Understanding consumer evaluation criteria for repurchase in a performing arts context

The purpose of this paper is to examine consumers' experience of a performing arts service to identify the predictors of audience behaviour especially as related to positive repurchase intention. Experiential service settings such as the performing arts have been cited in recent research as service contexts that may challenge current theory that repurchase intention is driven by service quality and customer satisfaction. It is posited that consumer emotions and the hedonic nature of the consumption experience may complicate the evaluation process to repurchase intention in a setting such as the performing arts. Qualitative semi-structured indepth interviews were undertaken of twenty-six performing arts consumers using a pool of questions and prompts developed from a review of the extant literature. Transcribed field notes were examined for key words and phrases and data was divided into the main emergent themes related to each of the questions and also coded for confirmation and is-confirmation of the extant literature constructs and relationships. The dimensions of service experience,price, service quality, target goal-directed emotions and non-target appraisal emotions were identified as driving repurchase intention in a performing arts setting. Customer satisfaction in this setting appears to result from emotional factors rather than expectancy dis-confirmation. This research supports the notion that an experiential consumption experience such as the performing arts will challenge the current theory of the drivers of repurchase intention and suggests that a more thorough large scale examination of these dimensions in this service setting is warranted.

SANTIFICAR A JAVÉ UM ESTUDO DE ISAÍAS 8,11-15

Esta pesquisa visa analisar a mensagem de Javé transmitida através do profeta Isaías em meio à guerra siro-efraimita (734-732 a.C.), no tempo do rei Acaz. A primeira parte deste trabalho fornece uma panorâmica histórica da situação tanto internacional quanto nacional da nação de Judá. No meio de sinais de guerras, invasões estrangeiras, desolação e aumento de tributos que acarretam maior insegurança para os setores mais empobrecidos, Javé faz sua aposta pela vida de Israel. Através do oráculo profético mo stra um caminho que pode chegar a subverter a ordem de um injusto sistema político advindo do próprio pecado da nação de Israel. Neste texto, santificar a Javé é a trilha que pode livrar-lhes da queda e da destruição. Santificar a Javé significa cuidar e preservar a vida, especialmente dos mais desprotegidos. Isto implica optar conscientemente por uma nova ordem que garanta uma existência digna para todos e todas. O objetivo desta pesquisa é entender como o conceito de santificação salientado pelo profeta Isaías, na perícope (Is 8,11-15), pode ajudar-nos a superar os problemas cotidianos e fornecer-nos novas posturas éticas para enfrentar a vida, isto é um conceito de santificação que requer do engajamento com o povo, fundamentalmente com a população mais carente e necessitada atualmente. Por meio do trabalho exegético tentamos encontrar respostas escondidas entre palavras, termos e frases, procurando entender o texto em diálogo com a vida cotidiana de seu tempo e do nosso. Este estudo pretende providenciar subsídios para a leitura popular da Bíblia que está sendo realizada por muitos grupos nas igrejas e comunidades cristãs, que buscam novos caminhos, horizontes, sonhos e utopias para continuar a viver em meio de sociedades em crises e de tempos difíceis.(AU)

