The structure of developed economies has changed radically in recent decades. As late as the 1960s, it was reasonable to describe the economy in terms of three stages of production: primary production—of agricultural and mineral raw materials; secondary production—a manufacturing industry that transformed raw materials into items of final consumption; tertiary production—a sector that provided ...

This will not come as a great surprise to many readers, but it turns out that multinational tobacco companies are not generous, kind hearted or benevolent, and that any similarity they bear to boy scouts or fairy godmothers is dangerously misleading. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Conference of the Parties (COP), meeting last November in Durban, reminded us of these truths. ...

A technique for learning new words is discussed. The technique uses expectations generated by the context and an ISA hierarchy to guide the inference process. The learning process uses the context of several independent occurrences of the word to converge on its meaning.

Background: The Japanese government is an important shareholder in the Japanese tobacco industry. Negotiations to develop the WHO’s historic Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) were based on consensus, resulting in countries needing to agree to the lowest acceptable common denominator in clause development. Objective: To illustrate Japan’s role in negotiating key optional language in...

Today service providers need to mobilize all the internal energies in order to face the increasing competition and a changing market environment. Knowing the customer and the ability to provide flexible services has become crucial to building customer loyalty. With regard to technology-intensive services, Parasuraman [57] proposed that customer technology readiness (TR) has an impact on the per...

In order to built and (or) sustain competitive advantages, firms devoted to technology research for competition. Because of complexity of technology and time pressure of business opportunity, R&D teams become the main stream in firms' research. Our empirical research analyses the Taiwan semiconductor industry, and the data is from USPTO of U.S.A patent database. Our studt finds an R&D team’s lo...

We report herein the concise preparation of a range of functionalised aminoindoles via a new application of the Bartoli reaction. Scope and limitations of the methodology have been extensively studied to reveal the importance of protecting groups and substitution patterns. The use of amino substituted nitroanilines for the Bartoli reaction is to our knowledge unprecedented. Our work thus repres...

More and more software developers are recognizing the need for solutions that make it possible to share code between different applications in the same domain. Reusing code increases not only the productivity of the developers but also the reliability and maintainability of the software products. Many software companies have ended up with a repository of enterprise components modelling the core...

In June 2015, a discussion meeting entitled ‘Catalysis improving society’ was held based around the research initiatives of the recently established UK Catalysis Hub. The title is very bold for a discussion meeting, and this is indeed true. However, it is hard to imagine the world today or indeed civilized society without the impact of catalysis on the fundamental aspects required for life, nam...

This research highlight overviews the development roadmap of digital design and manufacturing and focuses on the future development directions under the Industries 4.0.