This investigation was begun in order to determine the nature of the 104 degree melting compound prepared by Ashmore and to determine which isomers and their relative amounts are produced during bromination of phenylmercaptoacetic acid.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Since the end of the Cold War, reduced budgets have limited technology growth in the defense industry making the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software the accepted way to build systems. Twenty years ago, almost all DOD software-intensive systems were built by awarding large multimillion-dollar contracts to defense contractors to build systems from scratch. Consequently, with dwindling budgets, the military has recognized that they can no longer build an infrastructure independent of commercial industry. The use of commercial items does not reduce or eliminate the risks associated with the traditional development of software systems. Numerous programs have stumbled for the lack of careful consideration and identification of the unique risk factors imposed by commercial items. Even though the types of programs are diverse, there are common risk factors that can be identified from the past experiences of these programs. This thesis focuses on the critical risk factors and lessons learned associated with integrating commercial items into DOD software programs. It summarize lessons learn from programs that have made extensive use of commercial items, provides a risk checklist/questionnaire to assist PMs and developers in understanding the risks associated with their developments of a system using commercial items, and suggests mitigation strategies, which can be used as guidelines for the risk factors, to consider when adopting commercial components. Providing the starting point for a systematic structure approach to the risk management of commercial items. / Major, United States Army

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1952 H31 / Master of Science

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, 2002. / This thesis presents a new approach to the measurement of consumer brand equity outcomes. The approach links financial performance with consumer behaviour to acknowledge the true source of a brand's strength. The methodology developed can be used to value brands for a variety of purposes ranging from corporate accounting, to taxation, to trademark protection and to capital market analysis. Its most significant application might well become the re-positioning of marketing as the leader of a company-wide activity that contributes to and protects shareholder wealth. The study concludes that the function of marketing has become too introspective and is in danger of allowing its essential role of building and maintaining brands to be taken over by the company as a whole. Brands today are becoming the responsibility of the board and marketing is increasingly seen as a function that deals with certain extemal agencies and buys their services. The author has studied the extant valuation methodologies and has found that they avoid incorporating consumer perceptions of brands: the main reason why brands exist and thrive. The explanation for this is to avoid what the financial community call the "soft issues". And yet it is these so called "soft issues" that determine the value of the brand. Brand equity is defined as the value a brand adds to a non-branded, or commodity, version. This value is invested in the brand by its users and to ignore this in a valuation methodology is to omit a key variable. The methodology presented in this thesis deals with this fundamental requirement and departs from the conventional approaches in four substantive ways: • It uses the Capital Asset Pricing Model to estimate the cost of capital which acts as a proxy for the commodity or non-branded version. • An adapted Delphi approach iteration survey isolates the super profits attributable to the brand from the other profit generating resources. • By analysing the category in which the brand sells according to four defining variables - longevity, leadership, barriers to entry, and vulnerability - time markers are set for notional category dominant and marginal brands. • Survey based consumer data provides quantitative statistics that are reduced to Brand Knowledge Structure (BKS) scores. These are substituted for the dominant and marginal brand markers to establish the Brand Expected Life. The brand value, captured by this approach, is the capitalised present value of the future cash flows. In developing a valuation approach that incorporates consumer behaviour a metric has been developed that links marketing activities directly with shareholder value; which raises the status of the marketing function and which provides the company with a tool to measure return on marketing investment and monitor the value of what in many cases is the firm's most important asset.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Medicine in the branch of Community Health. / Tobacco is a major cause of morbidity and mortality world-wide. Smoking rates in South Africa have been increasing over the past decade. The promotion of health by targeting anti smoking campaigns at school going children is a common strategy throughout the world. The aim of this study was to examines the extent and nature of cigarette smoking in high schools in Greater Johannesburg in 1994, in order to inform health promotion programmes dealing with tobacco contro / IT2018

