How can electronics industries become green manufacturers in Taiwan and Japan

The world’s leading countries have reached a consensus concerning the need for environmental protection, and many international environmental protection rules and regulations have been implemented. Of these, the EU-legislated Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS), Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Eco-design of Energy-using Products (EuP) compel the electronics industry to incorporate waste disposal considerations in product design and manufacturing in order to benefit the environment. This study accordingly employed the ISO 14000 environmental management family’s ISO 14031 environmental performance evaluation (EPE) standards as an assessment framework, and investigated the types of factors influencing environmental performance, and their level of importance, when the electronics industry implements lead-free manufacturing. The study conducted a questionnaire survey of industry experts, scholars, and government officers in Taiwan and Japan—which constitute two of the world’s leading electronics product manufacturing centers—employing the Delphi method to extract assessment indicators, and using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to analyze indicators’ relative levels of importance. The results showed that the choice of lead-free substitute materials, soil heavy metal pollution, and compliance with environmental laws and regulations are the three important indicators of the environmental performance of lead-free manufacturing. As a consequence, when relevant industries adopt lead-free manufacturing in the future, they should first establish basic process technology, and also take their industries’ process characteristics and the suitability of substitute materials into consideration. In order to maintain compliance with laws and regulations, and to reduce pollution emissions, such industries should cooperate with government in connection with waste and wastewater treatment. In addition, apart from implementing environmental policies and testing standards, government can facilitate the realization of environmental protection policies and help conserve corporate resources by providing assistance, specialized training, and incentive measures to industry.     

A Roadmap for Thermal Metrology

A provisional roadmap for thermal metrology was developed in Spring 2006 as part of the EUROMET iMERA activity toward increasing impact from national investment in European metrology R&D. This consisted of two parts: one addressing the influence of thermal metrology on society, industry, and science, and the other specifying the requirements of enabling thermal metrology to serve future needs. The roadmap represents the shared vision of the EUROMET TC Therm committee as to how thermal metrology should develop to meet future requirements over the next 15 years. It is important to stress that these documents are a first attempt to roadmap the whole of thermal metrology and will certainly need regular review and revision to remain relevant and useful to the community they seek to serve. The first part of the roadmap, “Thermal metrology for society, industry, and science,” identifies the main social and economic triggers driving developments in thermal metrology—notably citizen safety and security, new production technologies, environment and global climate change, energy, and health. Stemming from these triggers, key targets are identified that require improved thermal measurements. The second part of the roadmap, “Enabling thermal metrology to serve future needs” identifies another set of triggers, like global trade and interoperability, future needs in transport, and the earth radiation budget. Stemming from these triggers, key targets are identified, such as improved realizations and dissemination of the SI unit the kelvin, anchoring the kelvin to the Boltzmann constant, k _B, and calculating thermal properties from first principles. To facilitate these outcomes, the roadmap identifies the technical advances required in thermal measurement standards.     

Government organizations’ innovative use of the Internet: The case of the Twitter activity of South Korea’s Ministry for Food,Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries

Noting the government’s role in diffusing information across various sectors of society, this study analyzes the Twitter activity of the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MFAFF), one of Korea’s government organizations. From a broad perspective, this study provides a better understanding of innovation activity mediated by social media—particularly the government’s Twitter activity, a topic that has not been addressed by previous webometric research on Triple Helix relationships—by employing social network analysis and content analysis. The results indicate some limitations of the MFAFF’s activity on Twitter as a mutual communication channel, although Twitter has the potential to facilitate risk management. Further, based on the MFAFF’s confined use of its Twitter account, the results suggest that its Twitter account can be an effective information distribution channel, indicating Twitter’s value as a communication tool for innovation activity through social media. This study provides an empirical analysis of the government’s Twitter activity and contributes to the literature by providing an in-depth understanding of the Triple Helix relationship on the Web.     

A basis for the évolution of strategy for a futuristic development of building materials

Conclusions A basis for evolving strategy for development of building materials maintaining the mass—energy— environment balance is outlined. The technical, ecological and economic dictates of the future compell us to develop building materials aligning with nature — using natural resources and converting society’s wastes into wealth. Energy requirements in the manufacture and use of materials will be a prime consideration. Greater thrusts to the engineering and industrial aspects of manufacture and utilization of building materials is futuristically important.     

