Propuesta de contructos para el análisis de los espacios físicos de los establecimientos de atención al público en el sector servicios: aplicación empírica en la oficina de banca

This work is part of the contributing theories concerning space or physical environment of customer service establishments. New constructs are defined here, such as “store” versus “office” and “ES+” (experiential space +) versus “ES-“(experiential space -). These constructs create axes which can be used for plotting all kinds of sales or public establishments. The questions that need answering are as follows: 1. Do these concepts really exist in the consumer’s mind or are they just theoretical concepts with no useful reality? 2. If they do, in fact, exist, how are they defined by customers or consumers? The constructs defined in this work have relevant implications for management. The empirical project is conducted with bank customers.Este trabajo se enmarca dentro de las aportaciones teóricas sobre el espacio o lugar físico de los establecimientos de atención al público. Se definen los nuevos constructos de “Tienda” vs “Oficina”, y “Espacio Experiencial positivo vs negativo”. Estos constructos permitirán crear ejes donde poder posicionar los establecimientos de atención al público de las empresas de servicios. Las preguntas a responder son: ¿realmente existen en la mente del consumidor estos conceptos? o ¿son meros constructos teóricos? Si existen, ¿cómo son definidos por los clientes? Estos nuevos constructos tienen importantes aplicaciones prácticas. La aplicación empírica se realiza sobre la sucursal de banca minorista

Towards a clinical staging for bipolar disorder: defining patient subtypes based on functional outcome.

BACKGROUND: The functional outcome of Bipolar Disorder (BD) is highly variable. This variability has been attributed to multiple demographic, clinical and cognitive factors. The critical next step is to identify combinations of predictors that can be used to specify prognostic subtypes, thus providing a basis for a staging classification in BD. METHODS: Latent Class Analysis was applied to multiple predictors of functional outcome in a sample of 106 remitted adults with BD. RESULTS: We identified two subtypes of patients presenting "good" (n=50; 47.6%) and "poor" (n=56; 52.4%) outcome. Episode density, level of residual depressive symptoms, estimated verbal intelligence and inhibitory control emerged as the most significant predictors of subtype membership at the p<0.05 level. Their odds ratio (OR) and confidence interval (CI) with reference to the "good" outcome group were: episode density (OR=4.622, CI 1.592-13.418), level of residual depressive symptoms (OR=1.543, CI 1.210-1.969), estimated verbal intelligence (OR=0.969; CI 0.945-0.995), and inhibitory control (OR=0.771, CI 0.656-0.907). Age, age of onset and duration of illness were comparable between prognostic groups. LIMITATIONS: The longitudinal stability or evolution of the subtypes was not tested. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide the first empirically derived staging classification of BD based on two underlying dimensions, one for illness severity and another for cognitive function. This approach can be further developed by expanding the dimensions included and testing the reproducibility and prospective prognostic value of the emerging classes. Developing a disease staging system for BD will allow individualised treatment planning for patients and selection of more homogeneous patient groups for research purposes

Electro-optic correlator for large-format microwave interferometry: Up-conversionand correlation stages performance analysis

In this paper, a microwave interferometer prototype with a near-infra-red optical correlator is proposed as a solution to get a large-format interferometer with hundreds of receivers for radio astronomy applications. A 10 Gbits/s Lithium Niobate modulator has been tested as part of an electro-optic correlator up-conversion stage that will be integrated in the interferometer prototype. Its internal circuitry consists of a single-drive modulator biased by a SubMiniature version A (SMA) connector allowing to up-convert microwave signals with bandwidths up to 12.5 GHz to the near infrared band. In order to characterize it, a 12 GHz tone and a bias voltage were applied to the SMA input using a polarization tee. Two different experimental techniques to stabilize the modulator operation point in its minimum optical carrier output power are described. The best achieved results showed a rather stable spectrum in amplitude and wavelength at the output of the modulator with an optical carrier level 23 dB lower than the signal of interest. On the other hand, preliminary measurements were made to analyze the correlation stage, using 4f and 6f optical configurations to characterize both the antenna/fiber array configuration and the corresponding point spread function.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain, under the Plan Nacional de I+D+i project with Reference No. ESP2015-70646-C2-1-R cofinanced with EU FEDER funds and the CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 programme under the Reference No. CSD2010-00064. The authors would like to thank Félix Gracia from Instituto Astrofísico de Canarias (IAC) for his assistance and help

