With the end of the Supermarket Revolution in the 1970s, new forms of horizontal, vertical, and geographic competition have appeared to chaflenge the supremacy of the supermarket format. New retail formats like warehouse stores, supercenters, and fast-food outlets appear to affect local retail supermarket prices. Slotting allowances, coupons, and electronic data gathering have intensified retai...

This article examines political party behaviour around the referendums on the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Starting from the presumption that this behaviour needs to be analysed in the light of the domestic government–opposition dynamics, a set of hypotheses on the causes and consequences of party behaviour in EU Treaty referendums is developed and reviewed for the EU member states in whic...

Structural walls commonly used as efficient structural elements to resist lateral and vertical loads. Diverse performance of bearing wall system in past earthquakes, motivates investigation on the adequacy of current seismic design provision for these walls. This study considers seismic performance of model walls of bearing wall and building frame systems designed as ordinary and special struct...

Mobile-bearing posterior-stabilised knee replacements have been developed as an alternative to the standard fixed- and mobile-bearing designs. However, little is known about the in vivo kinematics of this new group of implants. We investigated 31 patients who had undergone a total knee replacement with a similar prosthetic design but with three different options: fixed-bearing posterior cruciat...

Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) are capable of very precise searching using the metric relationships between a goal and multiple landmarks to relocate the goal location. They can judge the direction more accurately than the distance to a landmark when the landmark is distant from the goal. On the basis of these findings, we propose that nutcrackers use a set of bearings, each a measu...

We report a method of calculating the motion error of a linear motion bearing stage. The transfer function method, which exploits reaction forces of individual bearings, is effective for estimating motion errors; however, it requires the rail-form errors. This is not suitable for a linear motion bearing stage because obtaining the rail-form errors is not straightforward. In the method described...

This paper is concerned with the modeling of engineering images by the fractal properties of 6-point binary interpolating scheme. Association between the fractal behavior of the limit curve/surface and the parameter is obtained. The relationship between the subdivision parameter and the fractal dimension of the limit fractal curve of subdivision fractal is also presented. Numerical examples and...