O estudo fitoquímico do extrato etanólico de caules adultos de Araucaria angustifólia resultou no isolamento e identificação da vanilina, p-hidroxibenzaldeído, coniferaldeído, dois isoflavonóides (cabreuvina e irisolidona), quatro lignanas (pinoresinol, eudesmina, lariciresinol e 9\'-O-acetato de lariciresinol) e β-sitosterol. Foi desenvolvido um protocolo para a obtenção de calos, a partir de caules de plântulas estioladas, dos quais foram isolados e caracterizados mistura de isômeros E e Z do p-cumarato de octadecila e do ferulato de octadecila. / Phytochemical investigations carried out on ethanolic extract from woods of Araucaria angustifolia resulted on the isolation and identification of vanillin, p-hydroxybenzaldehyde, coniferaldehyde; two isoflavones (cabreuvine and irisolidone); four lignans (pinoresinol, eudesmine, lariciresinol and 9\'-O-lariciresinolacetate), and β-sitosterol. Its callus culture was showed to accumulate mixtures of isomers E and Z of octadecyl p-cumarate and of octadecyl ferulate.

This research is focused on finding new secondary metabolites from bacterial sources through genome mining, allowing the study of unknown molecules that could be potential candidates for use as drugs against microbial infections, cancer, and immune diseases. Bioprospection was conducted through targeted environmental sampling, unusual environments exploration and molecular and computational biology. In the first project, an environmental DNA (eDNA) fosmid library from urban soil samples was built and arrayed for the presence of potential gene clusters. In total, 7% of the library was positive for the presence of secondary metabolite pathways. Sequencing revealed genetic similarity with other organisms that belong to urban areas, showing adaptation of the microbiota to anthropogenic environments. The second project focuses on the heterologous expression of a lantipeptide from a bacterial isolate from an urban environment. Using a Multigene Expression System (MES), different components of the biosynthetic pathway were cloned and expressed. We were able to successfully express the genes responsible for lantipeptide tailoring but the lantipeptide portion of the pathway was not obtained with the methods used. The last project examined cave bacterial secondary metabolite production and organism diversity to determine the relationship between the microbiome and to retrieve potential active natural compounds. Through sequence analysis and LC-ESI-HRMS, several metabolites were detected and their potential role for the cave microbiome could be established.

O estudo fitoquímico do extrato etanólico de caules adultos de Araucaria angustifólia resultou no isolamento e identificação da vanilina, p-hidroxibenzaldeído, coniferaldeído, dois isoflavonóides (cabreuvina e irisolidona), quatro lignanas (pinoresinol, eudesmina, lariciresinol e 9\'-O-acetato de lariciresinol) e β-sitosterol. Foi desenvolvido um protocolo para a obtenção de calos, a partir de caules de plântulas estioladas, dos quais foram isolados e caracterizados mistura de isômeros E e Z do p-cumarato de octadecila e do ferulato de octadecila. / Phytochemical investigations carried out on ethanolic extract from woods of Araucaria angustifolia resulted on the isolation and identification of vanillin, p-hydroxybenzaldehyde, coniferaldehyde; two isoflavones (cabreuvine and irisolidone); four lignans (pinoresinol, eudesmine, lariciresinol and 9\'-O-lariciresinolacetate), and β-sitosterol. Its callus culture was showed to accumulate mixtures of isomers E and Z of octadecyl p-cumarate and of octadecyl ferulate.

