Companies routinely overestimate the attractiveness of foreign markets. Dazzled by the sheer size of untapped markets, they lose sight of the difficulties of pioneering new, often very different territories. The problem is rooted in the analytic tools (the most prominent being country portfolio analysis, or CPA) that managers use to judge international investments. By focusing on national wealth, consumer income, and people's propensity to consume, CPA emphasizes potential sales, ignoring the costs and risks of doing business in a new market. Most of these costs and risks result from the barriers created by distance. "Distance," however, does not refer only to geography; its other dimensions can make foreign markets considerably more or less attractive. The CAGE framework of distance presented here considers four attributes: cultural distance (religious beliefs, race, social norms, and language that are different for the target country and the country of the company considering expansion); administrative or political distance (colony-colonizer links, common currency, and trade arrangements); geographic distance (the physical distance between the two countries, the size of the target country, access to waterways and the ocean, internal topography, and transportation and communications infrastructures); and economic distance (disparities in the two countries' wealth or consumer income and variations in the cost and quality of financial and other resources). This framework can help to identify the ways in which potential markets may be distant from existing ones. The article explores how (and by how much) various types of distance can affect different types of industries and shows how dramatically an explicit consideration of distance can change a company's picture of its strategic options.
In this unprecedented and brilliant study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of anti-porn/anti-censorship position-taking to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does - as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. Working against tendencies to oversimplify hard core - either as pure abusive power or pure liberatory pleasure - Williams sees the form as inherently contradictory. Hard core claims to speak confessional and involuntary 'truths' of sex. However, analysis of its forms (including its spectacular 'money shots' and sexual 'numbers' parallel to those in musicals) reveals that sex in the sense of a natural, visible 'doing what comes naturally' is in fact the supreme and deeply contradictory fiction of the genre. Gender, the social construction of the relation between the sexes, is what determines this fiction. For most of its history, pornography has been for men and about women. Yet in hard core's attempt to solve the riddles of sex with more, different, or better sex, the monolith of masculine pleasure breaks down and the possibility of women using pornography for their own purposes begins to emerge. To this end, Williams traces the roots of contemporary hard core's quest to see the 'truth' of sex back to the origins of cinema itself - in motion studies of women's bodily movements. She then follows the generic development of hard core through its silent, primitive stag form and into feature-length narratives like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, up to its recent sadomasochistic and 'couples market' permutations - showing how the form has begun to respond and react to changing gender relations. Neither a defense of what pornography has been nor a utopian dream of what it should be, this daring book refuses simply to scapegoat the form as the cause of all our ills. Instead, Williams utilizes the insights of recent studies of mass culture to show that hard core is a discourse, a genre, and a rhetoric that can only be understood through comparison with, rather than separation from, other forms.
In order to confirm the existence of a first-order melting transition for a classical many-body system of hard spheres and to discover the densities of the coexisting phases, we have made a Monte Carlo determination of the pressure and absolute entropy of the hard-sphere solid. We use these solid-phase thermodynamic properties, coupled with known fluid-phase data, to show that the hard-sphere solid, at a density of 0.74 relative to close packing, and the hard-sphere fluid, at a density of 0.67 relative to close packing, satisfy the thermodynamic equilibrium conditions of equal pressure and chemical potential at constant temperature. To get the solid-phase entropy, we integrated the Monte Carlo pressure–volume equation of state for a “single-occupancy” system in which the center of each hard sphere was constrained to occupy its own private cell. Such a system is no different from the ordinary solid at high density, but at low density its entropy and pressure are both lower. The difference in entropy between an unconstrained system of particles and a constrained one, with one particle per cell, is the so-called “communal entropy,” the determination of which has been a fundamental problem in the theory of liquids. Our Monte Carlo measurements show that communal entropy is nearly a linear function of density.
A free-energy density functional for a system of hard spheres is derived on a semiempirical basis. It is constructed to reproduce the thermodynamics and direct correlation function of a homogeneous fluid and then is tested in two highly inhomogeneous situations: the hard-wall--hard-sphere interface and the hard-sphere solid. The results are very good in both cases, showing that this density-functional model may be used with advantage in the study of the hard-sphere model by itself, or used as a reference system in a perturbative analysis.
We prove that multilinear (tensor) analogues of many efficiently computable problems in numerical linear algebra are NP-hard. Our list includes: determining the feasibility of a system of bilinear equations, deciding whether a 3-tensor possesses a given eigenvalue, singular value, or spectral norm; approximating an eigenvalue, eigenvector, singular vector, or the spectral norm; and determining the rank or best rank-1 approximation of a 3-tensor. Furthermore, we show that restricting these problems to symmetric tensors does not alleviate their NP-hardness. We also explain how deciding nonnegative definiteness of a symmetric 4-tensor is NP-hard and how computing the combinatorial hyperdeterminant is NP-, #P-, and VNP-hard.
