The kinetics of the elementary reactions involved in the low-temperature combustion of alkanes are reviewed. The reactions are centred on the alkyl radical and its decomposition, recombination and reactions with 0,. A combination of theory, modelling and direct measurements, using especially laser flash photolysis, have played key roles in the characterisation of all three reaction types. A rem...

That may seem rather unnecessary: social transformation is a commonly used expression and not particularly new. Generally it implies an underlying notion of the way society and culture change in response to such factors as economic growth, war or political upheavals. We may have in mind the ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 1944) in western societies brought about by industrialisation and moderni...

The common digital method that is used to eliminate the effect of fiber tilt from fiber diffraction patterns is based on an approximation given by Franklin & Gosling [Acta Cryst. (1953), 6, 678-685]. The estimate of the tilt angle is iteratively optimized in the so-called ;Fraser correction'. Building on the fundamental work of Polanyi [Z. Phys. (1921), 7, 149-180], the exact solution is presen...

‘Scientific community’ is common currency in the study of science, largely due to Kuhn’s use of the term in his highly influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this article explains, however, ‘scientific community’ was not of Kuhn’s coining. It was hinted at by Peirce, and expressly designated by Royce. On a few occasions Fleck affirmed a scientific community, while Polanyi ...

Kuhn and Feyerabend have little to say about the thought of Michael Polanyi, and the secondary literature on Polanyi’s relation to them is meagre. I argue that Polanyi’s view, in Personal knowledge and in other writings, of conceptual frameworks ‘segregated’ by a ‘logical gap’ as giving rise to controversies in science foreshadowed Kuhn and Feyerabend’s theme of incommensurability. The similari...

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, we have entered a new era of knowledge management; humans must now live and work in a knowledge-based society as knowledge workers (Drucker, 1993). Various streams of knowledge management (KM) research have emerged. Early research focused on understanding the differences among data, information, knowledge and classifications, such as tacit versu...