Enterprise portals: addressing the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems

Enterprise portals are being viewed as the next generation application platform of choice, offering benefits over both client/server and thin client arrangements. By providing a mediating layer between the information applications and resources of the organisation and the individuals using them, enterprise portals appear to provide a unique context to allow both the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems to be addressed. This study seeks to examine these often competing perspectives of information systems by using an exploratory empirical survey to investigate the actual deployment of enterprise portals within a range of different organisations. It is found that both the individual and organisational benefits that enterprise portals can offer appear to have been recognised, and coherent sets of services addressing each of these perspectives are being developed. Consistent with diffusion and acceptance of technology models, organisations appear to be commencing their portal developments with services that will ensure utilisation by individuals, and are subsequently seeking to realise organisational level benefits

TIME VARYING PARAMETERS WITH RANDOM COMPONENTS: THE ORANGE JUICE INDUSTRY

Crop Production/Industries,

The use of Public Funds for Private Benefit: An Examination of the Relationship between Public Stadium Funding and Ticket Prices in the National Football League

During the past decade there has been a proliferation of sports stadia being built in America’s municipal districts. While it used to be common for the public to fully fund stadium construction projects, over the past twenty years factors such as political motives, tax reform and increased public awareness of tax equity have forced sports teams to share increasing amounts of the financial burden (Crompton, Howard, & Var, 2003). As public funding for stadia construction has decreased, franchises have continued to strive for maximized profits. Concurrently, the cost of attending events in sports stadia has increased for consumers in terms of higher ticket prices even though changes in fixed costs should not affect pricing (Leeds & von Allmen, 2004). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the use of public funds to build stadia and the profit maximizing goals of National Football League (NFL) franchises. A hypothesis was formulated that stated the impact of the public share of the construction cost would have no effect on relative ticket prices for those that consume the product. The cross-sectional data for a ticket price model, which consisted of seasonal data from every NFL team to play from 1991 through 2003, was investigated. The results showed an increase in public funding by 10% lowers ticket prices by 42 cents. As shown, the bulk of the variation in ticket prices was due to a general increase over time and MSA per capita income.sunk costs; stadium; financing; public finance; football; ticket prices; fixed costs

On The Continuous Steering of the Scale of Tight Wavelet Frames

In analogy with steerable wavelets, we present a general construction of adaptable tight wavelet frames, with an emphasis on scaling operations. In particular, the derived wavelets can be "dilated" by a procedure comparable to the operation of steering steerable wavelets. The fundamental aspects of the construction are the same: an admissible collection of Fourier multipliers is used to extend a tight wavelet frame, and the "scale" of the wavelets is adapted by scaling the multipliers. As an application, the proposed wavelets can be used to improve the frequency localization. Importantly, the localized frequency bands specified by this construction can be scaled efficiently using matrix multiplication