Linking competitive outcomes to environmental conditions is necessary for understanding species' distributions and responses to environmental change. Despite this importance, generalizable approaches for predicting competitive outcomes across abiotic gradients are lacking, driven largely by the highly complex and context-dependent nature of biotic interactions. Here, we present and empirically ...

The South African Facilities Management (FM) industry has seen increased operational strategy complexity from single-site contractors providing basic janitorial services to highly integrated and bundled FM service providers.  Despite these major changes, very little research has been conducted on evaluating the effectiveness of FM in innovating, integrating and aligning business strategies to a...

Commercially provided electronic services commonly operate on top of a complex, highly-interconnected infrastructure, which provides a multitude of entry points for attackers. Providers of e-services also operate in dynamic, highly competitive markets, which provides fertile ground for fraud. Before a business idea to provide commercial e-services is implemented in practice, it should therefore...

Academic health centers operate simultaneously in the highly intellectual world of academia and the highly competitive world of health care delivery. As a result of this unique operating circumstance, health care reform will likely exert unique impacts on academic health centers relative to community hospitals and independent providers. This discussion focuses on health care reform from the per...

This paper describes a study of a simple open learner model that can be optionally released to peers in named or anonymous form, to facilitate collaborative and competitive learning in a situation where the learner model contents contributed to students' assessment. Results suggest that, under the right conditions, students may start working sooner; discussion amongst students can be increased;...

Most developed countries exhibit high rates of R&D performed in industry, but the situation is considerable different in medium income countries such as Portugal. Despite the lower levels of R&D, Portuguese firms have increased their competitiveness, and the country has been able to show remarkable levels of economic performance. This paper provides a framework to analyze the way in which R&D i...

Mining local structure is important in data analysis. Gaussian mixture is able to describe local structure through the covariance matrices, but when used on highdimensional data, fitly specifying such a large number of d(d + 1)=2 free elements in each covariance matrix is difficult. In this paper, by constraining the covariance matrix in decomposed orthonormal form, we propose a Local PCA algor...

A novel halogen bonding bis(iodotriazole)-imidazolium axle containing [2]rotaxane is capable of strong halide and sulfate binding in highly competitive aqueous–organic solvent mixtures.