Anticipating technological breakthroughs: Using bibliographic coupling to explore the nanotubes paradigm

There is general consensus that the field of nanotechnology will be very important in the future. An open question is, however, which technological approaches or paradigms will be important in the field. The paper assumes that the carbon nanotube will be a key element of an emerging technological paradigm in nanotechnology. This study employs a bibliometric method — bibliographic coupling — to identify important nanotubes-related ‘leitbilder’ — a concept meaning ‘guiding images’ that provide a basis for different professions and disciplines to work in the same direction. Until recently, bibliographic coupling has been applied rarely for purposes of research evaluation, not to mention technology foresight. Our case study seems to suggest that bibliographic coupling is particularly suitable for anticipating technological breakthroughs. Bibliographic coupling analysis of recent nanotube-related patents focused our attention to recent patents owned by Nantero Inc. Nantero’s main focus is the development of NRAM — a high-density nonvolatile random access memory. The NRAM leitbild seems to be an important emerging leitbild. It connects technical opportunities and promising applications relating to the memories in devices such as cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, as well as applications in networking arena.     

Inelasticity of solids for small strains

Residual (irreversible) deformations of solids were observed under very low stresses for strains ε ≈10⁻⁶, which in the literature are traditionally classed in the elastic region. Inelastic deformations appeared in this range for all types of solids (mono-and polycrystals of plastic and brittle materials, amorphous solids) differing strongly in nature and physicomechanical properties. These deformations can be classified as a special form of inelastic deformations—quasimicroplastic—and quasimicroplasticity can be classified as a fundamental property of solids. Pis’ma Zh. Tekh. Fiz. 25, 29–35 (September 12, 1999)     

Skeletal tissues as nanomaterials

Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and, though the fibre-forming collagens have a ‘common’ structure, it is adapted to perform a large range of functions—from the differing mechanical needs of tendon versus bone to forming a transparent support structure in the cornea. This perfidy also suggests that collagen could form a generic basis for a range of scaffold needs for tissue engineering or medical device coating applications. We at the London Centre for Nanotechnology—a joint venture between University College London and Imperial College—are taking a bottom-up approach having decided that many of the ‘accepted dogmas’ of collagen biology may not be quite as soundly based as currently held. We are using several of the tools of ‘hard’ nanotechnology—such as atomic force microscopy—to re-examine collagen structure with the longer term aim of using such information to design materials with appropriate physical attributes. Examples of our current research on mineralised and soft tissue collagens are presented.     

Dependence of Mechanical and Thermal Properties of Thermoplastic Composites on Electron Beam Irradiation

Since the restrictions for environmental protection being strengthened, thermoplastics reinforced with natural fibers (NF’s), such as jute, kenaf, flax, etc. have appeared as alternatives to chemical plastics for automobile interior materials. In this study, the thermal conductivity, tensile strength, and deformation of several kinds of thermoplastic composites composed of 50% polypropylene (PP) and 50% natural fiber (NF) irradiated by an electron beam (energy: 0.5 MeV, dose: 0–20 kGy) were measured. The length and thickness of PP and NF are 80 ± 10 mm and 40–120 μm, respectively. The results show that the thermal conductivity and the tensile strength changed and became minimum, when the dose of the electron beam was 10 kGy. However, the effect of the dose on the deformation was not clear.     

Knowledge-based innovation and collaboration: a triple-helix approach in Saudi Arabia

This study analyzed the research productivity of Saudi academics using the triple-helix model. In the analysis, we combined domestic and international collaboration by three sectors—university, industry, and government—according to the model of the triple-helix. This approach produces better results than by simply including international collaboration as fourth sector. According to the analysis, research collaboration in Saudi Arabia which is measured by the triple-helix, was “-” uncertainty (negative T-value) while scientific productivity has been dramatically increasing since the late 2000s. The triple-helix collaboration does not quite differ between domestic collaboration and “domestic and international” collaborations. In our further analysis, we found that technological development was not based on scientific research in Saudi Arabia; rather, the technological development relies on prior technology (patent references). From that point, Saudi Arabia’s current long-term strategic plan to develop a scientific base for a knowledge-based industry is well aligned to the current contexts of Saudi Arabia.     