JAVÉ, O PASTOR QUE ABRIGA EM BELAS PASTAGENS CONTRIBUIÇÃO EXEGÉTICA SOBRE O SALMO 23

Na América Latina temos pouca bibliografia sobre o Salmo 23. No entanto, contamos com alguns pesquisadores que podem dialogar academicamente com cientistas europeus sobre nosso objeto de estudo. Apesar do grande atrativo deste texto no mundo pastoral de nosso continente, o aporte exegético deste Salmo estava em dívida, o que se tem convertido numa de nossa justificação científica para o estudo do Salmo 23. O Salmo 23 se incrusta dentro do saltério. É poesia hebraica, a que se caracteriza pela repetição do sentido de suas frases. Seu conteúdo está nas entrelinhas pelo uso freqüente de imagens, símbolos e figuras. Por estas e outras razões é difícil assinalar sua data de origem, mas deve ser pré-exílico. Nosso texto revela, como lugar vital, uma comunidade litúrgica. Essa comunidade está localizada no templo de Jerusalém. Ali se encontram, por sua vez, sacerdotes, levitas, intelectuais orgânicos; enfim, pessoas que têm testemunhado de perto a controvérsia de uma pessoa refugiada no templo, a que tem achado no santuário um lugar de amparo. Desde aqui deduzimos que o Salmo 23 foi escrito por alguém de sensibilidade poética, inspirado na vida do asilado. O salmista tem experimentado os cuidados de Javé. Ali, no templo, na área do reino de Javé, seus ameaçadores não podem capturá-lo. Os motivos de perseguição podem sugerir assuntos de dívidas e, ao mesmo tempo, assuntos de justiça. Uma vez no santuário, não carece de nada, porque seu pastor/rei lhe fornece o que precisa, isto é, comida, bebida, proteção, segurança, dignidade e fraternidade. Os agressores são testemunhas do estado de felicidade de seu inimigo, mas não podem fazer-lhe nada. Por isso o salmista, não teme e, na presença de Javé, encontra seu consolo. Javé, como pastor/rei, hospeda a seu protegido. Pela inocência reconhecida do refugiado, nasce o ambiente de festa, porque a comunidade litúrgica celebra a salvação alcançada. As graças recebidas têm para o salmista uma repercussão comunitária, o bem e a solidariedade que experimentou voltarão aos que o circundam, não por obrigação e sim por gratidão. Por assuntos de segurança e agradecimento o salmista deseja permanecer na casa de Javé.(AU)

DROGAS E ALUNOS USUÁRIOS DE DROGAS NA ESCOLA: ESTUDO DE REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS DE PROFESSORES DO ENSINO MÉDIO DA REDE ESTADUAL DE SÃO PAULO

Este estudo apresenta uma discussão a respeito de drogas e de alunos usuários de drogas na escola, explorando as Representações Sociais manifestadas por professores que atuam na Rede Estadual de São Paulo, no ensino Médio. O estudo resgata aspectos históricos e sociais que influenciaram representações sociais sobre drogas em diferentes contextos da sociedade, na perspectiva de buscar compreender a maneira como atualmente elas se apresentam. Discute aspectos conceituais da Teoria das Representações Sociais a partir de Moscovici, considerando contribuições de Jodelet, e outros autores. Os dados coletados por meio de questionários e entrevistas foram analisados com o auxílio de dois softwares, o ALCESTE para análise lexical e o EVOC para análise de associação de palavras ou expressões, em articulação com uma análise de conteúdo clássica sugerida por Maria Laura Puglisi Barbosa Franco. O resultado identificou que as representações sociais sobre drogas na escola e alunos usuários estão ancoradas no modo como a grande mídia trata o tema, de forma alarmista e sensacionalista, influenciando grande parte dos professores que associa drogas na escola à violência. Verificou-se ainda que objetivação do aluno usuário de drogas é simbolizada como doença e que o grupo pesquisado segue as representações sociais há muito tempo estruturadas na sociedade, tendo a normalidade como sinônimo de saúde e a drogadição como condição desviante, decorrente de patologias. Assim, espera-se estar contribuindo para a reflexão sobre o uso e abuso de drogas nas escolas, um tema indispensável e que precisa ser enfrentado para construir-se uma via que leve a uma Educação justa e democrática.(AU)

Author identification, idiolect and linguistic uniqueness

For forty years linguists have talked about idiolect and the uniqueness of individual utterances. This article explores how far these two concepts can be used to answer certain questions about the authorship of written documents—for instance how similar can two student essays be before one begins to suspect plagiarism? The article examines two ways of measuring similarity: the proportion of shared vocabulary and the number and length of shared phrases, and illustrates with examples drawn from both actual criminal court cases and incidents of student plagiarism. The article ends by engaging with Solan and Tiersma's contribution to this volume and considering whether such forensic linguistic evidence would be acceptable in American courts as well as how it might successfully be presented to a lay audience.

