One of the major goals in ecology is to determine the mechanisms that drive the asymptotic increase in ecosystem productivity with plant species diversity. Niche complementarity, the current paradigm for the asymptotic diversity-productivity pattern, posits that the addition of species to a community increases productivity because each species specializes on different resources and thus can mor...

Over the last decade, field endocrinologists have explored the efficacy of using plasma corticosterone concentrations of breeding seabirds as an indicator of food availability and predictor of breeding success. However, studies have been predominately confined to adults and the results have been inconsistent. We examined the relationship between the productivity of black-legged kittiwakes (Riss...

Understanding the allocation of skilled labor across industries is necessary to explain inter-industry wage differences and the effect of trade on wages. This paper develops an assignment model with both labor and non-labor inputs in which the assignment of heterogeneous labor across sectors is driven by variation in non-labor input productivity. A scale of operations effect causes high skill a...

Labour Turnover and Labour Productivity in a Retail Organization We study the impact of labour turnover on labour productivity using a panel dataset of 347 shops belonging to a large UK clothing retailer over1995-1999. For the within-shop link – holding constant the shop’s permanent characteristics – we observe an inverted U-shape effect of labour turnover on productivity. The productivity-maxi...

In order to identify drought tolerant chickpea genotypes, an experiment was conducted in the west of Iran, during 2007-2009 cropping seasons. Several selection indices were used to illustrate genotypic differences in response to drought stress. The results of combined analysis of variance showed that year, genotype, stress conditions and their interaction effects were highly significant. Correl...

An ever increasing focus is being placed on the manufacturing costs of biotherapeutics. The drive towards continuous processing offers one opportunity to address these costs through the advantages it offers. Continuous operation presents opportunities for real-time process monitoring and automated control with potential benefits including predictable product specification, reduced labour costs,...

S FROM KIWIFRUIT MEETING IN ITALY The following abstracts are from the 7th International Symposium on Kiwifruit hosted by Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna (Italy) and Emilia-Romagna Region from September 12 to 17, 2010 in Faenza, Italy.

An efficient implementation of task parallelism is important for high productivity languages. Specifically, it requires a tasking layer that fulfills following requirements: (i) its performance scales to high core counts, and (ii) it is seamlessly integrated into a runtime system that performs inter-node communication and synchronization. More specifically, it should facilitate interactions bet...

A total productivity measure was developed as part of an action research productivity analysis project for a manufac turer of computer peripheral devices. The productivity meas ure had to be appropriate for a broad range of automation levels, yet resolve the long-standing methodological problems of index construction in a manner intuitive to management. The difficulties encountered in attemptin...

Saliya Ekanayake School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University [email protected] Abstract Parallel languages have been focused towards performance, but it alone is not be sufficient to overcome the barrier of developing software that exploits the power of evolving architectures. DARPA initiated high productivity computing systems (HPCS) languages project as a solution which addr...