Newcastle Business School Principles of Responsible Management Education Project (NBS PRIME)

The world is changing rapidly and new demands face business leaders to deal with the planet and environment more sustainably, to deal with the numerous societies their organisations operate in more equitably and with greater cultural understanding, and to be more open, transparent and responsible with respect to their stakeholders. Recent events such as the credit and banking crisis alongside general global corporate social responsibility and sustainability concerns, have led to questions as to whether current management education is adequate to equip and develop future leaders with the requisite skills to meet these new demands (Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, Dolle, & Shulman, 2011; Datar, Garvin, & Cullen, 2010; Weybrecht, 2010). For these reasons it is essential that universities and business schools seek to embrace principles of sustainability and responsible management into their teaching, research and enterprise activities. Newcastle Business school is ideally placed to make a significant contribution to social, environmental and economic well being through its global reputation for delivering some of the best business management education in the UK

Electromechanical Response of Polycrystalline Barium Titanate Resolved at the Grain Scale

Ferroic materials are critical components in many modern devices. Polycrystalline states of these materials dominate the market due to their cost effectiveness and ease of production. Studying the coupling of ferroic properties across grain boundaries and within clusters of grains is therefore critical for understanding bulk polycrystalline ferroic behavior. Here, three-dimensional X-ray diffraction is used to reconstruct a 3D grain map (grain orientations and neighborhoods) of a polycrystalline barium titanate sample and track the grain-scale non-180° ferroelectric domain switching strains of 139 individual grains in situ under an applied electric field. The map shows that each grain is located in a very unique local environment in terms of intergranular misorientations, leading to local strain heterogeneity in the as-processed state of the sample. While primarily dependent on the crystallographic orientation relative to the field directions, the response of individual grains is also heterogeneous. These unique experimental results are of critical importance both when building the starting conditions and considering the validity of grain-scale modeling efforts, and provide additional considerations in the design of novel ferroic materials

A study of fragmentation processes using a discrete element method

We present a model of solids made from polygonal cells connected via beams. We calculate the macroscopic elastic moduli from the beam and cell parameters. This modellisation is particularly suited for the simulation of fragmentation processes. We study the effects of an explosion inside a circular disk and the impact of a projectile and obtain the fragment size distribution. We find that if breaking only happens under tensile forces a layer on the free wall opposed to impact is first ejected. In that case the distribution follows a power-law with an exponent that in most cases is around two.Comment: 16 pages in LaTex format, 17 PostScript figures. Figures are available upon request from the authors. Submitted to Int. J. of Mod. Phys.

First Order Static Excitation Potential: Scheme for Excitation Energies and Transition Moments

We present an approximation scheme for the calculation of the principal excitation energies and transition moments of finite many-body systems. The scheme is derived from a first order approximation to the self energy of a recently proposed extended particle-hole Green's function. A hermitian eigenvalue problem is encountered of the same size as the well-known Random Phase Approximation (RPA). We find that it yields a size consistent description of the excitation properties and removes an inconsistent treatment of the ground state correlation by the RPA. By presenting a hermitian eigenvalue problem the new scheme avoids the instabilities of the RPA and should be well suited for large scale numerical calculations. These and additional properties of the new approximation scheme are illuminated by a very simple exactly solvable model.Comment: 15 pages revtex, 1 eps figure included, corrections in Eq. (A1) and Sec. II

Automation Factors Influencing the Operation of IoT in Health Institutions: A Decision Support Methodology

Health institutions are adopting new technologies for their processes through automation by means of the concept of "Internet of Things" (IoT). Hence, offering innovative tools, applications and technology for the collection of key data and information, which is then integrated and consolidated, covering the different systems and their collaborators. The necessity of receiving quality medical services is essential in the public Policy of any country. The increasing demand for having an adequate number of medical specialists, pharmacies and medications stock, dental and mental health coverage and other, together with the minimization of the waiting list and patient care time have been a crucial concern. Under this context, it is valuable to redesign the processes planning and its coordination through the use of Information & Communications Technology (ICT) and IoT that unifies the systems. Based on previous research, the general purpose is to generate a system model to examine healthcare quality of service and corroborate its effectiveness in a real environment. The aim of this paper focus on the development of a decision support model to define key areas where the inclusion of IoT would sustain the efficiency in health care service. The research methodology is based on case study, integrating planning processes, data analysis, scoring method that interacts with multicriteria approach. A pilot case study is pursued in health institutions in Chile, determining critical factors and the current automation level system appraisal to generate actions of improvement in processes that show poor service quality. The results give rise to the development of an investment plan that can be converted into action plans for a health institution

A multiple length scale description of the mechanism of elastomer stretching

Conventionally, the stretching of rubber is modeled exclusively by rotations of segments of the embedded polymer chains; i.e. changes in entropy.</p

Imprinting the memory into paste and its visualization as crack patterns in drying process

In the drying process of paste, we can imprint into the paste the order how it should be broken in the future. That is, if we vibrate the paste before it is dried, it remembers the direction of the initial external vibration, and the morphology of resultant crack patterns is determined solely by the memory of the direction. The morphological phase diagram of crack patterns and the rheological measurement of the paste show that this memory effect is induced by the plasticity of paste.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to JPS