Spanish Entomology: Past and Present

Excerpt: The history of pure entomology in Spain begins during the Eighteenth Century and continues until today with emphasis upon systematics. The reasons for this are several, but chief among them must be mentioned the extraordinary richness and diversity of the Iberian entomological fauna. This peninsula was a landbridge that in earlier geological times linked Europe and Africa. It is highly zoned and stratified, and supports a variety of faunal elements including European, Mediterranean, African, Atlantic and indigenous. This rich fauna, together with a paucity of skilled entomologists, has resulted in insufficient study of Iberian insects. Except for the Orthoptera, and possibly one or two other groups, our insect fauna is still in the alpha taxonomic status, with the consequence that it is generally not feasible to carry out the comparative anatomical, ecological, physiological, or behavioral studies that can be accomplished in countries with either a better-known fauna or with a poorer one

South-South cooperation, policy transfer and best-practice reasoning : the transfer of the Solidarity in Literacy Program from Brazil to Mozambique

Mozambique;Brazil;South South cooperation;development programmes;literacy;policy research

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

Creating green consumer loyalty; How to strategically market CSR and obtain consumer preference

Sustainability is an important social theme that is taking on increasing significance in many areas, including the supermarket sector. This report presents the findings of a literature study looking at the opportunities available to supermarkets to gain a preferential position in the eyes of consumers for their efforts regarding sustainability. Duurzaamheid is een belangrijk maatschappelijk thema, dat ook in de supermarktbranche van steeds grotere betekenis wordt. Dit rapport presenteert de bevindingen van een literatuurstudie naar de aangrijpingspunten die supermarkten hebben om voor hun duurzaamheidsinspanningen een voorkeurspositie bij de consument te verkrijgen

Predicting Customer Lifetime Value in Multi-Service Industries

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a key-metric within CRM. Although, a large number of marketing scientists and practitioners argue in favor of this metric, there are only a few studies that consider the predictive modeling of CLV. In this study we focus on the prediction of CLV in multi-service industries. In these industries customer behavior is rather complex, because customers can purchase more than one service, and these purchases are often not independent from each other. We compare the predictive performance of different models, which vary in complexity and realism. Our results show that for our application simple models assuming constant profits over time have the best predictive performance at the individual customer level. At the customer base level more complicated models have the best performance. At the aggregate level, forecasting errors are rather small, which emphasizes the usability of CLV predictions for customer base valuation purposes. This might especially be interesting for accountants and financial analysts.forecasting;value;customer relationship management;customer lifetime value;customer segmentation;database marketing;interactive marketing

Speech-based recognition of self-reported and observed emotion in a dimensional space

The differences between self-reported and observed emotion have only marginally been investigated in the context of speech-based automatic emotion recognition. We address this issue by comparing self-reported emotion ratings to observed emotion ratings and look at how differences between these two types of ratings affect the development and performance of automatic emotion recognizers developed with these ratings. A dimensional approach to emotion modeling is adopted: the ratings are based on continuous arousal and valence scales. We describe the TNO-Gaming Corpus that contains spontaneous vocal and facial expressions elicited via a multiplayer videogame and that includes emotion annotations obtained via self-report and observation by outside observers. Comparisons show that there are discrepancies between self-reported and observed emotion ratings which are also reflected in the performance of the emotion recognizers developed. Using Support Vector Regression in combination with acoustic and textual features, recognizers of arousal and valence are developed that can predict points in a 2-dimensional arousal-valence space. The results of these recognizers show that the self-reported emotion is much harder to recognize than the observed emotion, and that averaging ratings from multiple observers improves performance

Interpreting environmental computational spreadsheets

Abstract. Environmental computational spreadsheets are important tools in supporting decision making. However, as the underlying concepts and relations are not made explicit, the transparency and re-use of these spreadsheets is severely limited. The goal of this project is to provide a semi-automatic methodology for constructing the underlying knowl-edge level model of environmental computational spreadsheets. We de-velop and test this methodology in a limited number of case studies. Our methodology combines heuristics on spreadsheet layout and for-mulas, with existing methods from computer science. We evaluate our constructed model with both the original developers and their peers. 1 Problem Statement Current environmental issues, like climate change and biodiversity loss, are uni-versal in their scale and long-term in their impact, their mechanisms are complex, and empirical data are scarce [1–3]. In addition there is an urgent need to find strategies to cope with these issues, and political pressure on the research com

Convergence in the Padé Table For 1F1(1; c; x)

SummaryWe prove convergence for arbitrary sequences of (µ, v)-approximants with {ie1} in the Padg table for 1F1(1; c; x) with {ie2}. Also an asymptotic formula for the orthogonal polynomials connected with this table is derived. This formula implies asymptotic formulas for the Bessel and generalized Bessel polynomials