Positive Developments and Challenges before Indigenous Software Industries: Looking at Bulgaria, Thinking about CEE

software, Bulgaria, CEE, industrial development, accumulation of capabilities, industrial policy

Organic semiconductors with increased dielectric constants:properties and perspectives

Organic semiconductors are a versatile class of materials whose functionality can be tuned extensively with the use of synthetic organic chemistry techniques. Over the years, this has led to the development of organic light emitting diodes, organic solar cells, organic thermoelectric generators and organic field effect transistors, amongst other organic electronic devices. For organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices, a key challenge to developing high performance solar cells has been overcoming the exciton binding energy. The exciton binding energy keeps the photogenerated electrons (negative charge) and holes (positive charge) attracted to one another and hinders the generation of electrical current from the OPV device. Previous research has suggested that one way to tune the exciton binding energy in organic materials could be to change the dielectric constant. The dielectric constant is a material property that describes the ability of a material to screen charges from one another; in theory if the dielectric constant is increased, the exciton binding energy will decrease. At the University of Groningen, various synthetic approaches have been employed to increase the dielectric constant of organic semiconductors. Of these approaches, the incorporation of polar ethylene glycol (EG) chains into the structure of known organic materials has shown particular promise. This thesis builds on this previous work with a focus on the fundamental aspects of how the EG chains affect the optoelectronic properties. In this way, the aim is to provide insight to the interplay between the dielectric constant and the functionality of organic semiconductors

Rape and Sexual Assault in Chechnya

This article sheds light on the horrors of ethnic cleansing practiced upon the women and men of Chechnya by Russian soldiers since 1994

Approach for Analysing Capabilities in Latecomer Software Companies

Software development activities have been identified as a 'window of opportunity' for latecomer companies. Notwithstanding the growth of software development activities in the latecomers, there are single exceptional cases of companies that have successfully launched their own products in global software markets. This suggests that most of the latecomer software companies possess limited technological capabilities. This point has not been explored systematically in the literature so far, as the critical literature review reveals. This paper develops an approach for analysing technological capabilities in latecomer software industries. It outlines the specifics in analysing technological capability in latecomer software companies and makes an account of the array of technical and organisational capabilities associated with development of software technological capability. The research also looks at the diverse learning paths pursued by the latecomer companies in developing software activities. The study improves our understanding about the complexity in developing software industries in latecomer context, and the challenges the latecomer companies face in entering and competing in international markets.technological capabilities, software industry, latecomers

Linguistic Terms of Greek Origin in English and Bulgarian.

The Greek language has been the source of linguistic terms for centuries up to the present. Greek word-forming patterns, words and word elements were adopted and adapted into Latin (Neo-Latin) 1,500 years ago, and passed through Latin into many European and other languages, being used in the main for scholarly and technical purposes. The analytical study of language began in the second half of the first millennium BC in both Greece and India. The present day study of grammar descends from the Greek tradition and thus many Greek technical terms were converted into English (via Latin) and into Bulgarian (under more direct Greek influence — for historical and geographical reasons). The corpus of linguistic terms dealt with in this paper contains 696 English words and 248 Bulgarian words. They have been classified according to three criteria: the time they entered the language, the extent of their adaptation and the branches of linguistics they belong to

The Nonexistence of some Griesmer Arcs in PG(4, 5)

In this paper, we prove the nonexistence of arcs with parameters (232, 48) and (233, 48) in PG(4,5). This rules out the existence of linear codes with parameters [232,5,184] and [233,5,185] over the field with five elements and improves two instances in the recent tables by Maruta, Shinohara and Kikui of optimal codes of dimension 5 over F5