Abstract: This paper discusses the theory behind the existence of an idealistic model for business network governance and uses a clarifying case-study, containing governance structures and processes within a business network framework. The case study from a German pharmaceutical industry company complements existing literature by providing a comprehensive explanation of the relations between supply chains and business networks, and also between supply chain management and business network governance. Supply chains and supply chain management are only one side of the interorganizational relationships and ensure short-term performance, while real-world governance structures are needed for ensuring the long-term existence of a supply chain. Within this context, a comprehensive model for business governance is presented. An interesting finding from the case study is that multiple business network governance systems co-exist within the evaluated supply chain.
Abstract: Directional over current relays (DOCR) are commonly used in power system protection as a primary protection in distribution and sub-transmission electrical systems and as a secondary protection in transmission systems. Coordination of protective relays is necessary to obtain selective tripping. In this paper, an approach for efficiency reduction of DOCRs nonlinear optimum coordination (OC) is proposed. This was achieved by modifying the objective function and relaxing several constraints depending on the four constraints classification, non-valid, redundant, pre-obtained and valid constraints. According to this classification, the far end fault effect on the objective function and constraints, and in consequently on relay operating time, was studied. The study was carried out, firstly by taking into account the near-end and far-end faults in DOCRs coordination problem formulation; and then faults very close to the primary relays (nearend faults). The optimal coordination (OC) was achieved by simultaneously optimizing all variables (TDS and Ip) in nonlinear environment by using of Genetic algorithm nonlinear programming techniques. The results application of the above two approaches on 6-bus and 26-bus system verify that the far-end faults consideration on OC problem formulation don-t lose the optimality.
Abstract: When consistently innovative business-models can
give companies a competitive advantage, longitudinal empirical
research, which can reflect dynamic business-model changes, has yet
to prove a definitive connection. This study consequently employs a
dynamic perspective in conjunction with innovation theory to examine
the relationship between the types of business-model innovation and
firm value. This study tries to examine various types of
business-model innovation in high-end and low-end technology
industries such as HTC and the 7-Eleven chain stores with research
periods of 14 years and 32 years, respectively. The empirical results
suggest that adopting radical business-model innovation in addition to
expanding new target markets can successfully lead to a competitive
advantage. Sustained advanced technological competences and
service/product innovation are the key successful factors in high-end
and low-end technology industry business-models respectively. In
sum up, the business-model innovation can yield a higher market value
and financial value in high-end technology industries than low-end
ones.
Abstract: Social media has led to paradigm shifts in ways
people work and do business, interact and socialize, learn and obtain
knowledge. So much so that social media has established itself as an
important spatial extension of this nation-s historicity and challenges.
Regardless of the enabling reputation and recommendation features
through social networks embedded in the social media system, the
overflow of broadcasted and publicized media contents turns the
table around from engendering trust to doubting the trust system.
When the trust is at doubt, the effects include deactivation of
accounts and creation of multiple profiles, which lead to the overflow
of 'ghost' contents (i.e. “the abundance of abandoned ships"). In
most literature, the study of trust can be related to culture; hence the
difference between Western-s “openness" and Eastern-s “blue-chip"
concepts in networking and relationships. From a survey on issues
and challenges among Malaysian social media users, 'authenticity'
emerges as one of the main factors that causes and is caused by other
factors. The other issue that has surfaced is credibility either in terms
of message/content and source. Another is the quality of the
knowledge that is shared. This paper explores the terrains of this
critical space which in recent years has been dominated increasingly
by, arguably, social networks embedded in the social media system,
the overflow of broadcasted and publicized media content.
Abstract: Ultra-low-power (ULP) circuits have received
widespread attention due to the rapid growth of biomedical
applications and Battery-less Electronics. Subthreshold region of
transistor operation is used in ULP circuits. Major research challenge
in the subthreshold operating region is to extract the ULP benefits
with minimal degradation in speed and robustness. Process, Voltage
and Temperature (PVT) variations significantly affect the
performance of subthreshold circuits. Designed performance
parameters of ULP circuits may vary largely due to temperature
variations. Hence, this paper investigates the effect of temperature
variation on device and circuit performance parameters at different
biasing voltages in the subthreshold region. Simulation results clearly
demonstrate that in deep subthreshold and near threshold voltage
regions, performance parameters are significantly affected whereas in
moderate subthreshold region, subthreshold circuits are more
immune to temperature variations. This establishes that moderate
subthreshold region is ideal for temperature immune circuits.
