Developing an Intranet-based Knowledge Management Framework in a Consulting Firm: A Conceptual Model and its Implementation

Management consulting firms are considered typical examples of highly knowledge-intensive companies since they depend heavily on the expertise of their people and the nature of their assignments is knowledge-based. Hence, consulting firms have been in the forefront of thinking about how to manage knowledge However, one of the major knowledge management challenges in any organization is to develop a conceptual model to represent organizational knowledge and to use information technology for its effective implementation that would enhance right information access at right time. This paper reports our experiences in designing and developing a knowledge management framework in Management Consulting Services (MCS) of PricewaterhouseCoopers Ltd. in India (PwC India). This framework is based on a conceptual model where various knowledge sources at the content level interact to realize an integrated knowledge structure. Information technology is used here to realize an Intra-net-based framework that captures organizational structure and procedures and establishes semantic linkages among all the documents. Moreover, the framework supports sharing of informal or tacit knowledge that flows in the organization

A Massively Parallel Implementation of a Numerical Weather Forecast Model

this paper there is hope that the computer power offered by parallel systems can be utilized efficiently for these kinds of applications. Furthermore, this investigation shows that the applied programming model, data-parallelism without explicit message passing, can lead to acceptable efficient code for this application area. This is mainly due to the fact that we deal here with regular computations. For irregular cases, like sparse computations, present day compilers are frequently not smart enough to produce efficient code. The role of the underlying hardware with respect to data-parallelism without explicit message passing is not clear yet. The MasPar implementation is currently ported to the CM5 of Thinking Machines Corporation. Also the T3D of Cray will be investigated. It is expected that the current version can be easily ported to these systems. How efficient the resulting implementations will be is still an open question. Finally, it is interesting that the idea (see section 1) proposed by Richardson far before the invention of what we call computers now, can be realized. Fortunately we do not need thousands of humans to implement it, some sophisticated hardware with accompanying software will do the job. Reference

A wave roughness Reynolds number parameterization of the sea spray source flux

Parameterizations of the sea spray aerosol source flux are derived as functions of wave roughness Reynolds numbers, R and R, for particles with radii between 0.176 and 6.61μm at 80% relative humidity. These source functions account for up to twice the variance in the observations than does wind speed alone. This is the first such direct demonstration of the impact of wave state on the variability of sea spray aerosol production. Global European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts operational mode fields are used to drive the parameterizations. The source flux from the R parameterizations varies from approximately 0.1 to 3 (R) and 5 (R) times that from a wind speed parameterization, derived from the same measurements, where the wave state is substantially underdeveloped or overdeveloped, respectively, compared to the equilibrium wave state at the local wind speed. Key Points: Sea spray aerosol source function is derived in terms of a wave Reynolds number The Reynolds number explains more flux variability than wind speed alone Wave state modifies the wind-driven flux by a factor between 0.1 and 3