A Coordinated Program of Basketball Instruction for Grades Five Through Eight

This study is intended to establish a planned course of instruction for basketball in grades five through eight. The purpose is to present a progressive instruction plan that will offer to all the children of a physical education class the opportunity to acquire some knowledge and skills fundamental to playing the game of basketball. This plan will be based on learning processes and development of children that are normally found in the age groups included in grades five through eight. This study is to serve as an available, working guide for instruction that can be taken into the classroom as an instructional guide

Cross-category variation in customer satisfaction and retention

Perceived quality, expectations, customer satisfaction, and effect of customer satisfaction on repurchase likelihood are found to be higher for products than for services, but repurchase likelihood for products is lower. Retailers have the highest repurchase likelihood and score lowest on the other variables. A set of relevant category characteristics is used to further understand variation in both the levels of these variables and their relationships. Quality, expectations, satisfaction, and satisfaction's effect on repurchase are higher — and repurchase likelihood is lower — when competition, differentiation, involvement, or experience is high and when switching costs, difficulty of standardization, or ease of evaluating quality is low.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47140/1/11002_2004_Article_BF00993955.pd

Customer satisfaction and price tolerance

This study investigates the association between customer satisfaction and willingness-to-pay or price tolerance. The goal is not only to determine whether the association between customer satisfaction and price tolerance is positive or negative but also to gauge the degree of association. The Swedish Customer Satisfaction Barometer provides the data. The empirical analysis indicates a negative association between the level of customer satisfaction provided by the firm and the degree of price tolerance exhibited by its customers. However, a positive association is found between year-to-year changes in the levels of customer satisfaction and price tolerance.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47216/1/11002_2004_Article_BF00435742.pd

The American Customer Satisfaction Index: Nature, Purpose, and Findings

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a new type of market-based performance measure for firms, industries, economic sectors, and national economies. The authors discuss the nature and purpose of ACSI and explain the theory underlying the ACSI model, the nation-wide survey methodology used to collect the data, and the econometric approach employed to estimate the indices. They also illustrate the use of ACSI in conducting benchmarking studies, both cross-sectionally and over time. The authors find customer satisfaction to be greater for goods than for services and, in turn, greater for services than for government agencies, as well as find cause for concern in the observation that customer satisfaction in the United States is declining, primarily because of decreasing satisfaction with services. The authors estimate the model for the seven major economic sectors for which data are collected. Highlights of the findings include that (1) customization is more important than reliability in determining customer satisfaction, (2) customer expectations play a greater role in sectors in which variance in production and consumption is relatively low, and (3) customer satisfaction is more quality-driven than value- or price-driven. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of ACSI for public policymakers, managers, consumers, and marketing in general

Probing Cosmology with Weak Lensing Minkowski Functionals

In this paper, we show that Minkowski Functionals (MFs) of weak gravitational lensing (WL) convergence maps contain significant non-Gaussian, cosmology-dependent information. To do this, we use a large suite of cosmological ray-tracing N-body simulations to create mock WL convergence maps, and study the cosmological information content of MFs derived from these maps. Our suite consists of 80 independent 512^3 N-body runs, covering seven different cosmologies, varying three cosmological parameters Omega_m, w, and sigma_8 one at a time, around a fiducial LambdaCDM model. In each cosmology, we use ray-tracing to create a thousand pseudo-independent 12 deg^2 convergence maps, and use these in a Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the joint confidence contours on the above three parameters. We include redshift tomography at three different source redshifts z_s=1, 1.5, 2, explore five different smoothing scales theta_G=1, 2, 3, 5, 10 arcmin, and explicitly compare and combine the MFs with the WL power spectrum. We find that the MFs capture a substantial amount of information from non-Gaussian features of convergence maps, i.e. beyond the power spectrum. The MFs are particularly well suited to break degeneracies and to constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter w (by a factor of ~ three better than from the power spectrum alone). The non-Gaussian information derives partly from the one-point function of the convergence (through V_0, the "area" MF), and partly through non-linear spatial information (through combining different smoothing scales for V_0, and through V_1 and V_2, the boundary length and genus MFs, respectively). In contrast to the power spectrum, the best constraints from the MFs are obtained only when multiple smoothing scales are combined.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 5 table

Microscopic Electron Models with Exact SO(5) Symmetry

We construct a class of microscopic electron models with exact SO(5) symmetry between antiferromagnetic and d-wave superconducting ground states. There is an exact one-to-one correspondence between both single-particle and collective excitations in both phases. SO(5) symmetry breaking terms can be introduced and classified according to irreducible representations of the exact SO(5) algebra. The resulting phase diagram and collective modes are identical to that of the SO(5) nonlinear sigma model.Comment: 5 pages, LATEX, 4 eps fig

Observations of cosmic rays at high altitudes

Direct measurements of the momenta of cosmic-ray particles at an altitude of 30,000 feet have recently been reported

Non-Fermi Liquid Behavior In Quantum Critical Systems

The problem of an electron gas interacting via exchanging transverse gauge bosons is studied using the renormalization group method. The long wavelength behavior of the gauge field is shown to be in the Gaussian universality class with a dynamical exponent $z=3$ in dimensions $D \geq 2$. This implies that the gauge coupling constant is exactly marginal. Scattering of the electrons by the gauge mode leads to non-Fermi liquid behavior in $D \leq 3$. The asymptotic electron and gauge Green's functions, interaction vertex, specific heat and resistivity are presented.Comment: 9 pages in REVTEX 2.0. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. 3 figures in postscript files can be obtained at [email protected]. The filename is gan.figures.tar.z and it's compressed. You can uncompress it by using commands: "uncompress gan.figures.tar.z" and "tar xvf gan.figures.tar

Ground state of a double-exchange system containing impurities: bounds of ferromagnetism

We study the boundary between ferromagnetic and non-ferromagnetic ground state of a double-exchange system with quenched disorder for arbitrary relation between Hund exchange coupling and electron band width. The boundary is found both from the solution of the Dynamical Mean Field Approximation equations and from the comparison of the energies of the saturated ferromagnetic and paramagnetic states. Both methods give very similar results. To explain the disappearance of ferromagnetism in part of the parameter space we derive from the double-exchange Hamiltonian with classical localized spins in the limit of large but finite Hund exchange coupling the $t-J$ model (with classical localized spins).Comment: 5 pages, 8 eps figures, latex; minor typos correcte