Exploring the Preference Structure for Online and Traditional Retail Formats

retail, structure, formats

STATE GOVERNMENT Open Meetings Legislation in the 1989 Session of the Georgia General Assembly

Open meetings legislation, which was introduced during the 1989 session of the Georgia General Assembly, included: A proposed constitutional amendment which would have made all General Assembly sessions and committee meetings open to the public; a bill dealing with open meeting and records provisions of school disciplinary hearings; a bill which would have exempted most records dealing with the hiring of high-level or professional personnel by a state agency, and which exempted records resulting from staff services to the Legislative and Congressional Reapportionment Office, the Senate Research Office, or the House Research Office; a bill which, although similar to the above bill, restricted the exemption regarding hiring to the Board of Regents; a bill requiring agencies holding other than regularly scheduled meetings to give notice of the time, place, and subjects expected to be discussed; and a bill exempting county and municipal hospital authorities from the disclosure of any data which may give the hospital authority a competitive advantage

Extracomunitario? Networks and Brunetto Latini

My paper uses Latour’s models of network/worknet and of diplomacy to discuss the interactions between political exile and multilingual translation in writings by Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri. It explores how the exclusionary prefix ‘extra’, in medieval definitions of exile (extra solum) and in modern Italian descriptions of extracomunitari (non-European Union) migrants, can be recast to indicate supplement, expansion, and connection, using Latour’s model of a diplomatic engagement in which all sides agree to ‘speak well about things that really matter to them’. I argue that several of Brunetto’s and Dante’s vernacular works engage Latour’s openness of ‘speaking well’ as a means to negotiate the experience of exile and bring transtemporal and translinguistic worknets into being, in which their different actants assemble new material and textual spaces and forms in which to overcome the disruptions of exile by re-imagining [POL]itical and [FIC]tional modes of (co)existence

Transfer Properties of the Hair Cell-Afferent Fiber Synapse

The perception of sound is initiated in the inner ear by the conversion of vibrational energy into a neural code, a transduction process achieved by the chemical synapses of hair cells in the auditory periphery. Thus, the operation of the hair cell’s presynaptic active zone is key to understanding auditory transduction. However, the lack of suitable experimental systems in which to investigate both the presynaptic and postsynaptic aspects of this synapse with high resolution has limited our understanding of its functional characteristics. This work describes the development of a novel in vitro preparation of the amphibian papilla from Rana catesbeiana that provides electrical access to the pre- and postsynaptic elements of the hair cell’s afferent synapse. The transfer properties of this ribbon-type synapse have been explored with a variety of electrophysiological techniques, including whole-cell recordings, capacitance measurements, and iontophoresis. Glutamate is released from hair cells in response to Ca2+ influx through L-type Ca2+ channels and is detected by AMPA receptors in postsynaptic fibers. Gradations in the extent of presynaptic stimulation are encoded by a linear increase in the postsynaptic response with respect to the presynaptic Ca2+ current, a relation imparted primarily by an increase in the frequency of release events. Both spontaneous and evoked postsynaptic signals are stereotyped in waveform but highly variable in amplitude. Determination of the size of the quantal response provides compelling evidence that the majority of these events are multiquantal. Multiquantal events may originate from individual active zones and do not typically saturate postsynaptic receptors, thus suggesting that they may have functional significance. The results presented in this study are most consistent with compound exocytosis as the dominant form of transmitter release at individual hair-cell active zones

Draft genome sequence of the naturally competent Bacillus simplex strain WY10

ABSTRACT We sequenced a naturally competent bacterial isolate, WY10, cultured from a Wyoming soil sample. Sequence analysis revealed that WY10 is a novel strain of Bacillus simplex . To our knowledge, WY10 is the first B. simplex strain to be characterized as naturally competent for DNA uptake by transformation. </jats:p

Exploring the preference structure for online and traditional retail formats

The growth of Internet technology and electronic commerce has not been matched by theoretically-guided social science research. Clear and well designed consumer research is needed to describe, explain, and predict what will happen to this changing landscape. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the structure for consumer preferences to make product purchases through three available retail formats - store, catalog, and the Internet. Conjoint analysis was used to assess the structure of the decision and the importance of the attributes in the decision-making process. The results from this study noticeably show that the structure of the consumer decision-making process was found to be primarily one of choosing the retail format (store, catalog, or Internet) and price of product (set at low, medium or high) desired. The strength of the retail store format suggests that fears that the Internet will take over the retail arena seem, at least at this point in time, overblown and exaggerated. However, there seems to be an identifiable segment of customers that has a preference for the Internet as a retail shopping alternative