Security is not considered a priority by developers of shrink-wrap systems because without a means to accurately and understandably measure it, security fails to provide a competitive advantage. I assert that the cost to break into a system is an effective metric, that this metric can be measured from the start of testing until product retirement, and that using this metric to differentiate pro...

Over the years, there has been much interest in modelling processes. Processes include those associated with the development of software and those business processes that make use of software systems. Recent research in Systems Engineering for Business Process Change highlights the importance of modelling business processes in order to evolve and maintain the legacy systems that support those p...

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it will be asymmetric, with one large “fat” capacity-hoarding firm and a ...

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the results of following that very policy. This requires a large number of interactions with the environment as different polices are considered. We present a fa...

Public technology transfer and commercialization are attracting worldwide attention, but the research on of transferred from government-funded institutes (GRIs) to small- medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is scarce. This study aims identify prioritize factors contributing success technologies GRIs SMEs quantitatively present their importance. We proposed novel concepts SMEs’ GRIs’ proactiveness (...

In the present study, we evaluated and described the sensitivity of the stem cell marker B cell-specific moloney murine leukemia virus integration site 1 (Bmi-1) in identifying early lesions of carcinoma ex pleomorphic adenoma (CXPA). While invasive CXPAs are tumors with a prominent and easily recognizable malignant component, the identification of early carcinomatous changes in PA remains a di...

This article examines the livelihood strategies of land scarce peasants in Ethiopian. Land scarce peasants have a limited livelihood security on a sustainable manner and bypassed by major development programmes. The study was centred on two sets of rationales. First, for those peasants who do not have sufficient farmland, agriculture provides only a limited portion of households’ livelihood...