Training or vacation? The academic conference tourism

The current study concentrates on factors affecting the intentions of academics attending an academic conference. It highlights the importance of academic conferences and academic conference tourism and discusses meetings, the convention industry and also their utility in the career development of academics. Through qualitative research and a review of the literature on conference tourism push and pull motivation factors are suggested. The power of these factors to predict the intention to attend an academic conference is examined through quantitative research and regression analysis. The results indicate that ‘pull’ factors are better predictors of the intention to attend an academic conference than motivational ‘push’ factors

Solutions for a Nonlocal Conservation Law with Fading Memory

Global entropy solutions in $BV$ for a scalar nonlocal conservation law with fading memory are constructed as limits of vanishing viscosity approximate solutions. The uniqueness and stability of entropy solutions in $BV$ are established, which also yield the existence of entropy solutions in $L^\infty$ while the initial data is only in $L^\infty$. Moreover, if the memory kernel depends on a relaxation parameter \de>0 and tends to a delta measure weakly as measures when \de\to 0+, then the global entropy solution sequence in $BV$ converges to an admissible solution in $BV$ for the corresponding local conservation law.Comment: 11 pages. Proceedings of American Mathematical Society, 2006 (to appear

Varimax rotation based on gradient projection needs between 10 and more than 500 random start loading matrices for optimal performance

Gradient projection rotation (GPR) is a promising method to rotate factor or component loadings by different criteria. Since the conditions for optimal performance of GPR-Varimax are widely unknown, this simulation study investigates GPR towards the Varimax criterion in principal component analysis. The conditions of the simulation study comprise two sample sizes (n = 100, n = 300), with orthogonal simple structure population models based on four numbers of components (3, 6, 9, 12), with- and without Kaiser-normalization, and six numbers of random start loading matrices for GPR-Varimax rotation (1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000). GPR-Varimax rotation always performed better when at least 10 random matrices were used for start loadings instead of the identity matrix. GPR-Varimax worked better for a small number of components, larger (n = 300) as compared to smaller (n = 100) samples, and when loadings were Kaiser-normalized before rotation. To ensure optimal (stationary) performance of GPR-Varimax in recovering orthogonal simple structure, we recommend using at least 10 iterations of start loading matrices for the rotation of up to three components and 50 iterations for up to six components. For up to nine components, rotation should be based on a sample size of at least 300 cases, Kaiser-normalization, and more than 50 different start loading matrices. For more than nine components, GPR-Varimax rotation should be based on at least 300 cases, Kaiser-normalization, and at least 500 different start loading matrices.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, 4 figures in the Supplemen

Special issue on information flow and WOM in social media and online communities

No abstract available

THE RE-ENGINEERING OF MANAGERIAL PROCESS IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

The base of this research was a comparative analyse of the international practices in the field, in order to identify the most important tendencies in public services management. Considering the results of this research, there were identified the foundamental principles of an intelligent management model for public management (subsidiarity, public value and deliberative governance). Starting from this point, we proposed a new intelligent management model applicable in romanian public sector, which can be structured into three major components: top management component (executive and deliberative), operational management component (back office) and communication component (front level). As a case study, we focused in particullary on the water supply public service and we developed a methodology for projecting the front-office component starting from the necessity of optimising stakeholder satisfaction.public management, intelligent services, intelligent public organizations, top management, back and front office