Knowledge Sharing in Emerging Economies

One of the new factors in Eastern European countries (and there is an acknowledgement that this aspect is inherent in other countries too) is this concept of freely sharing information i.e. the concept of what is known in KM literature of “Knowledge Sharing”. Sharing only takes place where there is trust and where there is a shared feeling of ownership of goals. The reasons behind the tendency to share are based on the kind of interpersonal relations between co- workers inherent within the organization and the effects of social relationships within organizational teams. Strengthening the social relationships between individuals in the team is crucial in motivating team members to share knowledge. New research is currently investigating the concept of “sharing social relationships” and one of the aims of the project is to investigate the barriers to sharing information in a particular type of business - that of the small to medium sized enterprises (the SME) in order to form a comparative study. The results of the study will be used to from a model of “information sharing best practice” for SME who are setting up or using KM systems. The work will examine the barriers to sharing in two newly emerging economies (Poland and Hungary) and one relatively established economy (the UK). At the time of writing the work with Poland and Hungary has been completed and this paper gives the initial results from the Hungarian study

Financial frictions and the K/L ratio in UK manufacturing

We investigate whether technological differences of UK manufacturing industries influence the response of firms’ capital–labour (K/L) ratio to changes in financial indicators under financial frictions. The results reveal that technological factors along with internal funds significantly affect the K/L ratio for financially constrained firms

Near surface geophysical surveying of Northern Ireland from the air

A recent low-level high resolution airborne geophysical survey of Northern Ireland has provided detailed imagery of ground radioactivity, electrical conductivity and magnetisation. Although airborne geophysics is usually thought of as a regional mapping method, these results are being used widely for near-surface applications - for shallow mineral exploration, geological mapping, environmental management and for research in these fields. Data have been licensed to industry and have prompted significant inward investment in mineral exploration. Together with complementary geochemical datasets, these near-surface geophysical results support environmental monitoring by regulators. They provide a basis for research in other fields, including structural geology, environmental radioactivity, soil science, groundwater management and geostatistics. Some of these applications are described. The project illustrates the value of airborne geophysical data in a range of economic sectors

MARKETING ORDERS - WITH PRODUCTION CONTROLS

Marketing,

Predicting the wake structure of the HART II rotor using the vorticity transport model

Brown’s Vorticity Transport Model has been used to predict the wake structure and resultant blade loading of the rotor that was studied during the HART II experimental programme. The descending flight condition of the experiment yields significant high-frequency content to the blade loading due to the presence of blade-vortex interactions. PIV images of the wake structure were compared against numerical predictions of the detailed geometry of the rotor wake using three different computational resolutions of the flow. This was done to investigate the origin of inaccuracies exposed in an earlier study of the system in capturing the effects of blade vortex interactions on the loading on the rotor. The predicted positions of the vortex cores agree with measured data to within a fraction of the blade chord, and the strength of the vortices is preserved to well downstream of the rotor, essentially independently of the resolution of the calculation. Nevertheless the amplitude of the loading impulses induced on the blade by vortex interaction are strongly influenced by the resolution of the calculation through the effect of cell density on the minimum vortex core size that can be supported. It would appear thus that the inaccuracies in predicting the high-frequency loading on the rotor are not due to any inherent deficiency in the representation of the wake, although viscous effects may need to be considered in future in order to decouple the vortex core size from the cell size, but rather due to the inherent deficiencies of the lifting line approach used to model the blade aerodynamics

Portable high-end instrument for in-vivo infrared spectroscopy using spread spectrum modulation

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can be employed to monitor noninvasively and continuously local changes in hemodynamics and oxygenation of human tissues. In particular, the technique can be particularly useful for muscular functional monitoring during unattended physical activity. A portable NIRS research-grade acquisition system, dedicated to low-noise measurements during muscular exercise, is presented. A spread-spectrum multiplexing scheme significantly enhances system performance. The resulting instrument is compact, lightweight and efficient. Preliminary tests on oxygen consumption during exercise and venous occlusion show excellent detectivity and time response

Results from the 4PI Effective Action in 2- and 3-dimensions

We consider a symmetric scalar theory with quartic coupling and solve the equations of motion from the 4PI effective action in 2- and 3-dimensions using an iterative numerical lattice method. For coupling less than 10 (in dimensionless units) good convergence is obtained in less than 10 iterations. We use lattice size up to 16 in 2-dimensions and 10 in 3-dimensions and demonstrate the convergence of the results with increasing lattice size. The self-consistent solutions for the 2-point and 4-point functions agree well with the perturbative ones when the coupling is small and deviate when the coupling is large.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures; v5: added numerical calculations in 3D; version accepted for publication in EPJ