This article explains how the salt-chemical industry may evolve over time from a high-energy consumption-based industry complex in the local community to a consolidated pro-growth pluralist regime at the urban scale. The salt-chemical industry is resisting to restructure to a sustainable, environmentalfriendly economic system by spilling over in the form of pro-growth political-economic coaliti...

AIMS To study the validity of using a cross-sectional industry-wide exposure survey to develop exposure groupings for epidemiological purposes that extend beyond the time period in which the exposure data were collected. METHODS Exposure determinants were used to group workers into high, medium, and low exposure groups. The contrast of this grouping and other commonly used grouping schemes ba...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors determining the productivity of the software industry in Japan, using individual data from the Survey of the State of the Information Service Industry conducted in August 2006 by IPA (Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan). This paper focuses on the relationship between the subcontracting structure and productivity in the Japanes...

h MAXIMIZING PRODUCT YIELDS is the primary opportunity to improve profit margins for products during high-volume production. Even more important, quickly ramping yields is tcritical to meeting time-to-market (and ‘‘time-to-money’’) requirements. In several high-profile cases yield issues have materially altered product roadmaps for key sub-40 nm products across the industry, affecting both foun...

The data presented in this article is an original data on "Investigating the role of onsite learning in the optimisation of craft gang's productivity in the construction industry". This article describes the constraints influencing craft gang's productivity and the influence of onsite learning on the blockwork craft gang's productivity. It also presented the method of data collection, using a s...

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an analysis tool for identifying and preventing flaws or defects in products during the design and process planning stage, preventing the repeated occurrence of problems, reducing the effects of these problems, enhancing product quality and reliability, saving costs, and improving competitiveness. However, FMEA can only analyze one influence factor ac...

Over the past few decades there has been a continual drum of concern by instructional designers, psychologists, researchers and informed educators concerning the design, presentation and evaluation of instructional resources in all their various formats. The innovations brought about by Internet technologies have once again amplified concerns regarding the viability of online course content, pr...

Software piracy has been a serious problem for decades and continues to cost software industry some billions of dollars each year. In this study we examine the Normative and Informational Social Influences that affect an individual’s decision to buy or use pirated software. Based upon previous research about ethical decision making in software adoption, and consumer susceptibility to social inf...

Many previous studies invariably focused on the linear relationship between R&D investment and firm performance while overlooking there may be a quadratic effect, which may cause mixed and conflicting empirical findings, and leave some business cases difficult to understand. Thus, in this study, using a sample of 1923 IT companies from three industry sectors (i.e., hardware, computer chips and ...

Calls are increasing for manufacturers to provide evidence of comparative efficacy of new drugs at the time of regulatory approval. However, drug manufacturers maintain that doing so would create unrealistically high barriers for market entry and deter innovation. At a time of a perceived productivity crisis in the drug industry, many claim that stricter market authorisation regulation will be ...