The future of branded sportswear store formats in Germany 2030: Four images of the future

A fast changing dynamic business environment is becoming a norm today in different areas, including retailing. The aims of this study are to explore existing store formats of branded sportswear retailing and their characteristics, and to identify the trends which might shape their future. The ultimate goal, however, is to create and analyze images of the future of branded sportswear retailing in Germany 2030 by applying the methods of futures studies. As theoretical background, the cyclical theories of retail evolution have been used. Empirical material is obtained by conducting a Disaggregative Policy Delphi method based study, the aim of which is to obtain well–argued qualitative and quantitative information from experts about store format development in order to create future images based on cluster analysis. Flagship stores, Concept stores, Factory Outlets, Pop-up stores, E-commerce and M-commerce represent the diversity of store formats existing in Germany today. They have different aims, roles, and advantages which retailers try to leverage. However such trends as multichannel integration, technological enhancements, growing popularity of online channels, switching customer behaviors, customization and personalization, and economic turbulence might shape the future of sportswear retailing. Four future images constructed: “Multichannel Integration”, “Smart and Personal”, “Consumer Diversification”, and “Always Online” – describe alternative futures of German branded sportswear store formats in 2030 based on different trends, assumptions, hopes and fears. They also point out uncertainties in retailing such as cannibalization of channels, the growing power and expectations of consumers, the complexity of multichannel synergies, and the switching customer behavior. Constructed future images, thus, provide readers with an opportunity to imagine and explore alternative states of the future of branded sportswear store formats in Germany 2030. They could serve well as a tool to communicate the results to decision–makers, compare them, and to analyze to inspire and direct actions for a better future tomorrow.

Database Engines for Geographical Information Systems

Our ability to identify, acquire, store, enquire on and analyse data is increasing as never before, especially in the GIS field. Technologies are becoming available to manage a wider variety of data and to make intelligent inferences on that data. The mainstream arrival of large-scale database engines is not far away. The experience of using the first such products tells us that they will radically change data management in the GIS field.

Information processing: US Patent 4,409,617

An information processor for rendering input data compatible with standard video recording and/or display equipment, comprizing means for digitizing the input data over periods which are synchronous with the fields of a standard video signal, a store adapted to store the digitized data and release stored digitized data in correspondence wiht the line scan of a standard video monitor, the store having two halves which correspond to the interlaced fields of a standard video signal and being so arranged that one half is filed while the other is emptied, and means for converting the released stored digitized data into video luminance signals. The input signals may be in digital or analogue form. A second stage which reconstitutes the recorded data is also described.

The management of positive inter-store externalities in shopping centres: some empirical evidence

In enclosed shopping centres, stores benefit from the positive externalities of other stores in the centre. Some stores provide greater benefits to their neighbours than others – for example anchor tenants and brand leading stores. In managing shopping centres, these positive externalities might be captured through rental variations. This paper explores the determinants of rent – including externalities – for UK regional shopping centres. Two linked databases were utilised in the research. One contains characteristics of 148 shopping centres; the other has some 1,930 individual tenant records including rent level. These data were analysed to provide information on the characteristics of centres and retailers that help determine rent. Factors influencing tenant rents include market potential factors derived from urban and regional economic theory and shopping centre characteristics identified in prior retail research. The model also includes variables that proxy for the interaction between tenants and the impact of positive in-centre externalities. We find that store size is significantly and negatively related to tenant with both anchor and other larger tenants, perhaps as a result of the positive effects generated by their presence, paying relatively lower rents while smaller stores, benefiting from the generation of demand, pay relatively higher rents. Brand leader tenants pay lower rents than other tenants within individual retail categories.

To what extent are CO2 emissions from intra-urban shopping trips by cars affected by drivers’ travel behaviour and store location?

Transportation is seen as one of the major sources of CO2 pollutants nowadays. The impact of increased transport in retailing should not be underestimated. Most previous studies have focused on transportation and underlying trips, in general, while very few studies have addressed the specific affects that, for instance, intra-city shopping trips generate. Furthermore, most of the existing methods used to estimate emission are based on macro-data designed to generate national or regional inventory projections. There is a lack of studies using micro-data based methods that are able to distinguish between driver behaviour and the locational effects induced by shopping trips, which is an important precondition for energy efficient urban planning. The aim of this study is to implement a micro-data method to estimate and compare CO2 emission induced by intra-urban car travelling to a retail destination of durable goods (DG), and non-durable goods (NDG). We estimate the emissions from aspects of travel behaviour and store location. The study is conducted by means of a case study in the city of Borlänge, where GPS tracking data on intra-urban car travel is collected from 250 households. We find that a behavioural change during a trip towards a CO2 optimal travelling by car has the potential to decrease emission to 36% (DG), and to 25% (NDG) of the emissions induced by car-travelling shopping trips today. There is also a potential of reducing CO2 emissions induced by intra-urban shopping trips due to poor location by 54%, and if the consumer selected the closest of 8 existing stores, the CO2 emissions would be reduced by 37% of the current emission induced by NDG shopping trips.

