Universal Rights and Wrongs

This paper argues for the important role of customers as a source of competitive advantage and firm growth, an issue which has been largely neglected in the resource-based view of the firm. It conceptualizes Penrose’s (1959) notion of an ‘inside track’ and illustrates how in-depth knowledge about established customers combines with joint problem-solving activities and the rapid assimilation of new and previously unexploited skills and resources. It is suggested that the inside track represents a distinct and perhaps underestimated way of generating rents and securing long-term growth. This also implies that the sources of sustainable competitive advantage in important respects can be sought in idiosyncratic interfirm relationships rather than within the firm itself

Fast cholesterol flip-flop and lack of swelling in skin lipid multilayers

Atomistic simulations were performed on hydrated model lipid multilayers that are representative of the lipid matrix in the outer skin (stratum corneum). We find that cholesterol transfers easily between adjacent leaflets belonging to the same bilayer via fast orientational diffusion (tumbling) in the inter-leaflet disordered region, while at the same time there is a large free energy cost against swelling. This fast flip-flop may play an important role in accommodating the variety of curvatures that would be required in the three dimensional arrangement of the lipid multilayers in skin, and for enabling mechanical or hydration induced strains without large curvature elastic costs

Freeform Fabrication of High Performance Titanium Components via SLS/HIP

AbstractThis paper presents the development of Selective Laser Sintering/Hot Isostatic Pressing (SLS/HIP) technology for production of functional high performance components in the titanium alloy Ti-6AI-4V. SLS/HIP is a net shape manufacturing technique that combines and exploits the freeform shaping capability of selective laser sintering and the full densification capability of hot isostatic pressing. The advantages of SLS combined with in situ HIP encapsulation include single step net shape canning, full densification by containerless HIP, no container-powder adverse interactions, reduced pre-processing time, and minimal post-process machining compared to conventional HIP of canned powders. Microstructure and mechanical properties of SLS processed and HIP post-processed Ti-6A1-4V are consistent with conventionally processed material. The potential of SLS/HIP technology was demonstrated by net shape fabricating a component to specification, namely the titanium guidance section housing base for the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile.</jats:p

The three dimensional dilute Ising magnet

The dilute Ising model with a p = 0.8 fraction of the sites occupied by spins is simulated on L3 systems for L up to 300, using a single-cluster algorithm of Wolff. In the range of reduced temperature 0.002 &lt; (T - Tc)/Tc &lt; 0.03 the susceptibility appears to fit a simple power with an effective exponent &#947; eff&#8776; 1.36