Abstract: The use of Electronic Commerce (EC)
technologies enables Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to improve their efficiency and competitive position. Much of the literature proposes an extensive set of benefits for
organizations that choose to adopt and implement ECommerce
systems. Factors of Business –to-business (B2B)
E-Commerce adoption and implementation have been
extensively investigated. Despite enormous attention given to encourage Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to adopt and
implement E-Commerce, little research has been carried out in identifying the factors of Business-to-Consumer ECommerce adoption and implementation for SMEs. To conduct the study, Tornatsky and Fleischer model was adopted
and tested in four SMEs located in Christchurch, New
Zealand. This paper explores the factors that impact the
decision and method of adoption and implementation of ECommerce
systems in automobile industry. Automobile
industry was chosen because the product they deal with i.e.
cars are not a common commodity to be sold online, despite this fact the eCommerce penetration in automobile industry is
high. The factors that promote adoption and implementation of
E-Commerce technologies are discussed, together with the
barriers. This study will help SME owners to effectively
handle the adoption and implementation process and will also
improve the chance of successful E-Commerce
implementation. The implications of the findings for
managers, consultants, and government organizations engaged in promoting E-Commerce adoption and implementation in
small businesses and future research are discussed.
Abstract: Perhaps no single issue has been cited as either the root
cause and / or the greatest challenge to the restructured power system then the lack of adequate reliable transmission. Probabilistic transmission planning has become increasingly necessary and important in recent
years. The transmission planning analysis carried out by the authors,
spans a 10-year horizon, taking into consideration a value of 2 % load
increase / year at each consumer. Taking into consideration this increased
load, a probabilistic power flow was carried out, all the system components
being regarded from probabilistic point of view. Several contingencies
have been generated, for assessing the security of the power system. The results have been analyzed and several important conclusions were pointed. The objective is to achieve a network that works without limit violations for all (or most of) scenario realizations. The case study is represented by the IEEE 14 buses test power system.
Abstract: This paper shows that the economy of any country
can be presented as three different shells such as: economic shell of a
big, a medium and a small business. The new concepts were
introduced such as: volume of an economic shell, coefficient of
shell-s expansion (compression) etc. These shells can expansion or
compress under action by internal or external powers and when shell
expansions - it means the rising of a business activity and
compression shows us that economy goes on recession. This process
of an expansion or a compression can develop in the various ways
like linear, logarithm or any other mathematical laws.
Abstract: Authentication of multimedia contents has gained much attention in recent times. In this paper, we propose a secure semi-fragile watermarking, with a choice of two watermarks to be embedded. This technique operates in integer wavelet domain and makes use of semi fragile watermarks for achieving better robustness. A self-recovering algorithm is employed, that hides the image digest into some Wavelet subbands to detect possible malevolent object manipulation undergone by the image (object replacing and/or deletion). The Semi-fragility makes the scheme tolerant for JPEG lossy compression as low as quality of 70%, and locate the tempered area accurately. In addition, the system ensures more security because the embedded watermarks are protected with private keys. The computational complexity is reduced using parameterized integer wavelet transform. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme guarantees the safety of watermark, image recovery and location of the tempered area accurately.
Abstract: Reentry trajectory optimization is a multi-constraints
optimal control problem which is hard to solve. To tackle it, we
proposed a new algorithm named CDEN(Constrained Differential
Evolution Newton-Raphson Algorithm) based on Differential Evolution(
DE) and Newton-Raphson.We transform the infinite dimensional
optimal control problem to parameter optimization which is finite
dimensional by discretize control parameter. In order to simplify
the problem, we figure out the control parameter-s scope by process
constraints. To handle constraints, we proposed a parameterless constraints
handle process. Through comprehensive analyze the problem,
we use a new algorithm integrated by DE and Newton-Raphson to
solve it. It is validated by a reentry vehicle X-33, simulation results
indicated that the algorithm is effective and robust.