Data information system to promote the organization data of collections - modeling considerations by the Unified Modelign Language (UML)

Pode-se afirmar que a evolução tecnológica (desenvolvimento de novos instrumentos de medição como, softwares, satélites e computadores, bem como, o barateamento das mídias de armazenamento) permite às Organizações produzirem e adquirirem grande quantidade de dados em curto espaço de tempo. Devido ao volume de dados, Organizações de pesquisa se tornam potencialmente vulneráveis aos impactos da explosão de informações. Uma solução adotada por algumas Organizações é a utilização de ferramentas de sistemas de informação para auxiliar na documentação, recuperação e análise dos dados. No âmbito científico, essas ferramentas são desenvolvidas para armazenar diferentes padrões de metadados (dados sobre dados). Durante o processo de desenvolvimento destas ferramentas, destaca-se a adoção de padrões como a Linguagem Unificada de Modelagem (UML, do Inglês Unified Modeling Language), cujos diagramas auxiliam na modelagem de diferentes aspectos do software. O objetivo deste estudo é apresentar uma ferramenta de sistemas de informação para auxiliar na documentação dos dados das Organizações por meio de metadados e destacar o processo de modelagem de software, por meio da UML. Será abordado o Padrão de Metadados Digitais Geoespaciais, amplamente utilizado na catalogação de dados por Organizações científicas de todo mundo, e os diagramas dinâmicos e estáticos da UML como casos de uso, sequências e classes. O desenvolvimento das ferramentas de sistemas de informação pode ser uma forma de promover a organização e a divulgação de dados científicos. No entanto, o processo de modelagem requer especial atenção para o desenvolvimento de interfaces que estimularão o uso das ferramentas de sistemas de informação.

A model to store coordination mappings

Exploratory tasks supported by visualization are usually improved by Coordinated and Multiple Views (CMV) of the data under study. Several coordination techniques have been proposed in the literature, resulting in a diversity of tools to generate mappings among the multiple views. These mappings can be highly dynamic, and their history reveals the settings employed in the multiple exploratory tasks conducted in a discovery process. Several solutions have been proposed to help users to recover the steps performed in exploratory tasks, but little support is found for registering the multiple coordination mappings employed. This paper provides a contribution in this direction, proposing a model for storing and recovering such mappings. We believe such a facility is an important feature of CMV systems, so that users can recover and rerun the coordinations performed when exploring their data. We present details of the proposed model and show some potential applications. © 2012 IEEE.

Development strategies for the information and communications technology sector in the Caribbean: A global perspective

This occasional paper examines the experiences of three leading global centres of the ICT industry – India, Silicon Valley, and Estonia – to reflect on how the lessons of these models can be applied to the context of countries in the Caribbean region.Several sectors of the technology industry are considered in relation to the suitability for their establishment in the Caribbean. Animation is an area that is showing encouraging signs of development in several countries, and which offers some promise to provide a significant source of employment in the region. However, the global market for animation production is likely to become increasingly competitive, as improved technology has reduced barriers to entry into the industry not only in the Caribbean, but around the world. The region’s animation industry will need to move swiftly up the value chain if it is to avoid the downsides of being caught in an increasingly commoditized market. Mobile applications development has also been widely a heralded industry for the Caribbean. However, the market for consumer-oriented smartphone applications has matured very quickly, and is now a very difficult sector in which to compete. Caribbean mobile developers would be better served to focus on creating applications to suit the needs of regional industries and governments, rather than attempting to gain notice in over-saturated consumer marketplaces such as the iTunes App Store and Google Play. Another sector considered for the Caribbean is “big data” analysis. This area holds significant potential for growth in coming years, but the Caribbean, which is generally considered to be a datapoor region, currently lacks a sufficient base of local customers to form a competitive foundation for such an industry. While a Caribbean big data industry could plausibly be oriented toward outsourcing, that orientation would limit positive externalities from the sector, and benefits from its establishment would largely accrue only to a relatively small number of direct participants in the industry. Instead, development in the big data sector should be twinned with the development of products to build a regional customer base for the industry. The region has pressing needs in areas such as disaster risk reduction, water resource management, and support for agricultural production. Development of big data solutions – and other technology products – to address areas such as these could help to establish niche industries that both support the needs of local populations, and provide viable opportunities for the export of higher-value products and services to regions of the world with similar needs.

