The British ‘failure’ that never was? The Anglo-American ‘productivity gap’ in large-scale interwar retailing—evidence from the department store sector

Interwar British retailing has been characterized as having lower productivity, less developed managerial hierarchies and methods, and weaker scale economies than its US counterpart. This article examines comparative productivity for one major segment of large-scale retailing in both countries—the department store sector. Drawing on exceptionally detailed contemporary survey data, we show that British department stores in fact achieved superior performance in terms of operating costs, margins, profits, and stock-turn. While smaller British stores had lower labour productivity than US stores of equivalent size, TFP was generally higher for British stores, which also enjoyed stronger scale economies. We also examine the reasons behind Britain's surprisingly strong relative performance, using surviving original returns from the British surveys. Contrary to arguments that British retailers faced major barriers to the development of large-scale enterprises, that could reap economies of scale and scope and invest in machinery and marketing to support the growth of their primary sales functions, we find that British department stores enthusiastically embraced the retail ‘managerial revolution’—and reaped substantial benefits from this investment.

Minimising the latency induced by consistency control, within a large scale multi-user distributed virtual reality system

Where users are interacting in a distributed virtual environment, the actions of each user must be observed by peers with sufficient consistency and within a limited delay so as not to be detrimental to the interaction. The consistency control issue may be split into three parts: update control; consistent enactment and evolution of events; and causal consistency. The delay in the presentation of events, termed latency, is primarily dependent on the network propagation delay and the consistency control algorithms. The latency induced by the consistency control algorithm, in particular causal ordering, is proportional to the number of participants. This paper describes how the effect of network delays may be reduced and introduces a scalable solution that provides sufficient consistency control while minimising its effect on latency. The principles described have been developed at Reading over the past five years. Similar principles are now emerging in the simulation community through the HLA standard. This paper attempts to validate the suggested principles within the schema of distributed simulation and virtual environments and to compare and contrast with those described by the HLA definition documents.

The variability of tropical ice cloud properties as a function of the large-scale context from ground-based radar-lidar observations over Darwin, Australia

The high complexity of cloud parameterizations now held in models puts more pressure on observational studies to provide useful means to evaluate them. One approach to the problem put forth in the modelling community is to evaluate under what atmospheric conditions the parameterizations fail to simulate the cloud properties and under what conditions they do a good job. It is the ambition of this paper to characterize the variability of the statistical properties of tropical ice clouds in different tropical "regimes" recently identified in the literature to aid the development of better process-oriented parameterizations in models. For this purpose, the statistical properties of non-precipitating tropical ice clouds over Darwin, Australia are characterized using ground-based radar-lidar observations from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program. The ice cloud properties analysed are the frequency of ice cloud occurrence, the morphological properties (cloud top height and thickness), and the microphysical and radiative properties (ice water content, visible extinction, effective radius, and total concentration). The variability of these tropical ice cloud properties is then studied as a function of the large-scale cloud regimes derived from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), the amplitude and phase of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), and the large-scale atmospheric regime as derived from a long-term record of radiosonde observations over Darwin. The vertical variability of ice cloud occurrence and microphysical properties is largest in all regimes (1.5 order of magnitude for ice water content and extinction, a factor 3 in effective radius, and three orders of magnitude in concentration, typically). 98 % of ice clouds in our dataset are characterized by either a small cloud fraction (smaller than 0.3) or a very large cloud fraction (larger than 0.9). In the ice part of the troposphere three distinct layers characterized by different statistically-dominant microphysical processes are identified. The variability of the ice cloud properties as a function of the large-scale atmospheric regime, cloud regime, and MJO phase is large, producing mean differences of up to a factor 8 in the frequency of ice cloud occurrence between large-scale atmospheric regimes and mean differences of a factor 2 typically in all microphysical properties. Finally, the diurnal cycle of the frequency of occurrence of ice clouds is also very different between regimes and MJO phases, with diurnal amplitudes of the vertically-integrated frequency of ice cloud occurrence ranging from as low as 0.2 (weak diurnal amplitude) to values in excess of 2.0 (very large diurnal amplitude). Modellers should now use these results to check if their model cloud parameterizations are capable of translating a given atmospheric forcing into the correct statistical ice cloud properties.

