Evidence suggests that small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have failed to capitalize on the Internet to facilitate the management of customer relations (e-CRM) and the creation of competitive advantage (Chen & Popovich, 2003; Geiger & Martin, 1999; McGowan et al., 2001; O’Toole, 2001). This is attributed to a lack of influence, time, finance and specialised knowledge, (Carson & Gilmore, 20...

Despite the recent increase in the adoption and use of social media tools to support firm operations, very little empirical research focusing on smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been conducted todate. The aim of this study is to fill this knowledge gap by investigating SME adoption of social media tools. In particular, we assess the impact of organizational, manager and environmenta...

We show how qualitative spatial representations can be used with the Structure-Mapping Engine (SME), a domain-general model of analogy, to solve a set of problems from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. SME is used in a two-stage mapping process which we have previously shown to be effective for solving geometric analogy problems. Each problem is drawn in PowerPoint and input into sKEA, our...

The responses of ten isolates of Enterobacteriaceae to ceftibuten exposure were monitored by measuring several parameters. Post-antibiotic effect (PAE), control-related effective regrowth time (CERT) and post-antibiotic sub-MIC effect (PA-SME) were determined by bacterial enumeration carried out either by impedance in combination with viable counting (IMP/VC) or by impedance in combination with...

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...