Nonisothermal conditions for limitation of the current injected into a composite superconductor exposed to pulsed perturbations

This study is devoted to solving one of the major problems of superconductivity engineering — the thermal stability of the superconducting state of a composite superconductor. The formulated problem is analyzed most comprehensively with allowance for the nonisothermal dynamics of the magnetic flux inside the composite. This approach allowed us to formulate the main aspects of the behavior under the simultaneous influence of various perturbing factors, i.e., varying current and external thermal perturbation. Pis’ma Zh. Tekh. Fiz. 23, 14–21 (February 12, 1997)     

The global science base of information and communication technologiges: Bibliometric analysis of ICT research papers

The science and engineering base is a key source of knowledge for the development and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In order to be able to effectively describe and monitor world-wide scientific activity related to ICTs, it is important to be able to provide reliable macro-level statistics of this knowledge base. International bibliographic databases and related bibliometric indicators together provide an analytical framework and appropriate measures to cover both the ‘supply side’—research capabilities and outputs—and ‘demand side’—collaboration, diffusion and citation impact—related to the ICT research. This paper presents results of such a bibliometric study describing macro-level features of this ICT knowledge base. The data were retrieved from a specially developedCWTS ICT Database which provides a broad-scope world-wide coverage of ICT-relevant research papers published in high-quality international scientific and technical journals. The cross-country comparison focuses on the level of scientific output and co-operation patterns of the most actively publishing nations with a focus on the three Triad zones—the European Union, the USA and Japan.     

Using online databases to form subject collections for informetric analyses

The online databases of the Dialog System retrieve only 26% of documents in an exhaustively compiled collection on the subject of Bradford's Law of Scattering, with some documents being retrieved from many databases. However, when the Exhaustive Collection is more stringently defined to include only those documents more about the subject, the retrieval rate of Dialog improves to 61%, while its most productive database, LISA, alone retrieves 37%. Both of these ‘samples’ give good estimates of the size-invariant properties of the Exhaustive Collection which are typically studied in Bradford and Growth Analyses—vindicating this use of online searching. However, without additional information, online searches are of little use in determining size-related properties of subject literature collections. Whether the analysis reported here—which relies on identical interpretations of a ‘subject’—has secure foundations is briefly considered.     

Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity in autoimmune diseases

Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity are important features in autoimmune disease research. Taking co-authorship as an indicator for research collaboration, for selected European countries it was found that 91% to 99% of all publications are based on collaboration. International collaboration affects about 27% of all publications. Small countries like Sweden and Finland pursue international collaboration more intensively than larger countries like Germany or the UK. Different collaboration strategies were found for nationally co-authored papers, for instance, Germany seems to focus more on intra-departmental collaboration, while France and Italy have stronger inter-institutional links. About 54% of all publications are based on cross-disciplinary The term ‘cross-disciplinarity’ is used to highlight the fact that contributions from more than one discipline are made and required. This more general term is used—rather than the term ‘interdisciplinarity’—because it collaboration, which was found to be even more important in international collaboration. is hard or even impossible to distinguish interdisciplinary from multi-disciplinary work based on the data used. For a more detailed discussion of the terminology see e.g. Refs 1–5.     

Import-export of knowledge between scientific subject categories: The iceberg hypothesis

The capacity to attract citations from other disciplines — or knowledge export — has always been taken into account in evaluating the quality of scientific papers or journals. Some of the JCR’s (ISI’s Journal Citation Report) Subject Categories have a greater exporting character than others because they are less isolated. This influences the rank/JIF (ISI’s Journal Impact Factor) distribution of the category. While all the categories fit a negative power law fairly well, those with a greater External JIF give distributions with a more sharply defined peak and a longer tail — something like an iceberg. One also observes a major relationship between the rates of export and import of knowledge.     

Mathematical modeling of the process of warming up of a cylindrical surface by a moving intense heat source

A mathematical model of the process of warming up of a metal cylindrical surface by a moving point heat source has been proposed; the model allows for the presence of a thin absorbing coating on the metal surface and for the thermal resistance of the contact surface. An algorithm of calculation of a nonstationary temperature field has been constructed.; this algorithm makes it possible to find the values of the problem’s parameters ensuring local surface heating. An example of numerical calculation has been given. __________ Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 79, No. 6, pp. 31–37, November–December, 2006.     

Functional approach to the Rayleigh-Bénard problem for a nematic liquid crystal

The derivation of a functional analog of the free energy—the generalized thermodynamic potential— for an open system such as a nematic liquid crystal in a temperature gradient field is proposed. Near the threshold of thermal convection all the hydrodynamic variables can be described by a single complex amplitude w, the order parameter of the system, which enables one to determine the spatial position and the intensity of rotation of the convection rolls that arise. The orthogonality condition for the solutions is shown to yield an Euler equation from which one can recover the generalized thermodynamic potential, the extrema of which correspond to the most probable realizations of the dissipative structures. Pis’ma Zh. Tekh. Fiz. 24, 6–12 (June 26, 1998)     

Incentive contrats and strictly proper scoring rules

When a decision maker (DM) contracts with an expert to provide information, the nature of the contract can, create incentives for the expert, and it is up to the DM to ensure that the contract provides incentives that align the expert’s and DM’s interests. In this paper, scoring rules (and related functions) are viewed as such contracts and are reinterpreted in terms of agency theory and the theory of revelation games from economics. Although scoring rules have typically been discussed in the literature as devices for eliciting and evaluating subjective probabilities, this study relies on the fact that strictly proper scoring rules reward greater expertise as well as honest revelation. We describe conditions under which a DM can use a strictly proper scoring rule as a contract to give an expert an incentive to gather an amount of information that is optimal from the DM’s perspective. The conditions we consider focus on the expert’s cost structure, and we find that the DM must have substantial knowledge of that cost structure in order to design a specific contract that provides the correct incentives. The model and analysis suggest arguments for hiring and maintaining experts in-house rather than using outside consultants.     

Correlation analysis between university research competitiveness and library’s scholarly information in OECD nations and Korea

Beginning from the premise that research competitiveness at the university level is the starting point for national competitiveness as a whole, this paper analyzes the correlation between university research-related performance and the scholarly or academic resources available through a country’s library system. An analysis of this correlation from two different angles — a macroscopic approach considering universities in OECD nations and a microscopic approach focusing only upon universities in Korea — found that there is indeed a significant correlation between university research performance and the scholarly information available at libraries. A regression analysis of the two approaches also found that the more journal titles subscribed to by university libraries and the higher their budget for materials, the greater the contribution university libraries make to university research competitiveness in Korea as well as other OECD countries. In this light, in order for Korea to reach a level of research competitiveness comparable to other OECD members, policies need to be created that will effectively increase the number of journals subscribed to by university libraries.     

Thermal and force loads on the vehicle surface in high-velocity motion in the earth’s atmosphere

Consideration has been given to a number of aspects of mathematical modeling of a high-velocity flight in the earth’s atmosphere in a wide range of variation of the determining parameters. Super-and hypersonic gas flow past flying vehicles has been investigated based on computer-aided calculations with allowance for its actual properties. Data on the distribution of gasdynamic parameters in the flow field, including thermal and force loads on the surface, have been obtained and analyzed. The issues of applying today’s information technologies to archiving scientific knowledge obtained in electronic databases of a specialized Internet center and their dissemination via the Global Network have been discussed. __________ Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 338–344, March–April, 2008.     

Contrôle des matériaux de construction par dynamostratigraphie

Résumé La fabrication des matériaux de construction nécessite des contr?les systématiques de qualité, en laboratoire. Il est tout aussi important de pouvoir effectuer des contr?lesin situ, une fois l’ouvrage terminé et dans le temps. La dynamostratigraphie apporte une solution à ces deux problèmes. Cette méthode est basée sur la mesure de l’effort de pénétration (R) d’un foret animé simultanément de mouvements de rotation (ϕ) et de translation (x) à des vitesses imposées. L’enregistrement de la variationR(x) permet de constater les variations de résistance mécanique et par là-même l’épaisseur des différents constituants traversés. Deux exemples d’utilisation de la dynamostratigraphie sont présentés à partir de mesures effectuées en laboratoire. Lorsque le matériau n’est pas stratifié—un mortier—la résistance à la pénétration permet de comparer différentes compositions (sable/ciment) et leurs évolutions au cours du séchage. Lorsque le matériau est hétérogène—un béton—la résistance à la pénétration décèle la taille des gravillons et la qualité du mortier. La dynamostratigraphie s’applique avec succès à tous les matériaux.

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Summary The manufacture of building materials calls for systematic quality control in the laboratory. It is equally important to be able to carry out control on site, once the construction is completed, and then later during service. Dynamostratigraphy brings a solution to these two problems. This method is based on the measurement of the penetration force (R) of a drill driven simultaneously in rotation (ϕ) and sideways (x) at imposed rates. Recording the variation inR(x) indicates the variation in the mechanical resistance and thereby the thickness of the different constituents penetrated. Details are given of two examples of the use of dynamostratigraphy in the laboratory. When the material examined is not a stratified medium—a mortar—the resistance to penetration will give the possibility of comparing different design mixes (sand/cement) and their modification during drying. When the material is heterogeneous—concrete—the resistance to penetration defines the size of gravel and the quality of the mortar. In fact, dynamostratigraphy can be applied successfully to all materials.