How entrepreneurial practices balance art and business: Insights into creative entrepreneurship in the European film industry

Relying on the literature on tensions and contradictions and the theory of practice, coupled with the literature on creative industries, this study uncovers how creative entrepreneurs balance the tension between art and business and respond to other challenges of creative entrepreneurship. The multiple case studies method is adopted by examining founders, cofounders and main employees of European film production companies. We reveal the perception of creative entrepreneurs towards the relationship between art and business. We explore different organizational and industry-level challenges experienced by creative entrepreneurs and uncover the organizational practices they adopt to deal with the identified challenges. The research contributes to the phenomenon of creative entrepreneurship by introducing the practice perspective, to the literature on paradox and contradiction by exploring the micro-foundations of tensions and paradox responses in high-intensity situations and to practice-based studies by investigating a domain-specific practice theory and highlighting the agency of creative entrepreneurs in adapting practices necessary to deal with conflicting demands of creative entrepreneurship.     

Airline planning benchmark problems—Part I:: Characterising networks and demand using limited data

This paper is the first of two papers entitled “Airline Planning Benchmark Problems”, aimed at developing benchmark data that can be used to stimulate innovation in airline planning, in particular, in flight schedule design and fleet assignment. While optimisation has made an enormous contribution to airline planning in general, the area suffers from a lack of standardised data and benchmark problems. Current research typically tackles problems unique to a given carrier, with associated specification and data unavailable to the broader research community. This limits direct comparison of alternative approaches, and creates barriers of entry for the research community. Furthermore, flight schedule design has, to date, been under-represented in the optimisation literature, due in part to the difficulty of obtaining data that adequately reflects passenger choice, and hence schedule revenue. This is Part I of two papers taking first steps to address these issues. It does so by providing a framework and methodology for generating realistic airline demand data, controlled by scalable parameters. First, a characterisation of flight network topologies and network capacity distributions is deduced, based on the analysis of airline data. Then a multi-objective optimisation model is proposed to solve the inverse problem of inferring OD-pair demands from passenger loads on arcs. These two elements are combined to yield a methodology for generating realistic flight network topologies and OD-pair demand data, according to specified parameters. This methodology is used to produce 33 benchmark instances exhibiting a range of characteristics. Part II extends this work by partitioning the demand in each market (OD pair) into market segments, each with its own utility function and set of preferences for alternative airline products. The resulting demand data will better reflect recent empirical research on passenger preference, and is expected to facilitate passenger choice modelling in flight schedule optimisation.     

Poly(lactide)/cellulose nanocrystal nanocomposites by high-shear mixing

There is currently considerable interest in developing stiff, strong, tough, and heat resistant poly(lactide) (PLA) based materials with improved melt elasticity in response to the increasing demand for sustainable plastics. However, simultaneous optimization of stiffness, strength, and toughness is a challenge for any material, and commercial PLA is well-known to be inherently brittle and temperature-sensitive and to show poor melt elasticity. In this study, we report that high-shear mixing with cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) leads to significant improvements in the toughness, heat resistance, and melt elasticity of PLA while further enhancing its already outstanding room temperature stiffness and strength. This is evidenced by (i) one-fold increase in the elastic modulus (6.48 GPa), (ii) 43% increase in the tensile strength (87.1 MPa), (iii) one-fold increase in the strain at break (∼6%), (iv) two-fold increase in the impact strength (44.2 kJ/m²), (v) 113-fold increase in the storage modulus at 90°C (787.8 MPa), and (vi) 10³-fold increase in the melt elasticity at 190°C and 1 rad/s (∼10⁵ Pa) via the addition of 30 wt% CNC. It is hence possible to produce industrially viable, stiff, strong, tough, and heat resistant green materials with improved melt elasticity through high-shear mixing.     

