Sustained growth in small enterprises: a process management approach

This thesis illustrates that given the necessary resource and a structured Business Growth Framework, Small and Medium Enterprises can lay the foundation for sustained growth. The author investigated the essence of Small and Medium Enterprises, conducted a literature review in SME growth, and asserted the importance of the application of structure to business processes in achieving sustainable business growth. The author introduced the SME business process structure deficit, assessed its implications on business growth, and elaborated that the business process structure deficit can be addressed through the methodical application of six internationally accepted UK initiatives already available in the SME domain. The thesis establishes the characteristics of Business Growth for SMEs, leading to the development of a Business Growth Framework, based upon a defined set of business processes. This framework supports business growth. The framework provides diagnostic assessment of business process performance, process specific improvements embracing better practice through the innovative application of, for example DTI publications, and internal Benchmarking linking, if desired, to the UK Benchmarking Index. The resulting Business Growth Framework, along with the Business Growth Framework Implementation Methodology have evolved during this research and are the key tools for sustained business growth developed by the author and discussed in this thesis. The benefits of close integration of financial and manufacturing systems, like ERP, with Business Processes is discussed. The author demonstrated that Business Growth could successfully occur amongst Small and Medium Enterprises if approached through a structured methodology. Intentionally no new and complex business models have been proposed. The research showed that there is sufficient literature available in this area already

Facilities Planning Approach for the Space Shuttle

In developing an overall facilities plan for the Space Shuttle program, it is important to recognize that manufacturing, development, and operations requirements cannot be independently developed. While it is true that specific requirements for each element can be developed independently, applying these requirements to candidate locations can only result in an optimized facilities plan when the appropriate interrelationships of all program elements are properly assessed. Starting with an understanding both of the Shuttle vehicles and of the overall assembly flow, this paper discusses the MDC study of the overall manufacturing, test, and operations requirements for facilities. It also demonstrates the various interrelationships that must be recognized and studied before a recommended facilities plan can be effectively developed

A Bit-String Model for Biological Aging

We present a simple model for biological aging. We studied it through computer simulations and we have found this model to reflect some features of real populations.Comment: LaTeX file, 4 PS figures include

Addressing spin transitions on 209Bi donors in silicon using circularly-polarized microwaves

Over the past decade donor spin qubits in isotopically enriched $^{28}$Si have been intensely studied due to their exceptionally long coherence times. More recently bismuth donor electron spins have become popular because Bi has a large nuclear spin which gives rise to clock transitions (first-order insensitive to magnetic field noise). At every clock transition there are two nearly degenerate transitions between four distinct states which can be used as a pair of qubits. Here it is experimentally demonstrated that these transitions are excited by microwaves of opposite helicity such that they can be selectively driven by varying microwave polarization. This work uses a combination of a superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) microresonator and a dielectric resonator to flexibly generate arbitrary elliptical polarizations while retaining the high sensitivity of the CPW

Reexamining Black-Body Shifts for Hydrogenlike Ions

We investigate black-body induced energy shifts for low-lying levels of atomic systems, with a special emphasis on transitions used in current and planned high-precision experiments on atomic hydrogen and ionized helium. Fine-structure and Lamb-shift induced black-body shifts are found to increase with the square of the nuclear charge number, whereas black-body shifts due to virtual transitions decrease with increasing nuclear charge as the fourth power of the nuclear charge. We also investigate the decay width acquired by the ground state of atomic hydrogen, due to interaction with black-body photons. The corresponding width is due to an instability against excitation to higher excited atomic levels, and due to black-body induced ionization. These effects limit the lifetime of even the most fundamental, a priori absolutely stable, "asymptotic" state of atomic theory, namely the ground state of atomic hydrogen.Comment: 11 pages; LaTe

What Have We Learned from Policy Transfer Research? Dolowitz and Marsh Revisited

Over the last decade, policy transfer has emerged as an important concept within public policy analysis, guiding both theoretical and empirical research spanning many venues and issue areas. Using Dolowitz and Marsh's 1996 stocktake as its starting point, this article reviews what has been learned by whom and for what purpose. It finds that the literature has evolved from its rather narrow, state-centred roots to cover many more actors and venues. While policy transfer still represents a niche topic for some researchers, an increasing number have successfully assimilated it into wider debates on topics such as globalisation, Europeanisation and policy innovation. This article assesses the concept's position in the overall ‘tool-kit’ of policy analysis, examines some possible future directions and reflects on their associated risks and opportunities

Evaluating Variable-Length Multiple-Option Lists in Chatbots and Mobile Search

In recent years, the proliferation of smart mobile devices has lead to the gradual integration of search functionality within mobile platforms. This has created an incentive to move away from the "ten blue links'' metaphor, as mobile users are less likely to click on them, expecting to get the answer directly from the snippets. In turn, this has revived the interest in Question Answering. Then, along came chatbots, conversational systems, and messaging platforms, where the user needs could be better served with the system asking follow-up questions in order to better understand the user's intent. While typically a user would expect a single response at any utterance, a system could also return multiple options for the user to select from, based on different system understandings of the user's intent. However, this possibility should not be overused, as this practice could confuse and/or annoy the user. How to produce good variable-length lists, given the conflicting objectives of staying short while maximizing the likelihood of having a correct answer included in the list, is an underexplored problem. It is also unclear how to evaluate a system that tries to do that. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we define some necessary and some optional properties that an evaluation measure fit for this purpose should have. We further show that existing evaluation measures from the IR tradition are not entirely suitable for this setup, and we propose novel evaluation measures that address it satisfactorily.Comment: 4 pages, in Proceeding of SIGIR 201

Automated Data Management Information System (ADMIS)

ADMIS stores and controls data and documents associated with manned space flight effort. System contains all data oriented toward a specific document; it is primary source of reports generated by the system. Each group of records is composed of one document record, one distribution record for each recipient of the document, and one summary record