Efficacy of purchasing activities and strategic involvement: an international comparison

The purchasing function plays a strategic role in a company’s ability to compete. As globalization continues to increase, what becomes interesting is the effect that national culture may have on purchasing activities and, ultimately, manufacturing competitiveness. This study examines the effects of purchasing activities and the purchasing function’s involvement with corporate strategy on manufacturing competitiveness as it is affected by national differences. In particular, we are interested in the research question: Do purchasing theories built on samples from mainly North American and Western European countries apply in other countries with different cultural contexts? The statistical results provide evidence that the engagement and efficacy of purchasing activities and strategic involvement within companies vary by national culture. Moreover, a particular cultural dimension, Long-term orientation, is significantly related to the efficacy of purchasing activities and strategic involvement. This finding has important implications from the perspective of purchasing decision-making in global operations. Specifically, top managers from different nations could adopt and implement similar purchasing activities, but those activities could lead to different outcomes depending on the culture. The paper concludes by reviewing research limitations and suggests further examination of operations management theories

Inhibition effect of a custom peptide on lung tumors

Cecropin B is a natural antimicrobial peptide and CB1a is a custom, engineered modification of it. In vitro, CB1a can kill lung cancer cells at concentrations that do not kill normal lung cells. Furthermore, in vitro, CB1a can disrupt cancer cells from adhering together to form tumor-like spheroids. Mice were xenografted with human lung cancer cells; CB1a could significantly inhibit the growth of tumors in this in vivo model. Docetaxel is a drug in present clinical use against lung cancers; it can have serious side effects because its toxicity is not sufficiently limited to cancer cells. In our studies in mice: CB1a is more toxic to cancer cells than docetaxel, but dramatically less toxic to healthy cells

The characterization of the saddle shaped nickel(III) porphyrin radical cation: an explicative NMR model for a ferromagnetically coupled metallo-porphyrin radical

Ni(III)(OETPP˙)(Br)2 is the first Ni(III) porphyrin radical cation with structural and (1)H and (13)C paramagnetic NMR data for porphyrinate systems. Associating EPR and NMR analyses with DFT calculations as a new model is capable of clearly determining the dominant state from two controversial spin distributions in the ring to be the Ni(III) LS coupled with an a1u spin-up radical

Spin Torque and Spin-Dependent Transport in Nanoscale Devices

Spin Hall effect in a heavy metal (HM) generates a pure spin current flowing perpendicular to an applied electric charge current. When injected into a ferromagnet (FM), this pure spin current can act as negative magnetic damping thereby exciting self-oscillations of magnetization. In a simple HM/FM bilayer geometry, the current-driven self-oscillations of magnetization result in a microwave voltage generation due to anisotropic magneto-resistance (AMR) of the FM. Since AMR in thin films of typical FM materials such as Permalloy (Py) is relatively small, the output microwave signal generated by the HM/FM bilayer spin Hall oscillators (SHOs) is typically limited to ~ 0.1 nW. In this thesis, a new type of SHO by replacing FM layer with spin valve multilayers. In this type of devices, the microwave power generation relies on current-in-plane (CIP) giant magneto-resistance (GMR) instead of AMR. Since the magnitude GMR typically exceeds that of AMR, this new type of SHO can generate significantly higher power than the AMR-based SHOs. The maximum microwave power generated by the device exceeds 1 nW, which is over an order of magnitude higher than that in HM/FM bilayer SHO nanowire devices.Spin Transfer Torque Random Access Memory (STT-RAM) is a promising non-volatile memory technology that offers scalable area, fast operation, and low power consumption advantages over traditional SRAM, DRAM, and flash memories. Performance of the STT-RAM sensitively depends on magnetic anisotropy and properties of the magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), which is the most essential part in STT-RAM. We present here the results on the effect of ionizing radiation on perpendicular-anisotropy MTJs (PMTJs). These samples were exposed to both gamma radiation and a mix of gamma and thermal neutron, using the TRIGA reactor. The studies were on TMR, the electrical transport measurements taken on the MTJ nanopillars, both before and after the irradiation. Our results match the previous study\cite{Jander2012}, in which no explicit changes on TMR curves of MTJs after the gamma and neutron irradiation. We also investigated the radiation effect on current switching TMR loop of PMTJs that no one reported before. To be confirmed robustness of MTJs statistically, more than 150 devices were investigated in this study.Non-local lateral devices have been extensively employed for studies of spin-dependent transport in a wide range of non-magnetic (NM) metals and semiconductors. In these devices, pure spin currents in non-magnetic channel materials can be generated and their propagation and decay can be electrically detected. We have successfully observed a non-local spin valve signal in a topological insulator (TI) channel material Sb$_2$Te$_3$. The characteristic property of TI, spin-momentum locking (SML), was identified. The spins of the TI Dirac surface state lies in-plane, and is locked at right angles to the electrons' momentum

Orderly arranged NLO materials on exfoliated layeredtemplates based on dendrons with alternating moietiesat the periphery†

Nonlinear optical dendrons with alternating terminal groups of the stearyl group (C18) and chromophorewere prepared through a convergent approach. These chromophore-containing dendrons were used asthe intercalating agents for montmorillonite via an ion-exchange process. An orderly exfoliatedmorphology is obtained by mixing the dendritic structure intercalated layered silicates with a polyimide.As a result, optical nonlinearity, i.e. the Pockels effect was observed for these nanocomposites withoutresorting to the poling process. EO coefficients of 9–22 pm V 1 were achieved despite that relativelylow NLO densities were present in the nanocomposites, particularly for the samples comprising thedendrons with alternating moieties. In addition, the hedging effects of the stearyl group on the selfalignmentbehavior, electro-optical (EO) coefficient and temporal stability of the dendron-intercalatedmontmorillonite/polyimide nanocomposites were also investigated