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Monte Carlo simulations of hard-sphere (HS) crystal grown on a square patterned wall under gravity have been performed. While previous simulations were performed with step-wise controlled gravity, in the present simulations constant gravity has been applied from the first. In the case in which a flat wall is used as the bottom wall, if a large gravity is suddenly applied, the system does polycrystallize. On the other hand, in the present simulations, despite the sudden application of gravity, the system has not polycrystallize. Crystalline nucleation on the square pattern and successive crystal growth upward are suggested to overcome the homogeneous nucleation inside and result in. Defect disappearance, which has been essentially the same as that for the case with step-wise controlled gravity, has also observed for the present case. The characteristic of the square patterned bottom wall simulation with a large horizontal system size has been existence of triangular defects suggesting stacking tetrahedra.

The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate which of the elements of five management practice constructs – management commitment, quality practice, team-based work, training, and sharing and understanding – can significantly lessen the adverse impact of cultural differences on efficient technology transfer.

Exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling multigroup analysis are used to analyze structured survey data from 223 Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries in Vietnam.

The following are the primary factors that moderate the adverse impact of cultural difference on efficient technology transfer: employees’ understanding of quality; top managements’ communication of clear goals and procedures for technology transfer; the nature of the collaborative teamwork and frequent communication about technical issues among Japanese experts and Vietnamese staff; sending of key Vietnamese technical staff to Japan for technological seminars and on-the-job training while providing them with the appropriate materials and guidelines.

Although cultural diversity’s impact on technology transfer may never be problem-free, Japanese and Vietnamese managers should be aware of the effects of differing cultural values and use the appropriate interfaces to minimize cultural problems, maintain a cooperative environment, and transform cultural values into business value.

Cross-cultural technology transfer research, from the knowledge-based perspective, has produced interesting findings but has not yet identified which managerial elements effectively reduce the adverse impact of cultural difference on efficient technology transfer. This study addresses that shortcoming through the organizational learning perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to improve the accuracy of estimating feature points of human body on a vision‐based motion capture system (MCS) by using the variable‐density self‐organizing map (VDSOM).

The VDSOM is a kind of self‐organizing map (SOM) and has an ability to learn training samples incrementally. The authors let VDSOM learn 3D feature points of human body when the MCS succeeded in estimating them correctly. On the other hand, one or more 3D feature point could not be estimated correctly, the VDSOM is used for the other purpose. The SOM including VDSOM has an ability to recall a part of weight vector which have learned in the learning process. This ability is used to recall correct patterns and complement such incorrect feature points by replacing such incorrect feature points with them.

Experimental results show that the approach is effective for estimation of human posture robustly compared with the other methods.

The proposed approach is interesting for the collaboration between an MCS and an incremental learning.

Nowadays there are a large number of XML documents on the web. This means that information retrieval techniques for searching XML documents are very important and necessary for internet users. Moreover, it is often said that users of search engines want to browse only relevant content in each document. Therefore, an effective XML element search aims to produce only the relevant elements or portions of an XML document. Based on the demand by users, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate a method for obtaining more accurate search results in XML search.

The existing approaches generate a ranked list in descending order of each XML element's relevance to a search query; however, these approaches often extract irrelevant XML elements and overlook more relevant elements. To address these problems, the authors' approach extracts the relevant XML elements by considering the size of the elements and the relationships between the elements. Next, the authors score the XML elements to generate a refined ranked list. For scoring, the authors rank high the XML elements that are the most relevant to the user's information needs. In particular, each XML element is scored using the statistics of its descendant and ancestor XML elements.

The experimental evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms BM25E, a conventional approach, which neither reconstructs XML elements nor uses descendant and ancestor statistics. As a result, the authors found that the accuracy of an XML element search can be improved by reconstructing the XML elements and emphasizing the informative ones by applying the statistics of the descendant XML elements.

This work focused on the effectiveness of XML element search and the authors did not consider the search efficiency in this paper. One of the authors' next challenges is to reduce search time.

The paper proposes a method for improving the effectiveness of XML element search.

The purpose of this paper is to propose methods for fast incremental indexing with effective and efficient query processing in XML element retrieval. The effectiveness of a search system becomes lower if document updates are not handled when these occur frequently on the Web. The search accuracy is also reduced if drastic changes in document statistics are not managed. However, existing studies of XML element retrieval do not consider document updates, although these studies have attained both effectiveness and efficiency in query processing. Thus, the authors add a function for handling document updates to the existing techniques for XML element retrieval.

Though it will be important to enable fast updates of indices, preliminary experiments have shown that a simple incremental update approach has two problems: some kinds of statistics are inaccurate, and it takes a long time to update indices. Therefore, two methods are proposed: one to approximate term weights accurately with a small number of documents, even for dynamically changing statistics; and the other to eliminate unnecessary update targets.

Experimental results show that this proposed system can update indices up to 32 per cent faster than the simple incremental updates while the search accuracy improved by 4 per cent compared with the simple approach. The proposed methods can also be fast and accurate in query processing, even if document statistics change drastically.

The paper shows that there could be a more practical XML element search engine, which can access the latest XML documents accurately and efficiently.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of theory building in public procurement by reviewing and classifying manuscripts published in the Journal of Public Procurement (JoPP) from 2001 to 2016.

The articles are divided into four important periods: discovery, agenda setting, embracing and expansion and consolidation. The articles are classified according to a hierarchical level of theory building composed of six levels: rapporteurs, reporters, testers, qualifiers, builders and expanders.

Key findings indicate that public procurement, in light of JoPP publications from 2001 to 2016, is at the tester level. There is also increase in the classification of articles with high level of theoretical contribution over time.