Lexical database enrichment through semi-automated morphological analysis

Derivational morphology proposes meaningful connections between words and is largely unrepresented in lexical databases. This thesis presents a project to enrich a lexical database with morphological links and to evaluate their contribution to disambiguation. A lexical database with sense distinctions was required. WordNet was chosen because of its free availability and widespread use. Its suitability was assessed through critical evaluation with respect to specifications and criticisms, using a transparent, extensible model. The identification of serious shortcomings suggested a portable enrichment methodology, applicable to alternative resources. Although 40% of the most frequent words are prepositions, they have been largely ignored by computational linguists, so addition of prepositions was also required. The preferred approach to morphological enrichment was to infer relations from phenomena discovered algorithmically. Both existing databases and existing algorithms can capture regular morphological relations, but cannot capture exceptions correctly; neither of them provide any semantic information. Some morphological analysis algorithms are subject to the fallacy that morphological analysis can be performed simply by segmentation. Morphological rules, grounded in observation and etymology, govern associations between and attachment of suffixes and contribute to defining the meaning of morphological relationships. Specifying character substitutions circumvents the segmentation fallacy. Morphological rules are prone to undergeneration, minimised through a variable lexical validity requirement, and overgeneration, minimised by rule reformulation and restricting monosyllabic output. Rules take into account the morphology of ancestor languages through co-occurrences of morphological patterns. Multiple rules applicable to an input suffix need their precedence established. The resistance of prefixations to segmentation has been addressed by identifying linking vowel exceptions and irregular prefixes. The automatic affix discovery algorithm applies heuristics to identify meaningful affixes and is combined with morphological rules into a hybrid model, fed only with empirical data, collected without supervision. Further algorithms apply the rules optimally to automatically pre-identified suffixes and break words into their component morphemes. To handle exceptions, stoplists were created in response to initial errors and fed back into the model through iterative development, leading to 100% precision, contestable only on lexicographic criteria. Stoplist length is minimised by special treatment of monosyllables and reformulation of rules. 96% of words and phrases are analysed. 218,802 directed derivational links have been encoded in the lexicon rather than the wordnet component of the model because the lexicon provides the optimal clustering of word senses. Both links and analyser are portable to an alternative lexicon. The evaluation uses the extended gloss overlaps disambiguation algorithm. The enriched model outperformed WordNet in terms of recall without loss of precision. Failure of all experiments to outperform disambiguation by frequency reflects on WordNet sense distinctions.

A lifetime of language experience at each click!

Native speakers learn their mother tongue slowly, from birth, by the constant repetition of common words and phrases in a variety of contexts and situations, within the language community. As foreign language learners, we face considerable disadvantages when compared to children learning their mother tongue. Foreign language learners start later in life, have less time, have fewer opportunities to experience the language, and learn in the restricted environment of the classroom. Teachers and books give us information about many words and phrases, but it is difficult for us to know what we need to focus on and learn thoroughly, and what is less important. The rules and explanations are often difficult for us to understand. A large language corpus represents roughly the amount and variety of language that a native-speaker experiences in a whole lifetime. Learners can now access language corpora. We can check which words and phrases are important, and quickly discover their common meanings, collocations, and structural patterns. It is easier to remember things that we find out ourselves, rather than things that teachers or books tell us. Each click on the computer keyboard can show us the same information in different ways, so we can understand it more easily. We can also get many more examples from a corpus. Teachers and native-speakers can also use corpora, to confirm and enhance their own knowledge of a language, and prepare exercises to guide their students. Each of us can learn at our own level and at our own speed.

Authority in the classroom: dictionaries and corpora, COBUILD and the Bank of English

Language learners ask a variety of questions about words and their meanings and uses: “What does X mean? What is the word for X in English? Can you say X? When do you use X and when do you use Y (e.g. synonyms, grammatical structures, prepositional choices, variant phrases, etc)?”

Privatization : problems of implementation in Egypt

This study aims to investigate to what extent the views of the managers of the enterprises to be privatized are a barrier to smooth implementation of privatization as opposed to other problems. Accordingly, the research tackles two main issues: Identification and analysis of the major problems encountered in the implementation of the Egyptian privatization programme and at which level these problems exist while proposing different approaches to tackle them; and views of public sector top and middle-level managers regarding the main issues of privatization. The study relies upon a literature survey, interviews with stakeholders, a survey of managers' attitudes and several illustrative case studies. A model of "good practice" for the smooth and effective implementation of privatization has been designed. Practice in Egypt has then been studied and compared with the "good practice" model. Lack of strictness and firmness in implementing the announced privatization programme has been found to be a characteristic of Egyptian practice. This is partly attributable to the inadequacy of the programme and partly to the different obstacles to implementation. The main obstacles are doubtful desirability of privatization on the part of the managers at different implementation levels, resistance of stakeholders, in adequately of the legal framework governing privatization, redundant labour, lack of an efficient monitoring system allowing for accountability, inefficient marketing of privatization, ineffective communication, insufficient information at different levels and problems related to valuation and selling procedures. A large part of the thesis is concerned with SOE (State Owned Enterprise) managers' attitudes on and understanding of the privatization (appraised through surveys). Although most managers have stated their acceptance of privatization, many of their responses show that they do not accept selling SOEs. They understand privatization to include enterprise reform and restructuring, changing procedures and giving more authority to company executives, but not necessarily as selling SOEs. The majority of managers still see many issues that have to be addressed for smooth implementation of privatization e.g. insufficiency of information, incompleteness of legal framework, restructuring and labour problems. The main contribution to knowledge of this thesis is the study of problems of implementing privatization in developing countries especially managers' resistance to privatization as a major change, partly because of the threat it poses and partly because of the lack of understanding of privatization and implications of operating private businesses. A programme of persuading managers and offsetting the unfavourable effects is recommended as an outcome of the study. Five different phrases and words for the national Index to theses are: Egypt, privatization, implementation of privatization, problems of implementing privatization and managers' attitudes towards privatization.

