Theo Angelopoulos’s O Thiasos/The Travelling Players (1975) and Oi Kynigoi/The Hunters (1977) and how they affect the Brechtian Project

Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1977) have been widely characterized as Brechtian mainly because of the filmmak¬er’s use of defamiliarization effects (V-effects) and the disrupted chronology in these films, but without close attention to the cinematic ways in which these films inflect, expand, and critique Brechtian aesthetics. Angelopoulos makes use of Brechtian techniques that invite spectatorial contemplation. In contrast to Brechtian epic theater, however, these two Angelopoulos films aes¬thetically and ideologically are characterized by melancholy and pessimism as opposed to Brecht’s optimism and progressive view. After exploring the concept of left-wing melancholy, on the one hand, and Brechtian aesthetics, on the other, specifically Brecht’s recommendations for a critically engaging theatre that makes the audience think and respond, this article studies The Travelling Players and The Hunters in relation to Brechtian aesthetics to argue that they offer a cyclical view of history representative of left-wing melancholy as opposed to a teleological, progressive Brechtian view

A socioemotional wealth perspective on innovativeness and performance of family businesses.

This dissertation is a theoretical and empirical examination of the relationships among socioemotional wealth, innovativeness, and performance in family firms. Building on the Behavioral Agency Theory’s predictions that socioemotional wealth of family firms may affect their strategic decision making both positively and negatively, this study theoretically develops and tests a research model that aims at understanding the nuanced influences of different socioemotional wealth dimensions on firm innovativeness and performance. Specifically, the study hypothesizes that a family’s socioemotional wealth affects the firm’s innovativeness and performance both negatively, in the case of internal socioemotional wealth and positively, in the case of external socioemotional wealth. Analyzing a sample of 277 US-based, privately-held, and small-sized family firms, I find that internal socioemotional wealth positively affects firm innovativeness. Interestingly, external does not have a significant impact on family firm innovativeness. The results also show that internal socioemotional wealth does not directly influence firm performance whereas external does. Lastly, the results highlight that, overall, socioemotional wealth has a more pronounced direct effect on family firm innovativeness than it does on financial performance underscoring its importance for understanding the strategic decision-making of family firms. The study contributes to the discussion of heterogeneity among family businesses in terms of the importance that they attach to different socioemotional wealth dimensions and engages the conversation about the dual effects of such heterogeneity on innovativeness and performance. It also helps advance our understanding of the nuanced effects of internal and external socioemotional wealth on innovativeness and performance. The results yield important practical implications for family business owners. They provide insights to family business owners to help them mitigate the negative effects of their socioemotional wealth on firm innovation through the professionalization of their firms and the promotion of their family brand identity

The eye of Persepolis’ tiger : how melancholy and nostalgia resonate through Satrapi’s animated film

Will Eisner coined the term sequential art to refer to comic strips/books and graphic novels, while arguing that this distinct discipline not only has much in common with film-making but it is in fact a forerunner to film-making. Sequential art is a powerful form of popular culture. However, the scholarly community has generally ignored this popular form of art. This article discusses the animated film Persepolis (Paronnaud and Satrapi, 2007) and explores the ways in which animation is used. We analyse this film in terms of the cultural memory discourse and suggest that this film not only creates a melancholic cultural memory of the past it negotiates, but also, paradoxically, it generates a nostalgic one. As we shall argue, the film’s inherent melancholy and nostalgia allegorically communicate a quest for identity in our present-day societies

A multicriteria hierarchical discrimination approach for credit risk problems

Recently, banks and credit institutions have shown an increased interest in developing and implementing credit-scoring systems for taking corporate and consumer credit granting decisions. The objective of such systems is to analyze the characteristics of each applicant (firm or individual) and support the decision making process regarding the acceptance or the rejection of the credit application. This paper addresses this problem through the use of a multicriteria classi - fication technique, the M.H.DIS method (Multi-group Hierarchical DIScrimination). M.H.DIS is applied to real-world case studies regarding the assessment of corporate credit risk and the evaluation of credit card applications. The results obtained through the M.H.DIS method are compared to the results of three wellknown statistical techniques, namely linear and quadratic discriminant analysis, as well as logit analysis.peer-reviewe

Smoking Attitudes Among Adolescents: Effect of Messages Varying on Argument Quality and Source’s Expertise

The present study examined the effectiveness of an anti-smoking message on processing and persuasion in young adolescents. Data were collected from 112 Greek adolescents 13 to 16 years of age, who were randomly assigned into a control and four experimental groups. All participants in experimental groups read a written anti-smoking message varying on the source’s expertise (expert or non expert) and on the quality of the arguments (12 weak/12 strong arguments). Before and after the experimental manipulation, participants completed questionnaires assessing attitudes towards smoking, intention to smoke, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, knowledge, and smoking behavior. Repeated measures analyses showed no significant differences between experimental groups (p \u3e .05). All groups perceived they were more informed about smoking after the experimental manipulation. Results are discussed according to planned behavior theory and elaboration likelihood model, for effective anti-smoking messages addressed to adolescents

Generalised Probabilistic Control Design for Uncertain Stochastic Control Systems

In this paper a novel generalised fully probabilistic controller design for the minimisation of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the actual joint probability density function (pdf) of the closed loop control system, and an ideal joint pdf is presented for a linear Gaussian uncertain class of stochastic systems. A single layer neural network is used to approximate the probability density function of the system dynamics. The generalised probabilistic control law is obtained by solving the recurrence equation of dynamic programming to the fully probabilistic design control problem while taking into consideration the dependency of the parameters of the estimated probability density function of the system dynamics on the input values. It is shown to be of the class of cautious type controllers which accurately minimises the value of the Kullback-Leibler divergence without disregarding the variance of the model prediction as an element to be minimised. Comparison of theoretical and numerical results obtained from the F-16 fighter aircraft application with existing state-of-the-art demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method