Design of alternative energy storage systems for hybrid vehicles based on statistical processing of driving cycles information

Hybrid vehicles represent the future for automakers, since they allow to improve the fuel economy and to reduce the pollutant emissions. A key component of the hybrid powertrain is the Energy Storage System, that determines the ability of the vehicle to store and reuse energy. Though electrified Energy Storage Systems (ESS), based on batteries and ultracapacitors, are a proven technology, Alternative Energy Storage Systems (AESS), based on mechanical, hydraulic and pneumatic devices, are gaining interest because they give the possibility of realizing low-cost mild-hybrid vehicles. Currently, most literature of design methodologies focuses on electric ESS, which are not suitable for AESS design. In this contest, The Ohio State University has developed an Alternative Energy Storage System design methodology. This work focuses on the development of driving cycle analysis methodology that is a key component of Alternative Energy Storage System design procedure. The proposed methodology is based on a statistical approach to analyzing driving schedules that represent the vehicle typical use. Driving data are broken up into power events sequence, namely traction and braking events, and for each of them, energy-related and dynamic metrics are calculated. By means of a clustering process and statistical synthesis methods, statistically-relevant metrics are determined. These metrics define cycle representative braking events. By using these events as inputs for the Alternative Energy Storage System design methodology, different system designs are obtained. Each of them is characterized by attributes, namely system volume and weight. In the last part the work, the designs are evaluated in simulation by introducing and calculating a metric related to the energy conversion efficiency. Finally, the designs are compared accounting for attributes and efficiency values. In order to automate the driving data extraction and synthesis process, a specific script Matlab based has been developed. Results show that the driving cycle analysis methodology, based on the statistical approach, allows to extract and synthesize cycle representative data. The designs based on cycle statistically-relevant metrics are properly sized and have satisfying efficiency values with respect to the expectations. An exception is the design based on the cycle worst-case scenario, corresponding to same approach adopted by the conventional electric ESS design methodologies. In this case, a heavy system with poor efficiency is produced. The proposed new methodology seems to be a valid and consistent support for Alternative Energy Storage System design.

Authoring tools and management information systems: study of a generalizable architecture

The need to effectively manage the documentation covering the entire production process, from the concept phase right through to market realise, constitutes a key issue in the creation of a successful and highly competitive product. For almost forty years the most commonly used strategies to achieve this have followed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) guidelines. Translated into information management systems at the end of the '90s, this methodology is now widely used by companies operating all over the world in many different sectors. PLM systems and editor programs are the two principal types of software applications used by companies for their process aotomation. Editor programs allow to store in documents the information related to the production chain, while the PLM system stores and shares this information so that it can be used within the company and made it available to partners. Different software tools, which capture and store documents and information automatically in the PLM system, have been developed in recent years. One of them is the ''DirectPLM'' application, which has been developed by the Italian company ''Focus PLM''. It is designed to ensure interoperability between many editors and the Aras Innovator PLM system. In this dissertation we present ''DirectPLM2'', a new version of the previous software application DirectPLM. It has been designed and developed as prototype during the internship by Focus PLM. Its new implementation separates the abstract logic of business from the real commands implementation, previously strongly dependent on Aras Innovator. Thanks to its new design, Focus PLM can easily develop different versions of DirectPLM2, each one devised for a specific PLM system. In fact, the company can focus the development effort only on a specific set of software components which provides specialized functions interacting with that particular PLM system. This allows shorter Time-To-Market and gives the company a significant competitive advantage.

