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The foundation collection of the printed books now forming the Library of the British Museum was that of Sir Hans Sloane. This comprised about 40,000 volumes. To it was added in 1759 the Royal collection, begun in the time of Henry VII and inherited by George II from his predecessors on the throne.

This study aims to propose a novel viscoelastic–viscoplastic combined constitutive model for glassy amorphous polymers within the framework of thermodynamics at finite strain that is capable of capturing their rate-dependent inelastic mechanical behavior in wide ranges of deformation rate and amount.

The rheology model whose viscoelastic and viscoplastic elements are connected in series is set in accordance with the multi-mechanism theory. Then, the constitutive functions are formulated on the basis of the multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient implicated by the rheology model within the framework of thermodynamics. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and loading/unloading/no-load tests for polycarbonate (PC) are conducted to identify the material parameters and demonstrate the capability of the proposed model.

The performance was validated in comparison with the series of the test results with different rates and amounts of deformation before unloading together. It has been confirmed that the proposed model can accommodate various material behaviors empirically observed, such as rate-dependent elasticity, elastic hysteresis, strain softening, orientation hardening and strain recovery.

This paper presents a novel rheological constitutive model in which the viscoelastic element connected in series with the viscoplastic one exclusively represents the elastic behavior, and each material response is formulated according to the multiplicatively decomposed deformation gradients. In particular, the yield strength followed by the isotropic hardening reflects the relaxation characteristics in the viscoelastic constitutive functions so that the glass transition temperature could be variant within the wide range of deformation rate. Consequently, the model enables us to properly represent the loading process up to large deformation regime followed by unloading and no-load processes.

Discusses principles of equality and justice in order to justify affirmative action and clarify its need. Posits that in both the USA and South Africa, issues of segregation and discrimination are not new and both countries have had the opportunity to address their past policies by way of affirmative action programmes. Looks at what determined the denouncement of the affirmative action in the USA and why the answer to this question may have a great impact on South Africa’s attempt to improve its own affirmative action programmes. Concludes that, although 30 years of affirmative action was deemed unconstitutional, how can South Africa derive and make use of the knowledge gained to help in stopping reverse discrimination.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

THE purpose of this article is to present a mathematical treatment which has been found extremely useful in the design of spiral springs since it enables us to determine the physical dimensions of a spiral spring, and also its behaviour when subject to a straining action; i.e. the change of the radius of curvature at any point, change in the number of coils or in the spacing of coils. The following method concerns itself only with the spiral springs whose coils throughout the whole range of deflexion are free, i.e. do not touch one another, and also the springs which become completely solid at the maximum deflexion.

The marketing literature uses five different experience terms that are supposed to represent different streams of research. Many papers do not provide a definition, most of the used definitions are unclear, the different experience terms have similar dimensionality and are regularly used interchangeably or have the same meaning. In addition, the existing definitions are not adequately informed from other disciplines that have engaged with experience. This paper aims to build a comprehensive conceptual framework of experience in marketing informed by related disciplines aiming to provide a more holistic definition of the term.

This research follows previously established procedures by conducting a systematic literature review of experience. From the approximately 5,000 sources identified in three disciplines, 267 sources were selected, marketing (148), philosophy (90) and psychology (29). To address definitional issues the analysis focused on enlightening four premises.

This paper posits that the term brand experience can be used in all marketing-related experiences and proposes four premises that may resolve the vagaries associated with the term’s conceptualization. The four premises address the what, who, how and when of brand experience and aim to rectify conceptual issues. Brand experience is introduced as a multi-level phenomenon.

The suggested singular term, brand experience, captures all experiences in marketing. The identified additional elements of brand experience, such as the levels of experience and the revision of emotions within brand experience as a continuum, tempered by repetition, should be considered in future research.

The multi-level conceptualization may provide a greater scope for dynamic approaches to brand experience design thus providing greater opportunities for managers to create sustainable competitive advantages and differentiation from competitors.

This paper completes a systematic literature review of brand experience across marketing, philosophy and psychology which delineates and enlightens the conceptualization of brand experience and presents brand experience in a multi-level conceptualization, opening the possibility for further theoretical, methodological and interdisciplinary promise.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanism of transmitting economic policy uncertainty (EPU) shocks to capital structure.

