Marketing in SMEs: a '4Ps' self-branding model

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which traditional marketing theory and practice can be applied in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and consider how owner-managers perceive their own role in marketing within a small business setting. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative exploratory approach using semi-structured in-depth interviews amongst owner-managers of SMEs in the UK. Findings – SME marketing is effective in that it embraces some relevant concepts of traditional marketing, tailors activities to match its customers and adds its own unique attribute of self-branding as bestowed by the SME owner-manager. Research limitations/implications – The study was limited to the UK and to a small sample of SMEs and as such the findings are not necessarily generalisable. Originality/value – A “4Ps” model for SME self-branding is proposed, which encompasses the attributes of personal branding, (co)production, perseverance and practice

Safe Concurrency Introduction through Slicing

Traditional refactoring is about modifying the structure of existing code without changing its behaviour, but with the aim of making code easier to understand, modify, or reuse. In this paper, we introduce three novel refactorings for retrofitting concurrency to Erlang applications, and demonstrate how the use of program slicing makes the automation of these refactorings possible

The dependence of the pairwise velocity dispersion on galaxy properties

(abridged) We present measurements of the pairwise velocity dispersion (PVD) for different classes of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. For a sample of about 200,000 galaxies, we study the dependence of the PVD on galaxy properties such as luminosity, stellar mass (M_*), colour (g-r), 4000A break strength (D4000), concentration index (C), and stellar surface mass density (\mu_*). The luminosity dependence of the PVD is in good agreement with the results of Jing & B\"orner (2004) for the 2dFGRS catalog. The value of \sigma_{12} measured at k=1 h/Mpc decreases as a function of increasing galaxy luminosity for galaxies fainter than L*, before increasing again for the most luminous galaxies in our sample. Each of the galaxy subsamples selected according to luminosity or stellar mass is divided into two further subsamples according to colour, D4000, C and \mu_*. We find that galaxies with redder colours and higher D4000, C, and \mu_* values have larger PVDs on all scales and at all luminosities/stellar masses. The dependence of the PVD on parameters related to recent star formation(colour, D4000) is stronger than on parameters related to galaxy structure (C, \mu_*), especially on small scales and for faint galaxies. The reddest galaxies and galaxies with high surface mass densities and intermediate concentrations have the highest pairwise peculiar velocities, i.e. these move in the strongest gravitational fields. We conclude that the faint red population located in rich clusters is responsible for the high PVD values that are measured for low-luminosity galaxies on small scales.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures; reference updated and text slightly changed to match the published version; data of measurements of power spectrum and PVD available at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~leech/papers/clustering

Semiclassical Time Evolution of the Holes from Luttinger Hamiltonian

We study the semi-classical motion of holes by exact numerical solution of the Luttinger model. The trajectories obtained for the heavy and light holes agree well with the higher order corrections to the abelian and the non-abelian adiabatic theories in Ref. [1] [S. Murakami et al., Science 301, 1378(2003)], respectively. It is found that the hole trajectories contain rapid oscillations reminiscent of the "Zitterbewegung" of relativistic electrons. We also comment on the non-conservation of helicity of the light holes.Comment: 4 pages, 5 fugure

Comment on Ds∗→Dsπ0D_s^* \to D_s \pi^0 Decay

We calculate the rate for $D_s^* \rightarrow D_s \pi^0$ decay using Chiral Perturbation Theory. This isospin violating process results from $\pi^0$ - $\eta$ mixing, and its amplitude is proportional to $(m_d - m_u)/\bigl(m_s-(m_u+m_d)/2 \bigr)$. Experimental information on the branching ratio for $D_s^* \rightarrow D_s \pi^0$ can provide insight into the pattern of $SU(3)$ violation in radiative $D^*$ decays.Comment: 7 pages with 2 figures not included but available upon request, CALT-68-191

Revisiting Charmless Hadronic B_{u,d} Decays in QCD Factorization

Within the framework of QCD factorization (QCDF), we consider two different types of power correction effects in order to resolve the CP puzzles and rate deficit problems with penguin-dominated two-body decays of B mesons and color-suppressed tree-dominated $\pi^0\pi^0$ and $\rho^0\pi^0$ modes: penguin annihilation and soft corrections to the color-suppressed tree amplitude. We emphasize that the electroweak penguin solution to the $B\to K\pi$ CP puzzle via New Physics is irrelevant for solving the CP and rate puzzles related to tree-dominated decays. While some channels e.g. $K^-\pi^+,K^-\rho^0,\pi^+\pi^-,\rho^\pm\pi^\mp$ need penguin annihilation to induce the correct magnitudes and signs for their CP violation, some other decays such as $B^-\to K^-\pi^0,\pi^-\eta, K^-\eta$ and $\bar B^0\to \bar K^{*0}\eta,\pi^0\pi^0$ require the presence of both power corrections to account for the measured CP asymmetries. In general, QCDF predictions for the branching fractions and direct CP asymmetries of $\bar B\to PP,VP,VV$ decays are in good agreement with experiment. The predictions of pQCD and soft-collinear effective theory are included for comparison.Comment: 51 pages, 1 figur

Near-Optimal Distributed Approximation of Minimum-Weight Connected Dominating Set

This paper presents a near-optimal distributed approximation algorithm for the minimum-weight connected dominating set (MCDS) problem. The presented algorithm finds an $O(\log n)$ approximation in $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ rounds, where $D$ is the network diameter and $n$ is the number of nodes. MCDS is a classical NP-hard problem and the achieved approximation factor $O(\log n)$ is known to be optimal up to a constant factor, unless P=NP. Furthermore, the $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ round complexity is known to be optimal modulo logarithmic factors (for any approximation), following [Das Sarma et al.---STOC'11].Comment: An extended abstract version of this result appears in the proceedings of 41st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2014