A Computational Model for Processing Lexical Information"

The group analysed some syntactic and phonological phenomena that presuppose the existence of interrelated components within the lexicon, which motivate the assumption that there are some sublexicons within the global lexicon of a speaker. This result is confirmed by experimental findings in neurolinguistics. Hungarian speaking agrammatic aphasics were tested in several ways, the results showing that the sublexicon of closed-class lexical items provides a highly automated complex device for processing surface sentence structure. Analysing Hungarian ellipsis data from a semantic-syntactic aspect, the group established that the lexicon is best conceived of being as split into at least two main sublexicons: the store of semantic-syntactic feature bundles and a separate store of sound forms. On this basis they proposed a format for representing open-class lexical items whose meanings are connected via certain semantic relations. They also proposed a new classification of verbs to account for the contribution of the aspectual reading of the sentence depending on the referential type of the argument, and a new account of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of aspectual prefixes. The partitioned sets of lexical items are sublexicons on phonological grounds. These sublexicons differ in terms of phonotactic grammaticality. The degrees of phonotactic grammaticality are tied up with the problem of psychological reality, of how many degrees of this native speakers are sensitive to. The group developed a hierarchical construction network as an extension of the original General Inheritance Network formalism and this framework was then used as a platform for the implementation of the grammar fragments.

Consumer Health Information for Asians (CHIA): a collaborative project.

According to the 2000 United States Census, the Asian population in Houston, Texas, has increased more than 67% in the last ten years. To supplement an already active consumer health information program, the staff of the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library worked with community partners to bring health information to predominantly Asian neighborhoods. Brochures on health topics of concern to the Asian community were translated and placed in eight informational kiosks in Asian centers such as temples and an Asian grocery store. A press conference and a ribbon cutting ceremony were held to debut the kiosks and to introduce the Consumer Health Information for Asians (CHIA) program. Project goals for the future include digitizing the translated brochures, mounting them on the Houston HealthWays Website, and developing touch-screen kiosks. The CHIA group is investigating adding health resources in other Asian languages, as well as Spanish. Funding for this project has come from outside sources rather than from the regular library budget.

Tracking the Flow of Information through the Hippocampal Formation in the Rat

The hippocampus receives input from upper levels of the association cortex and is implicated in many mnemonic processes, but the exact mechanisms by which it codes and stores information is an unresolved topic. This work examines the flow of information through the hippocampal formation while attempting to determine the computations that each of the hippocampal subfields performs in learning and memory. The formation, storage, and recall of hippocampal-dependent memories theoretically utilize an autoassociative attractor network that functions by implementing two competitive, yet complementary, processes. Pattern separation, hypothesized to occur in the dentate gyrus (DG), refers to the ability to decrease the similarity among incoming information by producing output patterns that overlap less than the inputs. In contrast, pattern completion, hypothesized to occur in the CA3 region, refers to the ability to reproduce a previously stored output pattern from a partial or degraded input pattern. Prior to addressing the functional role of the DG and CA3 subfields, the spatial firing properties of neurons in the dentate gyrus were examined. The principal cell of the dentate gyrus, the granule cell, has spatially selective place fields; however, the behavioral correlates of another excitatory cell, the mossy cell of the dentate polymorphic layer, are unknown. This report shows that putative mossy cells have spatially selective firing that consists of multiple fields similar to previously reported properties of granule cells. Other cells recorded from the DG had single place fields. Compared to cells with multiple fields, cells with single fields fired at a lower rate during sleep, were less likely to burst, and were more likely to be recorded simultaneously with a large population of neurons that were active during sleep and silent during behavior. These data suggest that single-field and multiple-field cells constitute at least two distinct cell classes in the DG. Based on these characteristics, we propose that putative mossy cells tend to fire in multiple, distinct locations in an environment, whereas putative granule cells tend to fire in single locations, similar to place fields of the CA1 and CA3 regions. Experimental evidence supporting the theories of pattern separation and pattern completion comes from both behavioral and electrophysiological tests. These studies specifically focused on the function of each subregion and made implicit assumptions about how environmental manipulations changed the representations encoded by the hippocampal inputs. However, the cell populations that provided these inputs were in most cases not directly examined. We conducted a series of studies to investigate the neural activity in the entorhinal cortex, dentate gyrus, and CA3 in the same experimental conditions, which allowed a direct comparison between the input and output representations. The results show that the dentate gyrus representation changes between the familiar and cue altered environments more than its input representations, whereas the CA3 representation changes less than its input representations. These findings are consistent with longstanding computational models proposing that (1) CA3 is an associative memory system performing pattern completion in order to recall previous memories from partial inputs, and (2) the dentate gyrus performs pattern separation to help store different memories in ways that reduce interference when the memories are subsequently recalled.