An equation of state is proposed for the mixture of hard spheres based on an averaging process over the two results of the solution of the Percus–Yevick integral equation for the mixture of hard spheres. Compressibility and other equilibrium properties of the binary mixtures of hard spheres are calculated and they are compared with the related machine-calculated (Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics) data. The comparison shows excellent agreement between the proposed equation of state and the machine-calculated data.
Abstract Recently, lithium‐ion batteries have been attracting more interest for use in automotive applications. Lithium resources are confirmed to be unevenly distributed in South America, and the cost of the lithium raw materials has roughly doubled from the first practical application in 1991 to the present and is increasing due to global demand for lithium‐ion accumulators. Since the electrochemical equivalent and standard potential of sodium are the most advantageous after lithium, sodium based energy storage is of great interest to realize lithium‐free high energy and high voltage batteries. However, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no successful reports on electrochemical sodium insertion materials for battery applications; the major challenge is the negative electrode and its passivation. In this study, we achieve high capacity and excellent reversibility sodium‐insertion performance of hard‐carbon and layered NaNi 0.5 Mn 0.5 O 2 electrodes in propylene carbonate electrolyte solutions. The structural change and passivation for hard‐carbon are investigated to study the reversible sodium insertion. The 3‐volt secondary Na‐ion battery possessing environmental and cost friendliness, Na + ‐shuttlecock hard‐carbon/NaNi 0.5 Mn 0.5 O 2 cell, demonstrates steady cycling performance as next generation secondary batteries and an alternative to Li‐ion batteries.
We investigate the cosmological evolution of the hard X-ray luminosity function (HXLF) of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the 2-10 keV luminosity range of 10 41.5 -10 46.5 ergs s 1 as a function of redshift up to 3. From a combination of surveys conducted at photon energies above 2 keV with HEAO 1, ASCA, and Chandra, we construct a highly complete (>96%) sample consisting of 247 AGNs over the wide flux range of 10 10 to 3:8 10 15 ergs cm 2 s 1 (2-10 keV).For our purpose, we develop an extensive method of calculating the intrinsic (before absorption) HXLF and the absorption (N H ) function.This utilizes the maximum likelihood method, fully correcting for observational biases with consideration of the X-ray spectrum of each source.We find that (1) the fraction of X-ray absorbed AGNs decreases with the intrinsic luminosity and (2) the evolution of the HXLF of all AGNs (including both type I and type II AGNs) is best described with a luminositydependent density evolution (LDDE) where the cutoff redshift increases with the luminosity.Our results directly constrain the evolution of AGNs that produce a major part of the hard X-ray background, thus solving its origin quantitatively.A combination of the HXLF and the N H function enables us to construct a purely '' observation-based '' population synthesis model.We present basic consequences of this model and discuss the contribution of Compton-thick AGNs to the rest of the hard X-ray background.
Approximation algorithms have developed in response to the impossibility of solving a great variety of important optimization problems. Too frequently, when attempting to get a solution for a problem, one is confronted with the fact that the problem is NP-hard. This, in the words of Garey and Johnson, means "I can't find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all of these famous people." While this is a significant theoretical step, it hardly qualifies as a cheering piece of news.If the optimal solution is unattainable then it is reasonable to sacrifice optimality and settle for a "good" feasible solution that can be computed efficiently. Of course, we would like to sacrifice as little optimality as possible, while gaining as much as possible in efficiency. Trading-off optimality in favor of tractability is the paradigm of approximation algorithms.The main themes of this book revolve around the design of such algorithms and the "closeness" to optimum that is achievable in polynomial time. To evaluate the limits of approximability, it is important to derive lower bounds or inapproximability results. In some cases, approximation algorithms must satisfy additional structural requirements such as being on-line, or working within limited space. This book reviews the design techniques for such algorithms and the developments in this area since its inception about three decades ago.
ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVArticleNEXTHard and Soft Acids and BasesRalph G. PearsonCite this: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1963, 85, 22, 3533–3539Publication Date (Print):November 1, 1963Publication History Published online1 May 2002Published inissue 1 November 1963https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja00905a001https://doi.org/10.1021/ja00905a001research-articleACS PublicationsRequest reuse permissionsArticle Views28682Altmetric-Citations7890LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail Other access optionsGet e-Alertsclose Get e-Alerts
A free-energy density functional for the inhomogeneous hard-sphere fluid mixture is derived from general basic considerations and yields explicit analytic expressions for the high-order direct correlation functions of the uniform fluid. It provides the first unified derivation of the most comprehensive available analytic description of the hard-sphere thermodynamics and pair structure as given by the scaled-particle and Percus-Yevick theories. The infinite-order expansion around a uniform reference state does not lead, however, to a stable solid, thus questioning the convergence of the density-functional theory of freezing.
The hard / soft acids / bases principle has been justifiably criticized because of the lack of a precise definition of hardness and the inability to quantify this property; recent developments have overcome these objections, however.
