Japanese banking in the United States: From transient advantage to strategic failure

Japanese banks instantly became major players in world financial markets when the 1985 Plaza Accord doubled the value of the yen. Access to cheap capital and long-term relationships with Japanese firms doing business abroad allowed them to undercut overseas rivals and achieve early success. However this quick-term overseas strategy lacked a defined long-term outlook. Based upon the author's interviews with 61 Japanese bankers, this paper examines the failure of Japanese banks to create and sustain competitive advantage. Their lack of "soft" resources, such as international experience, knowledge about local markets, and management expertise, have all contributed to their recent retreat

Reflection on-line or off-line: the role of learning technologies in encouraging students to reflect

This paper presents case studies that describe the experiences of the two authors in trying to use learning technologies to facilitate reflective thinking in their students. At the University of Leicester, a Web-based biology tutorial called ‘How Now Mad Cow’, which covers the topics of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and a new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (nvCJD). At the University of Southampton, a web-based hyper-mail discussion list to support teaching on a first year psychosocial science module for occupational therapy and physiotherapy students has been established. In both examples, the tutors had attempted to create a learning environment that would engage students in the learning experience and facilitate reflection by helping them to create meaning from the learning experience and see things in a different way. The evaluation data from both case studies provides some evidence that the learning technologies helped to facilitate reflection for some students. However, the evidence for reflection is not overwhelming and the data provides some evidence that four key factors may have influenced how successful the use of learning technologies were in facilitating reflection. These factors are the way the learning technology is used, the nature of the student groups, the role of the tutor and student preferences for ‘off-line reflection’. These are discussed and ways forward are identified

Lagrangians with electric and magnetic charges of N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories

General Lagrangians are constructed for N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories in four space-time dimensions involving gauge groups with (non-abelian) electric and magnetic charges. The charges induce a scalar potential, which, when the charges are regarded as spurionic quantities, is invariant under electric/magnetic duality. The resulting theories are especially relevant for supergravity, but details of the extension to local supersymmetry will be discussed elsewhere. The results include the coupling to hypermultiplets. Without the latter, it is demonstrated how an off-shell representation can be constructed based on vector and tensor supermultiplets.Comment: 34 pages, LaTe

Fracton pairing mechanism for "strange" superconductors: Self-assembling organic polymers and copper-oxide compounds

Self-assembling organic polymers and copper-oxide compounds are two classes of "strange" superconductors, whose challenging behavior does not comply with the traditional picture of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (BCS) superconductivity in regular crystals. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model that accounts for the strange superconducting properties of either class of the materials. These properties are considered as interconnected manifestations of the same phenomenon: We argue that superconductivity occurs in the both cases because the charge carriers (i.e., electrons or holes) exchange {\it fracton excitations}, quantum oscillations of fractal lattices that mimic the complex microscopic organization of the strange superconductors. For the copper oxides, the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ as predicted by the fracton mechanism is of the order of $\sim 150$ K. We suggest that the marginal ingredient of the high-temperature superconducting phase is provided by fracton coupled holes that condensate in the conducting copper-oxygen planes owing to the intrinsic field-effect-transistor configuration of the cuprate compounds. For the gate-induced superconducting phase in the electron-doped polymers, we simultaneously find a rather modest transition temperature of $\sim (2-3)$ K owing to the limitations imposed by the electron tunneling processes on a fractal geometry. We speculate that hole-type superconductivity observes larger onset temperatures when compared to its electron-type counterpart. This promises an intriguing possibility of the high-temperature superconducting states in hole-doped complex materials. A specific prediction of the present study is universality of ac conduction for $T\gtrsim T_c$.Comment: 12 pages (including separate abstract page), no figure

Fluxes, Gaugings and Gaugino Condensates

Based on the correspondence between the N = 1 superstring compactifications with fluxes and the N = 4 gauged supergravities, we study effective N = 1 four-dimensional supergravity potentials arising from fluxes and gaugino condensates in the framework of orbifold limits of (generalized) Calabi-Yau compactifications. We give examples in heterotic and type II orientifolds in which combined fluxes and condensates lead to vacua with small supersymmetry breaking scale. We clarify the respective roles of fluxes and condensates in supersymmetry breaking, and analyze the scaling properties of the gravitino mass.Comment: 17 pages, C

Enriching the values of micro and small business research projects: co-creation service provision as perceived by academic, business and student

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Studies in Higher Education, first published online 3 September 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2014.942273.The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1996) chaired by Lord Dearing envisioned a university sector central to the UK’s knowledge-based economy. With successive government support the university-business partnership ideology has been put into practice. Widening participation has increased in emphasis over recent years, providing key innovations and skills to support business growth. Yet business schools activities in business growth is marginal against other university schools. The paper reports on an empirical study analyzing the university/business values derived from one small business engagement project. Data collected through semi-structured interviews, observations, memos, and discussions were coupled with critical evaluation of work and action-based learning (ABL) literature. Analysis reveals evidence of multiple value adding factors; it emerged that the existence of knowledge, present or generated through blended learning techniques, was a key value adding element. The findings enabled the construction of a universal process model providing a project framework, detailing areas of collaborative efforts and associated recompenses; this included ease in project advancements and a noticeably advanced project outcome. The study highlights these values in terms of individual and organizational learning, originality and quality of outputs. Given the growing importance of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to the UK economy, understanding the value co-created by collaborative projects in delivering both work-based and ABL for graduates/students, academics and enterprise management is important.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio