Determinants and outcomes of electronic data interchange diffusion

Protagonists of electronic data interchange (EDI), a specific form of inter organizational systems (IOS), claim that it has the potential to dramatically alter the exchange of business documents and business operations (particularly material procurement and sales functions) in a number of industries. Drawing upon past research on innovation diffusion and information systems (IS) implementation, this study examines the role of key innovation and organizational factors in influencing the extent to which EDI is diffused within organizations, and whether more extensive diffusion leads to improved organizational outcomes. Two senior executives (one from the IS and the other from selling/buying function) from over 200 large American companies participated in the field study. The path analyses results indicate that compatibility and relative advantage (two of the three classical innovation attributes), championing, scope for use of EDI within the firm's task environments, and being an early adopter determine the extent to which EDI gets internally diffused through greater integration with other IS applications within the organization. Technical compatibility, top management support and being an early adopter emerge as the key variables influencing the extent to which EDI gets externally diffused through greater external diffusion of business transactions with trading partners. The results also indicate that greater internal as well as external diffusion of EDI facilitates improved organizational outcomes that was measured on six dimensions such as implementation success, organizational performance, influence on market structure, standardization of transactions, etc     

Clones: what is that smell?

Clones are generally considered bad programming practice in software engineering folklore. They are identified as a bad smell?(Fowler et?al. 1999) and a major contributor to project maintenance difficulties. Clones inherently cause code bloat, thus increasing project size and maintenance costs. In this work, we try to validate the conventional wisdom empirically to see whether cloning makes code more defect prone. This paper analyses the relationship between cloning and defect proneness. For the four medium to large open source projects that we studied, we find that, first, the great majority of bugs are not significantly associated with clones. Second, we find that clones may be less defect prone than non-cloned code. Third, we find little evidence that clones with more copies are actually more error prone. Fourth, we find little evidence to support the claim that clone groups that span more than one file or directory are more defect prone than collocated clones. Finally, we find that developers do not need to put a disproportionately higher effort to fix clone dense bugs. Our findings do not support the claim that clones are really a “bad smell”?(Fowler et?al. 1999). Perhaps we can clone, and breathe easily, at the same?time.     

Internet messaging: An examination of the impact of attitudinal,normative, and control belief systems

While instant messaging (IM) has been very popular among teenagers and college students for social and recreation communication, its use in corporate settings has been limited. We examined the factors that influence the intention to use and actual use of IM. A research model was developed based on diffusion of innovation and Socio-psychological theories. The model examined the influence of seven variables in three belief structures (the attitudinal, normative, and control). The model was empirically validated using a field survey of 349 respondents. The results indicated that five of the seven variables explained about 41% of the variance in the intention to use IM. The five significant variables were: utilitarian beliefs, hedonic beliefs, subjective norms, critical mass, and ease of use. Affiliation motivation was not significant and social belief had a negative impact on intention. As expected, intention to use had a significant influence on actual usage.     

Bacteria-Responsive Self-Assembly of Antimicrobial Peptide Nanonets for Trap-and-Kill of Antibiotic-Resistant Strains

Bacterial trapping using nanonets is a ubiquitous immune defense mechanism against infectious microbes. These nanonets can entrap microbial cells, effectively arresting their dissemination and rendering them more vulnerable to locally secreted microbicides. Inspired by this evolutionarily conserved anti-infective strategy, a series of 15 to 16 residue-long synthetic β-hairpin peptides is herein constructed with the ability to self-assemble into nanonets in response to the presence of bacteria, enabling spatiotemporal control over microbial killing. Using amyloid-specific K114 assay and confocal microscopy, the membrane components lipoteichoic acid and lipopolysaccharide are shown to play a major role in determining the amyloid-nucleating capacity as triggered by Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria respectively. These nanonets displayed both trapping and killing functionalities, hence offering a direct improvement from the trap-only biomimetics in literature. By substituting a single turn residue of the non-amyloidogenic BTT1 peptide, the nanonet-forming BTT1-3A analog is produced with comparable antimicrobial potency. With the same sequence manipulation approach, BTT2-4A analog modified from BTT2 peptide showed improved antimicrobial potency against colistin-resistant clinical isolates. The peptide nanonets also demonstrated robust stability against proteolytic degradation, and promising in vivo efficacy and biosafety profile. Overall, these bacteria-responsive peptide nanonets are promising clinical anti-infective alternatives for circumventing antibiotic resistance.     

Organometallic L-Alanine Cadmium Iodide Crystals for Optical Device Fabrication

Single crystals of L-alanine cadmium iodide (LACI) were grown by the slow evaporation technique at room temperature. A single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SXRD) model was used to evaluate the crystal structure of the as-grown LACI crystal. The energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis and ultraviolet-visible-near infrared (UV-vis-NIR) transmittance studies were carried out, and the results reveal the presence of elements in the title compound. From the transmittance data, the optical bandgap as a function of photon energy was estimated, and the different optical constants were calculated. A fluorescence study was performed for the LACI crystal. Thermogravimetric and differential thermal analyses have also been studied to investigate the thermal property of the LACI crystal. The efficiency of the second harmonic generation (SHG) of the title crystal was investigated. The magnetic and electrical properties were estimated by the vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) analysis and impedance study, respectively.     

Plasma spheroidization of nickel powders in a plasma reactor

Thermal spray coatings of surfaces with metal, alloy and ceramic materials for protection against corrosion, erosion and wear is an intense field of research. The technique involves injection of the powder into a plasma flame, melting, acceleration of the powder particles, impact and bonding with the substrate. Feedstock powders of metals, alloys and ceramics for thermal spray applications have to meet several requirements. Particle shape, size and its distribution, powder flow characteristics and density are the important factors to be considered in order to ensure high spray efficiency and better coating properties. For smooth and uniform feeding of powders into plasma jet, the powder particles have to be spherical in shape. High temperatures and steep temperatures present in thermal plasma is exploited to spheroidize particles in the present investigation. Nickel powder particles in the size range from 40–100 μm were spheroidized using plasma processing. SEM and optical micrographs showed spherical shape of processed particles.     

Effect of phase maldistribution on performance of two-phase catalytic monolith reactor and its comparison with trickle bed reactor

Monolith reactors are widely considered as an alternative to the conventional trickle bed reactor. For the commercial deployment of monolith reactors, comparative performance studies are required. Reliable comparative and performance studies require a detailed understanding of the effect of phase distribution/maldistribution on the performance studies. In this work, performance and comparative studies were carried out in a relatively large column that was 4.8 cm in diameter. Experiments were performed in the same conditions that were used in studies for which phase distribution data were available. Since the properties of the catalyst used were different in both the reactors, the apparent kinetics were studied to facilitate the comparison. The hydrogenation of alpha-methyl styrene (AMS) was used as a test reaction. From the performance studies, it was found that the effect of maldistribution on the performance was stronger than the catalyst availability. From the comparative studies, it was found that the monolith reactor with maldistributed flow conditions provides higher productivity than the trickle bed reactor.     

Non‐dominated sorting particle swarm optimization (NSPSO) and network security policy enforcement for Policy Space Analysis

Network operators depend on security services with the aim of safeguarding their IT infrastructure. Various types of network security policies are employed on a global scale and are disseminated among several security middleboxes implemented in networks. But, owing to the complications in security policies, it is not quite efficient to directly use the path‐wise enforcement schemes that are prevalent. The major motivation of this work is to improve security levels and solve the policy enforcement problem. For the first time, this work reports the issue of policy enforcement on middleboxes. The major contribution of this work is to design security policy enforcement as a Weighted K Set Covering Problem, and we designed a Policy Space Analysis (PSA) tool intended for a group of operations in the security policy. This PSA tool was developed based on range‐signified hyper‐rectangles, which are indexed by the Hilbert R‐tree. Leveraging the PSA, we first investigated the topological features of various kinds of policies. Balancing the PSA tool in a non‐dominated sorting particle swarm optimization technique exposes the intrinsic difficulties of this security strategy and provides guidance for designing the enforcement approach. In addition, in this research, a new fuzzy rule‐based classification system is introduced for packet classification. A scope‐wise policy enforcement algorithm was proposed, which chooses a moderate number of enforcement network nodes for deploying multiple policy subsets in a greedy manner. This scheme is much quicker compared with the first one and therefore has found its application in real‐time deployments.     

Effect of annealing temperature on structural,optical and humidity sensing properties of indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films

Tin doped indium oxide (ITO) thin films were prepared by sol–gel spin coating method with In (NO₃)·3H₂O and SnCl₄·5H₂O as indium and tin sources, respectively. The as deposited samples were annealed at various temperature such as, 300, 400, 500 and 600?°C for 2 h in ambient atmosphere. The grown ITO thin films are polycrystalline in nature with cubic structure of In₂O₃ with the space group La3 and the results are in good agreement with the standard JCPDS data (card no#06-0416). In addition crystalline size increases with increasing annealing temperature from 25 to 55 nm. Polycrystalline with uniform smooth surface was observed by SEM micrographs. The optical band gap energy was found to be decreased from 3.85 to 3.23 eV as the annealing temperature is increased from 300 to 600?°C. The humidity sensing performance (high sensitivity and fast response time) was significantly improved for 600?°C thin films samples, which is probably due to smaller energy band gap and physisorption between the water molecules and the surface of the thin films. The films were further characterized by PL and EDS analysis. The effect of temperature on humidity sensing mechanism of ITO thin films is also discussed.     

Temperature dependence of the dielectric response of BaZrO3 by immittance spectroscopy

Electrical measurements using AC immittance spectroscopic technique over the temperature range of 25-300°C, on sintered compacts of pure BaZrO₃ and those containing 5 wt.% BaSnO₃ sintered in the temperature range of 1600-1700°C for up to 12 h are reported. Data analyses revealed that the capacitance and the derived dielectric constant remained invariant over more than three decades of frequency in the kilo to megahertz regime. Typically, the average dielectric constant was 15 and the TCK values were P3 and P186 ppm/°C for pure and 5 wt.% BaSnO₃-added BaZrO₃, respectively, in the range 25-300°C.