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Moulded substrates offer a wide spectrum of performance at economical prices, featuring enhanced electrical, physical and environmental properties. By expanding interconnection into a third dimension by providing connectivity between or along non‐planar surfaces or planes, moulded boards allow designers the freedom to be highly creative in devising circuitry comprising complex shapes or forms of unique sculpture. Opportunities abound for achieving cost reductions, savings being achieved first through eliminating processing steps in PCB fabrication and secondly by simplifying or minimising sub‐assembly or final assembly labour or hardware costs. In addition, further savings can be achieved by incorporating attachment joining techniques like ultrasonic welding. Discussion covers the characteristics of moulded substrates, metallisation of unclad substrates using the additive process, and several applications of moulded circuitry and 3‐D assemblies, before a prediction of the future potential for this technology.

The properties and constituents of PTF inks are outlined. Surface resistivity in relation to PTF inks is defined. Applications of PTF inks are discussed with emphasis on potential design and cost benefits for SMT applications, including crossovers, polymer multilayer, printing through holes, printed resistors, carbon key pads, moulded and three‐dimensional circuits.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the history of pharmacist involvement as vaccine providers in the USA and discuss examples of growing interests in other parts of the world.

Literature searches were performed in PubMed as well as pharmacy-related journals.

Pharmacists have been involved with the storage and management of vaccines for more than a century. Based on the unmet needs in meeting national goals for vaccination rates among adults in the USA, efforts led to training and recognizing pharmacists as vaccine providers which is now within the scope of practice for a pharmacist in all US states and territories. Pharmacists complete a comprehensive training program in vaccine sciences, regulatory considerations, as well as demonstration of skills in administering vaccines. Over 300,000 pharmacists have been trained in vaccine delivery and this represents the majority of the pharmacist workforce in the USA. There are examples of the beneficial impact of pharmacist involvement as vaccine providers in community pharmacy settings.

This review is based on a thorough review of the literature but was not conducted in a systematic fashion.

This review provides a historical perspective and evidence of the benefit of pharmacists as vaccine providers.

In this paper, the authors introduce supply disruption ambiguity as the inability of a sourcing firm to attach probability point estimates to the occurrence of and to the magnitude of loss from supply disruptions. The authors drew on the “ambiguity in decision-making” literature to define this concept formally, connected it to relevant supply disruption information deficit, positioned it relative to supply chain risk assessment and hypothesized and tested its negative associations with both supply base ties and inventory turnover.

The authors analysed survey data from 171 North American manufacturers and archival data for a subset (88 publicly listed) of these manufacturers via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation after ensuring that methodological concerns with survey research have been addressed. They used appropriate controls and employed the heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable (HBIV) approach to ensure that inferences from our results are not unduly influenced by endogeneity.

Strong supply base ties decrease supply disruption ambiguity, which, in turn, increases inventory turnover. Moreover, strong supply base ties and data integration with the supply base have indirect and positive effects on inventory turnover. As sourcing firms strengthen ties and integrate data exchange with their supply base, their inventory turnover improves from access to information relevant to detect and diagnose supply disruptions effectively.

Research on supply disruption management has paid more attention to the “disruption recovery” stage than to the “disruption discovery” stage. In this paper, the authors add novel insights regarding the recognition and diagnosis aspects of the “disruption discovery” stage. These novel insights reveal how and why sourcing firms reduce their overall ambiguity associated with detecting and assessing losses from supply disruptions through establishing strong ties with their supply base and how and why reducing such ambiguity improves inventory turnover performance.

The well-known discrete methods of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), cellular automata (CA), volume-of-fluid (VoF) and others rely on several parameters describing the boundary or the surface. Some of them are vector normal to the surface, coordinates of the point on the surface and the curvature. They are necessary for the reconstruction of the real surface (boundary) based on the values of the volume fractions of several cells. However, the simple methods commonly used for calculations of the vector normal to the surface are of unsatisfactory accuracy. In light of this, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a more accurate method for determining the vector normal to the surface.