The servitization of manufacturing:a review of literature and reflection on future challenges

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the state-of-the-art of servitization by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on the topic. The paper aims to define the servitization concept, report on its origin, features and drivers and give examples of its adoption along with future research challenges. Design/methodology/approach – In determining the scope of this study, the focus is on articles that are central and relevant to servitization within a wider manufacturing context. The methodology consists of identifying relevant publication databases, searching these using a wide range of key words and phrases associated with servitization, and then fully reviewing each article in turn. The key findings and their implications for research are all described. Findings – Servitization is the innovation of an organisation's capabilities and processes to shift from selling products to selling integrated products and services that deliver value in use. There are a diverse range of servitization examples in the literature. These tend to emphasize the potential to maintain revenue streams and improve profitability. Practical implications – Servitization does not represent a panacea for manufactures. However, it is a concept of significant potential value, providing routes for companies to move up the value chain and exploit higher value business activities. There is little work to date that can be used to help practitioners. Originality/value – This paper provides a useful review of servitization and a platform on which to base more in-depth research into the broader topic of service-led competitive strategy by drawing on the work from other related research communities.

A statistical analysis of regional variation in adverb position in a corpus of written Standard American English

This paper investigates whether the position of adverb phrases in sentences is regionally patterned in written Standard American English, based on an analysis of a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the United States. Seven measures of adverb position were tested for regional patterns using the global spatial autocorrelation statistic Moran’s I and the local spatial autocorrelation statistic Getis-Ord Gi*. Three of these seven measures were indentified as exhibiting significant levels of spatial autocorrelation, contrasting the language of the Northeast with language of the Southeast and the South Central states. These results demonstrate that continuous regional grammatical variation exists in American English and that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard English.

Learning higher-level features with convolutional restricted Boltzmann machines for sentiment analysis

In recent years, learning word vector representations has attracted much interest in Natural Language Processing. Word representations or embeddings learned using unsupervised methods help addressing the problem of traditional bag-of-word approaches which fail to capture contextual semantics. In this paper we go beyond the vector representations at the word level and propose a novel framework that learns higher-level feature representations of n-grams, phrases and sentences using a deep neural network built from stacked Convolutional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (CRBMs). These representations have been shown to map syntactically and semantically related n-grams to closeby locations in the hidden feature space. We have experimented to additionally incorporate these higher-level features into supervised classifier training for two sentiment analysis tasks: subjectivity classification and sentiment classification. Our results have demonstrated the success of our proposed framework with 4% improvement in accuracy observed for subjectivity classification and improved the results achieved for sentiment classification over models trained without our higher level features.

Summarization of scientific documents by detecting common facts in citations

Reading scientific articles is more time-consuming than reading news because readers need to search and read many citations. This paper proposes a citation guided method for summarizing multiple scientific papers. A phenomenon we can observe is that citation sentences in one paragraph or section usually talk about a common fact, which is usually represented as a set of noun phrases co-occurring in citation texts and it is usually discussed from different aspects. We design a multi-document summarization system based on common fact detection. One challenge is that citations may not use the same terms to refer to a common fact. We thus use term association discovering algorithm to expand terms based on a large set of scientific article abstracts. Then, citations can be clustered based on common facts. The common fact is used as a salient term set to get relevant sentences from the corresponding cited articles to form a summary. Experiments show that our method outperforms three baseline methods by ROUGE metric.©2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Editorial

