Revolution through electronic purchasing

Automation is finding its way in the world of purchasing. This development could evoke dramatic effects in the long term, not only on purchasing but even on the market place itself. Nowadays, EDI and CD-ROM are examples of automation applications that purchasing departments use frequently. Internet and other global communication systems are not yet perceived as major added value applications for purchasers. Nevertheless this medium could change purchasing in a revolutionary manner, provided that the information such global media present, is structured in an easily accessible way. At that point major elements of traditional purchasing will be automatically shifted to the end user. As a consequence the marketplace for these products will become completely transparent, creating a new fundamentally different reality. This will allow new competitors to enter and will demand new services to be rendered

EBSLG Annual General Conference, 18. - 21.05.2010, Cologne. Selected papers

Am 18.-21. Mai 2010 fand in der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek (USB) Köln die „Annual General Conference“ der European Business Schools Librarians Group (EBSLG) statt. Die EBSLG ist eine relativ kleine, aber exklusive Gruppe von Bibliotheksdirektorinnen und –direktoren bzw. Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekaren in Leitungspositionen aus den Bibliotheken führender Business Schools. Im Mittelpunkt der Tagung standen zwei Themenschwerpunkte: Der erste Themenkreis beschäftigte sich mit Bibliotheksportalen und bibliothekarischen Suchmaschinen. Der zweite Themenschwerpunkt Fragen der Bibliotheksorganisation wie die Aufbauorganisation einer Bibliothek, Outsourcing und Relationship Management. Der vorliegende Tagungsband enthält ausgewählte Tagungsbeiträge

Implementing the Gaia Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) in Java

This paper provides a description of the Java software framework which has been constructed to run the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution for the Gaia mission. This is the mathematical framework to provide the rigid reference frame for Gaia observations from the Gaia data itself. This process makes Gaia a self calibrated, and input catalogue independent, mission. The framework is highly distributed typically running on a cluster of machines with a database back end. All code is written in the Java language. We describe the overall architecture and some of the details of the implementation.Comment: Accepted for Experimental Astronom

The self organizing map of neighbour stars and its kinematical interpretation

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a neural network algorithm that has the special property ofcreating spatially organized tepresetüatioes of various features of input signals. The resulting maps resemble realneural structures found in the cortices of developed animal brains.: Also, the SOM. has been successful in various pattern recognition tasks involving noisy signals, as for instance, speech recognition and for this reason we are studying its application to some astronomical problems. In this paper w~ present the 2-D mapping and subsequerít study of one local sample of 12000 stars using SOM. The available attributes are 14: 3-D position and velocitiesvphotometric indexes, spectral type and luminosity class. The possible location of halo, thick disk and thin disk stars is discussed. Their kinematical properties are also compared using the velocity distribution moments up to order four.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Efficient data structures for masks on 2D grids

This article discusses various methods of representing and manipulating arbitrary coverage information in two dimensions, with a focus on space- and time-efficiency when processing such coverages, storing them on disk, and transmitting them between computers. While these considerations were originally motivated by the specific tasks of representing sky coverage and cross-matching catalogues of astronomical surveys, they can be profitably applied in many other situations as well.Comment: accepted by A&

The Variation of the Galaxy Luminosity Function with Group Properties

We explore the shape of the galaxy luminosity function (LF) in groups of different mass by creating composite LFs over large numbers of groups. Following previous work using total group luminosity as the mass indicator, here we split our groups by multiplicity and by estimated virial (group halo) mass, and consider red (passive) and blue (star forming) galaxies separately. In addition we utilise two different group catalogues (2PIGG and Yang et al.) in order to ascertain the impact of the specific grouping algorithm and further investigate the environmental effects via variations in the LF with position in groups. Our main results are that LFs show a steepening faint end for early type galaxies as a function of group mass/ multiplicity, with a much suppressed trend (evident only in high mass groups) for late type galaxies. Variations between LFs as a function of group mass are robust irrespective of which grouping catalogue is used, and broadly speaking what method for determining group `mass' is used. We find in particular that there is a significant deficit of low-mass passive galaxies in low multiplicity groups, as seen in high redshift clusters. Further to this, the variation in the LF appears to only occur in the central regions of systems, and in fact seems to be most strongly dependent on the position in the group relative to the virial radius. Finally, distance-rank magnitude relations were considered. Only the Yang groups demonstrated any evidence of a correlation between a galaxy's position relative to the brightest group member and its luminosity. 2PIGG possessed no such gradient, the conclusion being the FOF algorithm suppresses the signal for weak luminosity--position trends and the Yang grouping algorithm naturally enhances it.Comment: 20 pages, 29 figures, accepted for submission to MNRA