Use of Social Software in E-Business: A Cross-Sectional, Cross-Country Study

Social Software (SoS) is a term commonly used to describe a group of web based services that have capability to connect, disseminate information, network or blog. The popular SoS has created environments to attract millions of users and a favorable environment for businesses to exploit the benefit of having access to the users by adopting it as a business support tool. Studies indicate that SoS is being used by businesses for engaging with the general public, enhancing customer interaction and crisis communication. This paper analyses the status quo of the SoS use of enterprises from six countries and various industries in the context of e-business. The reported findings show that the surveyed enterprises mostly use the established SoS like Facebook and Twitter to engage with the customer but that there are also significant differences in SoS usage by country, industry and enterprise ranking

Separatrix Divergence of Stellar Streams in Galactic Potentials

Flattened axisymmetric galactic potentials are known to host minor orbit families surrounding orbits with commensurable frequencies. The behavior of orbits that belong to these orbit families is fundamentally different than that of typical orbits with non-commensurable frequencies. We investigate the evolution of stellar streams on orbits near the boundaries between orbit families (separatrices) in a flattened axisymmetric potential. We demonstrate that the separatrix divides these streams into two groups of stars that belong to two different orbit families, and that as a result, these streams diffuse more rapidly than streams that evolve elsewhere in the potential. We utilize Hamiltonian perturbation theory to estimate both the timescale of this effect and the likelihood of a stream evolving close enough to a separatrix to be affected by it. We analyze two prior reports of stream-fanning in simulations with triaxial potentials, and conclude that at least one of them is caused by separatrix divergence. These results lay the foundation for a method of mapping the orbit families of galactic potentials using the morphology of stellar streams. Comparing these predictions with the currently known distribution of streams in the Milky Way presents a new way of constraining the shape of our Galaxy's potential and distribution of dark matter.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

A derivation of Maxwell’s equations using the Heaviside notation

Maxwell's four differential equations describing electromagnetism are among the most famous equations in science. Feynman said that they provide four of the seven fundamental laws of classical physics. In this paper, we derive Maxwell's equations using a well-established approach for deriving time-dependent differential equations from static laws. The derivation uses the standard Heaviside notation. It assumes conservation of charge and that Coulomb's law of electrostatics and Ampere's law of magnetostatics are both correct as a function of time when they are limited to describing a local system. It is analogous to deriving the differential equation of motion for sound, assuming conservation of mass, Newton's second law of motion and that Hooke's static law of elasticity holds for a system in local equilibrium. This work demonstrates that it is the conservation of charge that couples time-varying E-fields and B-fields and that Faraday's Law can be derived without any relativistic assumptions about Lorentz invariance. It also widens the choice of axioms, or starting points, for understanding electromagnetism