Este trabalho descreve a utilização dos programas do sistema especialista denominado SISTEMAT, avaliando a sua eficiência para auxiliar os pesquisadores da área de Produtos Naturais no processo de determinação estrutural de sesquiterpenos, a partir de dados de RMN 13C. Os principais sistemas especialistas em determinação estrutural operam, basicamente, combinando fragmentos estruturais, chamados \"restrições estruturais\", obtidos a partir de dados espectroscópicos. Ocorre que para moléculas complexas (com mais do que 15 átomos), o número de propostas estruturais geradas é muito grande, sendo necessária a ajuda do químico para eliminar estruturas improváveis. Este fato demonstra a necessidade de grandes restrições estruturais para o bom funcionamento do programa gerador, como por exemplo, a definição de classe e esqueleto, que foram utilizadas no desenvolvimento do SISTEMAT. O SISTEMAT foi criado especificamente para determinação estrutural de substâncias de origem natural, sendo desenvolvidas técnicas para obtenção de regras heurísticas, a partir de dados de RMN13C, que permitam a identificação de esqueletos de produtos naturais. Estes serão usados como grandes restrições pelo gerador de estruturas, evitando-se, assim, a explosão combinatória e a geração de propostas estruturais incompatíveis. Para a realização deste trabalho foi criado um banco de dados contendo os deslocamentos químicos e multiplicidades de 2306 espectros de sesquiterpenos, distribuídos entre substâncias pertencentes a 288 tipos de esqueletos. Estes dados são analisados pelos vários programas aplicativos do SISTEMAT, sendo fornecidos os esqueletos mais prováveis para uma substância-problema e grandes subestruturas compatíveis com o espectro analisado. Para avaliar o desempenho do sistema foram realizados testes com dados de RMN 13C de 60 sesquiterpenos. A aplicação do SISTEMAT na identificação de sesquiterpenos em misturas, como por exemplo, em óleos essenciais, também foi investigada pela primeira vez, com resultados promissores. / The present work describes the use of the expert system programs called SISTEMAT, evaluating their efficacy at helping Natural Products researchers to determine the structure of sesquiterpenes, using 13C-NMR spectroscopy data. The major expert systems for structural determination operate by combining structural fragments called \"structural restrictions\", obtained from spectroscopic data. For complex molecules (bearing more than 15 atoms), the number of proposed structures becomes too large, hence the imposition of external chemical knowledge is required, in order to exclude improbable structures. This fact demonstrates the need of large structural restrictions to be imposed to get acceptable results output by the generator program. The definition of class and skeleton, which were used during the development of SISTEMAT, are examples of such restrictions. SISTEMAT was created specially for natural products structural determination and methods were developed to obtain heuristic rules, mainly from 13C-NMR data, which allow the identification of natural products skeletal types. These will be used as large restrictions by the generator of structures, in order to avoid a combinatory explosion process at the generation step of the system. To reach the purpose of this work a data base was created with 2306 13C-NMR spectra of sesquiterpenes, distributed in 288 skeletal types. Those data are used by the set of SISTEMAT programs which propose the most probable skeleton for the unknown sesquiterpene together with some large substructures compatible with the analysed spectrum. To evaluate the efficacy of the system, tests were carried out with the RMN 13C data from 60 sesquiterpenes. The application of SISTEMAT in the identification of sesquiterpenes in neat essential oils was also investigated for the first time with promising results.

After discussion of the relationship between KM and NPD, the study defines electronic new product development (E-NPD) as the convergence of customer relationship, business processes, enterprise IT applications, and knowledge management system necessary to perform continuous innovation and develop new quality products in efficient way. A circular E-NPD value chain is depicted to explore the mechanism how E-NPD takes advantage of KM. E-NPD value chain describes new ways of envisioning the NPD process, which states that NPD cannot be effectively managed without a deep understanding of the knowledge interdependencies between core activities along the value chain, The study undertakes detailed case studies of three industries, in which three patterns of E-NPD are examined. / Establishing on both industrial structure-based view and resource-based view on competitive advantage, knowledge-based view on competitive advantage is suggested for the theoretical basis of knowledge value chain. By analyzing knowledge value chain model, we can see clearly that the competitive advantage comes from core competence of organization---knowledge and KM. / Knowledge management (KM) is of growing interest in today's business and academic community. With the importance of KM being realized, companies are viewing KM as a critical success factor in today's dynamic borderless society. In addition to the growing literature on the subject, organizations are creating managerial positions, such as chief knowledge managers, and creating knowledge teams. Obviously, KM penetrates every business process within organization. As a core process, new product development (NPD) always makes great contribution to organizational performance. This study proposes a framework of KM and the link between KM and NPD performance aiming at identifying the key facilitators of NPD and enabling companies to launch their products into market more successful than their competitors. / The value of KM is difficult to pinpoint and has led senior management to manage it without actually measuring it. An essential aspect of KM is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and an attempt is made to measure KM in terms of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Employing confirmatory factor and path analyses, this thesis examines the relationship between KM and the performance of NPD, and finds that some interactions between KM and moderators also have a significant effect on the performance of NPD. These findings imply that if organizations fail to understand the subtle ways by which different features of KM influence product development, they may fail to harvest the full value of KM. / Yang Jie. / Adviser: Lee Ching-Chyi. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-09, Section: A, page: 3111. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-130). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.