Hillslope scale surface runoff, sediment, and nutrient losses associated with tramline wheelings

Research on arable sandy loam and silty clay loam soils on 4° slopes in England has shown that tramlines (i.e. the unseeded wheeling areas used to facilitate spraying operations in cereal crops) can represent the most important pathway for phosphorus and sediment loss from moderately sloping fields. Detailed monitoring over the October–March period in winters 2005–2006 and 2006–2007 included event-based sampling of surface runoff, suspended and particulate sediment, and dissolved and particulate phosphorus from hillslope segments (each ∼300–800 m2) established in a randomized block design with four replicates of each treatment at each of two sites on lighter and heavier soils. Experimental treatments assessed losses from the cropped area without tramlines, and from the uncropped tramline area, and were compared to losses from tramlines which had been disrupted once in the autumn with a shallow tine. On the lighter soil, the effects of removal or shallow incorporation of straw residues was also determined. Research on both sandy and silty clay loam soils across two winters showed that tramline wheelings represented the dominant pathway for surface runoff and transport of sediment, phosphorus and nitrogen from cereal crops on moderate slopes. Results indicated 5·5–15·8% of rainfall lost as runoff, and losses of 0·8–2·9 kg TP ha−1 and 0·3–4·8 t ha−1 sediment in tramline treatments, compared to only 0·2–1·7% rainfall lost as runoff, and losses of 0·0–0·2 kg TP ha−1 and 0·003–0·3 t ha−1 sediment from treatments without tramlines or those where tramlines had been disrupted. The novel shallow disruption of tramline wheelings using a tine once following the autumn spray operation consistently and dramatically reduced (p < 0·001) surface runoff and loads of sediment, total nitrogen and total phosphorus to levels similar to those measured in cropped areas between tramlines. Results suggest that options for managing tramline wheelings warrant further refinement and evaluation with a view to incorporating them into spatially-targeted farm-level management planning using national or catchment-based agri-environment policy instruments aimed at reducing diffuse pollution from land to surface water systems. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An item response analysis of the motor and behavioral subscales of the unified Huntington's disease rating scale in huntington disease gene expansion carriers

Although the Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS) is widely used in the assessment of Huntington disease (HD), the ability of individual items to discriminate individual differences in motor or behavioral manifestations has not been extensively studied in HD gene expansion carriers without a motor-defined clinical diagnosis (ie, prodromal-HD or prHD). To elucidate the relationship between scores on individual motor and behavioral UHDRS items and total score for each subscale, a nonparametric item response analysis was performed on retrospective data from 2 multicenter longitudinal studies. Motor and behavioral assessments were supplied for 737 prHD individuals with data from 2114 visits (PREDICT-HD) and 686 HD individuals with data from 1482 visits (REGISTRY). Option characteristic curves were generated for UHDRS subscale items in relation to their subscale score. In prHD, overall severity of motor signs was low, and participants had scores of 2 or above on very few items. In HD, motor items that assessed ocular pursuit, saccade initiation, finger tapping, tandem walking, and to a lesser extent, saccade velocity, dysarthria, tongue protrusion, pronation/supination, Luria, bradykinesia, choreas, gait, and balance on the retropulsion test were found to discriminate individual differences across a broad range of motor severity. In prHD, depressed mood, anxiety, and irritable behavior demonstrated good discriminative properties. In HD, depressed mood demonstrated a good relationship with the overall behavioral score. These data suggest that at least some UHDRS items appear to have utility across a broad range of severity, although many items demonstrate problematic features.

Measuring societal awareness of the rural agrarian landscape: indicators and scale issues

The work presented in this report is part of the effort to define the landscape state and diversity indicator in the frame of COM (2006) 508 “Development of agri-environmental indicators for monitoring the integration of environmental concerns into the common agricultural policy”. The Communication classifies the indicators according to their level of development, which, for the landscape indicator is “in need of substantial improvements in order to become fully operational”. For this reason a full re-definition of the indicator has been carried out, following the initial proposal presented in the frame of the IRENA operation (“Indicator Reporting on the Integration of Environmental Concerns into Agricultural Policy”). The new proposal for the landscape state and diversity indicator is structured in three components: the first concerns the degree of naturalness, the second landscape structure, the third the societal appreciation of the rural landscape. While the first two components rely on a strong bulk of existing literature, the development of the methodology has made evident the need for further analysis of the third component, which is based on a newly proposed top-down approach. This report presents an in-depth analysis of such component of the indicator, and the effort to include a social dimension in large scale landscape assessment.

The Climate-G testbed: towards large scale distributed data management for climate change

Climate-G is a large scale distributed testbed devoted to climate change research. It is an unfunded effort started in 2008 and involving a wide community both in Europe and US. The testbed is an interdisciplinary effort involving partners from several institutions and joining expertise in the field of climate change and computational science. Its main goal is to allow scientists carrying out geographical and cross-institutional data discovery, access, analysis, visualization and sharing of climate data. It represents an attempt to address, in a real environment, challenging data and metadata management issues. This paper presents a complete overview about the Climate-G testbed highlighting the most important results that have been achieved since the beginning of this project.