92,768 research outputs found
Do people change their buying behavior during crises? Insights from the COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka
Purpose: Panic buying occurs in many countries, including Sri Lanka, due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, leading to inventory shortages, supply chain disruptions, and many problems in the day-to-day lifestyle of people. This is a relatively new and unexplored area of consumer behavior, especially in the Sri Lankan context. Therefore, this study aims to explore consumer panic buying behavior in relation to Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), during the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Sri Lanka.
Design/methodology/approach: Given the scarcity of available literature and the aim of uncovering genuine customer insights, the study used a qualitative methodological approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-five participants selected using the non-probabilistic purposive sampling method in the Western Province, Sri Lanka. Data were analyzed using the thematic analysis approach.
Findings: The study found a change in customers' normal buying behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially at the beginning of the pandemic period. Seven fundamental changes were recognized related to purchasing quantity, mode of purchasing, price sensitivity, shopper, purchasing time, purchasing location, and choice of brands. Additionally, four themes were generated as reasons for adopting such panic buying behavior of FMCG: fear of fear, protective behaviors, social influence, and social trust.
Originality: The study adds new knowledge by identifying changes in consumer purchasing behavior, particularly in a pandemic situation, as well as the reasons for such changes, which is a rare phenomenon in the previous literature.
Implications: The study informs policymakers on how to implement appropriate policies and strategies to deal with panic buying situations. Retailers can use this expertise to effectively address the various demand conditions without disrupting their internal business practices.
Keywords: Panic buying behavior; Pandemic; COVID-19, Sri Lank
Chronic Tomboys: Feminism, Survival, and Paranoia in Jodie Foster’s Body of Work
From Freaky Friday (1976) to Flightplan (2005), Jodie Foster has made a career of defying gender norms–a defiance predicated largely upon her characteristically tomboyish embodiment and a mode of being that combines activeness, visual agency, and a distinctively resistant demeanor that spans her body of work to the extent that one can hardly watch any one of her films without involuntary recourse to her earlier and later movies. This essay takes up David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), which unites tomboy figures of two generations in Foster and Kristen Stewart and works, in light of the former’s corpus and its feminist bent, to refuse the trope that sees tomboyism capitulate to heteronormative strictures in adolescence. Instead, Panic Room reproduces that embodied resistance in an adult through interactions with her daughter. The essay then proceeds further into the films of an iconic tomboy actress to posit a mode of queer feminist reproductivity enacted through Foster’s star image and a recuperation of feminist “paranoia” through the consistent critique of heteronormativity that her aggregate body of work performs. Moreover, it addresses debates within queer theory about time, refuting antisocial currents—the push against “for-the-child” sentiments predominant in contemporary political rhetoric—and proposing an alternative, recursive temporality, and within the field of feminist film studies, demonstrating a subversive potential within commercial narrative film across the span of one Hollywood star’s career
The Impact of RDMA on Agreement
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is becoming widely available in data
centers. This technology allows a process to directly read and write the memory
of a remote host, with a mechanism to control access permissions. In this
paper, we study the fundamental power of these capabilities. We consider the
well-known problem of achieving consensus despite failures, and find that RDMA
can improve the inherent trade-off in distributed computing between failure
resilience and performance. Specifically, we show that RDMA allows algorithms
that simultaneously achieve high resilience and high performance, while
traditional algorithms had to choose one or another. With Byzantine failures,
we give an algorithm that only requires processes (where
is the maximum number of faulty processes) and decides in two (network)
delays in common executions. With crash failures, we give an algorithm that
only requires processes and also decides in two delays. Both
algorithms tolerate a minority of memory failures inherent to RDMA, and they
provide safety in asynchronous systems and liveness with standard additional
assumptions.Comment: Full version of PODC'19 paper, strengthened broadcast algorith
PANIC: A Near-infrared Camera for the Magellan Telescopes
PANIC (Persson's Auxiliary Nasmyth Infrared Camera) is a near-infrared camera
