Some spatial equilibria in facility investment under uncertain demand

This paper describes the spatial distribution of customer demand, supply of customer services and facility investment, as the outcome of a three-level game-like interaction between customers (e.g., shoppers), suppliers (e.g., retailers) and developers (e.g., landlords). Treating both the suppliers and developers at each centre as competitors, oligopolistic equilibria of the Nash-Stackelberg type are developed, and conditions for their existence and uniqueness established. Uncertain customer demand is specified in probabilistic terms, representing the suppliers' perception of expected customer behaviour.     

Stand and deliver

Poor service provision within the global software services industryis contributing to a profound rethink in many firms that offerinformation and technology services. Recent press reports suggestthat all but a few software providers are willing to committhe organisation and its resources to high volume high riskservice provision.     

A Sketch-Based Interface for Clothing Virtual Characters

This interactive system for garment creation determines a garment's shape and how the character wears it based on a user-drawn sketch. The system then uses distances between the 2D garment silhouette and the character model to infer remaining distance variations in 3D     

Nanoindentation mapping of mechanical properties of cement paste and natural rocks

This paper reports a study to assess nanoindentation mapping of mechanical properties of cement paste and natural rocks. Initial work seems to show that mechanical property mapping by nanoindentation is feasible and can be related to microscopic information. Further work is however required on the effect of indent size and spacing. Such a testing technique can be very useful for materials with different phases to study the intrinsic properties of each component, and also the interaction and properties of the interfacial regions of different phases. The values of Young's modulus and hardness of the individual mineral phases were also determined by statistically analysing a large number of experimental data.     

All the Way Through: Testing for Authorship in Different Frequency Strata

This article describes the operation of two new tests of authorshipand offers some results. Both tests rely on controlled contrastsof word-frequency and both exclude the very common words, whichhave been put to such good use in recent years. One test treatsof words used with some consistency by a target-author but moresporadically by others. The second treats of words used sporadicallyby the target-author but not by most others. (The inclusionof words that some other authors use avoids the strict constraintthat has impoverished this form of evidence.) In suitable cases,both tests prove very accurate. The fact that evidence of authorshipcan be detected in these three distinct frequency-strata helpsto explain why such tests should work at all and so encouragesthe development of even better ones.     

Visual insights into high-resolution earthquake Simulations.

This study focuses on the visualization of a series of large earthquake simulations collectively called TeraShake. The simulation series aims to assess the impact of San Andreas Fault earthquake scenarios in Southern California. We discuss the role of visualization in gaining scientific insight and aiding unexpected discoveries.     

Working memory in mild Alzheimer's disease and early Parkinson's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) impair working memory (WM). It is unclear, however, whether the deficits seen early in the course of these diseases are similar. To address this issue, the authors compared the performance of 22 patients with mild AD, 20 patients with early PD and without dementia, and 112 control participants on tests of inhibition, short-term memory, and 2 commonly administered tests of WM. The results suggest that although mild AD and early PD both impair WM, the deficits may be related to the interruption of different processes that contribute to WM performance. Early PD disrupted inhibitory processes, whereas mild AD did not. The WM deficits seen in patients with AD may be secondary to deficits in other cognitive capacities, including semantic memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)