As the European Union (EU) and its Member States face the pressures of recession, ongoing global competition and the challenges of implementing a new knowledge economy, improving the capabilities and participation of the huge small and medium enterprise (SME) sector is vital. This is particularly true of the microfirms (less than 10 employees) that account for 93 per cent of the EU’s 25 million...

Field data available to petroleum engineers can be sparse because they are generally obtained through discrete well locations. Therefore there is uncertainty in the knowledge of the reservoir’s physical properties such as the porosity or the permeability. In order to quantify the uncertainty in the predictions we are making for production quantities, what has traditionally been done is Monte Ca...

The most promising feature of a manufacturing system oriented to mass customization is to have at disposal a layout and a governance such to allow: a) to include a new product within the family of products under manufacture; b) and to apply the required modification of the manufacturing process in front of the market-requested product innovations, in such a way to minimise the cost for product ...

Task analysis is a method of identifying knowledge and procedures for performing a task or solving a problem. There are a variety of cognitive task analysis methods, but they often require significant overhead to learn and rely on having a subject matter expert (SME) defining how one should solve problems. This can be problematic because expertise often blinds people to the knowledge that novic...

Crystalline thin films of organic semiconductors are a good candidate for field effect transistor (FET) materials in printed electronics. However, there are currently two main problems, which are associated with inhomogeneity and poor thermal durability of these films. Here we report that liquid crystalline materials exhibiting a highly ordered liquid crystal phase of smectic E (SmE) can solve ...

The Standard Model Extension (SME) provides the most general observer-independent field theoretical framework for investigations of Lorentz violation. The SME lagrangian by definition contains all Lorentz-violating interaction terms that can be written as observer scalars and that involve particle fields in the Standard Model and gravitational fields in a generalized theory of gravity. This inc...

UNLABELLED Nickel-titanium shape memory alloy (NiTi-SMA) implants might allow modulating fracture healing, changing their stiffness through alteration of both elastic modulus and cross-sectional shape by employing the shape memory effect (SME). HYPOTHESES a novel NiTi-SMA plate stabilizes tibia osteotomies in rabbits. After noninvasive electromagnetic induction heating the alloy exhibits the ...

E-Commerce changes the way organizations do business. Recognizing the significance of ECommerce contributions to the nation’s economic growth, the Malaysian government introduced several stimuli to increase the practice of E-Commerce, particularly among SME, as they constituents about 84 percent of the Malaysian business enterprises. This paper looks at several stimulus provided by the Malaysia...

Software development is a complex activity. It is involved with different scenarios and risks which must be managed through a systematic approach to Software Risk Management (SRM). The best software process depends on the project’s particularities. Situational Method Engineering (SME) focuses on building project specific method/process according to the situation at hand. This paper proposes an ...

Small firms (SMEs) are encouraged to embrace e-business. However, the mechanisms by which such business transformation occurs is not understood. IS transformation models suggest a single path, though, there is little evidence that SMEs follow it, and e-business transformation models are untested. Venkatraman’s business transformation model provides a means of determining IS development that has...