Survival in a Declining Industry: The Case of Baseball Cards

The baseball card industry provides a case study of survival in a declining industry. The case study shows how manufacturers have varied their strategic behavior in response to changes that have occurred within the industry in the last 20 years. This is in stark contrast to most of the existing theoretical literature on behavior in declining industries, which assumes that behavior remains constant throughout the decline phase of an industry.Declining industry, case study, baseball cards

Archivists and Historians: A View from the United States

Considers the debate about the relationship of history and archives and archivists by examining the mission of the archival profession, the nature of archival theory and knowledge, and, as a case study, the career of Lester J. Cappon (1900-1981) as both historian and archivist

Mozart's Tempo-System

A reference book for the musician’s practical work of interpretation, this volume, after a general presentation of 18th century principles for determining a tempo, offers a compendium of all Mozart’s autograph tempo markings in 420 lists of pieces of similar character. Thus, a comparison of slower and quicker movements is made possible by 434 music examples, and there follows a wide-ranging collection of relevant texts taken from historical sources. The book does not claim to know “the single correct tempo” for the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It hopes to be of assistance in the unavoidable search by every interpreter for the “true mouvement” of each work—for the work itself, for the performer, the instrument or instruments, the room, the public, the nature of the event. It follows that there can be no absolutely “authentic” tempo for Mozart’s works. And yet his tempo markings, since he chose them so meticulously, should be taken equally seriously with the other parameters of his famously precise notation. Alfred Brendel writes: “an astonishing opus … one of those rare and important books in which music and musicology form a vital association; a lifelong study that makes one very much aware of a field to which attention is rarely paid. It accomplishes this by bringing to bear an understanding that never loses sight of the musical foundation on which it is built, and by a discerning intelligence that does not shy away from raising debatable topics, although without ever claiming infallibility … One cannot be grateful enough to Helmut Breidenstein for his methodological accuracy which allows us Mozart interpreters to orientate ourselves with ease and pleasure … His book sharpens our perception, at the same time giving an overview and making us sensitive to each individual case. Admiration and gratitude.

The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer

Classification of Arabic Autograph as Genuine ‎And Forged through a Combination of New ‎Attribute Extraction Techniques

تقترح هذه الدراسة إطارا جديدا لتقنية التحقق من التوقيع العربي. وهو يستخلص بعض السمات الديناميكية للتمييز بين التوقيعات المزورة والحقيقية. لهذا الغرض، يستخدم هذا الإطار التكيف وضعية النافذة لاستخراج تفرد من الموقعين في التوقيع بخط اليد والخصائص المحددة من الموقعين. وبناء على هذا الإطار، تقسم التوقيعات العربية أولا إلى نوافذ 14 × 14؛ كل جزء واسع بما فيه الكفاية لإدخال معلومات وافية عن أنماط الموقعين وصغيرة بما فيه الكفاية للسماح بالمعالجة السريعة. ثم، تم اقتراح نوعين من الميزات على أساس تحويل جيب التمام المنفصل، تحويل المويجة المنفصلة لاستخلاص الميزات من المنطقة ذات الاهتمام. وأخيرا، يتم اختيار شجرة القرار لتصنيف التوقيعات باستخدام الميزات المذكورة كمدخلات لها. وتجرى التقييمات على التوقيعات العربية. وكانت النتائج مشجعة جدا مع معدل تحقق 99.75٪ لاختيار سلسلة من للتوقيعات المزورة والحقيقية للتوقيعات العربية التي تفوقت بشكل ملحوظ على أحدث الأعمال في هذا المجالThis study proposes a new framework for an Arabic autograph verification technique. It extracts certain dynamic attributes to distinguish between forged and genuine signatures. For this aim, this framework uses Adaptive Window Positioning to extract the uniqueness of signers in handwritten signatures and the specific characteristics of signers. Based on this framework, Arabic autograph are first divided into 14X14 windows; each fragment is wide enough to include sufficient information about signers’ styles and small enough to allow fast processing. Then, two types of fused attributes based on Discrete Cosine Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform of region of interest have been proposed for attributes extraction. Finally, the Decision Tree is chosen to classify the autographs using the previous attributes as its input. The evaluations are carried out on the Arabic autograph. The results are very encouraging with verification rate 99.75% for sequential selection of forged and genuine autographs for Arabic autograph that significantly outperformed the most recent work in this fiel

Computations by fly-automata beyond monadic second-order logic

We present logically based methods for constructing XP and FPT graph algorithms, parametrized by tree-width or clique-width. We will use fly-automata introduced in a previous article. They make possible to check properties that are not monadic second-order expressible because their states may include counters, so that their sets of states may be infinite. We equip these automata with output functions, so that they can compute values associated with terms or graphs. Rather than new algorithmic results we present tools for constructing easily certain dynamic programming algorithms by combining predefined automata for basic functions and properties.Comment: Accepted for publication in Theoretical Computer Scienc