From contrastive rhetoric to intercultural rhetoric: Why intercultural rhetoric needs to reframe the concept of culture

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with fixed, flexible and free word order

Human learning, although highly flexible and efficient, is constrained in ways that facilitate or impede the acquisition of certain systems of information. Some such constraints, active during infancy and childhood, have been proposed to account for the apparent ease with which typically developing children acquire language. In a series of experiments, we investigated the role of developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with a distinction between shorter and relatively frequent words (‘function words,’ F-words) and longer and less frequent words (‘content words,’ C-words). We constructed 4 finite-state grammars, in which the order of F-words, relative to C-words, was either fixed (F-words always occupied the same positions in a string), flexible (every F-word always followed a C-word), or free. We exposed adults (N = 84) and kindergarten children (N = 100) to strings from each of these artificial grammars, and we assessed their ability to recognize strings with the same structure, but a different vocabulary. Adults were better at recognizing strings when regularities were available (i.e., fixed and flexible order grammars), while children were better at recognizing strings from the grammars consistent with the attested distribution of function and content words in natural languages (i.e., flexible and free order grammars). These results provide evidence for a link between developmental constraints on learning and linguistic typology

What do Topologists want from Seiberg--Witten theory? (A review of four-dimensional topology for physicists)

In 1983, Donaldson shocked the topology world by using instantons from physics to prove new theorems about four-dimensional manifolds, and he developed new topological invariants. In 1988, Witten showed how these invariants could be obtained by correlation functions for a twisted N=2 SUSY gauge theory. In 1994, Seiberg and Witten discovered dualities for such theories, and in particular, developed a new way of looking at four-dimensional manifolds that turns out to be easier, and is conjectured to be equivalent to, Donaldson theory. This review describes the development of this mathematical subject, and shows how the physics played a pivotal role in the current understanding of this area of topology.Comment: 51 pages, 10 figures, 8 postscript files. Submitted to International Journal of Modern Physics A, July 2002 Uses Latex 2e with class file ws-ijmpa.cls (included in tar file

Sales and Consumer Inventory

Temporary price reductions (sales) are quite common for many goods and usually result in an increase in the quantity sold. We explore whether the data support the hypothesis that these increases are, at least partly, due to dynamic consumer behavior: at low prices consumers stockpile for future consumption. This effect, if present, has broad implications for interpretation of demand estimates. We construct a dynamic model of consumer choice and use it to derive testable predictions. We test the implications of the model using two years of store-level scanner data and data on the purchases of a panel of households over the same time. The results support the existence of household stockpiling behavior.

Identifying Vertical Product Differentiation in Three Polish Manufacturing Industries: an Enterprise Survey

The paper attempts to identify indirectly vertical product differentiation in three industries of Polish manufacturing (manufacture of glass and glass products, manufacture of other general purpose machinery and manufacture of other special purpose machinery) by examining how focus on a given group of customers (segment) is related to company characteristics. Changes in companies' segment orientation between 2002 and 2005 are examined and the factors of these changes are discussed. The analysis is based on a survey of 77 companies. The data support the hypothesis that there exist segments in the consumer goods market, defined by the income level of customers. In the capital goods market, it is shown that domestic-owned customers are the low-end segment of the market, whereas foreign-owned customers constitute a higher segment. It seems that industries producing capital goods have shifted towards higher market segments between 2002 and 2005 and their principal motive was the pressure exerted by competitors, both domestic and foreign.product differentiation, quality, competitiveness, manufacturing.

Semiconductor devices for optical communications in 1 micron band of wavelength

Crystal growth and the characteristics of semiconductor lasers and diodes for the long wavelength band used in optical communications are examined. It is concluded that to utilize the advantages of this band, it is necessary to have a large scale multiple wavelength communication, along with optical cumulative circuits and optical exchangers

Changes in the Competitive Position of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in the EU Market

This paper aims at comparing the uneven process of changes in competitiveness among three accession countries' manufacturing industries, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, during the period prior to their EU membership (1996-2003). It demonstrates that the three countries improved competitiveness in the majority of their manufacturing industries. However, these changes were differentiated across time, among industries, in terms of the quality of segments and between the three countries overall. A drop in the productivity gap between the manufacturing industries of the three accession and the incumbent EU countries played the major role in improvement in competitiveness. It determined the drop in relative unit labour costs. The paper shows that changes in competitive advantages of a given country's industry reflect changes in relative (as compared to foreign) productivity rather than differences in level and changes in productivity among industries of a given country. The dynamics and levels of productivity among the Czech and Polish larger winners were lower than the manufacturing average of both countries. However, since the improvement in productivity in these industries in both countries was larger than in their incumbent EU counterparts, the former pushed the latter out of the EU market. Poland's and the Czech Republic's export specialisation in less productive industries implies that their export expansion to the EU would result in lower than potential economic growth in both countries. The paper shows that Smith's law of absolute advantages tends to determine changes in market share.competitiveness, productivity, transition economies, manufacturing industry, EU integration

Differentiation of changes in competitiveness among Polish manufacturing industries

This paper aims to show the uneven process of changes in competitiveness across Polish manufacturing industries during the period prior to Poland's EU membership (1996-2003). Based on the Schumpeterian approach to competitiveness, that is the ability to compete, it looks at changes in competitiveness as effects of competition and its factors. Using two types of measure, four clusters of Polish manufacturing industries are selected: double winners, export-led industries, export-oriented industries and losers. The analysis shows that the use of EU market share as a measure of changes in competitiveness fails to reveal differentiation in levels and changes in relative productivity in those industries that increased their EU market share. It also shows that the larger the initial differences in labour productivity across industries, the stronger the process of differentiation of changes in competitiveness. Systemic transition and external liberalisation are conducive to improvement in the competitiveness of highly productive industries, but create a weak stimulus for improvement in the competitiveness of the most backward ones. Secondly, the higher the investment rate and its dynamics, the larger the increase in competitive pressure on the EU market. This conclusion is of great importance for Polish manufacturing, all of the more so given that the potential to reduce employment seems to have been largely exhausted and investment intensity has dropped considerably, especially since 1998.competitiveness, productivity, transition economies, manufacturing industry, EU integration