Experimentation with obliquely incident light established that all four circular reflectances of a chiral sculptured thin film backed by a metallic mirror contain strong evidence of the circular Bragg phenomenon. When the mirror is removed, strong evidence of that phenomenon is found only in the spectrum of the co-polarized and co-handed reflectance.

Education continues to evolve to meet changing educational needs, budgetary pressures, and evolving lifestyles of different students. Distance and online education has become a greater force in the portfolio of products offered by colleges and universities. This chapter reviews recent trends in the courses and methods of delivery offered to meet the changing needs of students.

The successful completion of information systems projects is already a difficult process that many times ends with projects failing to meet the information systems requirements. These requirements typically center on completing projects that perform the way initially envisioned, and delivering completed projects on time and within budget. Pressures around communication and leadership style are now compounded by the use of virtual teams. The goal of this study was to determine whether or not technical proficiency in the project-based skills, facility with database management systems development, and greater technical proficiency in coping within the virtual environment contributed to the development of greater virtual team effectiveness. This study targeted millennial students at the Maine Business School who were assigned to virtual teams tasked with developing a database management system within a virtual environment. Findings suggest that increased proficiencies in project skills will contribute to greater team effectiveness and more importantly, increased proficiencies within the virtual environment will contribute to greater virtual team effectiveness. These findings have implications for business educators and by natural extension, business practitioners as they suggest that training students and workers how to communicate, collaborate, exchange ideas, and share information better within virtual environments will improve virtual team effectiveness which should translate into greater virtual teams project outcomes.

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The business environment today is transforming towards a collaborative context compounded by multiorganizational cooperation and related information system infrastructures. This chapter aims to examine Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems development and emerging practices in the management of multi-organizational enterprises and identify the circumstances under which the so-called 'ERPIII' systems fit into the Virtual Enterprise paradigm; and vice versa. An empirical inductive study was conducted using case studies from successful companies in the UK and China. Data were collected through 48 semi-structured interviews and analyzed using the Grounded-Theory based Methodology (GTM) to derive a set of 29 tentative propositions which were then validated via a questionnaire survey to further propose a novel conceptual framework referred to as the 'Dynamic Enterprise Reference Grid for ERP (DERG-ERP)'; which can be used for innovative decision-making about how ERP information systems and multi-organizational enterprises-particularly the Virtual Enterprise may be co-developed.

This research sought to determine what impact a social network messaging app could have on student’s team project performance. The app allowed students to self-select teams based on user profiles within the app. The study investigated three hypotheses that measured the apps impact on the quality of completed team projects, the team’s sense of shared goals, and team cohesiveness. The findings suggested that social network messaging apps that provide a sense of common ground between team members may better engage students in project teamwork which could lead to improved learning and better team cohesiveness.

The IoT (Internet of Things) can transform businesses by automating processes ranging from inventory management to robotics to automation, saving time, and money. However, can small businesses benefit from the IoT? This article explores the emerging role of the IoT in small businesses, the impact on their ability to compete in a rapidly changing digital environment, and their awareness, attitudes, perceptions, and willingness to adopt it. The research utilizes an initial exploratory approach based on a review of case studies in the literature, interviews with several economic development personnel and a few small and medium-size business managers. Benefits from the use of the IoT include increased efficiency in operations and reduced costs in businesses. The medium-size businesses interviewed have verified these benefits. However, the majority of economic development personnel and small businesses interviewed did not have much or any awareness of what IoT technologies were or their potential benefits.

This article provides a literature review on virtual team leaderships impact on project quality, team effectiveness, and team commitment to short-term projects. The authors summarize several negative findings related to virtual teams and posit that these negative outcomes contribute to the negative impact of organisational fault lines. The article concludes by exploring a theoretical model on the relationship between fault lines in virtual teams and team performance. The authors specifically propose that transformational leadership in virtual teams will positively moderate this relationship.