Consumer ethnocentrism in evaluations of superior foreign brands and inferior domestic brands : a study of Polish consumers

In recent years, there has been a great deal of research exploring the concept of consumer ethnocentrism, although little has been done in Eastern Bloc countries. In these countries, foreign brands are often clearly superior to domestic alternatives. This study applied the CETSCALE in a survey of 218 Polish consumers with respect to attitudes and beliefs for one domestic and two foreign gas station brands. The findings suggest that, in a situation where foreign brands are superior to domestic ones, consumer ethnocentrism is displayed in more positive perceptions of the domestic brand, with little or no effect on perceptions of foreign brands. Moreover, the effect of consumer ethnocentrism on evaluations of different types of product qualities (search vs. experience) is explored. The results support the prediction that consumer ethnocentrism has greater impact on evaluations of experience qualities than on search qualities. Managerial implications and future research directions are suggested

High Power Ultrasound to Recover Fine Particles in Flotation Process

9 pages, 6 figures.-- Communication presented at: Forum Acusticum Sevilla 2002 (Sevilla, Spain, 16-20 Sep 2002), comprising: 3rd European Congress on Acoustics; XXXIII Spanish Congress on Acoustics (TecniAcústica 2002); European and Japanese Symposium on Acoustics; 3rd Iberian Congress on Acoustics.-- Special issue of the journal Revista de Acústica, Vol. XXXIII, year 2002.The flotation process to recover useful substances from minerals has been used for dozens of years. For the flotation, air bubbles in a water solution of finely ground mineral particles must be introduced. The particles were prepared with chemical substances (surfactants) to be caught by the bubbles.Some attempts were made to improve the whole process, the best results reported were obtained for a technique called the "high energy" flotation experiments, [1] [2][3]. It seems that the recovering of the useful substances can be improved if some energy can be injected to the reactor with the metallurgic pulp. This suggests that an ultrasonic field can also improve the recovering in flotation. In this paper an application of acoustic cavitation to the flotation process is explored.The authors would like to thank the financial support of project FONDECYT 1010243.Peer reviewe

EEG Correlates of Song Prosody: A New Look at the Relationship between Linguistic and Musical Rhythm

Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called “textsetting.” Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners’ attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards?

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question – especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this question, we apply a variety of research designs to administrative data from Norway. We find that a worker is paid more and faces less earnings risk if she gets a job in a firm with worker representation on the corporate board. However, these gains in wages and declines in earnings risk are not caused by worker representation per se. Instead, the wage premium and reduced earnings risk reflect that firms with worker representation are likely to be larger and unionized, and that larger and unionized firms tend to both pay a premium and provide better insurance to workers against fluctuations in firm performance. Conditional on the firm’s size and unionization rate, worker representation has little if any effect. Taken together, these findings suggest that while workers may indeed benefit from being employed in firms with worker representation, they would not benefit from legislation mandating worker representation on corporate boards

Ressursinnsatsen i medisinsk og helsefaglig FoU i 2013: En analyse basert på FoU-statistisk materiale

Denne rapporten beskriver ressursinnsatsen innenfor medisinsk og helsefaglig forskning og utviklingsarbeid (FoU) i 2013. Rapporten er i hovedsak basert på eksisterende datamateriale hentet fra den nasjonale FoU-statistikken, men andre datakilder er også benyttet. Tilsvarende oversikter over FoU-innsatsen til medisin og helsefag er utarbeidet for 2009 og 2011. NIFU er ansvarlig for FoU-statistikken i universitets- og høgskolesektoren, instituttsektoren samt helseforetakene, og hovedvekt er lagt på innsatsen her. For å få et totalbilde for Norges innsats på området har vi også med noen tall for medisinrelatert FoU i næringslivet og for medisinsk forskning i de andre nordiske landene

Incompressible Quantum Liquids and New Conservation Laws

In this letter we investigate a class of Hamiltonians which, in addition to the usual center-of-mass (CM) momentum conservation, also have center-of-mass position conservation. We find that regardless of the particle statistics, the energy spectrum is at least q-fold degenerate when the filling factor is $p/q$, where $p$ and $q$ are coprime integers. Interestingly the simplest Hamiltonian respecting this type of symmetry encapsulates two prominent examples of novel states of matter, namely the fractional quantum Hall liquid and the quantum dimer liquid. We discuss the relevance of this class of Hamiltonian to the search for featureless Mott insulators.Comment: updated version, to be published by PR

Caveats with estimating natural mortality rates in stock assessment models using age aggregated catch data and abundance indices

We consider the challenge in estimating the natural mortality, M, in a standard statistical fish stock assessment model based on time series of catch- and abundance-at-age data. Though anecdotal evidence and empirical experience lend support to the fact that this parameter may be difficult to estimate, the current literature lacks a theoretical justification. We first discuss the estimatability of a time-invariant M theoretically and present necessary conditions for a constant M to be identifiable. We then investigate the practical usefulness of this by estimating M from simulated data based on models fitted to 19 fish stocks. Using the same data sets, we next explore several model formulations of time varying M, with a pre-specified mean value. Cross validation is used to assess the prediction performance of the candidate models. Our results show that a time-invariant M can be estimated with reasonable precision for a few stocks with long time series and typically high values of the true M. For most stocks, however, the estimation uncertainty of M is very large. For time-varying M, we find that accounting for variability across age and time using a simple model significantly improves the performance compared to a time-invariant M. No significant improvement is obtained by using complex models, such as, those with time dependencies in variability around mean values of M.publishedVersio

Politique Industrielle Contemporaine : le Problème de Dépendance en Energie et Capital Humain des Pays de l’Afrique Centrale

This study aims to show that for pro growth industrialization, contemporary industrial policy needs to emphasis on improvement of energy production and of the quality of human capital with application on Central Africa sub region. After a literature review on industrial policy concept, we have highlighted the link between improving energy production, investment in human capital and the level of industrial development through economic growth in Central Africa using a descriptive approach. Indeed produce less energy and unskilled human capital has a negative impact on medium and long term industrial development through economic growth channel. This result has therefore confirmed our recommendation to the implementation of an industrial policy mainly focused on reducing energy dependence and improving the quality of human capital in Central Africa; This, and not to be exhaustive, through increased investment in energy production capacity and in training

Politique Industrielle Contemporaine : le Problème de Dépendance en Energie et Capital Humain des Pays de l’Afrique Centrale

This study aims to show that for pro growth industrialization, contemporary industrial policy needs to emphasis on improvement of energy production and of the quality of human capital with application on Central Africa sub region. After a literature review on industrial policy concept, we have highlighted the link between improving energy production, investment in human capital and the level of industrial development through economic growth in Central Africa using a descriptive approach. Indeed produce less energy and unskilled human capital has a negative impact on medium and long term industrial development through economic growth channel. This result has therefore confirmed our recommendation to the implementation of an industrial policy mainly focused on reducing energy dependence and improving the quality of human capital in Central Africa; This, and not to be exhaustive, through increased investment in energy production capacity and in training