Cross-Cultural Cuisine: Long-Term Trend or Short-Lived Fad

Defining a consumer interest as a long-term trend or short-lived fad has significant implicatiosn for restauranteurs\u27 management decisions. The terms trend and fad can be operationally defined for the food service industry. The authors examine today\u27s popular cross-cultural cuisine to determine its trend or fad status and discuss the catalysts that promoted or hindered its trend/fad status, as well as implications for the food service industry

Influential Article Review - Politics and CRS: Examining a Unique Relationship

This paper examines corporate social responsibility. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: In recent years, Chinese private companies have improved a lot in corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance, especially in the philanthropic area. However, private companies’ awareness and performance of social responsibility still have a big disparity with SOEs. And private companies’ policy of social responsibility is subjective and preferential. To explain this contradiction, this paper tries to introduce political connection and, based on stakeholder salience theory, to test how political connection changes managers’ perception of stakeholders’ relative importance and cause changes in stakeholders’ satisfaction level of social responsibility requirement. The result shows that (1) political connection has positive influence on private companies’ CSR; (2) companies with political connection are significantly better than the ones without political connection in society-oriented and customers-oriented responsibility; (3) two kinds of companies have no significant difference in investors-oriented responsibility; (4) as for government-oriented and employee-oriented responsibility, companies with political connection are worse than ones without political connection. These findings are significant for China’s future construction of competition systems and private companies’ choice of stakeholders and future investment. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German

Remarks on observing aphasic people

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Assessing the long-term impact of aphasia center participation

Comprehensive aphasia centers are a growing trend in North America and have begun to influence service delivery for individuals with aphasia and their families. Such centers are grounded in group interaction and are intensive in terms of participation time. Consistent with principles of Life Participation Approaches (LPAA, 2001), centers incorporate programming across a range of experiences and activities, including conversation groups, technology and interactive programming (e.g., Skyping across centers), as well as outreach initiatives. Early examples include The Aphasia Institute in Toronto, the Aphasia Center of California, and Connect in London (Elman, 2007a). Simmons-Mackie and Holland (2011) conducted a survey that identified 33 such centers, with the majority opening in the preceding 10 years. Since that date, these authors estimate that at least 8 new centers have been developed and staffed. There are many obstacles to collecting effectiveness data in aphasia centers such as those described above. Heterogeneity of programming is an obvious one, compounded, in most cases, by limited professional staff and reliance on trained, but not necessarily equally talented volunteers for a substantial number of activities. Weather, transportation issues, self-selection of activities that are of interest to individual members, moving, illnesses and vacation schedules, as well as the very positive decision that members’ lives have moved beyond the type of support provided by Center programming, also contributes to heterogeneity. Finally, time and resources for collection of pre- and post-involvement data are typically limited, and research participation in most aphasia centers is voluntary. Nevertheless, we believe that, in much the same ways that data can be gathered across public schools to demonstrate their effectiveness, consistent data can be gathered to support the value of aphasia centers. It seems reasonable to assume that the relatively well-documented benefits of participating in an aphasia group would apply to aphasia centers (Avent, 1997; Elman, 2007a, b; Elman & Bernstein-Ellis, 1999). However, direct research on the impact of aphasia centers is limited (Hoen, Thelander, & Worsley, 1997; Van der Gaag et al., 2005). This presentation will describe the long-term impact of participation in programming at two well-established1 community-based aphasia Centers, referred to here as Centers A and B. Both provide two full days of programming for 6-8 hours weekly, with additional time spent in socializing and operate on three fifteen week terms each calendar year. They share similar philosophies, and are of somewhat similar size in terms of participants and staff directly involved in their programs. A similar core assessment battery is used at both centers. This paper will present results of initial and one and two year follow-up data concerning the effects of involvement at both sites

Sentactics®: A Virtual Treatment of Underlying Forms

This study tested the effects of Sentactics®, a computer-automated version of Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF). Results showed that treatment effects derived from Sentactics® replicated those of clinician-delivered TUF, improving agrammatic patients’ ability to comprehend and produce complex sentences and resulting in generalization to untrained linguistically related forms, of lesser complexity. Additionally, no differences were found in a comparison of the relative effectiveness of computer-delivered Sentactics® and clinician-delivered TUF. These results provide further support for the efficacy of the TUF protocol and demonstrate the viability of computerized therapies in the field of aphasia treatment

Cognitive Neuropsychological Theory and Treatment for Aphasia: Exploring the Strengths and Limitations

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When is Aphasia Aphasia? The Problem of Closed Head Injury.

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Aphasia With and Without Adjectives - Remarks on the Problems of Classifying Aphasic Patients

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PWAs and PBJs: Language for describing a simple procedure

The purpose of this study was to analyze responses to a simple procedural discourse task in persons with aphasia (PWAs n=141) and non-aphasic participants (n=145). Participants described how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Results showed significant differences between groups on mean length of utterance, total number of words, total number of utterances, and task duration. However, the top 10 verbs and nouns used by both groups were nearly identical and the proportion of nouns, verbs, pronouns, and determiners used by each group was similar. Aphasia severity correlated moderately with total number of words only

Script training and its application to everyday life observed in an aphasia center

Script training focuses on improved production of personally relevant monologues and dialogues through intensive practice. Commonly reported components of script training include use of personally relevant or functional scripts, a structured cueing hierarchy, and intensive rehearsal of scripted lines to promote automaticity (Youmans, Holland, Munoz, & Bourgeois, 2005; Lee, Kaye, & Cherney, 2009; Youmans, Youmans, & Hancock, 2011; Goldberg, Haley, & Jacks, 2012; Fridriksson et al., 2012). Fridriksson et al. (2012) also trained a series of common scripts to study neurophysiological changes that result from such training. This proposal presents results from four persons with aphasia (PWA) who received script training in an aphasia center, where there is opportunity to observe the effect of that training on everyday life. A secondary goal is to examine what, if any, individual, intervention, or environmental factors might affect a PWA’s ability to benefit from such training