Building Spanish Trustworthy Question-Answer Datasets for Suicide Information

Suicide is a public health problem since worldwide more than 800,000 suicidesare estimated to occur every year, one every 40 seconds, figures of epidemicproportions [4]. Such is the scale of the problem that specialists tasked withanswering questions related to it are overwhelmed and overburdened. Moreover,much of the information that can be found about suicide on the Internet couldbe more harmful than helpful. These problems could be tackled by means ofautomatic Question-Answering (Q&A) systems [3]; however, it is necessary tohave trustworthy corpora that help to validate, train, and guide the constructionof such systems [2]. Since, up to the best of the authors knowledge, there is nota Spanish Q&A corpus for suicide information, the aim of this work is to createsuch a corpora for suicide information. In particular, we have considered threelevels of quality [1]: bronze-standard, when the entire data has been generatedautomatically and has little processing; silver-standard, when starting from abronze corpora, a processing stage is applied to refine the data followed by anannotation and validation stage conducted by experts; and, gold-standard, whenthe corpus has been manually generated and validated by experts.The starting point to obtain the corpora is a set of trustworthy Spanishdocuments provided by suicide experts (in our case, it is composed of a to-tal of 151 documents). Then, a bronze-standard Q&A corpora was built usingthree large language models, two in Spanish (bertin-gpt-j-6B-alpaca and Llama-2-7b-ft-instruct-es) and one in English (t5-base-squad-qag), all of them freelyavailable at Hugging Face platform. We split the documents into chunks, andfor each chunk, we asked the language models to generate a Q&A pair. Usingthis procedure, a total of 22,920 Q&A pairs were obtained, but many generatedquestions were incomplete, repeated or contained essentially the same informa-tion among them. Therefore, some filters were applied to increase the quality of the generated corpus. A first filter was basic data processing operations, suchas the elimination of empty, duplicated or incomplete pairs. Then, we trained adeep learning classification model (named bertin-roberta-base-spanish-spanish-suicide-intent, again freely available at Hugging Face) using a suicidal behaviourdataset to determine whether a question-answer pair contains information aboutsuicide. This model allowed us to filter out not suicide related pairs. Finally, weremoved the pairs that were semantically similar by using an embedding andthe cosine distance. After all these steps, we obtained the final version of ourbronze-standard corpora, leaving us with 4,901 Q&A pairs.From that bronze corpora, a manual filtering was conducted by non-expertsto eliminate Q&A uninteresting pairs; i.e., they talked about suicide but seemednot to be useful or were too ambiguous. This left 484 pairs to be evaluated byexperts. In order to perform such an evaluation, a web application was developedfor the validation of the corpus by a group of psychologists and psychiatrists,allowing them to update or remove the pairs that did not pass their filter; thusobtaining the silver-standard corpus with 380 Q&A pairs.In order to evaluate the models performance to generate interesting Q&Apairs, we describe the number of pairs obtained by each model in each step ofthe process. As a starting point, 7,806 were generated from Bertin, 4,558 fromLlama-2, and 10,557 from t5-base-squad. After automatic filters, the numberof pairs were reduced to 760 from Bertin, 1,166 from Llama-2, and 2,977 fromt5-base-squad. After manual filtering by a non-expert, we had 337 from Bertin,55 from Llama-2, and 92 from t5-base-squad. Finally, the silver corpus had 272from Bertin, 45 from Llama-2, and 63 from t5-base-squad. We can observe thatthe Bertin model had the best performance.In addition, a gold-standard corpus directly extracted from the FAQs sec-tions contained in some of the documents provided by experts (i.e. they are notautomatically generated) has been also provided. This dataset consists of 118Q&A items.The built Q&A corpus and models described previously are freely availableat https://huggingface.co/PrevenIA. These corpus are the first step towardsthe validation, training, and construction of automatic Q&A systems that pro-vide information about suicid

La realidad aumentada como llave para abrir la tienda física al "mobile-assisted showroomer": ¿presente o futuro del "retail"?

From a technological perspective, the COVID-19 crisis has impacted retail in two ways: (a) it has accelerated the digital transformation of physical retail with the incorporation of interactive technologies such as mobile augmented reality (MAR); and (b) it has transformed the shopping journey for customers, especially mobile-assisted showroomer (MAS) customers. With the aim of jointly examining the technology of the MAS customer (smartphone) and the technology of the store (MAR), a Cognitive-Affective-Normative theoretical model is proposed and contrasted on a sample of 805 MAS to explain their intention to use in-store MAR considering the moderating role of gender. The results show that the «performance expectancy» is revealed as the highest antecedent for both groups, although there is a moderating effect of gender given the greater explanatory and predictive capacity of the MAS men model (R2 = 56.1 %) compared to the model of MAS women (R2 = 51.3 %). Surprisingly, the «effort expectancy» is decisive in the assessment of MAS men, when in the literature it has been related to women. The «social influence» is revealed as the second factor in the antecedents of the female segment. These results have theoretical implications in the field of modeling and practical implications for reactivating the physical retail sector.Este trabajo ha obtenido un accésit del Premio Estudios Financieros 2021 en la modalidad de Marketing y Publicidad. Desde la perspectiva tecnológica, la crisis covid-19 ha supuesto para el retail: (a) la aceleración de la transformación digital del comercio físico con la incorporación de tecnologías interactivas, como la realidad aumentada móvil (RAM), y (b) la transformación del shopping journey de sus clientes, en particular, los mobile-assisted showroomers (MAS). Con el objetivo de examinar de manera conjunta la tecnología del cliente MAS (smartphone) y la tecnología de la tienda (RAM), se propone y contrasta un modelo teórico cognitivo-afectivo-normativo sobre una muestra de 805 consumidores MAS que explique su intención de uso de la RAM in-store, considerando el papel moderador del género. Los resultados muestran que la «expectativa de rendimiento» se revela como el mayor antecedente para ambos grupos, aunque existe un efecto moderador del género, dada la mayor capacidad explicativa y predictiva del modelo de hombres MAS (R2 = 56,1 %) frente al modelo de mujeres MAS (R2 = 51,3 %). Sorprendentemente, el «esfuerzo esperado» es determinante en la valoración de los hombres MAS, cuando en la literatura ha sido relacionado con las mujeres. La «influencia social» se revela como el segundo factor en los antecedentes del segmento femenino. Estos resultados tienen implicaciones teóricas en el ámbito de la modelización e implicaciones prácticas para reactivar el sector del retail físico