Information-centric communication in mobile and wireless networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm that has been proposed to cope with drawbacks of host-based communication protocols, namely scalability and security. In this thesis, we base our work on Named Data Networking (NDN), which is a popular ICN architecture, and investigate NDN in the context of wireless and mobile ad hoc networks. In a first part, we focus on NDN efficiency (and potential improvements) in wireless environments by investigating NDN in wireless one-hop communication, i.e., without any routing protocols. A basic requirement to initiate informationcentric communication is the knowledge of existing and available content names. Therefore, we develop three opportunistic content discovery algorithms and evaluate them in diverse scenarios for different node densities and content distributions. After content names are known, requesters can retrieve content opportunistically from any neighbor node that provides the content. However, in case of short contact times to content sources, content retrieval may be disrupted. Therefore, we develop a requester application that keeps meta information of disrupted content retrievals and enables resume operations when a new content source has been found. Besides message efficiency, we also evaluate power consumption of information-centric broadcast and unicast communication. Based on our findings, we develop two mechanisms to increase efficiency of information-centric wireless one-hop communication. The first approach called Dynamic Unicast (DU) avoids broadcast communication whenever possible since broadcast transmissions result in more duplicate Data transmissions, lower data rates and higher energy consumption on mobile nodes, which are not interested in overheard Data, compared to unicast communication. Hence, DU uses broadcast communication only until a content source has been found and then retrieves content directly via unicast from the same source. The second approach called RC-NDN targets efficiency of wireless broadcast communication by reducing the number of duplicate Data transmissions. In particular, RC-NDN is a Data encoding scheme for content sources that increases diversity in wireless broadcast transmissions such that multiple concurrent requesters can profit from each others’ (overheard) message transmissions. If requesters and content sources are not in one-hop distance to each other, requests need to be forwarded via multi-hop routing. Therefore, in a second part of this thesis, we investigate information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. First, we consider multi-hop broadcast communication in the context of rather static community networks. We introduce the concept of preferred forwarders, which relay Interest messages slightly faster than non-preferred forwarders to reduce redundant duplicate message transmissions. While this approach works well in static networks, the performance may degrade in mobile networks if preferred forwarders may regularly move away. Thus, to enable routing in mobile ad hoc networks, we extend DU for multi-hop communication. Compared to one-hop communication, multi-hop DU requires efficient path update mechanisms (since multi-hop paths may expire quickly) and new forwarding strategies to maintain NDN benefits (request aggregation and caching) such that only a few messages need to be transmitted over the entire end-to-end path even in case of multiple concurrent requesters. To perform quick retransmission in case of collisions or other transmission errors, we implement and evaluate retransmission timers from related work and compare them to CCNTimer, which is a new algorithm that enables shorter content retrieval times in information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. Yet, in case of intermittent connectivity between requesters and content sources, multi-hop routing protocols may not work because they require continuous end-to-end paths. Therefore, we present agent-based content retrieval (ACR) for delay-tolerant networks. In ACR, requester nodes can delegate content retrieval to mobile agent nodes, which move closer to content sources, can retrieve content and return it to requesters. Thus, ACR exploits the mobility of agent nodes to retrieve content from remote locations. To enable delay-tolerant communication via agents, retrieved content needs to be stored persistently such that requesters can verify its authenticity via original publisher signatures. To achieve this, we develop a persistent caching concept that maintains received popular content in repositories and deletes unpopular content if free space is required. Since our persistent caching concept can complement regular short-term caching in the content store, it can also be used for network caching to store popular delay-tolerant content at edge routers (to reduce network traffic and improve network performance) while real-time traffic can still be maintained and served from the content store.

Proposal for the Management of temporal and semantic components of Geographic Information

This poster raises the issue of a research work oriented to the storage, retrieval, representation and analysis of dynamic GI, taking into account The ultimate objective is the modelling and representation of the dynamic nature of geographic features, establishing mechanisms to store geometries enriched with a temporal structure (regardless of space) and a set of semantic descriptors detailing and clarifying the nature of the represented features and their temporality. the semantic, the temporal and the spatiotemporal components. We intend to define a set of methods, rules and restrictions for the adequate integration of these components into the primary elements of the GI: theme, location, time [1]. We intend to establish and incorporate three new structures (layers) into the core of data storage by using mark-up languages: a semantictemporal structure, a geosemantic structure, and an incremental spatiotemporal structure. Thus, data would be provided with the capability of pinpointing and expressing their own basic and temporal characteristics, enabling them to interact each other according to their context, and their time and meaning relationships that could be eventually established