Facilitating Informed Decision-Making in Financial Service Encounters

While advice-giving encounters form an integral part of banks’ services, clients often buy inappropriate products and face financial consequences. Legislators have started to put banks under pressure to ensure that clients are properly educated. However, the literature describes barriers due to which client education is doomed to fail applying current advice-giving practices. Practicable alternatives to the predominant perfect agent style of advice-giving are dismissed, mainly with the argument of client-side cognitive limitations. This paper challenges this assumption by suggesting a decision-making process that seamlessly integrates educational interventions, thus supporting informed client decision-making. In the spirit of design science research, the authors take a fresh look at the problems of client education in cooperation with a large Swiss retail bank to derive generalizable requirements, and design a novel IT-supported advice-giving process. An evaluation demonstrates the design’s utility in significantly improving client learning, compared to traditional service encounters. This research extends the current discourse on service encounter design, and seeks to help practitioners to design the financial service encounters of tomorrow

Creating, Reinterpreting, Combining, Cuing: Paper Practices on the Shopfloor

Despite the advent of a flurry of digital technologies, paper prevails on manufacturing shopfloors. To understand the roles and value of paper on the shopfloor, we have studied the manufacturing practices at two state-of-the-art automotive supplier facilities, applying ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, as well as photo and document analysis. We find that paper has unique affordances that today’s digital technologies cannot easily supplant on current shopfloors. More specifically, we find four paper practices: (1) creating and adapting individual information spaces, (2) reinterpreting information, (3) combining information handover with social interaction, and (4) visual cuing. We discuss these practices and the unique affordance of paper that currently support shopfloor workers and also consider the limitations of paper, which are becoming increasingly apparent, since more tasks increasingly depend on real-time information

Current driven switching of magnetic layers

The switching of magnetic layers is studied under the action of a spin current in a ferromagnetic metal/non-magnetic metal/ferromagnetic metal spin valve. We find that the main contribution to the switching comes from the non-equilibrium exchange interaction between the ferromagnetic layers. This interaction defines the magnetic configuration of the layers with minimum energy and establishes the threshold for a critical switching current. Depending on the direction of the critical current, the interaction changes sign and a given magnetic configuration becomes unstable. To model the time dependence of the switching process, we derive a set of coupled Landau-Lifshitz equations for the ferromagnetic layers. Higher order terms in the non-equilibrium exchange coupling allow the system to evolve to its steady-state configuration.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Digital Work Design

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch)More and more academic studies and practitioner reports claim that human work is increasingly disrupted or even determined by information and communication technology (ICT) (Cascio and Montealegre 2016). This will make a considerable share of jobs currently performed by humans susceptible to automation (e.g., Frey and Osborne 2017; Manyika et al. 2017). These reports often sketch a picture of ‘machines taking over’ traditional domains like manufacturing, while ICT advances and capabilities seem to decide companies’ fate. Consequently, ICT is often put at the core of innovative efforts. While this applies to nearly all areas of workplace design, a recent popular example of increasing technology centricity is ‘Industry 4.0’, which is often delineated as ‘machines talking to computers’

Achievements and Challenges in the Science of Space Weather

In June 2016 a group of 40 space weather scientists attended the workshop on Scientific Foundations of Space Weather at the International Space Science Institute in Bern. In this lead article to the volume based on the talks and discussions during the workshop we review some of main past achievements in the field and outline some of the challenges that the science of space weather is facing today and in the future.Peer reviewe

Sound Signalling in Orthoptera

The sounds produced by orthopteran insects are very diverse. They are widely studied for the insight they give into acoustic behaviour and the biophysical aspects of sound production and hearing, as well as the transduction of sound to neural signals in the ear and the subsequent processing of information in the central nervous system. The study of sound signalling is a multidisciplinary area of research, with a strong physiological contribution. This review considers recent research in physiology and the links with related areas of acoustic work on the Orthoptera

It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: Functional Materials in Insects

Over the course of their wildly successful proliferation across the earth, the insects as a taxon have evolved enviable adaptations to their diverse habitats, which include adhesives, locomotor systems, hydrophobic surfaces, and sensors and actuators that transduce mechanical, acoustic, optical, thermal, and chemical signals. Insect‐inspired designs currently appear in a range of contexts, including antireflective coatings, optical displays, and computing algorithms. However, as over one million distinct and highly specialized species of insects have colonized nearly all habitable regions on the planet, they still provide a largely untapped pool of unique problem‐solving strategies. With the intent of providing materials scientists and engineers with a muse for the next generation of bioinspired materials, here, a selection of some of the most spectacular adaptations that insects have evolved is assembled and organized by function. The insects presented display dazzling optical properties as a result of natural photonic crystals, precise hierarchical patterns that span length scales from nanometers to millimeters, and formidable defense mechanisms that deploy an arsenal of chemical weaponry. Successful mimicry of these adaptations may facilitate technological solutions to as wide a range of problems as they solve in the insects that originated them.Insects have evolved manifold optimized solutions to everyday problems. The diversity and precision of their hierarchical material adaptations often outsmart and outperform current man‐made approaches. These materials hence provide an excellent basis for the inspiration of new technological approaches by taking design cues from nature’s solutions.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143760/1/adma201705322.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143760/2/adma201705322_am.pd

Mobiles Lernen für Industrie 4.0: Probleme, Ziele, Lernarrangements

Bestrebungen im Bereich Industrie 4.0 verändern die Rolle des Menschen in der Produktion nachhaltig. Dadurch verändern sich auch die Anforderungen an die Kompetenzen bei den Mitarbeitern. An hand des konkreten Fallbeispiels eines Unternehmens im Wandel (Segment Automobilzulieferer), zeigen wir Probleme der Personalentwicklung auf und erstellen konkrete Zielvorgaben an das Kompetenzmanagement. Eine besondere Herausforderung stellt die Transformation von fachspezifischen hin zu fachübergreifenden Aufgabenfeldern dar, ohne dabei langfristig Expertenwissen zu verlieren. Als möglichen Lösungsweg schlagen wir mobile Lernarrangements vor, welche dieses Wissen kapseln und individuell, dezentral und bedarfsgerecht zur Weiterbildung anbieten. Neu erarbeitetes, situatives Wissen erweitert diese Lernumgebung dabei sukzessiv. Der Artikel konkretisiert die Anforderungen an den Kompetenzaufbau im „Industrie 4.0“-Umfeld und leistet auch einen Beitrag zur praktischen Umsetzung

Flora Anhaltina

auctore S.H. SchwabeBd. 1: 1838, [4] Blätter, 431 Seiten ; Bd. 2: 1839, 425 Seiten, 7 Falttafel