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OF all modern engineering constructions, it is difficult to imagine a unit the components of which are more liable to general wear than the present‐day internal combustion and compression ignition engines. The performances demanded of aero‐engines in particular, have instigated the enormous amount of research and investigation that has been made on the problem of reducing metallic wear under various conditions of temperature, load, atmosphere, etc. The importance of this problem is manifest when one reflects that the great majority of the components of the aero‐engine (with the exception of details, nuts, bolts, pins, etc.) are subject to continual wear in one form or another. In other words, the serviceable life of any engine is largely a function of the degree to which particular forms of wear have been minimized. While the question of adequate lubrication is undoubtedly of vital importance in reducing friction, the primary causes of wear are dependent upon the properties and surface conditions of the materials at their respective working temperatures. For the majority of components, the selection of material must necessarily be mainly decided by such considerations as yield point, compression strength, fatigue range, specific tenacity, maximum stress, resistance to scaling, thermal expansion, etc., and the question of wear is reckoned rather as a problem for which the metallurgist will find a treatment which can be suitably applied to the material. Thus we have seen evolved the many processes for surface‐hardening, and numerous anti‐friction materials, etc. It is interesting to review the present position of the practical applications of the science of reducing metallic friction, and to note tendencies of future developments.

Microcontact printing is a process used to print high‐resolution protein arrays for biosensors. The paper aims to investigate using these techniques to print electrically conductive fine line structures for electroluminescent (E/L) light sources.

The viability of using microcontact printing as a process for electronics fabrication is investigated. Polydimethylsiloxane stamps inked with alkanethiol compounds form self‐assembled monolayers on substrate surfaces, acting as the resist to subsequent etching processes. The printed lines are characterized with regard to their performance as high‐electric field generators in electroluminescent displays.

It has been demonstrated that microcontact printing is a cheap, repeatable process for fabricating electronic devices. The results demonstrate the viability of the process to fabricate electric field generator structures for E/L light sources with reduced driving voltages.

The paper demonstrates that microcontact printing can produce electrically conductive fine‐line structures with high resolution, confirming its viability in printed electronics manufacture.

In a mechanism for synchronizing multiple prime movers, a liquid pump, a plurality of hydraulic motors in series therewith, there being a hydraulic motor for each prime mover, differential means associated with each of said prime movers and operable by the difference in relative speeds of said prime movers and said hydraulic motors, and mechanical connecting means positively connecting a speed control member of each of said prime movers with the respective differential means for governing the speed of each of said prime movers.

This study aims to examine the relationship between the individual auditor’s industry specialization and the audit report lag (hereafter ARD). Further, it explores whether changing in the audit reporting requirement (i.e. the adoption of ISA701) influences the auditor’s industry specialization effect on the ARD.

A large data set of companies listed on the NASDAQ OMX Stockholm over the period 2010–2019 has been analyzed. Least squares regressions have been estimated to provide empirical evidence for the researched hypotheses.

The research findings indicate that the ARD is shorter for client firms audited by an industry specialist audit partner. Testing for the moderating role of changing in the auditing reporting regulation on the relation between the audit partner’s industry specialization and the ARD, the authors reveal that all client firms (except client firms with industry specialist audit partners) experienced an increase in the ARD. Overall, the baseline regression findings are found to be robust to the endogenous auditor choice and multiple measures of both the ARD and the auditor’s industry specialization.

This paper provides novel evidence on the relationship between the audit reporting lag and industry specialization from the individual auditor perspective, an issue that has hitherto been unexplored. The regression results further contribute to the upsurge debate about the consequences of changing in the audit reporting model by providing consistent support for the importance of industry specialization of the audit partner in minimizing costs derived from the former requirement.

This study explores the relationship between leverage and earnings management in the context of Palestinian-listed companies, while also investigating whether audit industry specialization influences this relationship.

The data used in this study are extracted from public financial reports of 39 firms listed on Palestine Stock Exchange (PEX), spread across the service, insurance, industry and investment sectors, for the time period 2011–2022. A model is developed to test 4 hypotheses about the relationships between long-term and short-term debts, and earnings management, and then to examine the influence of audit industry specialization on these relationships.

The results depict a significant, negative relationship between long-term debt and earnings management. Whereas the association between short-term debt and earnings management is insignificant. Audit industry specialization is proven to have no influence on the relationships between the independent and the dependent variables. Results are robust for firms that changed their accounting policies and using different audit industry specialization proxies.

The association between leverage and earnings management is a significant research topic, given that previous research identifies credit ratings and debt covenant violations as key factors which motivate earnings management. This paper fills a substantial research gap by examining the relationship between the two variables in the context of Palestinian-listed firms, while emphasizing the distinction between long-term and short-term debts. It also highlights key relationships that have been neglected in this particular context, which adds to the body of literature. Furthermore, the research's findings provide a solid information base that is of great interest to accounting and auditing experts and that may be seriously evaluated to support and advance the PEX sector.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the feasibility of the manufacture of printed rechargeable power sources incorporating, in the first instance, electrode structures from the previous study, and moving on to improved electrode structures fabricated, via flexographic printing, using commercially available inks. It has been shown previously that offset lithography, a common printing technique, can be used to make electrodes for energy storage devices such as primary cells.

