Major problems of organic farming – experience transmission

As a very particular agricultural system organic farming encounters many problems. Some of these problems are common to several countries where organic farming is applied. On that ground it might be useful to compare condition and levels of organic farming in more countries, find its common problems and thanks to experience transmission try to eliminate some of these problems preventively. Mutual comparison of organic farming in the Czech Republic with organic farming in Austria and actual conditions assessment provide to determine main problems of organic farming in both countries. Within the framework of analysis of organic farming several general problems of organic farming in both countries were defined, e. g. lower yields and higher costs per production unit or legislative restrictions. At the same time for the Czech republic were defined major problems related to agricultural and socioekonomic differences (e. g. dual characteristics of farm size, high share of imported bioproduction) and for Austria (high prices of bioproducts, lower rate of conversion to organic farming) and proposed suitable solutions based on experience of partnership country. If the number of partnership countries with differentially developed organic farming was broaden and there was defined common problems and aims for organic farming in general it might be a very important step for simplification and acceleration of its development

Trends in quality management research in higher education institutions

The purpose of this study is to determine the state of research in quality management in higher education institutions based on a review of the academic literature. The aim is to provide universities with the best evidence for informing their focus and models for quality improvement. Despite quality’s role growing in importance as universities strive to compete in an increasingly underfunded market for students and research funds the review shows that current research is limited in volume and scope. To ensure the widest coverage in our systematic literature review we use three databases: ScienceDirect, ABI/Inform, and Emerald. The findings show that the three most common topics are quality management implementation issues, quality management models, techniques and tools, and quality management dimensions. The key quality management enabling dimensions found are: people management, process management and information and analysis, while the results dimension is predominantly focused on an understanding of stakeholders’ requirements and feedback on their perceptions of performance. We find in this literature that students are discussed as both end customers as graduates and participants in the learning process who have views on their experience. Also provided is an analysis that shows popular journal outlets, research methodologies used and country focus. The paper concludes with recommendations for the development of quality management for universities, and a future research agenda. This article is the first literature of research in quality management in Higher Education Institutions following the model used in previous literature reviews on quality management and operations management

From Measurement to Management: the Influence of IT on Service Operations

The state of service management practice and the developments in IT-efficiency research prompt the call for managerial relevance, normative theory building and the conceptualization and measurement of the impact of Information Technology (IT) on service efficiency. Drawing on theoretical insights from economic and behavioral literature, this article deduces a work system centered model of the service outlet and proposes a measurement methodology (ITIMPACT) geared towards the development of a business intelligence tool. The measurement follows a two-step methodology that first assesses compared-to-best efficiency, using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and subsequently explains efficiency differences using a regression framework. An inter-disciplinary approach bases the first step on econometric logic, while the second takes its foundation in behavioral sciences, and information system research.Service industry;

Emotion Recognition from Acted and Spontaneous Speech

Dizertační práce se zabývá rozpoznáním emočního stavu mluvčích z řečového signálu. Práce je rozdělena do dvou hlavních častí, první část popisuju navržené metody pro rozpoznání emočního stavu z hraných databází. V rámci této části jsou představeny výsledky rozpoznání použitím dvou různých databází s různými jazyky. Hlavními přínosy této části je detailní analýza rozsáhlé škály různých příznaků získaných z řečového signálu, návrh nových klasifikačních architektur jako je například „emoční párování“ a návrh nové metody pro mapování diskrétních emočních stavů do dvou dimenzionálního prostoru. Druhá část se zabývá rozpoznáním emočních stavů z databáze spontánní řeči, která byla získána ze záznamů hovorů z reálných call center. Poznatky z analýzy a návrhu metod rozpoznání z hrané řeči byly využity pro návrh nového systému pro rozpoznání sedmi spontánních emočních stavů. Jádrem navrženého přístupu je komplexní klasifikační architektura založena na fúzi různých systémů. Práce se dále zabývá vlivem emočního stavu mluvčího na úspěšnosti rozpoznání pohlaví a návrhem systému pro automatickou detekci úspěšných hovorů v call centrech na základě analýzy parametrů dialogu mezi účastníky telefonních hovorů.Doctoral thesis deals with emotion recognition from speech signals. The thesis is divided into two main parts; the first part describes proposed approaches for emotion recognition using two different multilingual databases of acted emotional speech. The main contributions of this part are detailed analysis of a big set of acoustic features, new classification schemes for vocal emotion recognition such as “emotion coupling” and new method for mapping discrete emotions into two-dimensional space. The second part of this thesis is devoted to emotion recognition using multilingual databases of spontaneous emotional speech, which is based on telephone records obtained from real call centers. The knowledge gained from experiments with emotion recognition from acted speech was exploited to design a new approach for classifying seven emotional states. The core of the proposed approach is a complex classification architecture based on the fusion of different systems. The thesis also examines the influence of speaker’s emotional state on gender recognition performance and proposes system for automatic identification of successful phone calls in call center by means of dialogue features.

Organizing for Service Innovation: Best-Practice or Configurations?

In this paper we contrast the notions of best-practice and configurations contingent on environmental conditions. The analysis draws upon our study of 38 UK and 70 US service firms which includes an assessment of the organization, processes, tools and systems used, and how these factors influence variation in the development and delivery of new services. The best-practice framework is found to be predictive of performance improvement in samples in both the UK and USA, but the model better fits the USA than UK data. We analyze the UK data to identify alternative configurations. Four system configurations are identified: project-based; mass customization; cellular; and organic-technical. Each has a different combination of organization, processes, tools and systems which offer different performance advantages. The results provide an opportunity for updating the typologies of operations and adapting them to include services, and begin to challenge the notion of any universal 'best practice' management or organization of new product or service development.service industry, performance improvement, best-practice, alternative system configurations