Discriminating between primary school students with high and low self-esteem.

From an initial sample of 747 primary school students, the top 16 percent (n =116) with high self-esteem (HSE) and the bottom 15 percent (n = I1 I) with low selfesteem (LSE) were se/eeted. These two groups were then compared on personal and classroom variables. Significant differences were found for all personal (self-talk, selfconcepts) and classroom (teacher feedback, praise, teacher-student relationship, and classroom environment) variables. Students with HSE scored more highly on all variables. Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA) was then used to determine which variables discriminated between these two groups of students. Learner self-concept, positive and negative self-talk, classroom environment, and effort feedback were the best discriminators of students with high and low self-esteem. Implications for educational psychologists and teachers are discussed.

An interview with Professor David Held : exploring the concepts of cosmopolitanism and democracy

David Held is the Graham Wallace Chair in Political Science, and co-director of LSE Global Governance, at the London School of Economics. He is the author of many works, such as Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (2010); The Cosmopolitanism Reader (2010), with Garrett Brown; Globalisation/AntiGlobalisation (2007), Models of Democracy (2006), Global Covenant (2004) and Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (1999). Professor Held is also the co-founder, alongside Lord Professor Anthony Giddens, of Polity Press. Professor Held is widely known for his work concerning cosmopolitan theory, democracy, and social, political and economic global improvement. His Global Policy Journal endeavours to marry academic developments with practitioner realities, and contributes to the understanding and improvement of our governing systems.

Provision of customer knowledge to supply chains

Knowledge about customers is vital for supply chains in order to ensure customer satisfaction. In an ideal supply chain environment, supply chain partners are able to perform planning tasks collaboratively, because they share information. However, customers are not always able or willing to share information with their suppliers. End consumers, on the one hand, do not usually provide a retail company with demand information. On the other hand, industrial customers might consciously hide information. Wherever a supply chain is not provided with demand forecast information, it needs to derive these demand forecasts by other means. Customer Relationship Management provides a set of tools to overcome informational uncertainty. We show how CRM and SCM information can be integrated on the conceptual as well as technical levels in order to provide supply chain managers with relevant information.

An ontology-based service discovery approach for the provisioning of product-service bundles

More and more traditional manufacturing companies form or join inter-organizational networks to bundle their physical products with related services to offer superior value propositions to their customers. Some of these product-related services can be digitized completely and thus fully delivered electronically. Other services require the physical integration of external factors, but can still be coordinated electronically. In both cases companies and consumers face the problem of discovering appropriate product-related service offerings in the network or market. Based on ideas from the web service discovery discipline we propose a meet-in-the-middle approach between heavy-weight semantic technologies and simple boolean search to address this issue. Our approach is able to consider semantic relations in service descriptions and queries and thus delivers better results than syntax-based search. However – unlike most semantic approaches – it does not require the use of any formal language for semantic markup and thus requires less resources and skills for both service providers and consumers. To fully realize the potentials of the proposed approach a domain ontology is needed. In this research-in-progress paper we construct such an ontology for the domain of product-service bundles through analysis and synthesis of related work on service description. This will serve as an anchor for future research to iteratively improve and evaluate the ontology through collaborative design efforts and practical application.

Lower partial moment and information entropy-based dynamic electricity purchasing strategy

In the electricity market environment, load-serving entities (LSEs) will inevitably face risks in purchasing electricity because there are a plethora of uncertainties involved. To maximize profits and minimize risks, LSEs need to develop an optimal strategy to reasonably allocate the purchased electricity amount in different electricity markets such as the spot market, bilateral contract market, and options market. Because risks originate from uncertainties, an approach is presented to address the risk evaluation problem by the combined use of the lower partial moment and information entropy (LPME). The lower partial moment is used to measure the amount and probability of the loss, whereas the information entropy is used to represent the uncertainty of the loss. Electricity purchasing is a repeated procedure; therefore, the model presented represents a dynamic strategy. Under the chance-constrained programming framework, the developed optimization model minimizes the risk of the electricity purchasing portfolio in different markets because the actual profit of the LSE concerned is not less than the specified target under a required confidence level. Then, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to solve the optimization model. Finally, a sample example is used to illustrate the basic features of the developed model and method.

A critical success factors model for enterprise resource planning implementation

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are integrated enterprise-wide standard information systems that automate all aspects of an organisations’ business processes. The ERP philosophy is that business systems incorporating sales, marketing, manufacturing, distribution, personnel and finance modules can be supported by a single integrated system with all of the company’s data captured in a central database. The ERP packages of vendors such as SAP, Baan, J.D. Edwards and Intentia represent more than a common systems platform for a business. They prescribe information blueprints of how organisation’s business processes should operate. In this paper, the scale and strategic importance of ERP systems is identified and the problem of ERP implementation is defined. Five company examples are analysed using a Critical Success Factors (CSFs) theoretical framework. The paper offers a framework for managers which provides the basis for developing an ERP implementation strategy. The case analysis identifies different approaches to ERP implementation, highlights the critical role of legacy systems in influencing the implementation process, and identifies the importance of business process change and software configuration in addition to factors already cited in the literature such as top management support and communication. The implications of the results and future research opportunities are outlined.

The good, the bad, and the efficient: Productivity, efficiency, and technical change in the airline industry, 2004–11

This study models the joint production of desirable and undesirable output production (that is, CO2 emissions) of airlines. The Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index is employed to measure productivity growth when undesirable output production is incorporated into the production model. The results show that pollution abatement activities of airlines lowers productivity growth, which suggests that the traditional approach of measuring productivity growth, which ignores CO2 emissions, overstates ‘true’ productivity growth. The reliability of the results is also tested and verified using confidence intervals based on bootstrapping.