Customers as Predictors of Rent Returns to Innovation and Small Firms – an exploratory study

Small to medium enterprises (SME) are frequently associated with high levels of innovation. However, it is difficult for such firms to fully assess the merits of a particular innovation. This study examined the risk-return profile of future investment in innovation by SME with respect to anticipated ‘rent' or financial returns. A survey of highly innovative SME was undertaken that examined management perceptions of the key strategic influences on rent returns. Regression analysis suggests that the firms' assessment of the rent returns from their innovation may be influenced by the value it is likely to deliver to the customer, the customer's expected use of the innovation to generate new sales and the ease of integrating the new innovation into existing technologies. The findings have implications for how entrepreneurs from early stage ventures are assisted.small business; entrepreneurship; innovation; risk assessment

More Lepton Flavor Violating Observables for LHCb's Run 2

The R_K measurement by LHCb suggests non-standard lepton non-universality (LNU) to occur in b -> s l+ l- transitions, with effects in muons rather than electrons. A number of other measurements of b -> s l+ l- transitions by LHCb and B-factories display disagreement with the SM predictions and, remarkably, these discrepancies are consistent in magnitude and sign with the R_K effect. Non-standard LNU suggests non-standard lepton flavor violation (LFV) as well, for example in B -> K l l' and B_s -> l l'. There are good reasons to expect that the new effects may be larger for generations closer to the third one. In this case, the B_s -> mu e decay may be the most difficult to reach experimentally. We propose and study in detail the radiative counterpart of this decay, namely B_s -> mu e gamma, whereby the chiral-suppression factor is replaced by a factor of order alpha/pi. A measurement of this mode would be sensitive to the same physics as the purely leptonic LFV decay and, depending on experimental efficiencies, it may be more accessible. A realistic expectation is a factor of two improvement in statistics for either of the B_{d,s} modes.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. v4: some typos corrected. Such corrections are not implemented in the journal versio

Creating tissue on chip constructs in microtitre plates for drug discovery

We report upon a novel coplanar dielectrophoresis (DEP) based cell patterning system for generating transferrable hepatic cell constructs, resembling a liver-lobule, in culture. The use of paper reinforced gel substrates provided sufficient strength to enable these constructs to be transfered into 96-well plates for long term functional studies, including in the future, drug development studies. Experimental results showed that hepatic cells formed DEP field-induced structures corresponding to an array of lobule-mimetic patterns. Hepatic viability was observed over a period of 3 days by the use of a fluorescent cell staining technique, whilst the liver specific functionality of albumin secretion showed a significant enhancement due to the layer patterning of cell lines (HepG2/C3A), compared to 2D patterned cells and un-patterned control. This “build and transfer” concept could, in future, also be adapted for the layer-by-layer construction of organs-on-chip in microtitre formats

The Energy-Momentum Tensor(s) in Classical Gauge Theories

We give an introduction to, and review of, the energy-momentum tensors in classical gauge field theories in Minkowski space, and to some extent also in curved space-time. For the canonical energy-momentum tensor of non-Abelian gauge fields and of matter fields coupled to such fields, we present a new and simple improvement procedure based on gauge invariance for constructing a gauge invariant, symmetric energy-momentum tensor. The relationship with the Einstein-Hilbert tensor following from the coupling to a gravitational field is also discussed.Comment: 34 pages; v2: Slightly expanded version with some improvements of presentation; Contribution to Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory, special issue in memory of Raymond Stora, Nucl. Phys.

Assessing the effects of sub-lethal doses of pesticides on bee populations

Ce cas concerne l’évolution des réglementations européennes sur les procédures d’homologation des pesticides La mise en évidence du rôle des faibles doses d’insecticide dans l’affaiblissement des essaims a conduit au retrait de molécules initialement homologuées pour l’enrobage des semences. Le test sur larves « Aupinel » pour l’évaluation de la toxicité des produits lors de leur phase d’homologation a été approuvé par l’OCDE. Les impacts autres que politiques de ces résultats, potentiellement multiples - économique, environnemental- sont difficilement objectivables car les pesticides ne sont qu’une des causes affectant les colonies d’abeilles

Capillary-based multiplexed isothermal nucleic acid-based test for sexually transmitted diseases in patients

We demonstrate a multiplexed loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay for infectious disease diagnostics, where the analytical process flow of target pathogens genomic DNA is performed manually by moving magnetic beads through a series of plugs in a capillary. Heat is provided by a water bath and the results read by the naked eye, enabling applications in low resource settings

Acoustically controlled enhancement of molecular sensing to assess oxidative stress in cells

We demonstrate a microfluidic platform for the controlled aggregation of colloidal silver nanoparticles using surface acoustic waves (SAWs), enabling surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) analysis of a cell based model for oxidative damage. We show that by varying the frequency and the power of the acoustic energy, it is possible to modulate the aggregation of the colloid within the sample and hence to optimise the SERS analysis

EOS -- A Software for Flavor Physics Phenomenology

I present EOS, an open-source software dedicated to a variety of tasks in the processing of flavor physics observables. EOS is written in C++ and offers both a C++ and a Python interface. It is developed for three main tasks, the production of theoretical predictions for flavor physics observables; the inference of theoretical parameters from an extensible database of likelihoods; and the production of Monte Carlo samples of flavor processes for sensitivity studies.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure