Un estudio de estrategias de aprendizaje de lenguas utilizadas por estudiantes exitosos de programas de pedagogia en inglés de universidades de Concepción, Chile: un estudio de caso

Indexación: Web of Science; Scielo.This study attempts to uncover the Language Learning Strategies (LLSs) utilized by proficient language learners in English pedagogy programs at two universities. It was found that students employ indirect strategies frequently, which are of a metacognitive nature. Through a case study methodology, these students were asked to do a semi-structured interview and a think-aloud protocol. It was found that cognitive and metacognitive strategies were the most prevalent.Este estudio procura develar las Estrategias de Aprendizaje de Lenguas (EALs) utilizadas por estudiantes avanzados en programa de Pedagogía en Inglés en dos universidades. Se estableció que los estudiantes de Pedagogía emplean estrategias indirectas con frecuencia, de naturaleza metacognitiva. A través de un estudio de caso, dos estudiantes fueron entrevistados y se les aplicó un procedimiento de pensamiento en voz alta. Se estableció que en ellos las estrategias cognitivas y metacognitivas son las predominantes.http://ref.scielo.org/73v83

Why Can’t a Family Business Be More Like a Nonfamily Business? Modes of Professionalization in Family Firms

The authors survey arguments that family firms should behave more like nonfamily firms and “professionalize.” Despite the apparent advantages of this transition, many family firms fail to do so or do so only partially. The authors reflect on why this might be so, and the range of possible modes of professionalization. They derive six ideal types: (a) minimally professional family firms; (b) wealth dispensing, private family firms; (c) entrepreneurially operated family firms; (d) entrepreneurial family business groups; (e) pseudoprofessional, public family firms; and (f) hybrid professional family firms. The authors conclude with suggestions for further research that is attentive to such variation

The Yin and Yang of Kinship and Business: Complementary or Contradictory Forces?

Are the social domains of kinship and business on balance complementary or contradictory? Do ventures that invest heavily in both – conventionally referred to as “family firms” – bear a net gain or net loss? We are scarcely the first to raise these questions. How then will we try to contribute to an answer? We try this in five ways, all of them based on previous literature. First, we develop the dichotomy of kinship and business by taking seriously the metaphor of yin and yang, merging it with the anthropological constructs of structural domains such as “domestic” and “public.” This metaphor proves to shed light on the relevant literature. Second, we provide a qualitative survey of the costs and benefits of kinship in business. Third, we summarize the empirical work that addresses the performance outcomes from family involvement. Fourth, we consider the practitioner implications of these studies. Finally, we ask if scholars are as yet in a position to answer these questions

Digital system bus integrity

This report summarizes and describes the results of a study of current or emerging multiplex data buses as applicable to digital flight systems, particularly with regard to civil aircraft. Technology for pre-1995 and post-1995 timeframes has been delineated and critiqued relative to the requirements envisioned for those periods. The primary emphasis has been an assured airworthiness of the more prevalent type buses, with attention to attributes such as fault tolerance, environmental susceptibility, and problems under continuing investigation. Additionally, the capacity to certify systems relying on such buses has been addressed

Development of an evaluation technique for strapdown guidance systems Interim scientific report

Evaluation technique to measure performance of strapdown guidance systems designed for unmanned interplanetary mission

The Internet and the Future of Financial Services: Transparency, Differential Pricing and Disintermediation

