepts of traditional marketing, tailors activities to match its customers and adds its own unique attribute of self-branding as bestowed by the SME owner-manager. Research limitations/implications – The study was limited to the UK and to a small sample of SMEs and as such the findings are not necessarily generalisable. Originality/value – A “4Ps” model for SME self-branding is proposed, which encompasses the attributes of personal branding, (co)production, perseverance and practice

Influence of pions on the hadron-quark phase transition

In this work we present the features of the hadron-quark phase transition diagrams in which the pions are included in the system. To construct such diagrams we use two different models in the description of the hadronic and quark sectors. At the quark level, we consider two distinct parametrizations of the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) models. In the hadronic side, we use a well known relativistic mean-field (RMF) nonlinear Walecka model. We show that the effect of the pions on the hadron-quark phase diagrams is to move the critical end point (CEP) of the transitions lines. Such an effect also depends on the value of the critical temperature (T_0) in the pure gauge sector used to parametrize the PNJL models. Here we treat the phase transitions using two values for T_0, namely, T_0 = 270 MeV and T_0 = 190 MeV. The last value is used to reproduce lattice QCD data for the transition temperature at zero chemical potential.Comment: 3 pages. Proceedings of XXXV Reuni\~ao de Trabalhos sobre F\'isica Nuclear no Brasil 201

Evaluation of linear classifiers on articles containing pharmacokinetic evidence of drug-drug interactions

Background. Drug-drug interaction (DDI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. [...] Biomedical literature mining can aid DDI research by extracting relevant DDI signals from either the published literature or large clinical databases. However, though drug interaction is an ideal area for translational research, the inclusion of literature mining methodologies in DDI workflows is still very preliminary. One area that can benefit from literature mining is the automatic identification of a large number of potential DDIs, whose pharmacological mechanisms and clinical significance can then be studied via in vitro pharmacology and in populo pharmaco-epidemiology. Experiments. We implemented a set of classifiers for identifying published articles relevant to experimental pharmacokinetic DDI evidence. These documents are important for identifying causal mechanisms behind putative drug-drug interactions, an important step in the extraction of large numbers of potential DDIs. We evaluate performance of several linear classifiers on PubMed abstracts, under different feature transformation and dimensionality reduction methods. In addition, we investigate the performance benefits of including various publicly-available named entity recognition features, as well as a set of internally-developed pharmacokinetic dictionaries. Results. We found that several classifiers performed well in distinguishing relevant and irrelevant abstracts. We found that the combination of unigram and bigram textual features gave better performance than unigram features alone, and also that normalization transforms that adjusted for feature frequency and document length improved classification. For some classifiers, such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA), proper dimensionality reduction had a large impact on performance. Finally, the inclusion of NER features and dictionaries was found not to help classification.Comment: Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, 201

Mantle dynamics and volcanism emplacement in the Azores

The Azores plateau is a triangular shaped topographic feature encompassing the boundary zone where three major tectonic plates (EU, NU and NA) meet. The eastern side of the plateau is delimited by two major tectonic discontinuities: the Mid Atlantic Ridge, and the Terceira Rift, a recently formed ultra-slow-spreading ridge. The origin of the plateau is still under debate. One hypothesis argues that the plateau would have been formed by successive NE jumps of the oblique spreading axis, where the present TR is the latest stage. Other hypotheses invoke the northward jump of the Azores triple junction, during which the Azores region would have been transferred from the Eurasian plate to the Nubian plate. For some authors, the presence of the Azores plume, a low seismic velocity zone in the mantle beneath, is required to explain the observations: the anomalously shallow seafloor depth as well as the geochemistry of the basaltic lavas erupted within the plateau. Here we use a highly resolved tomography model to quantify the influence of this plume and the surrounding mantle.We model the convection pattern, the induced dynamic topography and stresses, and compare them with the surface observations. The dynamic topography shows two maxima: one northwest of St. Miguel, the other encompassing the Terceira, Graciosa, S. Jorge, Faial and Pico islands. Both swells are approximately located on the Terceira Ridge. The convection pattern displays two distinct upwelling towards these two groups of Islands. This may explain the difference in the geochemical signatures, in particular the unique isotopic ratios observed in some lavas from S. Miguel. The stresses induced by the underlying mantle convection are compared with the surface observations (topographic features, seismic and GPS velocities). The modeled and observed tresses fairly correlate west of our study area but their directions depart east