Frontline Employees’ Informal Learning and Customer Relationship Skills in Macao Casinos: An Empirical Study

This study uses qualitative methods to better understand how the informal learning of frontline employees influenced their customer relationship skills in dealing with patrons at gaming tables, in the hope of achieving positive customer experiences in a competitive environment in Macao. As casino operators need to get their employees to work after limited formal training, they might find that their emphasis on formal training might be insufficient to provide patrons with customized service in Macao. In this context, the concept of informal learning, which is determined and directed by learners themselves to further improve what they have learned from their formal training, is likely to be of special significance in Macao. Based upon a constructivistic framework, this study used semi-structured interviews to gather data from 49 frontline employees. The study relied upon the Miles and Huberman (1994) framework to analyze qualitative data. Data analysis suggested that informal learning among frontline employees would lead to four strategies: (i) to be polite and respect patrons; (ii) to uncover patrons’ emotional status from their body language; (iii) to manage patrons’ emotions in their gaming pursuit; and (iv) to self-regulate emotions to the demands of a service encounter

Management of the Loco (Concholepas concholepas) as a Driver for Self-governance of Small-scale Benthic Fisheries in Chile

WRI led the "Reefs at Risk Revisited" analysis in collaboration with a broad partnership of more than 25 research, conservation, and educational organizations. Partners have provided data, offered guidance on the analytical approach, contributed to the report, and served as critical reviewers of the maps and findings.

Extended Non Linear Conformal Symmetry and DSR Velocities on the Physical Surface

The relation between Conformal generators and Magueijo Smolin Deformed Special Relativity term, added to Lorentz boosts, is achieved. The same is performed for Fock Lorentz transformations. Through a dimensional reduction procedure, it is demonstrated that a massless relativistic particle living in a $d$ dimensional space, is isomorphic to one living in a $d+2$ space with pure Lorentz invariance and to a particle living in a $AdS_{d+1}$ space. To accomplish these identifications, the Conformal Group is extended and a nonlinear algebra arises. Finally, because the relation between momenta and velocities is known, the problem of position space dynamics is solved.Comment: totally renewe

Nonlinear Hebbian learning as a unifying principle in receptive field formation

The development of sensory receptive fields has been modeled in the past by a variety of models including normative models such as sparse coding or independent component analysis and bottom-up models such as spike-timing dependent plasticity or the Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro model of synaptic plasticity. Here we show that the above variety of approaches can all be unified into a single common principle, namely Nonlinear Hebbian Learning. When Nonlinear Hebbian Learning is applied to natural images, receptive field shapes were strongly constrained by the input statistics and preprocessing, but exhibited only modest variation across different choices of nonlinearities in neuron models or synaptic plasticity rules. Neither overcompleteness nor sparse network activity are necessary for the development of localized receptive fields. The analysis of alternative sensory modalities such as auditory models or V2 development lead to the same conclusions. In all examples, receptive fields can be predicted a priori by reformulating an abstract model as nonlinear Hebbian learning. Thus nonlinear Hebbian learning and natural statistics can account for many aspects of receptive field formation across models and sensory modalities

Super-activation of quantum non-locality

In this paper we show that quantum non-locality can be super-activated. That is, one can obtain violations of Bell inequalities by tensorizing a local state with itself. Moreover, previous results suggest that such Bell violations can be very large.Comment: v2: Refs added. Same results, v3: Minor corrections. Close to the published versio