1522 research outputs found
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William Butler Yeats and Me
Get PDFThis thesis is a collection of poems/essay influenced by William Butler Yeat
Reconciling the past: Identity, Return and the Newfoundland Woman Migrant
Get PDFArticle from the Irish Journal of Newfoundland and Labrador Research ‘Ktaqamkuk Across The Water Thar Muir’ which was originally published in 2009 by the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studie
High performance ZnO varistors prepared from nanocrystalline precursors for miniaturised electronic devices
Get PDFAn industrially viable solution-based processing route using minimal amounts of solvent has been used
to prepare bulk quantity nanopowders (average particle size 15 � 3 nm) for the fabrication of ZnO
varistors. The xerogels, calcined powders and sintered materials were fully characterised. The
preparation of varistors from nanopowders has been optimised by studying the effect of temperature on
grain growth, densification and breakdown voltage. The varistors are prepared by sintering at 1050 �C
for 2 hours, a temperature that is significantly lower than that used in the current industrial process.
Highly dense varistor discs prepared from the sintered material produce devices, with a breakdown
voltage 85% higher than that of commercial varistors, making them suitable for use in miniaturised
electronic circuitry. Improved performance of these materials has been attributed to the small grain size
and better dispersion of additives on ZnO grains
Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture (2 vols.) - A Review
No full textAn examination into how Irish SMEs socialise non-Irish-national employees into their workforce
Get PDFThe purpose of this study is to investigate how Irish SMEs socialise non-Irish-nationals into their workforces. Levels of immigration into Ireland have increased significantly in recent years, caused by improved economic conditions in Ireland and the expansion of the European Union in 2004 and 2007. Due to this increase in immigration levels, Irish Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have to adapt to operating with a heterogeneous workforce as opposed to a homogenous one.
Previous research has suggested that the early stages of the employment of culturally diverse workers with an organisation are particularly crucial. According to McMilan- Capehart (2005) the methods which an organisation uses to assist the socialisation of culturally diverse employees will play a significant role in determining whether those employees will be able to adapt to that organisation or not. For this reason, this research focuses on the organisational socialisation of non-Irish-nationals into Irish SMEs. As far as this researcher is aware, the organisational socialisation of culturally diverse organisational entrants into small businesses has not been previously investigated in an Irish context.
The current study’s primary research methodology was qualitative. The primary data used in the study was gathered through a series of semi-structured interviews of owner/managers or operations managers of SMEs in the South East of Ireland. This research method allowed the researcher to engage with the respondents and gain an indepth understanding of how these SMEs are approaching the task of socialising non- Irish-national entrants.
A number of noteworthy findings emerged from this research. Firstly, it was found that the SMEs surveyed have altered their induction methods to meet the requirements of non-Irish-nationals entering their organisations, albeit in sometimes quite small ways. Secondly, the owner/manager or operations managers of the organisations surveyed played an important role in the socialisation process particularly in the early stages when the influence of the organisation over the entrants was at its strongest. Thirdly, the roles played by established employees were found to be extremely important.
Unexpectedly, it was discovered that the role played by non-Irish-national employees was of greater significance than that played by Irish employees. In all organisations surveyed, non-Irish-national employees were relied upon to assist in the recruitment process by recommending further potential employees. They also provided considerable levels of support to the entering non-Irish- nationals thereby playing a significant role in their socialisation.
Finally, the outcomes of the socialisation processes seemed to be somewhat mixed in terms of the integration of the non-Irish-national entrants on a social levels. While the non-Irish-national employees displayed exemplary adaptability and role proficiency in all cases, there were signs that non-Irish-nationals had not integrated completely with the established workforce. The workforces in some of the organisations surveyed had instead separated into two groups; Irish and non-Irish-national. This separation had been caused largely by cultural and language barriers.
The outcomes of this research may have implications for HRM practitioners, entrepreneurs, owner/managers and operations managers of SMEs, academics and policy makers
Harnessing Information Models and Ontologies for Policy Conflict Analysis
Get PDFPolicies are meant to govern the behaviour of the communications network. Unfortunately, most policy-based management systems do not contain conflict analysis processes. Therefore, if policy conflicts occur between deployed policies, there is no guarantee that the intended behaviour will be realised by the communications network. In addition, most policy-based management systems are designed to be used by a single constituency, so do not address the needs of different stakeholders that use the system in different ways. This thesis presents an approach to policy authoring that incorporates policy conflict analysis for communications networks. This approach is based on harnessing knowledge embodied in information models and ontologies to represent relationships between policy components that could indicate potential conflicts between policies. Harnessing the application information embodied in knowledge bases makes the approach independent from the application or use of policies because the application specific concerns are separated and thus can be designed independently. A model of a policy continuum is presented, which is used to maintain the relationships between different levels of policies used by different stakeholders. A policy authoring process is then developed to formally describe the interaction between stakeholders concerned with creating and modifying policies and the detection of policy conflicts. An efficient method of selecting appropriate subsets of policies that may conflict is developed. Experimental results show that this process results in a significant reduction in the number of policies that needed to be analysed
A STUDY OF STRATEGIC INNOVATION PRACTICES WITHIN THE IRISH TOURISM INDUSTRY
Get PDFOne dominant theme that continuously appears to emerge from national reports is that, in order for small tourism firms to surmount the detrimental effects of losing competitiveness (caused mainly by globalisation and the changing economic climate) emphasis must be directed at encouraging these companies to adopt a strategic innovation practice and become strategic innovators (The Tourism Policy Review, 2003). However, what makes good strategic practice in the context of innovativeness and thus increasing firm competitiveness is not clearly understood within the literature. Furthermore, research to date tends to focus on micro or product-level innovation and ignores the reality that small firms need to continually innovative as a firm-level strategic objective, especially considering that “innovations in and of themselves are not necessarily the key to long-term business success” (Sigauw et al 2006: 556). Therefore this paper makes a unique contribution to a very significant gap in the innovation and business strategy literature, by reviewing current work and conceptualizing strategic practices that link effective strategy to enhance innovativeness. Our conceptualization is elaborated with a set of propositions which have academic implications for enriching resource based theory and practical implications for managing the innovativeness journey
On the use of SHIM6 for Mobility Support in IMS Networks
Get PDFThe future of network communications is moving towards deployment of an all-IP core network. This has given rise to many devices hitting the market equipped with multiple network interfaces. However, in order to really benefit from such a heterogeneous network environment, applications must experience minimum disruption as they roam from one network to another, which requires seamless mobility support. Although, some mobility proposals have emerged (Mobile IPv6, and its extensions), none of them give satisfactory performance in terms of handover between different networks. In addition, they require infrastructural changes to the network and give poor performance in case of a failure. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to support mobility through a multi homing SHIM6 layer. The results show that our proposed mechanism outperforms Route Optimized Mobile IPv6
