We estimate the fractal dimension of the ρ Ophiuchus Molecular Cloud Complex, associated with star forming regions. We selected a cube (v, l, b) database, obtained with J = 1−0 transition lines of 12CO and 13CO at a resolution of 22′′ using a multibeam receiver system on the 14-m telescope of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Using a code developed within IRAF, we identified slice-clouds with two threshold temperatures to estimate the fractal dimension. With threshold temperatures of 2.25 K (3σ) and 3.75 K (5σ), the fractal dimension of the target cloud is estimated to be D = 1.52–1.54, where P / AD/2 , which is larger than previous results. We suggest that the sampling rate (spatial resolution) of observed data must be an important parameter when estimating the fractal dimension, and that narrower or wider dispersion around an arbitrary fit line and the intercepts at NP = 100 should be checked whether they relate to rms noise level or characteristic structure of the target cloud. This issue could be investigated by analysing several high resolution databases with different quality (low or moderate sensitivity).

Supply chain is usually represented by a network (which is called supply chain network) that contains some nodes. In a supply chain network these nodes are suppliers, plants, distribution centers and customers which are some facilities connected by some arcs to each other. The arcs connect the nodes in the direction of their production flow, meaning that each arc shows a route between the facilities for transporting the products. A multi-stage supply chain network (MSCN) is defined as a sequence of multiple supply chain network stages. This paper addresses a typical supply chain network problem which is based on a two-stage single-product system under uncertain conditions such that both cost and constraint parameters are interval numbers. The combination of these uncertain parameters are considered in this typical problem for the first time. In this case, two different order relations (the order relations UC ≤ and HW ≤ ) for interval numbers are considered. Then, two solution procedures are developed in order relations for the interval two-stage supply chain network design problem. The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated by a numerical example where it is proved that the relation HW ≤ shows better performance than the relation UC ≤ .

The thermally induced phase separation(TIPS) method offers higher reproducibility with lower tendency for defect formation and narrower pore size distribution, rendering the method more suitable for microfiltration(MF) and ultrafiltration(UF) applications. PVDF is widely used in membrane technology due to their excellent chemical resistance and strong mechanical properties. In case of MF and UF applications, the stretching method has been applied for increasing the performance of membrane by extending pore size. In this work, the effects of dope and bore flow rates and dope composition on the tensile strength of membranes was investigated. A design of experiment(DOE) analysis was used to understand the effects of the stretching parameters such as temperature, stretching ratio and holding time on the membrane performance.

Since Loeb and Sourirajan has introduced phase inversion method for membrane fabrication, the phase separation technique became the mainstream of membrane fabrication methods. Phase inversion includes solvent evaporation, vapor induced phase separation, thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) and nonsolvent induced phase separation (NIPS). Among those, NIPS and TIPS process is widely studied and employed for membrane fabrication. Depending on the membrane fabrication processes such as NIPS and TIPS, corresponding morphology differs from macrovoid structure to spherulitic structure, respectively. In this presentation, comparison of NIPS and TIPS effect on the final membrane morphology and controlling the membrane morphology by tuning the NIPS and TIPS effect will be presented.

In recent years there has been a drop in the percentage of male teachers. The gender disparity is evidenced in many primary and secondary schools in Nigeria. This article is set to ascertain the nature of gender disparity in Nigerian publicly funded schools, the underlying reasons for the growing disparity, such as the feminization of the teaching profession, low teacher’s salary, flexibility of teaching of the profession, women as care givers, cultural belief, and sexual molestation. Challenges to the increase of male teachers in schools, such as low status of teaching, parental expectation, work policies and societal perception were explored. The implications of the absence of male teachers in the schools, among others, were failure among male students, academic under-achievement, under-utilization of male talent and indiscipline in school. Suggested courses for action to increase the presence of male teachers in schools include improving the condition of service, education policy reform, gender balance in other professions, publicizing a male friendly environment, and admitting men to educational programs. The aforementioned are efforts meant to encourage diversity in the teaching workforce. The article relied heavily on data collected from Education Management Boards of some Nigerian States’ for its discussion.

