One of the most important objectives of the Business Innovation and Virtual Enterprise Environment (BIVEE) project is the management and fostering of innovation and production improvement in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This short paper presents a brief description of the key factors and the methodology followed during the analysis of the current situation of the companies selected as e...

We prove that finite groups have the same complex character tables iff the group algebras are twisted forms of each other as Drinfel'd quasi-bialgebras or iff there is non-associative bi-Galois algebra over these groups. The interpretations of class-preserving automorphisms and permutation representations with the same character in terms of Drinfel'd algebras are also given.

In Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), the context-dependent adaption of a system to a person’s needs is of particular interest. In the living area, a fine-grained context may not only contain information about the occupancy of certain furniture, but also the posture of a user on the occupied furniture. This information is useful in the application area of home automation, where, for example, a lyin...

In Iran, furniture is mainly manufactured in small workshops, where most activities are performed manually. This study was conducted among workers of furniture workshops to determine prevalence of musculoskeletal symptoms and to assess ergonomic working conditions to identify major risk factors associated with musculoskeletal symptoms. In this study, 410 randomly selected furniture workers part...

Mature industries are characterised by static or declining sales, low average margins and intense competition between firms for market share. This paper develops a typology of strategic options for small firms in the furniture industry and examines the extent to which firms are adopting simple or complex strategies. Empirical analysis is based on data from 39 firms with between 10 and 100 emplo...

Information Technologies until recently mainly have been focused on very constrained artifacts like desktop computers, set-top boxes or handheld. There is now a shift towards integrating technologies in everyday artifacts, ranging from tables to walls and even carpets or kitchen furniture. In this paradigm, the computer disappears and objects take advantage of computation capabilities to suppor...

Current bed bug, Cimex lectularius L., control usually involves insecticide applications that pose a high risk of insecticide exposure to residents and applicators. To minimize these risks and the amount of insecticides used, we designed and evaluated a dust band treatment technique. The laboratory assay showed that 1% cyßuthrin dust treated bands are highly effective in killing bed bugs. We fu...

Since the 1940s there has been an increase in the number of patients submitted for surgery of the spinal axis necessitating use of the prone position. Specifically designed operating tables were both rare and expensive, and probably only existed in a few highly specialized centres. Apparatus which could be easily made locally and used in conjunction with normal operating tables has been invente...

In this data article, laboratory experimental investigation results on drying kinetic properties: the drying temperature (T), drying air velocity (V) and dewatering time (Te), each of the factors has five levels, and the experiment was replicated three times and the output: drying rate and drying time obtained, were observed. The experiment was conducted at National Centre for Agricultural Mech...