New Product Development and Product Supply within a Network Setting: The Chilled Ready-meal Industry in the UK

This paper analyses inter-organizational networks that link together firms operating in the food processing and distribution industry in the UK. In doing so, the paper draws on insights recently developed by Mark Casson that treat inter-firm networks as an institutional response to the changing costs and opportunities of information management. Detailed analysis of product innovation and supply-chain management issues within the industry, exemplified by the growth of chilled ready-meals, leads to the identification of two distinct but complementary inter-firm networks: a network of control and a network of innovation. In each case, the study finds that the critical information is derived from the retailers' interface with consumers and thus that these information-based networks are effectively controlled by the leading supermarket chains. The study's conclusions are considered in relation to the recent findings of the UK Competition Commission following its investigation into grocery retailing in Britain.     

Signals in science - On the importance of signaling in gaining attention in science

Which signals are important in gaining attention in science? For a group of 1,371 scientific articles published in 17 demography journals in the years 1990-1992 we track their influence and discern which signals are important in receiving citations. Three types of signals are examined: the author's reputation (as producer of the idea), the journal (as the broker of the idea), and the state of uncitedness (as an indication of the assessment by the scientific community of an idea). The empirical analysis points out that, first, the reputation of journals plays an overriding role in gaining attention in science. Second, in contrast to common wisdom, the state of uncitedness does not affect the future probability of being cited. And third, the reputation of a journal may help to get late recognition (so-called sleeping beauties) as well as generate 'flash-in-the-pans': immediately noted articles but apparently not very influential in the long run.     

The influence of morphological information on cataphoric pronoun assignment.

In 3 eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the use of morphological information during pronoun resolution. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that disruption occurred when a preferred assignment was inconsistent with gender information. Experiment 2 ensured that this difficulty was not due to the introduction of a new discourse entity. Experiment 3 showed that disruption also occurred when number information was inconsistent with the preferred assignment. The results indicate that the use of morphological information is delayed until after the computation of coreference relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parallel associative combinator evaluation II

A new evaluation model for SK combinator expressions is presented and used as a basis for the design of a novel processor. The resulting machine architecture resembles a dataflow ring, but executions are constrained to be fully lazy. An automatic dynamic load sharing mechanism for a distributed multiprocessor architecture is suggested, and initial simulation results are presented.     

Air–steam leakage through cracks in concrete walls

In the context of a severe accident in a PWR nuclear plant, the evaluation of the leakage through the containment wall remains a key point of the safety analysis. Here we calculate the leakage of an air steam mixture through a traversing crack taking into account condensation. A 40 h test has been performed on a representative concrete slab with measurements of crack openings and flow rates. The CAST3M code enables us to simulate this test by making thermo-mechanical calculations and calculation of the leakage flow rate. Thermo-mechanical calculations provide data needed by the leakage calculations which are not measurable in the experiment. These are the internal crack profiles (variation of the opening with the curvilinear coordinate of the crack inside the concrete slab). Thermo-mechanical calculations are difficult to perform because boundary conditions of the test are complicated. Leakage calculations are performed with various hypotheses for the internal cracks profiles. A coefficient is applied on the friction factor to take into account additional complexity of the crack geometry.