Testing goodwill: Conflict and co-operation in new product development networks

Network forms are often seen as models of organisational flexibility, promoting the building of trust and exchange of information between different business functions while offering both cost savings and reductions in the uncertainties usually associated with innovation. Both internal and external networks have been identified as key elements in the collaborative development of new products. The actual process of network building and ongoing network management is not well researched, although the existing literature highlights difficulties for organisations attempting to maintain active product development networks. This article examines the development and management of such a network in the defence industry and focuses on network building processes in terms of the interactions between the individuals involved. This network has endured and evolved over many years despite a series of conflicts. One of the key findings is that the effective functioning of the overall network is closely allied to established processes within the two participating firms

Testing for Non-Gaussianity in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe Data: Minkowski Functionals and the Length of the Skeleton

The three Minkowski functionals and the recently defined length of the skeleton are estimated for the co-added first-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and compared with 5000 Monte Carlo simulations, based on Gaussian fluctuations with the a-priori best-fit running-index power spectrum and WMAP-like beam and noise properties. Several power spectrum-dependent quantities, such as the number of stationary points, the total length of the skeleton, and a spectral parameter, gamma, are also estimated. While the area and length Minkowski functionals and the length of the skeleton show no evidence for departures from the Gaussian hypothesis, the northern hemisphere genus has a chi^2 that is large at the 95% level for all scales. For the particular smoothing scale of 3.40 degrees FWHM it is larger than that found in 99.5% of the simulations. In addition, the WMAP genus for negative thresholds in the northern hemisphere has an amplitude that is larger than in the simulations with a significance of more than 3 sigma. On the smallest angular scales considered, the number of extrema in the WMAP data is high at the 3 sigma level. However, this can probably be attributed to the effect of point sources. Finally, the spectral parameter gamma is high at the 99% level in the northern Galactic hemisphere, while perfectly acceptable in the southern hemisphere. The results provide strong evidence for the presence of both non-Gaussian behavior and an unexpected power asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres in the WMAP data.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Improvements in Cd stable isotope analysis achieved through use of liquid–liquid extraction to remove organic residues from Cd separates obtained by extraction chromatography

Organic compounds released from resins that are commonly employed for trace element separations are known to have a detrimental impact on the quality of isotopic analyses by MC-ICP-MS. A recent study highlighted that such effects can be particularly problematic for Cd stable isotope measurements (M. Gault-Ringold and C. H. Stirling, J. Anal. At. Spectrom., 2012, 27, 449–459). In this case, the final stage of sample purification commonly applies extraction chromatography with Eichrom TRU resin, which employs particles coated with octylphenyl-N,N-di-isobutyl carbamoylphosphine oxide (CMPO) dissolved in tri-n-butyl phosphate (TBP). During chromatography, it appears that some of these compounds are eluted alongside Cd and cannot be removed by evaporation due to their high boiling points. When aliquots of the zero-ε reference material were processed through the purification procedure, refluxed in concentrated HNO(3) and analyzed at minimum dilution (in 1 ml 0.1 M HNO(3)), they yielded Cd isotopic compositions (ε(114/110)Cd = 4.6 ± 3.4, 2SD, n = 4) that differed significantly from the expected value, despite the use of a double spike technique to correct for instrumental mass fractionation. This result was accompanied by a 35% reduction in instrumental sensitivity for Cd. With increasing dilution of the organic resin residue, both of these effects are reduced and they are insignificant when the eluted Cd is dissolved in ≥3 ml 0.1 M HNO(3). Our results, furthermore, indicate that the isotopic artefacts are most likely related to anomalous mass bias behavior. Previous studies have shown that perchloric acid can be effective at avoiding such effects (Gault-Ringold and Stirling, 2012; K. C. Crocket, M. Lambelet, T. van de Flierdt, M. Rehkämper and L. F. Robinson, Chem. Geol., 2014, 374–375, 128–140), presumably by oxidizing the resin-derived organics, but there are numerous disadvantages to its use. Here we show that liquid–liquid extraction with n-heptane removes the organic compounds, dramatically improving quality of the Cd isotope data for samples that are analyzed at or close to minimum dilution factors. This technique is quick, simple and may be of use prior to analysis of other isotope systems where similar resins are employed

Topology of Neutral Hydrogen Within the Small Magellanic Cloud

In this paper, genus statistics have been applied to an HI column density map of the Small Magellanic Cloud in order to study its topology. To learn how topology changes with the scale of the system, we provide the study of topology for column density maps at varying resolution. To evaluate the statistical error of the genus we randomly reassign the phases of the Fourier modes while keeping the amplitudes. We find, that at the smallest scales studied ($40 {pc}\leq\lambda\leq 80 {pc}$) the genus shift is in all regions negative, implying a clump topology. At the larger scales ($110 {pc}\leq\lambda\leq 250 {pc}$) the topology shift is detected to be negative in 4 cases and positive (``swiss cheese'' topology) in 2 cases. In 4 regions there is no statistically significant topology shift at large scales

The Case for Combining a Large Low-Band Very High Frequency Transmitter With Multiple Receiving Arrays for Geospace Research: A Geospace Radar

We argue that combining a high‐power, large‐aperture radar transmitter with several large‐aperture receiving arrays to make a geospace radar—a radar capable of probing near‐Earth space from the upper troposphere through to the solar corona—would transform geospace research. We review the emergence of incoherent scatter radar in the 1960s as an agent that unified early, pioneering research in geospace in a common theoretical, experimental, and instrumental framework, and we suggest that a geospace radar would have a similar effect on future developments in space weather research. We then discuss recent developments in radio‐array technology that could be exploited in the development of a geospace radar with new or substantially improved capabilities compared to the radars in use presently. A number of applications for a geospace radar with the new and improved capabilities are reviewed including studies of meteor echoes, mesospheric and stratospheric turbulence, ionospheric flows, plasmaspheric and ionospheric irregularities, and reflection from the solar corona and coronal mass ejections. We conclude with a summary of technical requirements

Wage/Tenure Contracts with Heterogeneous Firms

This paper investigates equilibria in a labor market where heterogeneous firms post wage/tenure contracts and risk-averse workers, both employed and unemployed, search for new job opportunities. Different firms, even those with the same productivity, typically offer different contracts. Equilibrium finds workers never quit from higher productivity firms to lower productivity firms, but turnover is inefficiently low as employees with large tenures at low productivity firms may reject job offers from more productive firms. A worker who quits to a more productive firm may take a wage cut in anticipation of better wage promotion prospects. Wages within a firm might also increase by a discrete amount at the end of an initial 'probationary' spell

Lagrangian bias in the local bias model

It is often assumed that the halo-patch fluctuation field can be written as a Taylor series in the initial Lagrangian dark matter density fluctuation field. We show that if this Lagrangian bias is local, and the initial conditions are Gaussian, then the two-point cross-correlation between halos and mass should be linearly proportional to the mass-mass auto-correlation function. This statement is exact and valid on all scales; there are no higher order contributions, e.g., from terms proportional to products or convolutions of two-point functions, which one might have thought would appear upon truncating the Taylor series of the halo bias function. In addition, the auto-correlation function of locally biased tracers can be written as a Taylor series in the auto-correlation function of the mass; there are no terms involving, e.g., derivatives or convolutions. Moreover, although the leading order coefficient, the linear bias factor of the auto-correlation function is just the square of that for the cross-correlation, it is the same as that obtained from expanding the mean number of halos as a function of the local density only in the large-scale limit. In principle, these relations allow simple tests of whether or not halo bias is indeed local in Lagrangian space. We discuss why things are more complicated in practice. We also discuss our results in light of recent work on the renormalizability of halo bias, demonstrating that it is better to renormalize than not. We use the Lognormal model to illustrate many of our findings.Comment: 14 pages, published on JCA

Hot and cold spots counts as probes of non-Gaussianity in the CMB

We introduce the numbers of hot and cold spots, $n_h$ and $n_c$, of excursion sets of the CMB temperature anisotropy maps as statistical observables that can discriminate different non-Gaussian models. We numerically compute them from simulations of non-Gaussian CMB temperature fluctuation maps. The first kind of non-Gaussian model we study is the local type primordial non-Gaussianity. The second kind of models have some specific form of the probability distribution function from which the temperature fluctuation value at each pixel is drawn, obtained using HEALPIX. We find the characteristic non-Gaussian deviation shapes of $n_h$ and $n_c$, which is distinct for each of the models under consideration. We further demonstrate that $n_h$ and $n_c$ carry additional information compared to the genus, which is just their linear combination, making them valuable additions to the Minkowski Functionals in constraining non-Gaussianity.Comment: 17 pages, accepted for publication in Ap