Full text: There are phrases in daily use today which were not so common a decade or so back, such as ‘ageing population’ or ‘climate changes’ or ‘emerging markets’ or even ‘social networking’. How do these things affect our lives is certainly interesting but for us as eye care practitioners how these changes affect our clinical work may be also relevant and sometimes more interesting. A recent advertisement for recruitment to the Royal Marine Corps of the British Army ended with a comment ‘find us on Facebook!’ The BCLA, IACLE and other organisations as well as many manufacturers have their own Facebook groups. In 2011 Chandni Thakkar was awarded the BCLA summer studentship and her project was based around increasing the contact lens business of a small independent optometric practice where contact lens sales were minimal. The practice typically recruited one new wearer per month. Chandni was able to increase the number of new patient fits with various strategies (her work was presented as poster at the 2012 BCLA conference in Birmingham). One of her strategies was to start a Facebook group and 655 joined the special group she started in just over a month. Interestingly she found that the largest single factor in convincing patients to trial contact lenses was recommendation by the eye care practitioner at the end of the examination, but nonetheless it is interesting that so many people used the social networking site to find out more information regarding contact lenses in her study. Moreover, we already see the use, by some practitioners, of smart phone ‘apps’ or electronic diaries or text messages when coordinating patient check-ups. Climate change has affected the way we think and act; we now leave out special recycle bins and we hope that the items that are recyclable are actually recycled and do not just join our other refuse somewhere down the track! How environmentally friendly are contact lenses? This was discussed by various speakers at this year's BCLA conference in Birmingham. Daily disposable lenses surely produce more contact lens waste but do not involve solutions in plastic bottles like monthly lenses. It is certainly something that manufacturers are taking seriously and of course there are environmental benefits but the cynic in each of us sees the marketing potential too. The way the ageing population is certainly something that will impact all healthcare providers. In the case of eye care with people living longer they will need refractive corrections for longer. Furthermore, since presbyopes are not resigning themselves to only gentle hobbies like knitting and gardening, but instead want to continue playing tennis or skiing or whatever, their visual demands are becoming more complex. This is certainly an area that contact lens manufacturers are focussing on (pun not intended!). Again the BCLA conference in Birmingham saw the launch of various new products by different companies to help us deal with our presbyopic contact lens wearers. It is great to have such choice and now with fitting methods becoming easier too we have no excuse not to try them out with our clients. Finally to emerging markets – well there was not a specific session at the BCLA conference in May discussing this but this most certainly would have been discussed by professional services managers and marketing directors of most of the contact lens companies. ‘How will we conquer China?’ ‘How can we increase our market share in Russia?’ Or ‘How should we spend our marketing budget in India?’ These topics as well as others would certainly have cropped up in backroom discussions. Certainly groups like IACLE (International Association of CL Educators) have increasing numbers of members and activities in developing markets to ensure that educators educate, to that practitioners can practice successfully and in turn patients can become successful contact lenses wearers. Companies also wish to increase their market share in these developing markets and from the point of view of CLAE we are certainly seeing more papers being submitted from these parts of the world. The traditional centres of knowledge are being challenged, I suppose as they have been throughout history, and this can only be a good thing for the pursuit of science. The BCLA conference in Birmingham welcomed more international visitors than ever, and from more countries, and long may that continue. Similarly, CLAE looks forward to a wider audience in years to come and a wider network of authors too.

Practitioner perspectives on supply chain management and logistics:a study from the United Kingdom

Purpose: The focus of this paper is the evolution of supply chain management (SCM) and logistics, as well as of the relationship between them. Its purpose is to generate deep insights into practice, particularly in relation to the fundamental issue of how practitioners define these key terms and phrases. Research approach: A largely qualitative study which involved in depth interviews with managers from two third party logistics providers (3PLs)/distributors, two retailers and two manufacturers from the United Kingdom. This interview protocol is based on the template used in a previous study published over a decade ago. Findings and originality: The data collected during the focussed interviews in the United Kingdom is contrasted with results from the earlier study. The findings suggest that there is variation between practitioners particularly in relation to what SCM is specifically concerned with. This variation mirrors to a large extent the differing orientations and emphases evident in the many theoretical definitions of SCM that have been proposed in recent decades. Research impact: The authors introduced the concept of refined replication in SCM research. This allows previous research to be built upon in order to test understanding of SCM theory and its practical implementation among SCM professionals in the United Kingdom. Practical impact: A profile of SCM understanding and adoption by firms in the United Kingdom is presented .