The Adoption of New Technology: Conceptual Model and Application

The decision to adopt a new technology or not depends on the benefits to be gained by incorporating new technical, functional or esthetic solutions, in order to attain the company’s competitive positioning; this decision also depends on the costs and risks involved. In general terms, businesses lack the resources, whether financial, human, or structural, to innovate or even to adapt new technologies. The objectives of this study are to test an innovation adoption model on a real case and show the importance of international cooperation for new technology implementation processes, based on a decision-making case about whether or not to adopt a new technology that occurred in eletronic company in Brazil (called “A”). The new technology might help to solve certain challenges the company faced in its printer plant, by increasing efficiency and cutting costs

MiNAA: Microbiome Network Alignment Algorithm

Our Microbiome Network Alignment Algorithm (MiNAA) aligns two microbial networks using a combination of the GRAph ALigner (GRAAL) algorithm and the Hungarian algorithm. Network alignment algorithms find pairs of nodes (one node from the first network and the other node from the second network) that have the highest similarity. Traditionally, similarity has been defined as topological similarity such that the neighborhoods around the two nodes are similar. Recent implementations of network alignment methods such as NETAL and L-GRAAL also include measures of biological similarity, yet these methods are restricted to one specific type of biological similarity (e.g. sequence similarity in L-GRAAL). Our work extends existing network alignment implementations by allowing any type of biological similarity to be input by the user. This flexibility allows the user to choose whatever measure of biological similarity is suitable for the study at hand. In addition, unlike most existing network alignment methods that are tailored for protein or gene interaction networks, our work is the first one suited for microbiome networks

On a certain class of semigroups of operators

We define an interesting class of semigroups of operators in Banach spaces, namely, the randomly generated semigroups. This class contains as a remarkable subclass a special type of quantum dynamical semigroups introduced by Kossakowski in the early 1970s. Each randomly generated semigroup is associated, in a natural way, with a pair formed by a representation or an antirepresentation of a locally compact group in a Banach space and by a convolution semigroup of probability measures on this group. Examples of randomly generated semigroups having important applications in physics are briefly illustrated.Comment: 11 page

Raytheon -- Strength Optimized Designs Using Additive Manufacturing

Designing a structure to demonstrate the strength of 3-D printed part is more complicated than it seems. The design goal was to construct a device that demonstrates how 3-D printing can create a strength optimized design. The design must incorporate maximum strength, while not sacrificing other major components such as weight of the product, cost of the product, print time of the product and how much material is being used. Extensive research and tests were conducted on infill patterns, football helmets, and TPU material (material used in football helmets). There are multiple infill patterns that must be considered. The most important aspect of printing parts via FDM 3D printing is the infill pattern. This will directly affect the print time, material used, cost, and strength of the printed part. The second most important concept of the 3-D printed part is the infill structure. There are many infill structures, each having its own strengths and weaknesses when approaching higher strength, time to print, material used and weight. The team decided to focus on four commonly used infill structures (honeycomb, wiggle, triangular, and rectilinear). The team conducted a 3-point bending test and compression test, strictly following the ATSM standards to find out more about the strengths and weaknesses of each specific infill pattern (shown in this report). A design has been created and the application is a football Helmet. The design has 2 parts. The first part is a smaller, circular piece as the very top of the helmet. This piece contains a “triple layer infill sandwich.” The triple layer infill sandwich is composed of 3 different infills: wiggle infill (good for distributing rotational energy), honeycomb infill (good for distributing linear impact), wiggle infill again (good for distributing rotational energy). The second part of the helmet liner is a dome composed of an Isomax structure with a hole cut out at the top of the helmet. The team originally came up with 120 different designs in an attempted to best solve the task at hand. The method from obtaining these ideas came from brainstorming and online research. To narrow the solutions, a table was made with different attributes and rankings with each attribute. The team went through each individual concept and ranked it accordingly. After we had our top ideas team 13 conducted specific testing to figure out which idea was best and team 13 came up with this specific helmet liner

Remarks on some new models of interacting quantum fields with indefinite metric

We study quantum field models in indefinite metric. We introduce the modified Wightman axioms of Morchio and Strocchi as a general framework of indefinite metric quantum field theory (QFT) and present concrete interacting relativistic models obtained by analytical continuation from some stochastic processes with Euclidean invariance. As a first step towards scattering theory in indefinite metric QFT, we give a proof of the spectral condition on the translation group for the relativistic models.Comment: 13 page