Determination of the quality and purity characteristics of olive oils obtained from different regions of Turkey,depending on climatic changes

Virgin olive oils (VOOs) obtained from olives grown in different regions of Turkey under changing climatic conditions sometimes show different sensory and chemical properties. This study was planned to determine whether these deviations are due to climatic changes or not. For this purpose, five different olive varieties (Ayvalık, Memecik, Gemlik, Nizip Yağlık, Kilis Yağlık) of commercial importance were harvested from the provinces/districts (four different region) where cultivation is intense during the 2017/2018–2020/2021 harvest years. Every year, olive samples were collected from 3 orchards from 13 provinces/districts. One hundred and fifty-six samples were subjected to the purity, quality and sensory analysis. Basic climatic values (average, minimum and maximum temperature, humidity and precipitation) were examined for four consecutive years. All of the examined olive oil samples were determined within the legal limits in terms of fatty acid composition and fatty acid ethyl ester values. However, delta-7-stigmastenol value from the sterol composition was found to be above 0.5% in some samples in all the years studied (total 21 samples). Delta-7-stigmastenol values of olive oil samples varied between 0.16% and 1.14%. Multiple linear regression analysis was applied using a genetic algorithm-based inverse least squares method to determine whether there is a relationship between climate data and delta-7-stigmastenol values. According to this result, it has been determined that the delta-7-stigmastenol value is high when the annual average relative humidity is low and the annual average temperature is high. There is an urgent need to make forward-looking plans due to climate change.     

FPGA Based Implementation and Comparison of Beamformers for CDMA2000

For the integration of smart antennas into third generation code division multiple access (CDMA) base stations, it still remains as a challenging task to implement smart antenna algorithms on programmable processors. In this paper, we study implementations of some CDMA compatible beamforming algorithms, namely least mean square (LMS), constant modulus (CM), and space code correlator (SCC) algorithms, using Xilinx??s Virtex family FPGAs. This study exhibits feasibility of implementing even simple, practical, and computationally small algorithms based on today??s most powerful FPGA technologies. 16 and 32 bits floating point implementations of the algorithms are investigated using both Virtex II and Virtex IV FPGAs. CDMA2000 reverse link baseband signal format is used in the signal modeling. Randomly changing fading and Direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) of multipaths are considered as a channel condition. The implementation results in terms of beamforming accuracy, FPGA resource utilization, weight vector computation time, and DOA estimation error are presented. Beamformer weight vectors using LMS and CM can be computed within less than 20 ??s on Virtex II FPGA and 10 ??s on Virtex IV FPGA, and using SCC it can be achieved within less than 22 ??s on Virtex IV FPGA. These results show that FPGAs provide approximately 500 times faster speed in implementations than our previous work with DSPs.     

Design considerations for an automotive magnetorheological brake

In this paper, design considerations for building an automotive magnetorheological (MR) brake are discussed. The proposed brake consists of multiple rotating disks immersed in a MR fluid and an enclosed electromagnet. When current is applied to the electromagnet, the MR fluid solidifies as its yield stress varies as a function of the magnetic field applied. This controllable yield stress produces shear friction on the rotating disks, generating the braking torque. In this work, practical design criteria such as material selection, sealing, working surface area, viscous torque generation, applied current density, and MR fluid selection are considered to select a basic automotive MR brake configuration. Then, a finite element analysis is performed to analyze the resulting magnetic circuit and heat distribution within the MR brake configuration. This is followed by a multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) procedure to obtain optimal design parameters that can generate the maximum braking torque in the brake. A prototype MR brake is then built and tested and the experimental results show a good correlation with the finite element simulation predictions. However, the braking torque generated is still far less than that of a conventional hydraulic brake, which indicates that a radical change in the basic brake configuration is required to build a feasible automotive MR brake.     

Statistical evaluation of the damage potential of earthquake ground motions

This study focuses on the damage potential of earthquake ground motions based on the inelastic dynamic response of equivalent single degree of freedom structures. Their yield resistances are selected in accordance with seismic design codes. An index accounting for the accumulation of damage due to inelastic excursions is used to represent structural damage. A set of 94 ground motions are employed for this analysis, which are all scaled to the same peak ground acceleration of 0.4 g. Earthquake ground motions are classified with respect to both the ratio of peak velocity to peak acceleration (V/A ratio) and their effective excitation duration. The effect of these parameters on damage potential is investigated by using sensitivity analysis and probabilistic techniques. It is concluded that both V/A ratio and effective duration significantly influence the damage potential of earthquake ground motions, although they are not represented appropriately by the spectral definitions of earthquake excitations in seismic design codes.