This paper starts with one of Chalmers' basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no 'theoretical fix' or 'extra ingredient' in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenol- ogy. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. This paper responds to the issues raised by D.J. Chalmers (1995) by offering a research direction which is quite radical in the way in which some basic methodological principles are linked to the scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I am using here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thus placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of phenomenology. 1 My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special Issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools ena- bling them to develop a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I open my proposal by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness in the light of Chalmers' hard problem. Next, I outline the (neuro)pheno- menological strategy. I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and conse- quences of this strategy.
We introduce a greedy local search procedure called GSAT for solving propositional satisfiability problems. Our experiments show that this procedure can be used to solve hard, randomly generated problems that are an order of magnitude larger than those that can be handled by more traditional approaches such as the Davis-Putnam procedure or resolution. We also show that GSAT can solve structured satisfiability problems quickly. In particular, we solve encodings of graph coloring problems, N-queens, and Boolean induction. General application strategies and limitations of the approach are also discussed. GSAT is best viewed as a model-finding procedure. Its good performance suggests that it may be advantageous to reformulate reasoning tasks that have traditionally been viewed as theorem-proving problems as model-finding tasks. Introduction The property of NP-hardness is traditionally taken to be the barrier separating tasks that can be solved computationally with realistic resources fro...
Multicomponent refractory material systems can provide opportunities for specific materials for wear resistant coatings. The multitude of potential hard coating materials can be subdivided into three groups according to variations in chemical bonding character of the compounds. Many fundamental relations between the position of coating material components in the Periodic Table of the elements and the properties can be used to optimize these material selections. However, restrictions exist because of increasing hardness and strength which primarily decrease toughness and adherence. Multicomponent boride, carbide, nitride, and oxide systems are discussed in view of their potential as coating materials. Additional options for materials selection and optimization arise from the possibility of adjusting specific microstructures in the layers, especially in multilayer and multiphase coatings.
It is well known that for many NP-complete problems, such as K-Sat, etc., typical cases are easy to solve; so that computationally hard cases must be rare (assuming P = NP). This paper shows that NP-complete problems can be summarized by at least one "order parameter", and that the hard problems occur at a critical value of such a parameter. This critical value separates two regions of characteristically different properties. For example, for K-colorability, the critical value separates overconstrained from underconstrained random graphs, and it marks the value at which the probability of a solution changes abruptly from near 0 to near 1. It is the high density of well-separated almost solutions (local minima) at this boundary that cause search algorithms to "thrash". This boundary is a type of phase transition and we show that it is preserved under mappings between problems. We show that for some P problems either there is no phase transition or it occurs for bounded N (and so bounds the cost). These results suggest a way of deciding if a problem is in P or NP and why they are different.
We consider high-energy fixed-angle scattering of glueballs in confining gauge theories that have supergravity duals. Although the effective description is in terms of the scattering of strings, we find that the amplitudes are hard (power law). This is a consequence of the warped geometry of the dual theory, which has the effect that in an inertial frame the string process is never in the soft regime. At small angle we find hard and Regge behaviors in different kinematic regions.
Information, which can arrive in multiple forms, is a fundamental component of all financial transactions and markets. We define hard and soft information and describe the relative advantages of each. Hard information is quantitative, is easy to store, and can be transmitted in impersonal ways. Its information content is independent of its collection. As technology changes, the way we collect, process, and communicate information, it changes the structure of markets, the design of financial intermediaries, and the incentives to use or misuse information. We survey the literature to understand how information type influences the continued evolution of financial markets and institutions. Received October 25, 2016; editorial decision September 6, 2018 by Editor Efraim Benmelech.
ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVArticleNEXTHard and soft acids and bases, HSAB, part 1: Fundamental principlesRalph G. Pearson Cite this: J. Chem. Educ. 1968, 45, 9, 581Publication Date (Print):September 1, 1968Publication History Received3 August 2009Published online1 September 1968Published inissue 1 September 1968https://doi.org/10.1021/ed045p581RIGHTS & PERMISSIONSArticle Views13152Altmetric-Citations1830LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (5 MB) Get e-Alerts Get e-Alerts
An examination is presented of some recent reports dealing with the extremely high critical fields in certain hard superconductors. Observations of nuclear magnetic resonance in V/sub 3/Si and V/sub 3/Ga are shown to set a severe upper limit on the attainable critical field because of a reduction in the spin susceptibility of these materials in the superconducting state. Equations are derived for the maximum critical field using this limiting criterion. A table of maximum and estimated critical fields is presented for V/sub 2.95/ Ga, Nb/sub 3/ Sn, V/sub 3/Si, and V/sub 1.95/ Ga. It is concluded that the critical fields for these BETA -wolfran compounds are so high that they may be effectively limited at low temperatures by the normal-state paramagnetism. If this is the case, critical fields higher than about 300 kilogauss will not be realized unless materials can be discovered with high transition temperatures. (H.D.R.)