Retail Innovation - The never-ending road to success? A critical analysis of pitfalls and opportunities

This paper outlines the current and continuous changes occurring in the retail and social environment that necessitate the constant evolution of retail formats. Over recent years experiential retail formats have appeared in recognition of the increasing need to ‘entertain’ shoppers and satisfy their ‘leisure’ needs. A number of ‘best practice’ examples of such retail innovation have been presented. While such experiential innovations appear to be the ‘holy grail’ of modern retailing, they often require considerable investments of both capital and management time. This paper has used an autoethnographic approach to reflect upon the constraints and costs involved in the design, construction and operation of such a retail enterprise to provide a unique and holistic assessment of the benefits and challenges experiential innovation holds in developing new retail formats and initiatives. The findings from this research highlight a number of previously unreported pitfalls that are likely to be encountered, financially, operationally and symbolically. It is recommended that retailers continue to explore experiential innovations, but that they proceed with caution

Fundamental Flaws in Feller's Classical Derivation of Benford's Law

Feller's classic text 'An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications' contains a derivation of the well known significant-digit law called Benford's law. More specifically, Feller gives a sufficient condition ("large spread") for a random variable $X$ to be approximately Benford distributed, that is, for $\log_{10}X$ to be approximately uniformly distributed modulo one. This note shows that the large-spread derivation, which continues to be widely cited and used, contains serious basic errors. Concrete examples and a new inequality clearly demonstrate that large spread (or large spread on a logarithmic scale) does not imply that a random variable is approximately Benford distributed, for any reasonable definition of "spread" or measure of dispersionComment: 7 page

General Issues in the Evolution of Fermion Masses and Mixings

General issues in the renormalization group evolution of fermion masses and mixings is discussed. An effective fixed point in the top quark Yukawa coupling can strongly constrain its value at the electroweak scale. Predictions following from Yukawa coupling unification are affected by threshold corrections at the grand unified scale. The Landau pole translates into an upper limit on the strong gauge coupling $\alpha _3(M_Z)$. Given the hierarchy in the fermion sector, the evolution of the Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix can be expressed in terms of a single scaling parameter $S$. Using this scaling factor and analogous scaling factors for the quark and lepton masses, we outline a systematic strategy that readily yields electroweak predictions for any GUT scale texture.}Comment: (Talk given at the SUSY93 Conference MSB), 9 pages + 3 PS figures not included (available on request), MAD/PH/75

Erratum: Next-to-leading order supersymmetric QCD predictions for associated production of gauginos and gluinos [Phys. Rev. D 62, 095014 (2000)]

Errors in the published version of the paper are corrected, and new figures are provided.Comment: 3 pages, latex, 4 figure

A computer program incorporating fatigue and fracture criteria in the preliminary design of transport aircraft: An evaluation

The APAS program a multistation structural synthesis procedure developed to evaluate material, geometry, and configuration with various design criteria usually considered for the primary structure of transport aircraft is described and evaluated. Recommendations to improve accuracy and extend the capabilities of the APAS program are given. Flow diagrams are included

Spitzer Observations of Gamma-Ray Burst Host Galaxies: A Unique Window into High Redshift Chemical Evolution and Star-formation

We present deep Spitzer 3.6 micron observations of three z~5 GRB host galaxies. Our observations reveal that z~5 GRB hosts are a factor of 3 less luminous than the median rest-frame V-band luminosity of spectroscopically confirmed z~5 galaxies in the GOODS fields and the UDF. The strong connection between GRBs and massive star formation implies that not all star-forming galaxies at these redshifts are currently being accounted for in deep surveys and GRBs provide a unique way to measure the contribution to the star-formation rate density from galaxies at the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function. By correlating the co-moving star-formation rate density with co-moving GRB rates at lower redshifts, we estimate a lower limit to the star-formation rate density of 0.12+/-0.09 and 0.09+/-0.05 M_sun/yr/Mpc^3 at z~4.5 and z~6, respectively. Finally, we provide evidence that the average metallicity of star-forming galaxies evolves as (stellar mass density)^(0.69+/-0.17) between $z\sim5$ and $z\sim0$, probably indicative of the loss of a significant fraction of metals to the intergalactic medium, particularly in low-mass galaxies.Comment: ApJ, in pres