The authors adopt a novel approach that bridges the asset pricing implications of EPU and the debt-financing decisions of Chinese firms by introducing a variable “policy-risk-induced equity return” (PRER). PRER is the product of the EPU beta and the EPU shock. Differentiating firms as per the signs of the EPU beta helps to shed light on the deep questions of whether their respective leverage targets and speeds of adjustment are different and how the targets and speeds are determined.

The empirical evidence shows that it is the equity market that channels EPU shocks to capital structure through PRER in China. Firms with positive (negative) EPU betas have PRER impact negatively (positively) the leverage target, conforming to the market-timing theory. EPU and non-policy uncertainty shocks cause the speed of adjustment to change over time. Overall, the intertemporal relation between EPU and leverage is negative. These results are robust to alternative leverage measures and after controlling for non-policy uncertainty shocks and conventional firm characteristics and have implications for academic research, policymaking, market stability, and corporate financing.

This study is the first to probe for, and provide insights into, the underlying reason why EPU impacts capital structure by connecting asset pricing to corporate financing for a large sample of Chinese publicly traded firms.

This research aims to develop conceptual phase building project cost forecasting models by exploring the relationship of existing plan shape complexity indices and general design morphology parameters with total construction cost.

Plan shape indices proposed to date by the literature for measuring building design complexity are critically reviewed. Building morphology is also dictated by town planning restrictions such as plot coverage ratio or number of storeys. This study analyses historical data collected from 49 residential building projects to develop multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural network (ANN) models for forecasting construction cost. Existing plan shape coefficients are calculated to evaluate the geometrical complexity of sampled projects. Ten regression-based cost estimating equations are totally derived from stepwise backward and forward methods, and their predictive accuracy is contrasted: to performance levels reported in past studies and to ANN models developed in this research with multilayer perceptron architecture.

Analysis of plan shape indices revealed that 85.7% of examined past projects possess a high degree of design complexity, hence resulting in expensive initial decisions. This highlights the need for more effective early design stage decision-making by developing new building economic tools. The most accurate regression model, with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 19.2%, predicts the log of total cost from wall to floor index and total building envelope surface. Other explanatory variables resulting in MAPE values in the order of 20%–22% are total volume, volume above ground level, gross floor area below ground level, gross floor area per storey and total number of storeys. The overall MAPE of regression-based equations is 24.3% whilst ANN models are slightly more accurate with MAPE scores of 21.8% and 21.6% for one hidden and two hidden layers, respectively. The most accurate forecasting model in the research is the ANN with two hidden layers and the sigmoid activation function which predicts total building cost from total building volume (19.1%).

This paper introduces MLR-based and ANN-based conceptual construction cost forecasting models which are founded solely on building morphology design parameters and compare favourably with previous studies with an average predictive accuracy less than 25%. This paper is expected to be beneficial to both practitioners and academics in the built environment towards more effective cost planning of building projects. The methodology suggested can further be implemented in other countries provided that accurate and relevant data from historical projects are used.

