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DETAILS have recently been published of work undertaken at the Aeronautical Engineering School in Rome in connexion with stratospheric aero‐engines, started just before the war, and more particularly on the exothermic decomposition of nitromethane as a possible fuel in such engines. (La Chim. e l'Ind. 1949, XXXI (12) pp. 436–439.) The author is R. M. Corelli of the Institute of Aeronautical Material Technology, University of Rome, who was mainly responsible for the chemical side of the research. He worked in close collaboration with Professor Gen. G. A. Crocco and Professor Ing. Luigi Crocco. The first results on a large scale were unsuccessful.

One of the main objects in Russian economy for some years has been the development of new sources of raw materials and the effective use and conservation of existing supplies. This aim is probably more intensive and important in regard to metals than anything else, and for this reason the fight against corrosion takes a leading place in research. The amount of work, indeed, directed to this end has reached enormous proportions, with a corresponding and impressive array of literature, in books, articles and proceedings.

IN RUSSIA, as elsewhere, work has been undertaken for many years on the alloying of steel surfaces by ‘saturation’ with other metallic elements, with a view to increasing resistance to corrosion at high temperatures. Among the latest contributions on the subject is that of G. N. Dubinin (Vestnik Mashin, 1953, 33 (8), 74–79).

DR. S. C. ROBERT'S Presidential Address which is printed in the L.A. Record for May and reprinted in the usual separate Proceedings, will be read by all manner of librarians not only for its individual charm but also for a suggestion here and there which may have lasting effects. His major conclusion is that “the spiritual harmony and the intellectual Stability of mankind will Still be largely determined by the reading and writing of books,” whatever may be the triumphs of cinema, wireless and television. This was well worth repeating at a time when we are occupied by visual methods, quite justly, indeed ; if only again to Stress that these must not become an obsession which prevents our seeing that our real purpose is the book. So, too, we may ponder his gentle caveat: “in our laudable efforts towards a perfection of order and classification, there is inevitably a tendency to mistake means for ends, to make our systems our masters rather than our servants.” We know that there is a growing revolt against the intricate simplicities that are being introduced in cataloguing and classification; so intricate, indeed, that except to those who have done careful preparatory reading, writers upon them are completely unreadable. Not the least interesting part of Dr. Roberts's address was his account of early encounters with a library indicator and its attendant difficulties. These may be read as a warning, seeing that most of us have never seen an indicator, and some, because of the losses open access involves, would like to return to what is stupidly called “closed‐access,” a term as sensible as hot ice or dry wet.

Instead of enumerating the various scientific journals of the Soviet Union, this paper will discuss the special circumstances of present‐day Russian scientific publication, since it is the differences from normal British practice which raise difficulties for the inquirer.

The essence of a successful weld is that the joint should possess similar properties to the parent material. In the welding of stainless materials it is essential that the corrosion resistance be preserved in the weld metal and adjacent areas. In this article the author discusses the difficulties involved and the means whereby corrosion resistance is maintained.

In the last decade, web services have become a major technology to implement loosely coupled business processes and perform application integration. Through the use of context, a new generation of web services, namely context‐aware web services (CASs), is currently emerging as an important technology for building innovative context‐aware applications. Unfortunately, CASs are still difficult to build. Issues like lack of context provisioning management approach and lack of generic approach for formalizing the development process need to be solved in the first place for easy and effective development of CASs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the techniques on developing CASs.

The paper focuses on introducing a model‐driven platform, called ContextServ, and showcasing how to use this platform to rapidly develop a context‐aware web application, Smart Adelaide Guide. ContextServ adopts a model‐driven development (MDD) approach where a Unified Modeling Language (UML)‐based modeling language – ContextUML – is used to model web services and its context‐awareness features.

The paper presents novel techniques for efficient and effective development of CASs using a MDD approach. The ContextServ platform is the only one that provides a comprehensive software toolset that supports graphical modeling and automatic model transformation of CASs.

The proposed approach has been validated in practice by developing various CASs. The experimental study demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the approach.

The paper presents a novel platform called ContextServ, which offers a set of visual editing and automation tools for easy and fast generating and deploying CASs.

This study seeks to extend the existing literature on value creation by specifically focusing on service brand value creation (SBVC) and the role of brand marketing.

The authors first develop a model of SBVC and simultaneously investigate SBVC from the firm perspective (service brand value offering – SBVO) and from the customer perspective (service brand perceive value‐in use – SBPVI). Subsequently, they investigate the effects of SBVO on SBPVI and integrate the moderation role of service brand marketing capability (SBMC) on the relationship between SBVO‐SBPVI outcomes. SBVO is viewed as the firms' interpretation of and responsiveness to customer requirements via the delivery of superior performance the value offering through the service brand and SBPVI customers' perceived value from the firms' service brand. The contributions of SBVC to customer‐based performance outcomes are then investigated. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of the senior managers of service firms in Cambodia and their customers. A survey was used to gather data via a drop‐and‐collect approach.

Results indicated that SBVO is positively related to SBPVI and SBPVI is positively related to customer‐based performance. Noticeably, the results revealed that SBMC enhances the positive relationship between the firm SBVO and the customers SBPVI.

The paper extends the previous literature on value creation to capture SBVC. More significantly, the premise of the theoretical framework provides a breakthrough in the current SBVC literature which has so far neglected to take into account the dyadic approach (firm‐customer) in understanding value creation and more specifically SBVC. The model is expanded by looking at the contingency role of SBMC in communicating value to customers.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart based on the Wilcoxon rank-sum (WRS) statistic using repetitive sampling to improve the sensitivity of the EWMA control chart to process mean shifts regardless of the prior knowledge of the underlying process distribution.

The proposed chart is developed without any distributional assumption of the underlying quality process for monitoring the location parameter. The authors developed formulae as well as algorithms to facilitate the design and implementation of the proposed chart. The performance of the proposed chart is investigated in terms of the average run-length, standard deviation of the run-length (RL), average sample size and percentiles of the RL distribution. Numerical examples are given as illustration of the design and implementation of the proposed chart.

The proposed control chart presents very attractive RL properties and outperforms the existing nonparametric EWMA control chart based on the WRS in the detection of the mean process shifts in many situations. However, the performance of the proposed chart relatively deteriorates for small phase I sample sizes.

This study develops a new control chart for monitoring the process mean using a two-sample test regardless of the nature of the underlying process distribution. The proposed control chart does not require any assumption on the type (or nature) of the process distribution. It requires a small number of subgroups in order to reach stability in the phase II performance.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that uses cryptography to ensure transmission and access security, which provides solutions to numerous challenges to complex supply networks. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the impact of blockchain implementation on shareholder value varying from internal and external complexity from the complex adaptive systems (CASs) perspective. It further explores how business diversification, supply chain (SC) concentration and environmental complexity affect the relationship between blockchain implementation and shareholder value.

Based on 138 blockchain implementation announcements of listed companies on the Chinese A-share stock market, the authors use event study methodology to evaluate the impact of blockchain implementation on shareholder value.

The results show that blockchain implementation has a positive impact on shareholder value, and this impact will be moderated by business diversification, SC concentration and environmental complexity. In addition, environmental complexity exerts a moderating effect on SC concentration. In the post hoc analysis, the authors further explore the impact of blockchain implementation on long-term operational performance.

This is the first research empirically examining the effect of blockchain implementation on shareholder value varying from internal and external complexity from the CASs perspective. This paper provides evidence of the different effects of blockchain implementation on short- and long-term performance. It adds to the interdisciplinary research of information systems (IS) and operations management (OM).