Abstract: The Expert Witness Testimony in the Battered
Woman Syndrome Expert witness testimony (EWT) is a kind of
information given by an expert specialized in the field (here in BWS)
to the jury in order to help the court better understand the case. EWT
does not always work in favor of the battered women. Two main
decision-making models are discussed in the paper: the Mathematical
model and the Explanation model. In the first model, the jurors
calculate ″the importance and strength of each piece of evidence″
whereas in the second model they try to integrate the EWT with the
evidence and create a coherent story that would describe the crime.
The jury often misunderstands and misjudges battered women for
their action (or in this case inaction). They assume that these women
are masochists and accept being mistreated for if a man abuses a
woman constantly, she should and could divorce him or simply leave
at any time. The research in the domain found that indeed, expert
witness testimony has a powerful influence on juror’s decisions thus
its quality needs to be further explored. One of the important factors
that need further studies is a bias called the dispositionist worldview
(a belief that what happens to people is of their own doing). This
kind of attributional bias represents a tendency to think that a
person’s behavior is due to his or her disposition, even when the
behavior is clearly attributed to the situation. Hypothesis The
hypothesis of this paper is that if a juror has a dispositionist
worldview then he or she will blame the rape victim for triggering the
assault. The juror would therefore commit the fundamental
attribution error and believe that the victim’s disposition caused the
rape and not the situation she was in. Methods The subjects in the
study were 500 randomly sampled undergraduate students from
McGill, Concordia, Université de Montréal and UQAM.
Dispositional Worldview was scored on the Dispositionist
Worldview Questionnaire. After reading the Rape Scenarios, each
student was asked to play the role of a juror and answer a
questionnaire consisting of 7 questions about the responsibility,
causality and fault of the victim. Results The results confirm the
hypothesis which states that if a juror has a dispositionist worldview
then he or she will blame the rape victim for triggering the assault.
By doing so, the juror commits the fundamental attribution error
because he will believe that the victim’s disposition, and not the
constraints or opportunities of the situation, caused the rape scenario.
Abstract: This paper presents an environmental and technoeconomic
evaluation of light duty vehicles in Iran. A comprehensive
well-to-wheel (WTW) analysis is applied to compare different
automotive fuel chains, conventional internal combustion engines and
innovative vehicle powertrains. The study examines the
competitiveness of 15 various pathways in terms of energy
efficiencies, GHG emissions, and levelized cost of different energy
carriers. The results indicate that electric vehicles including battery
electric vehicles (BEV), fuel cell vehicles (FCV) and plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles (PHEV) increase the WTW energy efficiency by
54%, 51% and 46%, respectively, compared to common internal
combustion engines powered by gasoline. On the other hand,
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per kilometer of FCV and BEV
would be 48% lower than that of gasoline engines. It is concluded
that BEV has the lowest total cost of energy consumption and
external cost of emission, followed by internal combustion engines
(ICE) fueled by CNG. Conventional internal combustion engines
fueled by gasoline, on the other hand, would have the highest costs.
Abstract: Eye localization is necessary for face recognition and
related application areas. Most of eye localization algorithms reported
so far still need to be improved about precision and computational
time for successful applications. In this paper, we propose an eye
location method based on multi-scale Gabor feature vectors, which is
more robust with respect to initial points. The eye localization based
on Gabor feature vectors first needs to constructs an Eye Model Bunch
for each eye (left or right eye) which consists of n Gabor jets and
average eye coordinates of each eyes obtained from n model face
images, and then tries to localize eyes in an incoming face image by
utilizing the fact that the true eye coordinates is most likely to be very
close to the position where the Gabor jet will have the best Gabor jet
similarity matching with a Gabor jet in the Eye Model Bunch. Similar
ideas have been already proposed in such as EBGM (Elastic Bunch
Graph Matching). However, the method used in EBGM is known to be
not robust with respect to initial values and may need extensive search
range for achieving the required performance, but extensive search
ranges will cause much more computational burden. In this paper, we
propose a multi-scale approach with a little increased computational
burden where one first tries to localize eyes based on Gabor feature
vectors in a coarse face image obtained from down sampling of the
original face image, and then localize eyes based on Gabor feature
vectors in the original resolution face image by using the eye
coordinates localized in the coarse scaled image as initial points.
Several experiments and comparisons with other eye localization
methods reported in the other papers show the efficiency of our
proposed method.