A pair of the original Ag/C electrodes, printed via offset lithography, were sandwiched together with a PVA-KOH gel electrolyte and then sealed. The resultant structures were characterised using electrochemical techniques and the performance as supercapacitors assessed. Following these studies, electrode structures of the same dimensions, consisting of two layers, a silver-based current collector covered with a high surface area carbon layer, were printed flexographically, using inks, on a melinex substrate. The characterisation and assessment of these structures, as supercapacitors, was determined.

It was found that the supercapacitors constructed using the offset lithographic electrodes exhibited a capacitance of 0.72 mF/cm2 and had an equivalent series resistance of 3.96 Ω. The structures fabricated via flexography exhibited a capacitance of 4 mF/cm2 and had an equivalent series resistance of 1.25 Ω The supercapacitor structures were subjected to bending and rolling tests to determine device performance under deformation and stress. It was found that supercapacitor performance was not significantly reduced by bending or rolling.

This paper provides insight into the use of printed silver/carbon electrodes within supercapacitor structures and compares the performance of devices fabricated using inks for offset lithographic printing presses and those made using commercially available inks for flexographic printing. The potential viability of such structures for low-end and cheap energy storage devices is demonstrated.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between service integration and manufacturing firms’ profitability and to identify profitable services.

The study examines the service integration data of 202 firms in the machinery and equipment sector in Korea. Firm profitability comes from secondary data to eliminate common method bias.

The relationship between service integration, measured as the service-revenue ratio, and profitability has an inverted U-shape, likely stemming from political costs, a loss of opportunity in manufacturing improvements arising from resource constraints, and an increase in transaction costs. In addition, process operation outsourcing and technical consulting significantly contribute to profitability.

The authors show that the effect of service integration on profitability diminishes when firms experience both resource constraints and an increase in transaction costs from implementing the strategy. Furthermore, the profitability of services is heterogeneous across different offerings. Further research in other countries and sectors is necessary to refine the relationships suggested herein.

Managers should strive to minimize the costs and problems stemming from resource constraints and transaction costs. It is also important to utilize external resources to achieve profitability from service integration. Managers also need to realize the different cost-revenue structure of each service.

The authors find that the relationship between profitability and service integration depends on the degree of resource constraints and transaction costs. The authors also identify which service offerings are highly profitable, which has not been done in previous research.

Purpose – This paper extends research on social movement media by focusing on the use of a literary genre – realist fiction – namely, the labor problem novel in the context of the labor movement and countermovement in late 19th-century America.

Methodology – I do a close reading of a significant early dialogical cluster of such novels to address three key questions: (1) Field position of authors – What was the position of these labor problem authors in relation to the movement field and literary field and how did that positioning matter? (2) Genre selection – What was it about the realist novel that attracted labor problem partisans to it? (3) Internal content – How did authors shape the internal structure and content of their stories?

Findings – As literary activists, authors pivoted between the movement field and literary field selecting the novel for the special powers that it possessed relative to other historically available media. Authors produced stories with a good/evil binary attached to characters that stood for emerging social categories in young industrial America. During the Gilded Age (and beyond) the novel played an important role as medium for the labor movement and its opposition – characterizing collective actors, dramatizing forms of action, providing materials for claims of injustice or threats, solutions to social problems, and new categories and collective identities – all with powerful emotional appeal and entertainment value.

Implications – This study suggests that social movement scholars might expand their purview of cultural media used by movements and also take genre and its selection by activists seriously.

Originality – This study demonstrates how literature – realist fiction – has been shaped by movement agents and played an important, but under-appreciated, role in the struggle over cultural supremacy in the context of movement–countermovement dynamics.

This chapter provides a genealogy of the Gladue–Ipeelee principle of special consideration of Indigenous circumstances at sentencing. The principle is codified in the 1996 statutory requirement that “all available sanctions other than imprisonment … should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” (s. 718.2e of the Criminal Code of Canada). Using the Foucaultian genealogy method to produce a “history of the present,” this chapter eschews normative questions of how s. 718.2e has “failed” to reduce Indigenous over-incarceration to instead focus on how practices of “special consideration” reproduce settler-state paternalism. This chapter addresses three key components of the Gladue–Ipeelee principle: the collection of circumstances information, the characterization of those circumstances, and finally their consideration at sentencing. Part one focuses on questions of legitimacy and authority and explicates how authority and responsibility to produce Indigenous circumstances knowledge was transferred from the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) to Indigenous Courtworker organizations in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Part two identifies how authority shapes problematization by examining the characterization of Indigenous circumstances in the two eras, finding that present-day Gladue reports articulate an Indigenous history and critique of colonialism as the root cause of Indigenous criminalization, whereas DIA reports prior to 1970 generally characterized this criminalization as a “failure to assimilate.” Part three focuses on the structural reproduction of power relations by exploring historical continuities in judicial and executive-branch consideration of Indigenous circumstances, suggesting that the Gladue–Ipeelee principle reinscribes a colonial “mercy” framework of diminished responsibility. The author discusses how the principle operates in the shadow of Indigenous over-incarceration as a form of state “recognition” and a technique of governance to encourage Indigenous participation in the settler justice system and suggests that the Gladue–Ipeelee principle produces a governing effect that reinforces settler-state authority by recirculating colonial practices and discourses of settler superiority.