Cognitive and cultural proximity between service managers and customers in cross border regions: knowledge transfer implications

Knowledge transfer between customers and managers is an important source of new ideas for innovation in the service industries. In cross border regions, inter-cultural interactions engender but also constrain knowledge transfers between actors even when actors share similar economic and technological knowledge bases. This theme is explored through an analysis of cognitive and cultural proximity between service managers and customers from “the other side” in a European cross border region where the constituent regions have broadly similar national cultures: Tornio-Haparanda on the border between Finland and Sweden. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with Swedish and Finnish managers of small and micro businesses serving customers from both sides were undertaken to gauge their perceptions of the impact of cultural and cognitive proximity to customers on learning interactions. The study adds to the emerging literature in this field by identifying seven elements of cognitive and cultural proximity including mentality, ways of solving problems, conservatism, shared language, focus on contextualized details, mentality and use of similar technologies. It is also original for the implications of perceived cultural and cognitive proximity on cross border knowledge transfer between customers and managers

Authenticity and place attachment of major visitor attractions

This paper aims to explore the relationships between place attachment and perceived authenticity of major visitor attractions. The empirical study was conducted with a sample of international tourists to major visitor attractions in two capital cities, Helsinki, Finland and Jerusalem, Israel. The results indicate a positive correlation between place attachment and authenticity. Major visitor attractions located in places with considerable heritage experience value are considered more authentic, and that authenticity of visitor attractions is influenced by place attachment moderated by iconicity and heritage value of the destination region. These findings provide insight to the ways tourists perceive authenticity of visitor attractions and highlight the importance of the heritage value of tourism destinations for strategic planning and marketing purposes

Back to ABCs: Clustering Alphabetically, Rather than Semantically, EnhancesVocabulary Learning

Optimizing the study of vocabulary words for high-stakes tests such as the SAT or GRE prep can beproblematic, given that many words are semantically,orthographically, or phonologically confusable. Companiesmarketing test preparation programs make multiplerecommendations, such as clustering words on some basis,but little research has been carried out to examine what thatbasis should be. Across two experiments, we compare theefficacy of different types of clustering—categorical,alphabetical, and confusable--for the learning ofsemantically related words (Experiment 1) and confusablewords (Experiment 2). We demonstrate that, in contrastto most learners’ intuitions, an alphabetical sequence yieldssuperior learning

Discrete phase-space structure of nn-qubit mutually unbiased bases

We work out the phase-space structure for a system of $n$ qubits. We replace the field of real numbers that label the axes of the continuous phase space by the finite field \Gal{2^n} and investigate the geometrical structures compatible with the notion of unbiasedness. These consist of bundles of discrete curves intersecting only at the origin and satisfying certain additional properties. We provide a simple classification of such curves and study in detail the four- and eight-dimensional cases, analyzing also the effect of local transformations. In this way, we provide a comprehensive phase-space approach to the construction of mutually unbiased bases for $n$ qubits.Comment: Title changed. Improved version. Accepted for publication in Annals of Physic

The relationship between mental toughness and cognitive control: evidence from the item-method directed forgetting task

Previous research by the authors found that mental toughness, as measured by the Mental Toughness Questionnaire 48 (MTQ48; Clough, P.J., Earle, K., & Sewell, D. [2002]. Mental toughness: the concept and its measurement. In I. Cockerill (Ed.), Solutions in sport psychology [pp. 32–43]. London: Thomson Publishing), was significantly associated with performance on the list-method directed forgetting task. The current study extends this finding to the item-method directed forgetting task in which the instruction to Remember or Forget is given after each item in the study list. A significant positive association was found between the correct recognition of Remember words and the emotional control subscale of the MTQ48. No significant associations were observed with other measures of mental toughness or personality. The findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between mental toughness and cognitive control

Unpolarized states and hidden polarization

We capitalize on a multipolar expansion of the polarisation density matrix, in which multipoles appear as successive moments of the Stokes variables. When all the multipoles up to a given order $K$ vanish, we can properly say that the state is $K$th-order unpolarized, as it lacks of polarization information to that order. First-order unpolarized states coincide with the corresponding classical ones, whereas unpolarized to any order tally with the quantum notion of fully invariant states. In between these two extreme cases, there is a rich variety of situations that are explored here. The existence of \textit{hidden} polarisation emerges in a natural way in this context.Comment: 7 pages, 3 eps-color figures. Submitted to PRA. Comments welcome