Abstract: This paper presents a new stable robust adaptive controller and observer design for a class of nonlinear systems that contain i. Coupling of unmeasured states and unknown parameters ii. Unknown dead zone at the system actuator. The system is firstly cast into a modified form in which the observer and parameter estimation become feasible. Then a stable robust adaptive controller, state observer, parameter update laws are derived that would provide global adaptive system stability and desirable performance. To validate the approach, simulation was performed to a single-link mechanical system with a dynamic friction model and unknown dead zone exists at the system actuation. Then a comparison is presented with the results when there is no dead zone at the system actuation.
Abstract: Mobile banking services present a unique growth
opportunity for mobile operators in emerging markets, and have
already made good progress in bringing financial services to the
previously unbanked populations of many developing countries. The
potential is amazing, but what about the risks? In the complex
process of establishing a mobile banking business model, many kinds
of risks and factors need to be monitored and well-managed. Risk
identification is the first stage of risk management. Correct risk
identification ensures risk management effectiveness. Keeping the
risks low makes it possible to use the full potential of mobile banking
and carry out the planned business strategy. The focus should be on
adoption of consumers which is the main risk factor of mobile
banking services.
Abstract: Introduction applicability of high-speed cutting stock problem (CSP) is presented in this paper. Due to the orders continued coming in from various on-line ways for a professional cutting company, to stay competitive, such a business has to focus on sustained production at high levels. In others words, operators have to keep the machine running to stay ahead of the pack. Therefore, the continuous stock cutting problem with setup is proposed to minimize the cutting time and pattern changing time to meet the on-line given demand. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to solve the problem directly by using cutting patterns directly. A major advantage of the proposed method in series on-line production is that the system can adjust the cutting plan according to the floating orders. Examples with multiple items are demonstrated. The results show considerable efficiency and reliability in high-speed cutting of CSP.
Abstract: One of the most important problems to solve is eye
location for a driver fatigue monitoring system. This paper presents an
efficient method to achieve fast and accurate eye location in grey level
images obtained in the real-word driving conditions. The structure of
eye region is used as a robust cue to find possible eye pairs. Candidates
of eye pair at different scales are selected by finding regions which
roughly match with the binary eye pair template. To obtain real one,
all the eye pair candidates are then verified by using support vector
machines. Finally, eyes are precisely located by using binary vertical
projection and eye classifier in eye pair images. The proposed method
is robust to deal with illumination changes, moderate rotations, glasses
wearing and different eye states. Experimental results demonstrate its
effectiveness.
Abstract: In recent years, copulas have become very popular in
financial research and actuarial science as they are more flexible in
modelling the co-movements and relationships of risk factors as compared
to the conventional linear correlation coefficient by Pearson.
However, a precise estimation of the copula parameters is vital in
order to correctly capture the (possibly nonlinear) dependence structure
and joint tail events. In this study, we employ two optimization
heuristics, namely Differential Evolution and Threshold Accepting to
tackle the parameter estimation of multivariate t distribution models
in the EML approach. Since the evolutionary optimizer does not rely
on gradient search, the EML approach can be applied to estimation of
more complicated copula models such as high-dimensional copulas.
Our experimental study shows that the proposed method provides
more robust and more accurate estimates as compared to the IFM
approach.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a robust and secure
algorithm for watermarking, the watermark is first transformed into
the frequency domain using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT).
Then the entire DWT coefficient except the LL (Band) discarded,
these coefficients are permuted and encrypted by specific mixing.
The encrypted coefficients are inserted into the most significant
spectral components of the stego-image using a chaotic system. This
technique makes our watermark non-vulnerable to the attack (like
compression, and geometric distortion) of an active intruder, or due
to noise in the transmission link.
Abstract: The paper deals with the most important changes that have occurred in business because of social media and its impact on organisations and leadership in recent years. It seeks to synthesize existing research, theories and concepts, in order to understand "social destinations", and to provide a bridge from past research to future success. Becoming a "social destination" is a strategic and tactical leadership and management issue and the paper will present the importance of destination leadership in choosing the way towards a social destination and some organisational models. It also presents some social media tools that can be used in transforming a destination into a social one. Adapting organisations to the twentyfirst century means adopting social media as a way of life and a way of business.