Customer experience has become an important concept in explaining consumer behaviour with hedonic products in the online game industry. However, few studies have examined the differences in game experience internationally between players from different nationalities. Game producers who market their wares to a global audience need to take into account that individuals from different national backgrounds have different experiences according to nationally specific cultural and societal norms and restrictions. These experiences determine how players perceive, interact and enjoy products. The current study attempts to examine differences in game experiences between India and the US. Around 600 respondents were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), an online data panel. Analysis of results using a series of multivariate analysis of covariate, showed that players from India and the US are different in most aspects of game experience except for their analytical experience. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed and recommendations are made with consideration to the ramifications of the investigation.

Green products are often afflicted with a perceived performance liability, presenting marketing managers with a dilemma of how to motivate consumers to alter their consumption behavior, while acknowledging their negative inferences about green product performance. To address this problem, we develop green emphasis, defined as the prominence given to a firms’ environmental initiative in a green product communication appeal. By employing a green emphasis strategy, a firm makes prominent in a communication message either environmental attributes (Study 1 and 3), or uses assertive terminology (Study 2) to heighten issue importance. When a green emphasis strategy is used, the lack of performance-related extrinsic cues may reduce an individuals’ evaluation of a product’s performance ability. This relationship is mediated by autonomous motivation, which may be enhanced through the provision of information that is of interest and value to an individual (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Next, the moderating variable of performance criticality is examined, whereby the importance of the products’ performance ability is based on its associated category (Study 1) or purchase situation (Study 2). When a product belongs to a performance-critical category, or if situational involvement is heightened, the incongruent product information may heighten the negative impact of green emphasis. Finally, environmental attribute optionality (Study 3) is examined. When optional, the attribute is non-fundamental to the functioning of the base product (Ma, Gill, & Jiang, 2015). By making the environmental attribute an option, it is supposed that the incongruity between the attribute and perceived product performance is mitigated and localized, overcoming the negative effect of green emphasis.

This paper develops a conceptual model relating motivation, involvement, and changes to travel style to the selection of destinations and choice of events amongst non-professional participants involved in small-scale sporting events. A longitudinal comparison of t

Drawing on psychological reactance theory, this study examines consumers’ reactions to grocery categories’ variety reductions. Results show negative main effects on post-reduction satisfaction with variety and store patronage intentions, which are moderated by grocery category nature and by consumers’ intrinsic need for variety and attitude toward private label brands.

The paper focuses on the social commerce paradigm, underlining how social media are able to assist e-retailers in their effort of creating a total omni-channel e-customer experience. The empirical research represents a new prospect on the topic, because nowadays social commerce is not completely understood and realized from a managerial perspective.

The present study focuses on the construct of entrepreneurial alertness, investigating the external antecedents of the construct, responding to the call for more research pledged by Tang, Kacmar, and Busenitz (2012). Namely, we examine how receiving feedback, awards and collaboration offers in relation to an individual’s hobby activity influences the development of entrepreneurial alertness dimensions. Additionally, we make a contribution by testing the effect of these external factors in a non-entrepreneurial context of homebrewing communities, that is individuals producing beer at home as a hobby. In line with other form of craft activities, this context has demonstrated a high potential for business start-up development due to the increasing number of new small brewing businesses in North America run by entrepreneurs that were previously homebrewers (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000). We test our tenets within the complexity theory, where configurations of antecedents are examined in order to gain deeper understanding of the possible outcome (Woodside, 2014), using 213 completed questionnaires. We apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA, Ragin 2000; 2008) to achieve a holistic overview of the examined interrelationships (Ordanini, Parasuraman & Rubera, 2015). We find that high feedback is a sufficient condition for high scanning and search, association and connection, as well as evaluation and judgement activities of entrepreneurial alertness. Without feedback, people at the hobby stage engage in their leisure activities solely because they like it. However, receiving feedback in relation to their hobby outcomes provides an opportunity for individuals to develop and experience additional motivations beyond enjoyment, where they understand that the hobby could be commercialized and bring monetary rewards. Moreover, we find that an individual receiving low amount of awards but high amount of collaboration offers may also have high entrepreneurial alertness. Since individuals receive rewards related to the excellent performance in their leisure activity, it may not provide any cue for a potential transformation into a business. However, the more collaboration offers people receive, the more likely they get involved in scanning and search, association and connection, and evaluation and judgement activities of entrepreneurial alertness. Therefore, they are likely to conduct additional search, connect bits of available information and evaluate this business opportunity (Gaglio & Winter, 2009). The findings of this study could help entrepreneurs reflect on their decisions and behaviours during the business start-up planning process, and measure their entrepreneurial alertness and the extent of readiness to engage in business venturing.

