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Invoices, bills of lading, purchase orders, and the tons of costly paper transactions written by businesses each year may become relics of the past as industries implement Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI, forecast to grow 73% annually over the next five years, could erode the stacks of paper files and bring many companies into the twenty‐first century with instant, direct transfer of business documents. A direct result of this growth, according to a new 199‐page report by Frost & Sullivan on The Electronic Data Interchange Market in the US. (♯A 1911) is the development of document format standards that enable computer‐to‐computer transmission of business forms to multiple industries.

Australis abandons connect time As of 1 July, Australis users will no longer pay connect time charges. Instead they will pay a flat fee of A$450 per year for unlimited use of all the Australis databases. The move echoes the steps ESA‐IRS took away from connect time early last year, but is even more dramatic.

The costs of alternative methods of storing data have changed significantly as electronic systems have evolved. Moreover, we expect the average level of costs to continue falling over the next decade as technical change continues. Electronic systems are becoming closer substitutes for traditional ways of storing information in libraries. This issue's column examines the storage capacity of a wide array of representative storage devices in terms of the number of billions of characters or bytes of information—that is, gigabytes of storage—and each system's costs. The cost per gigabyte (GB) of storage varies by several orders of magnitude in ways that have important implications for the evolution of libraries over the next decade.

Digital repositories are still in nascent stages of development in academic institutions especially in developing countries like India. To identify the intellectual capital, facilitate knowledge sharing and management among the faculty and research staff at management institutions, the creation of digital institutional repositories is becoming a necessity. Management institutes in a developing country like India have constraints on infrastructure, manpower and funding. Thus identifying the resource requirements to establish an institutional knowledge repository keeping in view these constraints is necessary. The paper aims to describe a simulation on an institutional knowledge repository (IKR) test bed at a Business School using a performance and load testing tool to determine the number of simultaneous users that the IKR on a minimal server configuration can support on the institute intranet.

An institutional knowledge repository (IKR) at ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad, is built on a system with a minimal configuration using open source DSpace Institutional repository software to capture the intellectual capital and enable knowledge sharing. A simulation on the IKR test bed at ICFAI Business School, using a performance and load testing tool, to determine the number of simultaneous users that the IKR on a minimal server configuration could support on the institute intranet, is described.

The simulation exercise helped determine that about ten‐15 simultaneous users could be supported on the institute intranet in the current minimal configuration that the IKR test bed was built on. The simulation exercise when repeated with a server with higher memory indicated support for 15‐20 simultaneous users. For institutions with less than 20 full time faculties and in the initial stages of IKR development this minimal system configuration was sufficient, though an IKR server with higher memory was recommended.

Keeping in mind IT infrastructure constraints like disk space, memory and network in an academic institute; a minimal server configuration was chosen as the IKR Server and made available on the institute intranet as a part of the IKR test‐bed for the simulation exercise.

An IKR helps in capturing the intellectual capital and enabling knowledge sharing in a business school. An IKR can be initiated even with a minimal configuration at management institutes in a developing country like India.

It is critical that business schools in India should identify the intellectual capital, facilitate knowledge sharing and management among the faculty and research staff, by initiating the creation of an institutional knowledge repository. A business school with a small number of faculties can initiate the process of setting up an institutional repository even with constraints of infrastructure, manpower and funding. The IKR is of value to the faculty and institution.

Magneto-quasi-static fields emanated by inductive charging systems can be potentially harmful to the human body. Recent projects, such as TALAKO and MILAS, use the technique of wireless power transfer (WPT) to charge batteries of electrically powered vehicles. To ensure the safety of passengers, the exposing magnetic flux density needs to be measured in situ and compared to reference limit values. However, in the design phase of these systems, numerical simulations of the emanated magnetic flux density are inevitable. This study aims to present a tool along with a workflow, based on the Scaled-Frequency Finite Difference Time-Domain and Co-Simulation Scalar Potential Finite Difference schemes, to determine body-internal magnetic flux densities, electric field strengths and induced voltages into cardiac pacemakers. The simulations should be time efficient, with lower computational costs and minimal human workload.

The numerical assessment of the human exposure to magneto-quasi-static fields is computationally expensive, especially when considering high-resolution discretization models of vehicles and WPT systems. Incorporating human body models into the simulation further enhances the number of mesh cells by multiple millions. Hence, the number of simulations including all components and human models needs to be limited while efficient numerical schemes need to be applied.

This work presents and compares four exposure scenarios using the presented numerical methods. By efficiently combining numerical methods, the simulation time can be reduced by a factor of 3.5 and the required storage space by almost a factor of 4.

This work presents and discusses an efficient way to determine the exposure of human beings in the vicinity of wireless power transfer systems that saves computer simulation resources and human workload.

An assumption made in many applications of stated preference modeling is that preferences remain stable over time and over multiple exposures to information about choice alternatives. However, there are many domains where this assumption can be challenged. One of these is where individuals learn about new products. This paper aims to test how attribute preferences as measured in an experimental choice task shift when respondents are exposed to new product information. The paper presents results from a study investigating consumer preferences for a new consumer electronics product conducted among 400 respondents from a large consumer panel. All respondents received several choice tasks and were then able to read additional information about the new product. After this they completed an additional set of choice tasks. All choices were from pairs of new product alternatives that varied across eight attributes designed according to an orthogonal plan. Using heteroscedastic logit modeling, the paper analyses the shifts in attribute utilities and scale variances that result from the exposure to product information. Results show that as respondents become better informed about a new attribute the attribute has a greater influence on their choices. In addition a significant shift in scale variance is observed, suggesting an increase in preference heterogeneity after information exposure.