La realidad aumentada como llave para abrir la tienda física al "mobile-assisted showroomer": ¿presente o futuro del "retail"?

From a technological perspective, the COVID-19 crisis has impacted retail in two ways: (a) it has accelerated the digital transformation of physical retail with the incorporation of interactive technologies such as mobile augmented reality (MAR); and (b) it has transformed the shopping journey for customers, especially mobile-assisted showroomer (MAS) customers. With the aim of jointly examining the technology of the MAS customer (smartphone) and the technology of the store (MAR), a Cognitive-Affective-Normative theoretical model is proposed and contrasted on a sample of 805 MAS to explain their intention to use in-store MAR considering the moderating role of gender. The results show that the «performance expectancy» is revealed as the highest antecedent for both groups, although there is a moderating effect of gender given the greater explanatory and predictive capacity of the MAS men model (R2 = 56.1 %) compared to the model of MAS women (R2 = 51.3 %). Surprisingly, the «effort expectancy» is decisive in the assessment of MAS men, when in the literature it has been related to women. The «social influence» is revealed as the second factor in the antecedents of the female segment. These results have theoretical implications in the field of modeling and practical implications for reactivating the physical retail sector.Este trabajo ha obtenido un accésit del Premio Estudios Financieros 2021 en la modalidad de Marketing y Publicidad. Desde la perspectiva tecnológica, la crisis covid-19 ha supuesto para el retail: (a) la aceleración de la transformación digital del comercio físico con la incorporación de tecnologías interactivas, como la realidad aumentada móvil (RAM), y (b) la transformación del shopping journey de sus clientes, en particular, los mobile-assisted showroomers (MAS). Con el objetivo de examinar de manera conjunta la tecnología del cliente MAS (smartphone) y la tecnología de la tienda (RAM), se propone y contrasta un modelo teórico cognitivo-afectivo-normativo sobre una muestra de 805 consumidores MAS que explique su intención de uso de la RAM in-store, considerando el papel moderador del género. Los resultados muestran que la «expectativa de rendimiento» se revela como el mayor antecedente para ambos grupos, aunque existe un efecto moderador del género, dada la mayor capacidad explicativa y predictiva del modelo de hombres MAS (R2 = 56,1 %) frente al modelo de mujeres MAS (R2 = 51,3 %). Sorprendentemente, el «esfuerzo esperado» es determinante en la valoración de los hombres MAS, cuando en la literatura ha sido relacionado con las mujeres. La «influencia social» se revela como el segundo factor en los antecedentes del segmento femenino. Estos resultados tienen implicaciones teóricas en el ámbito de la modelización e implicaciones prácticas para reactivar el sector del retail físico

Identifying social cognition subgroups in euthymic patients with bipolar disorder: a cluster analytical approach

Background: Bipolar Disorder (BD) is associated with social cognition (SC) impairments even during remission periods although a large heterogeneity has been described. Our aim was to explore the existence of different profiles on SC in patients with BD, and further explore the potential impact of distinct variables on SC. Methods: Hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted using three SC domains (Theory of Mind (ToM), Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Attributional Bias (AB)). The sample comprised of 131 individuals, 71 patients with BD and 60 healthy control subjects who were compared in terms of SC performance, demographic, clinical and neurocognitive variables. A logistic regression model was used to estimate the effect of SC associated risk factors. Results: A two-cluster solution was identified with an adjusted performance group (N=48, 67.6%) and a low performance group (N=23, 32.4%) with mild deficits in ToM and AB domains and with moderate difficulties in EI. Patients with low SC performance were mostly males, showed lower estimated IQ, higher subthreshold depressive symptoms, longer illness duration, and poorer visual memory and attention. Low estimated IQ (OR=0.920; 95%CI=0.863-0.981), male gender (OR=5.661; 95%CI=1.473–21.762) and longer illness duration (OR=1.085; 95%CI=1.006–1.171) contributed the most to the patients clustering. The model explained up to 35% of the variance in SC performance. Conclusions: Our results confirmed the existence of two discrete profiles of SC among BD. Nearly two thirds of patients exhibited adjusted social cognitive abilities. Longer illness duration, male gender and lower estimated IQ were associated with low SC performance.