External landscape

This last part in the evaluation of the internal landscape demands that each business development transaction must be approached in the context of all these influences for the given situation. The transaction must be chosen to suit the internal and external landscapes and be presented to appeal to the influencers and decision-makers and deliver value in a way which enhances the company s future across all these dimensions. 

It is important to issue a common understanding on the topics of method validation, traceability, and uncertainty of measurements. Here, the interrelationships between method validation, traceability, and MU of results will be elucidated. Throughout the landscape of guidelines and standards, the most relevant information is selected, compiled, and summarized. Great importance is attached to the different method performance parameters and their definitions, ways of expression, and approaches for practical assessment. We discuss the role of method validation within QA as well as the topics of standardization, internal and external quality control (IQC and EQC, respectively), and accreditation and the links between these different aspects. 

That does not mean, however, that the external environment has become any easier. In particular, the growing economic importance of Asia (and especially China) both as a location for production and as a market will have a lasting impact on the chemical industry landscape, and many chemical companies are under enormous pressure to adapt. We are currently also seeing major shifts in feedstock prices, again resulting in a movement of some chemical production, here mostly towards the Middle East. 

Fig. 1 Conceptual energy landscapes for bound states c confined by sharp activation barriers. Oriented at an angle 9 to the molecular coordinate x, external force / adds a mechanical potential — (/cos 6)x that tilts the landscape and lowers the barrier. For sharp barriers, the energy contours local to barriers—transition states s —are highly curved and change little in shape or location under force, (a) A single barrier under force, (b) A cascade of barriers under force. The inner barrier emerges to dominate kinetics when the outer barrier is driven below it by k T.

Fig. 12.2. Forward and backward step movement of kinesin. (a) A single kinesin molecule moving on microtubules. A kinesin molecule is attached to a bead trapped by a focused laser as a cargo for measurements, (b) Time trajectory of displacement and force of kinesin. In the laser trap measurement, when kinesin moves the trapping force or external load increases indicted, (c) Energy landscape for the forward and backward step of kinesin. The thermodynamic parameters obtained for the forward and backward step movement of kinesin are included in the figure. The rates for the forward and backward steps, fc , are related to the activation energy U and external load F,...

After asserting the nanostructured nature of ionic liquids, the structural analysis of these fluids continued in two different directions. The first was to check how the built-in flexibility of the isolated ions of the model affect (or are affected by) the nanostructured nature of the ionic liquid, and how that can influence properties like viscosity, electrical conductivity, or diffusion coefficients. It must be stressed that the charges in the CLAP model are fixed to the atomic positions, which means that the most obvious way to probe the relation between the structure of the ionic liquid as a whole in terms of the structure of its individual ions is to investigate the flexibility (conformational landscape) of the latter. The second alternative direction was to probe the structure of ionic liquids not by regarding into the structure of the component ions but by instead using an external probe (for example, a neutral molecular species), solubility experiments with selected solute molecules being the most obvious experimental approach. 

Figure 67. Schematic of the potential barrier landscape under the action of an external electrical field.

Fractal Model. We consider in more detail the issue of relaxation times relevant to our fractal model of anomalous relaxation. As appears from the potential energy landscape for a system under the action of an external electrical field (Fig. 67), the energy differences between minima separated by energy maxima of different levels of self-similarity diminish, the larger the number of a selfsimilarity level. In view of the standard definition of a relaxation time, x eu "r. one may write the following chain of inequalities,... 

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