OF all trades or professions, with pretensions to some measure of specialization, if not learning, librarianship is the only one which does not make preliminary technical training an absolute condition of entrance to its fellowship. We know, from past experience, that the ranks of the library profession are filled from all sorts of sources and by all kinds of men, very few of whom can show a diploma, or any kind of certificate, beyond their own word and the testimony of interested friends, to prove that they possess any special qualification for the work. In this respect librarianship differs from every other branch of the municipal and public educational services of the country. There is no independent test of fitness applied, even for positions of great responsibility, and librarians hold tenure of their offices by means of credentials which would not be accepted in the case of most town clerks, medical officers, accountants, surveyors, schoolmasters, and even sanitary inspectors. We are assumed to possess qualifications of a profound and immense range, but, beyond the undoubted power to announce this, by means of the voices and tongues with which we are lavishly endowed, our references are, for the most part, testimonies to character and experience, rather than to scientific training and professional capacity. Mr. X. spends fifteen years in the service of the O. Public Library, which was organised by a superannuated railway guard in 1862, on lines which were, no doubt, suggested by his former experience in dealing with parcels, passengers, and other luggage. This system has the merit of being based upon the science of Mathematics, because number is the main factor relied upon in every department, and for every purpose. It may, possess, moreover, an elementary relationship to the science of literature by making some use of the ordinary English alphabet, and so we have a combination of letters and numerals which is satisfactory evidence that the librarian was no fool, although he was only a railway guard. His literary methods are, therefore, of the A, B, C, 1, 2, 3. type, and all his assistants are carefully trained in the art of preserving bibliographical order by observing that 5 comes between 4 and 6, and q after p. Now, the assistant who has been brought up in this kind of library may have 15 years' so‐called experience behind him to which he can proudly refer, when applying for a chief post, and there is nothing on earth to show that he does not know absolutely everything about literature, bibliography and library methods—ancient and modern, retrograde and advanced, childish and scientific, or that he is not, in every sense of the word, a Complete Librarian. Indeed, the possession of such an imposing qualification as Fifteen Years' Experience is enough to intimidate any ordinary committee who have no standards by which to compare such a phenomenon. There is no standard by which we can at present judge the qualifications of any librarian, unless he is ass enough to reveal his shortcomings by writing books and papers, and what is really happening every day is simply that appointments are being made on the successful candidate's own valuation of his fitness. He is not tested as regards his professional ability at all, and library authorities are driven to appoint men who have had a long term of experience, no matter how elementary or antiquated it may be. They cannot do anything else in the absence of proper training schools, and certificates of special knowledge, issued by independent and impartial examining bodies. It is quite common to hear librarians boasting about their ten, twenty, or thirty years of experience, who would be sorely put to it to answer intelligently any ordinary question in English literature, systematic classification, or bibliography. These men have managed to establish a kind of freehold for mere experience, minus every other qualification, and it is their continuance in office which has prevented Public Libraries from being more liberally recognised by both State and local authorities. This absurd substitution of mere experience in feeble and unworthy methods, for systematic training in the higher departments of librarianship, has produced a race of self‐sufficient librarians—inferior in general intelligence to commercial clerks and shopmen—who have succeeded, by their narrow‐minded mal‐administration and absence of culture, to thoroughly eradicate any little scrap of confidence in the Public Library idea originally cherished by the people. It is fashionable among those gentlemen to blame parliamentary and municipal stinginess and indifference, as the sole causes of the inadequate financial provision to be squeezed out of a 1d. rate. They can account for everything on this theory—small salaries, invisible book‐funds, poor buildings equipped with inferior furniture, and so on—forgetting, in their inflated self‐sufficiency, how much of this neglect and indifference is due to their own ignorance and failure to interest either people or governors. The argument that everything must wait till the penny rate is abolished is the refuge of everyone who has failed to realize the important fact that, if recognition is wanted, it must be worked for. It may be taken as pretty conclusive that the failure of Public Libraries to obtain greater support from the people and Parliament is due largely to an all‐round failure to meet public needs in a thoroughly efficient manner. It matters not if some twenty or thirty places are managed on business‐like and scientific lines. They cannot influence other places at a distance, scattered all over the Kingdom to the number of 450, and inaccessible in other respects to the reformative effect of a good example. There are plenty of superior, cock‐sure librarians going about, with all the authority conferred by twenty years' experience—and nothing else—telling the people that the utmost degree of accomplishment to be had for a penny has been reached. This alone is enough to counteract the good work of fifty well‐managed libraries. The people say to themselves, “If our library represents all we can get for a penny, and our librarian is the sort of man we may expect in the future, what's the good of paying more for a double dose of the same kind of outfit?”

The need for a holistic framework for studying organisational transformation towards Servitization is implicit. This is particularly relevant as Servitization demands consideration of both business model and organisational change. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to provide an integrative framework that systematically captures and evaluate existing literature on Servitization.

The aim of the paper has been achieved through three main objectives; comprehensively examine the literature in organisational change management that would assist with the selection of the most effective evaluation framework, classify previous studies against the proposed framework through a systematic literature review methodology and analyse the selected papers and propose research questions/propositions based on the identified gaps.

Results indicate that there are two somewhat macro opportunities for the Servitization community, namely, stronger infusion of generic theory into the Servitization debate and exploring Servitization in action through the lens of the theoretical framework.

The findings of the paper demonstrate the gaps in the Servitization literature, which indeed require further theoretical/empirical research.

It is discussed the usefulness and practicality of viewing research contributions that are setting out to be either “descriptive” or “prescriptive”. Consequently, the authors have proposed several avenues for future research based on these two viewpoints.