designed to operate at any one of the f/11 folded ports of the 6.5m Magellan
telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument is built around a
simple, all-refractive design that reimages the Magellan focal plane to a plate
scale of 0.125'' pixel^{-1} onto a Rockwell 1024x1024 HgCdTe detector. The
design goals for PANIC included excellent image quality to sample the superb
seeing measured with the Magellan telescopes, high throughput, a relatively
short construction time, and low cost. PANIC has now been in regular operation
for over one year and has proved to be highly reliable and produce excellent
images. The best recorded image quality has been ~0.2'' FWHM.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. To appear in "Astronomical Telescopes and
Instrumentation," Proc SPIE (Glasgow), June 2004. Version with higher
resolution figures is available at
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~pmartini/professional/publications/panic.pd
Market panic on different time-scales
Cross-sectional signatures of market panic were recently discussed on daily
time scales in [1], extended here to a study of cross-sectional properties of
stocks on intra-day time scales. We confirm specific intra-day patterns of
dispersion and kurtosis, and find that the correlation across stocks increases
in times of panic yielding a bimodal distribution for the sum of signs of
returns. We also find that there is memory in correlations, decaying as a power
law with exponent 0.05. During the Flash-Crash of May 6 2010, we find a drastic
increase in dispersion in conjunction with increased correlations. However, the
kurtosis decreases only slightly in contrast to findings on daily time-scales
where kurtosis drops drastically in times of panic. Our study indicates that
this difference in behavior is result of the origin of the panic-inducing
volatility shock: the more correlated across stocks the shock is, the more the
kurtosis will decrease; the more idiosyncratic the shock, the lesser this
effect and kurtosis is positively correlated with dispersion. We also find that
there is a leverage effect for correlations: negative returns tend to precede
an increase in correlations. A stock price feed-back model with skew in
conjunction with a correlation dynamics that follows market volatility explains
our observations nicely
PANIC: the new panoramic NIR camera for Calar Alto
PANIC is a wide-field NIR camera, which is currently under development for
the Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Spain. It uses a mosaic of four Hawaii-2RG
detectors and covers the spectral range from 0.8-2.5 micron(z to K-band). The
field-of-view is 30x30 arcmin. This instrument can be used at the 2.2m
telescope (0.45arcsec/pixel, 0.5x0.5 degree FOV) and at the 3.5m telescope
(0.23arcsec/pixel, 0.25x0.25 degree FOV). The operating temperature is about
77K, achieved by liquid Nitrogen cooling. The cryogenic optics has three flat
folding mirrors with diameters up to 282 mm and nine lenses with diameters
between 130 mm and 255 mm. A compact filter unit can carry up to 19 filters
distributed over four filter wheels. Narrow band (1%) filters can be used. The
instrument has a diameter of 1.1 m and it is about 1 m long. The weight limit
of 400 kg at the 2.2m telescope requires a light-weight cryostat design. The
aluminium vacuum vessel and radiation shield have wall thicknesses of only 6 mm
and 3 mm respectively.Comment: This paper has been presented in the SPIE of Astronomical Telescopes
and Instrumentation 2008 in Marseille (France
The Carnegie Supernova Project: The Low-Redshift Survey
Supernovae are essential to understanding the chemical evolution of the
Universe. Type Ia supernovae also provide the most powerful observational tool
currently available for studying the expansion history of the Universe and the
nature of dark energy. Our basic knowledge of supernovae comes from the study
of their photometric and spectroscopic properties. However, the presently
available data sets of optical and near-infrared light curves of supernovae are
rather small and/or heterogeneous, and employ photometric systems that are
poorly characterized. Similarly, there are relatively few supernovae whose
spectral evolution has been well sampled, both in wavelength and phase, with
precise spectrophotometric observations. The low-redshift portion of the
Carnegie Supernova Project (CSP) seeks to remedy this situation by providing
photometry and spectrophotometry of a large sample of supernovae taken on
telescope/filter/detector systems that are well understood and well
characterized. During a five-year program which began in September 2004, we
expect to obtain high-precision u'g'r'i'BVYJHKs light curves and optical
spectrophotometry for about 250 supernovae of all types. In this paper we
provide a detailed description of the CSP survey observing and data reduction
methodology. In addition, we present preliminary photometry and spectra
obtained for a few representative supernovae during the first observing
campaign.Comment: 45 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, accepted by PAS
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