Technological Diversification and Strategic Alliances

This paper examines empirically the relationship between the internal technological profile and the diversification through strategic alliances of the largest 219 industrial firms world-wide. It explores three related issues. First, the paper shows that firms? internal technological diversification is more pronounced than external technological diversification. Second, it confirms the idea that technological diversification is more pronounced than product and market diversification. Finally, by means of multiple correlation analysis, this work studies the relationship between firms? economic performance, internal technological diversification and diversification through strategic alliances. The empirical investigation combines firm level data on US patents, strategic technological alliances, production and marketing alliances, and firms? economic performances.-

Unfinished Business:Construction and Maintenance of a Semantically Tagged Historical Parliamentary Corpus, UK Hansard from 1803 to the present day

Creating, curating and maintaining modern political corpora is becoming an ever more involved task. As interest from various socialbodies and the general public in political discourse grows so too does the need to enrich such datasets with metadata and linguisticannotations. Beyond this, such corpora must be easy to browse and search for linguists, social scientists, digital humanists and thegeneral public. We present our efforts to compile a linguistically annotated and semantically tagged version of the Hansard corpus from1803 right up to the present day. This involves combining multiple sources of documents and transcripts. We describe our toolchainfor tagging; using several existing tools that provide tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging and semantic annotations. We also provide anoverview of our bespoke web-based search interface built on LexiDB. In conclusion, we examine the completed corpus by looking atfour case studies making use of semantic categories made available by our toolchain

LexiDB: Patterns & Methods for Corpus Linguistic Database Management

LexiDB is a tool for storing, managing and querying corpus data. In contrast to other database management systems (DBMSs), itis designed specifically for text corpora. It improves on other corpus management systems (CMSs) because data can be added anddeleted from corpora on the fly with the ability to add live data to existing corpora. LexiDB sits between these two categories ofDBMSs and CMSs, more specialised to language data than a general-purpose DBMS but more flexible than a traditional static corpusmanagement system. Previous work has demonstrated the scalability of LexiDB in response to the growing need to be able to scale outfor ever-growing corpus datasets. Here, we present the patterns and methods developed in LexiDB for storage, retrieval and querying ofmulti-level annotated corpus data. These techniques are evaluated and compared to an existing CMS (Corpus Workbench CWB - CQP)and indexer (Lucene). We find that LexiDB consistently outperforms existing tools for corpus queries. This is particularly apparent withlarge corpora and when handling queries with large result sets

Scaling out for extreme scale corpus data

Much of the previous work in Big Data has focussed on numerical sources of information. However, with the `narrative turn' in many disciplines gathering pace and commercial organisations beginning to realise the value of their textual assets, natural language data is fast catching up as an exploitable source of information for decision making. With vast quantities of unstructured textual data on the web, in social media, and in newly digitised historical document archives, the 5Vs (Volume, Velocity, Variety, Value and Veracity) apply equally well, if not more so, to big textual data. Corpus linguistics, the computer-aided study of large collections of naturally occurring language data, has been dealing with big data for fifty years. Corpus linguistics methods impose complex requirements on the retrieval, annotation and analysis of text in terms of displaying narrow contexts for each occurrence of a word or linguistic feature being studied and counting co-occurrences with other words or features to determine significant patterns in language. This, coupled with the distribution of language features in accordance with Zipf's Law, poses complex challenges for data models and corpus software dealing with extreme scale language data. A related issue is the non-random nature of language and the `burstiness' of word occurrences, or what we might put in Big Data terms as a sixth `V' called Viscosity. We report experiments to examine and compare the capabilities of two No-SQL databases in clustered configurations for the indexing, retrieval and analysis of billion-word corpora, since this size is the current state-of-the-art in corpus linguistics. We find that modern DBMSs (Database Management Systems) are capable of handling this extreme scale corpus data set for simple queries but are limited when querying for more frequent words or more complex queries

lexiDB:a scalable corpus database management system

lexiDB is a scalable corpus database management system designed to fulfill corpus linguistics retrieval queries on multi-billion-word multiply-annotated corpora. It is based on a distributed architecture that allows the system to scale out to support ever larger text collections. This paper presents an overview of the architecture behind lexiDB as well as a demonstration of its functionality. We present lexiDB's performance metrics based on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure with two part-of-speech and semantically tagged billion word corpora: Historical Hansard and EEBO (Early English Books Online)

Global footprint of mislabelled seafood on a small island nation

Seafood mislabelling is a global issue that affects consumers, target species, and the ability to manage fisheries. Due to their high demand and value, groupers (Epinephelinae spp.) are frequent targets for fraudulent substitution on the world's major seafood markets. Yet, little is known on the prevalence of grouper mislabelling in the Wider Caribbean Region. We conducted the first ‘grouper’ authentication survey in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), a luxury tourist destination where the locally caught but critically endangered Nassau grouper (Epinephelus striatus) features prominently on menus. DNA barcoding was used to assess mislabelling of market samples and simultaneously to gauge compliance with the Nassau grouper closed season. Our genetic analyses did not detect banned Nassau grouper, but only 18% of samples from restaurants and stores were confirmed as Epinephelinae (i.e. groupers), and 96% were mislabelled in some way. Substitutes for grouper mostly comprised freshwater catfish (Pangasianodon hypophthalmus; 57% of samples) and snappers (Lutjanidae; 25%), whereas samples sold as ‘local grouper’ were from Indo-Pacific or Asian inland waters. Only 22% of samples were matched to species found locally, all being cubera snapper (Lutjanus cyanopterus). Our study suggests that (i) mislabelling is motivated predominantly by financial incentives and/or driven by low supplies of groupers, (ii) local fishers are not the main source of mislabelled grouper into the supply chain, and (iii) the primary victims are consumers, fishing communities, and ultimately fragile fish stocks. Our findings can be used to help improve transparency, traceability and accountability in local seafood supply chains.publishedVersio

Tuning the reactivity of nitriles using Cu(ii) catalysis - potentially prebiotic activation of nucleotides

During the transition from prebiotic chemistry to biology, a period of solution-phase, non-enzymatic activation of (oligo)nucleotides must have occurred, and accordingly, a mechanism for phosphate activation must have existed. Herein, we detail results of an investigation into prebiotic phosphate activation chemistry using simple, prebiotically available nitriles whose reactivity is increased by Cu2+ ions. Furthermore, although Cu2+ ions are known to catalyse the hydrolysis of phosphodiester bonds, we found this deleterious activity to be almost completely suppressed by inclusion of amino acids or dipeptides, which may suggest a productive relationship between protein and RNA from the outset

Digital transformation of higher education in Australia: Understanding affordance dynamics in e-textbook engagement and use

This paper addresses digital transformation in higher education by exploring the engagement and use of e-textbooks through an affordance theory lens. Drawing on the insights from in-depth interviews (n = 18), focus group discussions (n = 15), a pilot survey (n = 83) and the main survey (n = 344) in Australia, we developed and validated an affordance actualisation model for the engagement and use of e-textbooks. The partial least squares (PLS) technique was used to validate the dimensions of affordance actualisation and its relationship with e-textbooks engagement and affordance effect. The findings indicate the efficacy of the two affordance constructs, as well as the significant mediating effect of engagement. An important lesson for the e-textbook industry is that firms need to consider affordance actualisation dimensions (i.e., portability, accessibility, searchability, highlighting, copying, browsing, hedonic and utilitarian value) when enhancing digital engagement and use of e-textbooks

The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative's work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft