High-alpine life forms and ecosystems exist at the limits of habitable environments, and thus, are especially sensitive to environmental change. Here we report a recent increase in the elevational limit of anurans following glacial retreat in the tropical Peruvian Andes. Three species have colonized ponds in recently deglaciated terrain at new record elevations for amphibians worldwide (5244-5400 m). Two of these species were also found to be infected with Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), an emerging fungal pathogen causally associated with global amphibian declines, including the disappearance of several Latin American species. The presence of this pathogen was associated with elevated mortality rates of at least one species. These results represent the first evidence of upward expansion of anurans to newly available habitat brought about by recent deglaciation. Furthermore, the large increase in the upper limit of known Bd infections, previously reported as 4112 m in Ecuador, to 5348 m in this study, also expands the spatial domain of potential Bd pathogenicity to encompass virtually all high elevation anuran habitats in the tropical Andes.

Performance improvement is high on the agenda of many companies around the world and with the growing number of improvement models now available care has to be taken to adopt an approach that will yield the most attractive return on investment. This paper compares and contrasts two widely known and wellpublicized improvement models: Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard and the EFQM Excellence Model. Each consists of a non-prescriptive template offering managers a relatively small number of categories of key performance metrics to focus on. Here, they are examined from a critical perspective with regard to ®ve central issues represented by ®ve questions relating to objectives, strategies and plans, target setting, reward structures and information feedback loops. The analysis conducted reveals that despite having some signi®cant differences both approaches seem to be developed from similar concepts. The paper concludes that it is dif®cult to ®nd a perfect match between a company and a performance measurement framework and that further research should concentrate on how to implement strategic performance frameworks effectively in speci®c types of organization.

Proposes that the role of traceability in manufacturing systems is to enable the history of events to be followed and compared with scheduled plans and predefined goals. Tracing techniques can be used to detect system status (status tracing), analyse system performance (performance tracing) and support decision making (goal tracing). Manufacturing systems are conceptualized as having the levels of strategy, planning and design, and operations. There is a need for all three forms of traceability at each manufacturing system level. The traceabilities approach provides a structured, holistic way of thinking about and designing manufacturing information systems which is not constrained by the physical system or by the narrower requirements of a computer management system.

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The preparation of assembly plans for manufactured goods is a major bottleneck in the time it takes to bring many new products to market. Computer aided assembly planning (CAAP) systems have been the subject of considerable research in recent years without achieving significant up-take in manufacturing industry. This paper proposes an alternative approach based on the adoption of immersive virtual reality, which is used here to produce practical downstream manufacturing information. The product is assembled from computer aided design (CAD) models of its components by experienced assembly operators working in a virtual environment. The operators' actions are monitored and assembly sequence plans are automatically generated by the system. In the research described in this paper, the plans produced for an advanced electromechanical product were then used by a second group of participants to demonstrate the functionality of the system in an industrial environment. The development of virtual reality-based assembly planning carries with it the opportunity not only to shorten the product innovation cycle but also to capitalize on the experience of assembly operators and bring this to bear much earlier in the design process.

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This paper presents novel tools to assist manual assembly in an virtual environment. While assembling virtual components, the user's actions are logged and an assembly plan is produced. Prototyping is reduced and concurrency is enhanced using such tools. Successful pilot studies have now been completed.Index terms -virtual reality, assembly planning, manual assembly.