Based on the thesis that information about the volume fractions of the 3 × 3 cell block should be enough for normal vector determination, a neural network (NN) was proposed for use in the paper. The normal vector and the volume fractions of the cells themselves can be defined on the basis of such variables as the location of the center and the radius of the circumference. Therefore, the NN is proposed to solve the inverse problem – to determine the normal vector based on known values of volume fractions. Volume fractions are inputs of NNs, while the normal vector is their output. Over a thousand variants of the surface location, orientations of the normal vector and curvatures were prepared for volume fraction calculations; their results were used for training, validating and testing the NNs.

The simplest NN with one neuron in the hidden layer shows better results than other commonly used methods, and an NN with four neurons produces results with errors below 1° relative to the orientation of the normal vector; for several cases, it proven to be more accurate by an order of magnitude.

The method can be used in the CFD, LBM, CA, VoF and other discrete computational methods. The more precise normal vector allows for a more accurate determination of the points on the surface and curvature in further calculations via the surface or interface tracking method. The paper contains the data for the practical application of developed NNs. The method is limited to regular square or cuboid lattices.

The paper presents an original implementation of NNs for normal vector calculation connected with CFD, LBM and other application for fluid flow with free surface or phase transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a UK-based assessment of oral history technology and to identify the most important features that should be available in any oral history search system.

A co-design approach involving interviews and focus groups was adopted. The framework approach with elements of grounded theory was used to analyse transcripts to identify themes.

The analysis found that “ethics, consent and control”, “accessibility and engagement”, “publicity and awareness”, and “innovative technologies” were the four major themes identified. It was also established that there is limited understanding of oral history in the digital age, numerous interests, ethical concerns, lack of publicity and several key attributes that those designing an oral history search system or archive should strive for. The findings also identified that further exploration into sampling selected technologies on different user groups is required in order to develop software that would benefit the field.

Participants were all recruited from one geographic region. The qualitative methodology utilised could be deemed to have elements of subjectivity.

This study has identified important features of any oral history search system and offered design recommendations for any developer of an oral history search systems.

This research has validated some previous findings for oral history search systems from more limited user studies. New issues for consideration including usability, software development and marketing have also been identified.

In the real world, the variance of portfolio returns provides only a limited quantification of incurred risks, as the distributions of returns have “fat tails” and the dependence between assets are only imperfectly accounted for by the correlation matrix. Value‐at‐risk and other measures of risks have been developed to account for the larger moves allowed by non‐Gaussian distributions. In this article, the authors distinguish “small” risks from “large” risks, in order to suggest an alternative approach to portfolio optimization that simultaneously increases portfolio returns while minimizing the risk of low frequency, high severity events. This approach treats the variance or second‐order cumulant as a measure of “small” risks. In contrast, higher even‐order cumulants, starting with the fourth‐order cumulant, quantify the “large” risks. The authors employ these estimates of portfolio cumulants based on fat‐tailed distributions to rebalance portfolio exposures to mitigate large risks.

The effect of ambiguity is investigated with regard to the success of a venture on the initial choice of interpersonal conflict management strategy of the venture's initiator. In the experiments reported here, subjects were asked to imagine a hypothetical situation in which the decision‐maker, in a capacity as an organization member, seeks the use of an organizational resource in order to initiate the venture. The conflict arises as another member of the organization also lays claim to the same resource. Subjects, taking on the role of the decision‐maker, show more collaboration in managing the conflict when experts disagree about the probability of successful outcome of the venture. Similar inclinations are revealed when the possible long‐term adverse consequences of the conflict are made explicit. These findings support the interpretation of ambiguity effect in terms of increased loss aversion due to personal responsibility.

The paper targets on providing new experimental data for validation of the well-established mathematical models within the framework of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), which are applied to problems of casting processes in complex mould cavities.

An experimental campaign aiming at the free-surface flow within a system of narrow channels is designed and executed under well-controlled laboratory conditions. An in-house lattice Boltzmann solver is implemented. Its algorithm is described in detail and its performance is tested thoroughly using both the newly recorded experimental data and well-known analytical benchmark tests.

The benchmark tests prove the ability of the implemented algorithm to provide a reliable solution when the surface tension effects become dominant. The convergence of the implemented method is assessed. The two new experimentally studied problems are resolved well by simulations using a coarse computational grid.

A detailed set of original experimental data for validation of computational schemes for simulations of free-surface gravity-driven flow within a system of narrow channels is presented.