The increasing competition in recent years made more and more firms regard strategic alliance as an important alternative and solution to respond to fierce competition. As a kind of system arrangement among firms, the concept of strategic alliance was first proposed by Hopland and Nigel in the early 1980s, who defined strategic alliance as the collaboration mode in which two or more firms, aiming at joint-owned both market and resources, formed the kind of cooperation to enhance advantages, share risk or cost, and also mutual flow of production factors via different kinds of contracts or agreement. However, even before this definition, many firms have already begun their alliance strategies practices. As a cooperative form, strategic alliance, no matter its specific types, becomes one key choice for firms to acquire, maintain and enhance their market shares and positions. Shrader (2001) found that collaboration to foreign firms become key methods for newly-founded firms and small firms to enter foreign markets, which can bring these firms with suitable knowledge and market information, making these firms expand even faster with lower costs and market risks. The enhancing pace of globalization and internationalization triggered firms’ attentions to external markets, Archibugi and Iammarino (2002) found that fierce changes in internal market forced firms to expand their market and product scopes, making more and more firms realize product and R&D internationalization by searching, choosing and collaborating with foreign firms. Dong and Glaister (2006) found Chinese firms cared more about market positions, international expansion and technology exchanges, while foreign firms tended to enter to Chinese market and learn how to operate in China via strategic alliances. Although, many scholars brought out managerial practices of firms’ strategic alliances, and had already formed theoretical foundations, researches related to market orientation, especially how alliance firms establish and realize their strategic goals and performance goals under market motivation is still lack of studies. In reality, the mechanism how firms’ alliance intention transformed into their strategic or performance goals is still in the black box. Taken alliance firms as research objectives, this paper tends to explore how firms constructed strategic alliance due to market-orientation realize their strategic or performance goals via choice of patent strategies. We introduced patent strategies to establish the matching model, to analyze how firms market orientation influence choices of patent strategies, and their mutual effects on firms innovative performance, in hope to provide to the future studies and managerial practice how firms can choose the reasonable and effective alliance partners according to their own strategic and performance goals. Based on differentiation of market access and market extension motivation, we pointed out that, in order to realize the transformation from alliance motivation to innovation performance, alliance firms had to choose and determine among a set of practical and operational plans. Patent strategies, as a kind of operational plan, were conducive to transformation from alliance motivation to innovation performance. With the framework of market motivation, patent strategy and firms innovative performance, we put forward the hypotheses on how market motivation affect firms’ choices of patent strategies, and also the joint effects of market motivation and patent strategies on firm innovative performance. We selected alliance firms in IT industry as samples, with data from Cooperative Agreements and Technology Indicators Database, USPTO and R&D Scoreboard released by Department for Business, Innovation & Skills of UK, we empirically tested effects of market motivation on choices of patent strategies, and also effects of market motivation and patent strategies on firms innovative performance. Results showed that: different market positions led to differentiated motivations and patent strategies in their strategic alliances, firms with relatively weak market positions tend to pursue strategic profile of patent defensive and leveraging strategies under market access motivation, while firms with strong positions would like to implement patent proprietary and leveraging strategies in market extension motivation. The implementation of patent defensive and leveraging strategies under market access motivation enhanced innovation efficiency of the firms with weak market positions. Since these firms focused more on market positions and opportunities, their market capitalization tended to improve, but the motivation and utilization of patent strategies had no effect on patent output. Similar to these firms, the ones with stronger market position were inclined to strengthen their market opportunities and improve their market capitalization. Results indicated that because of their stronger market positions, these firms showed lower awareness of innovation efficiency and their emphasis on patent output was not high either, which then led to the fact that both market extension motivation and patent strategies used had no effects on firms innovative performance measured by innovation efficiency or patent output.