Strategic motivators and expected benefits from e-Commerce in traditional organisations

This paper aims to identify the strategic motivators and expected benefits related to the implementation of e-commerce infrastructures in traditional “brick and mortar” organisations. Despite the fact that the clearest benefit from e-commerce might be expected to come from contribution to corporate profits, either from an increase of sales or reduction of costs, but this may not be the case. The literature suggests that there are different ways in which the potential benefits can be assessed. These ways are directly related to the evolution of e-commerce. This research has chosen six representative organisations from different sectors to explore their rationales for their e-commerce strategies. One of the main benefits reported is to increase the focus on the customer and improving internal communications. Additionally, obtaining competitive advantage was found to be a powerful motivator, despite the fact that the recent academic literature suggests that this is very difficult to achieve

A 3D Printed Toolbox for Opto-Mechanical Components

Nowadays is very common to find headlines in the media where it is stated that 3D printing is a technology called to change our lives in the near future. For many authors, we are living in times of a third industrial revolution. Howerver, we are currently in a stage of development where the use of 3D printing is advantageous over other manufacturing technologies only in rare scenarios. Fortunately, scientific research is one of them. Here we present the development of a set of opto-mechanical components that can be built easily using a 3D printer based on Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) and parts that can be found on any hardware store. The components of the set presented here are highly customizable, low-cost, require a short time to be fabricated and offer a performance that compares favorably with respect to low-end commercial alternatives.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Quark-Meson Coupling model based upon the Nambu-Jona Lasinio model

The NJL model for the octet baryons, using proper time regularization to simulate some of the features of confinement, is solved self-consistently in nuclear matter. This provides an alternative framework to the MIT bag model which has been used in the quark-meson coupling model. After fitting the parameters of the model to the saturation properties of symmetric nuclear matter the model is used to explore the equation of state of pure neutron matter as well as nuclear matter at densities relevant to heavy ion collisions. With a view to future studies of high mass neutron stars, the binding of hyperons is also explored.Comment: 7 pages and 4 figure

R-Band Imaging of Fields Around 1<z<2 Radiogalaxies

We have taken deep $R$-band images of fields around five radiogalaxies: 0956+47, 1217+36, 3C256, 3C324 and 3C294 with $1<z<2$ . 0956+47 is found to show a double nucleus. Our data on 1217+36 suggest the revision of its classification as a radiogalaxy. We found a statistically significant excess of bright ($19.5<R<22$) galaxies on scales of 2 arcmin around the radiogalaxies (which have $R \approx 21.4$) in our sample. The excess has been determined empirically to be at $\gtrsim 99.5\%$ level. It is remarkable that this excess is not present for $22<R<23.75$ galaxies within the same area, suggesting that the excess is not physically associated to the galaxies but due to intervening groups and then related to gravitational lensing.Comment: 20 pages, uuencoded compressed PostScript including tables. Figures available upon request. To appear in the March 1995 issue of The Astronomical Journa