Cross-Cultural Consumer Attitudes: A Case Of The Second-Hand Clothing Market In Armenia

Under the auspices of the Center for Business Research and Development (CBRD) at the American University of Armenia, and with contributions from assistants: Lusine Poghosyan; Armen Ginosyan; Christina Dombayan; and David Janibekyan, the authors of this article consider the issue of consumer attitudes in Armenia with respect to second-hand clothing. Results of an informal public poll in Yerevan, the country’s capital, and a rendering of an historical perspective on Armenia’s economy provide a backdrop for discourse on what appears to be a slight shift of consumer attitude away from a relatively negative bias against the purchase of second-hand clothing when compared to that evidenced broadly in the United States

Microstability analysis of pellet fuelled discharges in MAST

Reactor grade plasmas are likely to be fuelled by pellet injection. This technique transiently perturbs the profiles, driving the density profile hollow and flattening the edge temperature profile. After the pellet perturbation, the density and temperature profiles relax towards their quasi-steady-state shape. Microinstabilities influence plasma confinement and will play a role in determining the evolution of the profiles in pellet fuelled plasmas. In this paper we present the microstability analysis of pellet fuelled H-mode MAST plasmas. Taking advantage of the unique capabilities of the MAST Thomson scattering system and the possibility of synchronizing the eight lasers with the pellet injection, we were able to measure the evolution of the post-pellet electron density and temperature profiles with high temporal and spatial resolution. These profiles, together with ion temperature profiles measured using a charge exchange diagnostic, were used to produce equilibria suitable for microstability analysis of the equilibrium changes induced by pellet injection. This analysis, carried out using the local gyrokinetic code GS2, reveals that the microstability properties are extremely sensitive to the rapid and large transient excursions of the density and temperature profiles, which also change collisionality and beta e significantly in the region most strongly affected by the pellet ablation.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures. This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article submitted for publication in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from i

Viticulture, Wine Production, And Agriculture In Armenia: Economic Sectors In Transition

This paper focuses on perhaps the oldest branches of economic activity of Armenia viticulture and wine production. Accounts of vines and wines in Armenia are part of a larger story of the country’s agriculture industry. This paper pulls together the historic landscape and present state of affairs of the industries, revealing the significant roles agriculture, viticulture and winemaking have played in shaping Armenia and that they continue to play in sustaining the country’s standard of living. From ancient roots, through a transitional era of privatization and into modern times, the story of agriculture as a whole, grape-growing specifically, and wine production in Ar- menia is one of survival much like that which characterizes the lives of the Armenian people themselves across scores of centuries

3-manifolds which are spacelike slices of flat spacetimes

We continue work initiated in a 1990 preprint of Mess giving a geometric parameterization of the moduli space of classical solutions to Einstein's equations in 2+1 dimensions with cosmological constant 0 or -1 (the case +1 has been worked out in the interim by the present author). In this paper we make a first step toward the 3+1-dimensional case by determining exactly which closed 3-manifolds M^3 arise as spacelike slices of flat spacetimes, and by finding all possible holonomy homomorphisms pi_1(M^3) to ISO(3,1).Comment: 10 page

Automatic Restoration of Diacritics for Igbo Language

Igbo is a low-resource African language with orthographic and tonal diacritics, which capture distinctions between words that are important for both meaning and pronunciation, and hence of potential value for a range of language processing tasks. Such diacritics, however, are often largely absent from the electronic texts we might want to process, or assemble into corpora, and so the need arises for effective methods for automatic diacritic restoration for Igbo. In this paper, we experiment using an Igbo bible corpus, which is extensively marked for vowel distinctions, and partially for tonal distinctions, and attempt the task of reinstating these diacritics when they have been deleted. We investigate a number of word-level diacritic restoration methods, based on n-grams, under a closed-world assumption, achieving an accuracy of 98.83 % with our most effective method

Efficient Behavior of Small-World Networks

We introduce the concept of efficiency of a network, measuring how efficiently it exchanges information. By using this simple measure small-world networks are seen as systems that are both globally and locally efficient. This allows to give a clear physical meaning to the concept of small-world, and also to perform a precise quantitative a nalysis of both weighted and unweighted networks. We study neural networks and man-made communication and transportation systems and we show that the underlying general principle of their construction is in fact a small-world principle of high efficiency.Comment: 1 figure, 2 tables. Revised version. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

A Mandated Minimum Competency Testing Program and Its Impact on Learning Disabled Students: Curricular Validity and Comparative Performances

This research was published by the KU Center for Research on Learning, formerly known as the University of Kansas Institute for Research in Learning Disabilities.In this study, LD specialists, regular class teachers, and parents of LD students judged that the objectives of the Kansas Minimum Competency Specifications prescribed for nonhandicapped students were applicable to LD students. In addition, the Kansas Minimal Competency Test was administered to LD students under standard and oral conditions. Results showed that they did not perform as well as their nonhandicapped peers at any of the five grade levels. The test was then administered under two modified conditions. Learning disabled students' performance on some objectives at every grade level was not improved by either administering items orally or administering the test one grade level above that designated for nonhandicapped students