Consumer-Based Ranking for Strategic Selection of IoT Business Models

The digitization of business environments requires companies to be more consumer-centric than before. In the course of these adjustments, managers operate in the area of conflict between value creation for the firm, consumers’ limited willingness to pay for products and services, and the need to gain and maintain consumers’ trust. To support managers in the challenge to redefine their business models to fit the new digitized business environment, we suggest that managers should incorporate consumer\u27s attitudes towards Internet of Things (IoT) business models in their strategic business model choice. Based on a choice experiment with 301 individuals, we identified a set of business models ranked according to the probability that users are most likely to agree with, and thus accept. The results of the study provide direct indications about which IoT business models are from a consumer perspective desirable and which not so that managers can directly implement these insights in practice

Why Soot is not Alike Soot: A Molecular/Nanostructural Approach to Low Temperature Soot Oxidation

Due to worldwide increasingly sharpened emission regulations, the development of Gasoline Direct Injection and Diesel Direct Injection engines not only aims at the reduction of the emission of nitrogen oxides but also at the reduction of particulate emissions. Regarding present regulations, both tasks can be achieved solely with the help of exhaust after treatment systems. For the reduction of the emission of particulates, Gasoline (GPF) and diesel Particulate Filters (DPF) offer a solution and their implementation is intensely promoted. Under optimal conditions particulates retained on particulate filters are continuously oxidized with the exhaust residual oxygen so that the particulate filter (PF) is regenerated possibly without any additional intervention into the engine operating parameters. The regeneration behavior of PF depends on the reaction rates of soot particles with oxidative reactants at exhaust gas temperatures. The reaction rates of soot particles from internal combustion engines (ICE) often are discussed in terms of order/disorder on the particle nanoscale, the concentration and kind of functional groups on the particle surfaces, and the content of (mostly polycyclic aromatic) hydrocarbons in the soot. In this work the reactivity of different kinds of soot (soot from flames, soot from ICE, carbon black) under oxidation conditions representative for PF regeneration is investigated. Soot reactivity is determined in dynamic Temperature Programmed Oxidation (TPO) experiments and the soot primary particle morphology and nanostructure is investigated by High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM). An image analysis method based on known methods from the literature and improving some infirmities is used to evaluate morphology and nanostructural characteristics. From this, primary particle size distributions, length and separation distance distributions as well as tortuosities of fringes within the primary particle structures are obtained. Further, UV–visible spectroscopy and Raman scattering and other diagnostic techniques are used to study the properties connected to the reactivity of soot and to corroborate the experimental findings. It is found that nanostructural characteristics predominantly affect reactivity. Oxidation rates are derived from TPO and interpreted on a molecular basis from quantum chemistry calculations revealing a replication/activation oxidation mechanism

The iPlant Collaborative: Cyberinfrastructure for Plant Biology

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services

Functional Impairment of Human Myeloid Dendritic Cells during Schistosoma haematobium Infection

Chronic Schistosoma infection is often characterized by a state of T cell hyporesponsiveness of the host. Suppression of dendritic cell (DC) function could be one of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, since Schistosoma antigens are potent modulators of dendritic cell function in vitro. Yet, it remains to be established whether DC function is modulated during chronic human Schistosoma infection in vivo. To address this question, the effect of Schistosoma haematobium infection on the function of human blood DC was evaluated. We found that plasmacytoid (pDC) and myeloid DC (mDC) from infected subjects were present at lower frequencies in peripheral blood and that mDC displayed lower expression levels of HLA-DR compared to those from uninfected individuals. Furthermore, mDC from infected subjects, but not pDC, were found to have a reduced capacity to respond to TLR ligands, as determined by MAPK signaling, cytokine production and expression of maturation markers. Moreover, the T cell activating capacity of TLR-matured mDC from infected subjects was lower, likely as a result of reduced HLA-DR expression. Collectively these data show that S. haematobium infection is associated with functional impairment of human DC function in vivo and provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of T cell hyporesponsiveness during chronic schistosomiasis

The iPlant Collaborative: Cyberinfrastructure for Plant Biology

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services

3D printed luneburg lens for flexible beam steering at millimeter wave frequencies

A fully 3D printed meta-material based Luneburg lens operating at 60 GHz is presented. The meta-material design is discussed and the permittivity tuning based on the physical structure is discussed. On that basis a realized Luneburg lens is presented demonstrating the degrees of freedom offered by the emerging technology of rapid prototyping for passive millimeter wave component design