A homomorphism theorem and a Trotter product formula for quantum stochastic flows with unbounded coefficients

We give a new method for proving the homomorphic property of a quantum stochastic ow satisfying a quantum stochastic differential equation with unbounded coefficients, under some further hypotheses. As an application, we prove a Trotter product formula for quantum stochastic ows and obtain quantum stochastic dilations of a class of quantum dynamical semigroups generalizing results of [5

Antibacterial properties of novel Eumelanin-Inspired Phenylene Indolyne derivatives

BACKGROUND: The eumelanin core represents a novel compound having the intrinsic ability to act as scaffolding for functional groups which may possess antibacterial properties. The purpose of this study was to investigate the antibacterial potential of eumelanin-inspired phenylene indolyne (EIPE) derivatives EIPE-1 and EIPE-HCl which are hydrophobic and hydrophilic, respectively.METHODS: A standardized disk agar diffusion bioassay was employed to determine the susceptibility and resistance levels of 12 gram-positive and 13 gram-negative bacteria to nonpolar and polar EIPE derivatives. The bioassay was performed by dissolving the compounds in dimethyl sulfoxide and impregnating filter paper disks which were placed onto Mueller Hinton agar plates spread inoculated in a standardized manner to obtain even cell lawns after incubation for 18±1 hours at 37°C. Zones of growth inhibition were measured with the aid of electronic calipers.RESULTS: Five strains of Staphylococcus aureus, plus Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus epidermidis were all found to be susceptible to the hydrophobic derivative EIPE-1, while other gram-positive and all gram-negative organisms exhibited resistant phenotypes at potencies tested. The more polar EIPE-HCl derivative failed to inhibit growth of any of the organisms examined, regardless of gram reactivity.CONCLUSION: Hydrophobic EIPE derivative EIPE-1 clearly possesses a gram-positive antibacterial spectrum, although only certain organisms are susceptible at the potencies employed for this study. The susceptibility of two methicillin-resistant S. aureus strains (SFL 8 and SFL 64) to EIPE-1 suggests that its mechanism of action does not involve the penicillin-binding proteins of peptidoglycan biosynthesis targeted by mainstream B-lactam antibiotics. The uniform resistance of 13 phylogenetically disparate gram-negative bacteria supports the notion that intrinsic outer membrane exclusion properties may play a role in the mechanism underlying their phenotypic resistance to the molecule. The more polar EIPE-HCl possesses no antibacterial properties at the potencies examined here. Future work will include performing minimal inhibitory concentration bioassays to quantitatively describe susceptibly in selected gram-positive bacteria. In addition, batch culture growth kinetics assays will be crucial to learning the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for susceptibility and resistance to EIPE-1

On unbounded p-summable Fredholm modules

We prove that odd unbounded p-summable Fredholm modules are also bounded p-summable Fredholm modules (this is the odd counterpart of a result of A. Connes for the case of even Fredholm modules)

Tecnologia de produção e cultura organizacional em uma empresa de transporte em massa

O presente trabalho considera a relação entre tecnologia de produção e cultura organizacional em uma empresa estatal de transporte em massa. Este estudo sugere que as demandas de um sistema de produção altamente mecanizado, de alta intensidade de capital e de alta precisão não determinam diretamente a cultura organizacional como alegariam alguns estudos clássicos. Antes, parecem gerar tensões subculturais entre as unidades responsáveis pela operação cotidiana do sistema e as unidades que fazem intermediação entre a organização e o seu ambiente político e econômico. Essas tensões, por sua vez, podem gerar maior variância em percepções de cultura organizacional do que se encontra em organizações que não precisam conciliar simultaneamente as demandas de uma tecnologia de precisão e as tensões inerentes às organizações públicas. Em termos teóricos, este trabalho abre novo espaço conceitual para abordar a tecnologia como variável independente em um campo que tradicionalmente tem visto a cultura organizacional como variável dependente

Evaluating HPV Vaccination Adherence Amongst Teenagers Ages 12-18

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted infection that can cause genital warts and different cancers. According to the CDC, 85% of people will get an HPV infection in their lifetime. HPV infections have decreased significantly since the implementation of the HPV vaccine. Data has shown 90% of cancers caused by HPV can be prevented with administration of HPV vaccination. Current guidelines recommend vaccination administration as early as 9 years of age. This quality improvement project will evaluate HPV vaccination rates amongst teenagers ages 12-18