The Internet has had a profound effect on the financial service sector, dramatically changing the cost and capabilities for marketing, distributing and servicing financial products and enabling new types of products and services to be developed. This is especially true for retail financial services where widespread adoption of the Internet, the standardization provided by the world-wide web, and the low cost of Internet communications and transactions have made it possible to reach customers electronically in ways that were prohibitively costly even 5 years ago; indeed, pre-Internet attempts at the online distribution of retail financial services were outright failures in the mid-1980s. The concurrent growth and de-facto standardization of Internet-enabled personal financial management software (e.g., Quicken and Microsoft Money) have also contributed to an increasing array of low cost and potentially richer ways to provide information and transaction services to customers. The growth in Internet-enabled products and service has been rapid in some sectors and slower in others. Retail brokerage has seen a dramatic change with more than 15% (Salomon Smith Barney, 2000) of brokerage assets now managed in on-line trading counts, and substantially more if "traditional" brokerage accounts and mutual funds with on-line access are included. Similarly, approximately 10 million US customers currently use on-line banking (O'Brien, 2000) and 39 of the top 100 banks offer fully functional internet banking (ePayNews, 2000). Many banks and brokerages are on their second or third release of their on-line delivery platform. Credit cards, while not radically transformed in operational aspects of the business, have begun to have some volume of new origination on-line. In addition, leading credit card companies such as Capital One Financial have been some of the largest "traditional" companies in the use of Internet advertising (see www.adrelevance.com, 1999). More regulated and complex financial products such as mortgages and insurance have had some origination volume on the Internet (an estimated $17Bn of mortgages will be originated and ~$400mm in insurance premiums will be sold online in 2000). For these sectors, the adoption of on-line origination has been much slower and concentrated in entrants, rather than incumbent firms. However, despite the small level of originations, the Internet has become a significant and growing source of product information - it is estimated that about 10% of insurance customers and 15% of mortgage customers have used the internet to shop for these products (Forrester, 1998; McVey, 2000). This may ultimately affect product purchase and pricing structure, irrespective of the delivery channel. Internet companies have also played a role in many other segments of the industry such as financial information and news, rating and comparison services, and even some areas where one might think the Internet would have a less significant role, such as financial planning and investment banking. While the continued growth rates are uncertain and the penetration for the more complex products has not yet been shown to be widespread, it is safe to conclude that the Internet will play a significant role in consumer financial services for a large subset of customers, and that this role will be significantly different across different sub-sectors of the financial industry. In discussions of the Internet impact on the financial services sector, the emphasis has often been placed on the direct cost-saving effects of using the Internet to provide transaction services. These potential cost savings are indeed significant and in the long term may lead to significant creation of value. However, there also substantial barriers to realizing much of this value. In some industries, such as the credit card industry, many of the potential gains from automation have already been realized, and in others, the gains may be concentrated in only a few areas of the value chain. For products which are sold through branches or agents (banking, mortgage and insurance), realization of cost savings will require a difficult and time consuming redesign of the retail delivery system. Finally, many of these efficiencies are accompanied by improved customer convenience. To the extent that consumers respond by consuming more services, particularly those that generate costs but not revenue, overall costs may not be substantially reduced. This has been the experience of previous innovations in retail financial service delivery such as automated teller machines (ATMs). Computers, and more recently the Internet, are best described as "general purpose technologies" (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000), like the electric motor or the telegraph (Bresnehan and Trajtenberg, 1995). For general purpose technologies, most of the economic value they create is associated with their ability to enable complementary innovations in organization, market structure, and products and services. However, at the same time, these complementary changes are often disruptive to the existing structure of an industry (Tushman and Anderson, 1986; Bower and Christensen, 1995), leading to significant redistribution of value among industry participants and between producers and consumers. To understand the true impact of the Internet on the financial service industry, it is therefore necessary to identify how the Internet affects the critical drivers of industry structure, and how it enables or necessitates changes in products and services. This will necessarily be difficult, as it is hard to isolate the contribution of the Internet separately from the effects of other complementary innovations, and to distinguish Internet effects from other of long-term industry trends and exogenous factors. While obtaining precise numerical estimates of the productivity effects will be hard, in many cases the direction and general magnitude of the impact on productivity, profitability and consumer surplus (consumer value) will be clear. We see three principal issues that will determine the transformation of retail financial services: Transparency, or the ability of all market participants to determine the available range of prices for financial instruments and financial services; Differential pricing, in which finer and finer distinctions must be made among groups of customers, setting their prices based upon the revenue streams they generate, the costs to serve them, and their resulting profitability; Disintermediation or bypass, in which net-based direct interaction eliminates the role previously enjoyed by financial advisors, retail stock brokers, and insurance agents. Each of these will affect the roles to be played by financial service providers, the sources of profits available to them, and the strategies they may choose to pursue in order to earn those profits. However, different financial products will be affected differently by each of these issues in both the nature and the magnitude of the effect. In addition, these factors are often interdependent - for example, differential pricing is often a necessary response to increasing price transparency to prevent erosion of margins, and the ability to deliver sophisticated (although typically not complex) pricing strategies to customers may be affected by the incentives and structure of the distribution system. For these reasons, we will organize the remainder of the paper around the discussion of these effects as they apply within different sectors in financial services. The emphasis of our analysis will be on the primary sectors in retail financial services: credit cards, deposit banking, mortgages, brokerage, and insurance. Our focus is the retail segment because it has been the most radically transformed by the Internet to date, primarily because the retail business has the most to benefit from the reduction in customer interaction costs, the ability to reach mass markets, and the reduction in the role of geography in determining the strategies of financial services providers. Much of the computing- and communications-enabled transformation in the relationships among financial institutions or between financial institutions and consumers of wholesale financial services (for example, brokerage houses and exchanges, or large firms and their commercial lenders) have already occurred or were well underway before the Internet was commercialized. For these markets, the economics of computing and networking were still favorable under previous generations of technology. Many of the commercial financial services that are likely to be transformed by the Internet, at least in the medium term (3-5 years), are those that closely resemble retail services (such as commercial mortgage, short term lending, leasing, cash management, and the like). That is not to say that business to business (B2B) e-commerce opportunities do not exist in the financial sector - only that many of the medium term opportunities that are directly a result of the Internet are closely analogous to changes in the retail sector, and the others are probably more closely related to organizational and market innovation rather than a result of ubiquitous and low-cost communications technology.

Intangible Assets: How the Interaction of Computers and Organizational Structure Affects Stock Market Valuations

macroeconomics, Intangible Assets, Interaction, Computers, Organizational Structure, Stock Market Valuations

Do Better Customers Utilize Electronic Distribution Channels: The Case of PC Banking

Firms are increasingly implementing electronic distribution strategies to augment existing physical infrastructure for product and service delivery. However, to date there has been little systematic study on how these distribution channels affect customer profitability. In this study, we explore the revenue enhancement potential for electronic delivery in retail banking by comparing customers who utilize personal-computer based home banking ("PC Banking) to other bank customers. Our results, based on case studies and detailed customer data from four institutions, suggest that while PC banking customers appear to be more profitable, most of the differences are due to unobservable characteristics of these customers that were present before PC banking was adopted. Demographic characteristics and changes in customer behavior following the adoption of the product account for only a small fraction of the overall differences. We conclude that, at least to date, the primary potential value of the product is in the retention of high value customers rather than cost savings or incremental sales. Our results also suggest that it is important to distinguish behavioral changes from pre-existing customer characteristics when evaluating the impact of added electronic delivery channels.

Vertical Scope Revisited: Transaction Costs vs Capabilities & Profit Opportunities in Mortgage Banking

What determines vertical scope? Transactions cost economics (TCE) has been the dominant paradigm for understanding "make" vs. "buy" choices. However, the traditional focus on empirically validating or refuting TCE has taken attention away from other possible drivers of scope, and it has rarely allowed us to understand the explanatory power of TCE versus other competing theories. This paper, using a particularly rich panel dataset from the Mortgage Banking industry, explores both the extent to which TCE predictions hold, and their ability to explain the variance in scope, when compared to all other possible drivers of integration. Using some direct measures of transaction costs, we observe that integration does mitigate risks; yet such risks and transaction costs do not seem to drive firm-level decisions of integration in retail production of loans. Rather, capability-driven and capacity- (or limit to growth-) driven considerations explain a significant amount of variance in our sample, under a variety of specifications and tests. We thus conclude that while TCE explanations of vertical scope are important, their impact is dwarfed by capability differences and by the desire of firms to leverage their capabilities and productive capacity by using the market.Mortgage Banking; Transaction Costs; Integration; Capabilities; Capacity Constraints; Limits to Growth