Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Brands Defined as Semiotic Marketing Systems

Brands are one of marketing’s main foci. But while the American Marketing Association’s official marketing definition continues to evolve, its brand definition has remained stagnant for nearly 80 years. This article argues that the AMA’s simplistic trademark conceptualization of brands is increasingly out of touch with marketing theory and practice. Integrating the consumer culture, marketing semiotics, and General Systems Theory literatures, we re-conceptualize brands as semiotic marketing systems. This follows marketing systems being core to macromarketing. It also obeys marketing systems needing to contemplate their meaning infrastructures given today’s progressively symbolic markets. The antecedents, operation and benefits of this new systems approach to brands are discussed. Brands are re-defined as complex multidimensional constructs with varying degrees of meaning, independence, co-creation and scope. Brands are semiotic marketing systems that generate value for direct and indirect participants, society, and the broader environment, through the exchange of co-created meaning.
Financialisation, Financial Literacy and Asset-Based Welfare

This article examines New Labour's policies of asset-based welfare in the broader context of financialisation. It argues that these are indicative of a mode of government concerned to alter individual outlooks and aspirations, and that asset-based welfare, as developed by New Labour, is primarily a strategy for enhancing financial literacy. Exploring and identifying the general contours of New Labour's reform of welfare provision (particularly the rise of conditionality and personalisation), the article presents a case study of the Child Trust Fund, its development and marketing. The article closes with reflections on the fate of such policies after the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
THE VALUE OF EXPANSIONS WITHIN AND ACROSS INDUSTRIES: A LEARNING PERSPECTIVE.

In an attempt to reconcile prior inconsistent findings regarding the diversification-performance relationship, we build on organizational learning theory to propose a process perspective on corporate expansion within and across industries. Industry-specific experience of firms and experience across industries are shown to be the bases of distinct yet complementary skills that help firms create value. Entries into unrelated (rather than core or related) businesses, and acquisitions (rather than greenfield investments), are particularly valuable with increasing experience across industries. The converse holds for within-industry experience. Empirical tests render results that support most of our predictions.
Visual Tracking via the Fusion of Compressive Sensing and Speed Up Robust Feature Information

Traditional compressive sensing tracking algorithm has the problem that targets usually offset and loss when illumination changed strongly or the goals' scene scaling vary greatly. An improved compressive sensing tracking algorithm is proposed based on SURF feature points matching. Adopt Hessian matrix eigenvalue instead of the gray information feature in the original algorithm, and use SURF algorithm in the previous and next frame's feature matching, so the target frame's position and scale can update adaptively. First, we got the sparse expression of Hessian Matrix eigenvalues in the previous frame. Then, Naive Bayes classifier was applied to search the tar-get in the next frame and the classifier online was updated. Finally, the target position was corrected and the scale change was calculated by used the SURF feature match. Experiments show that the average frame rate can achieve 10fps when the target size is 126*100, it can meet the needs of real-time tracking, and target center deviation is less than 20 pixels, which mean the error is in the allowable range. When the target illumination changes strongly and scales change, the proposed algorithm can track the target in real time, and the robustness is better.
Gorillas in the closet? Public and private actors in the enforcement of transnational private regulation

This paper examines to what extent the background presence of state regulatory capacity – at times referred to as the “regulatory gorilla in the closet” – is a necessary precondition for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation. By drawing on regulatory regimes in the areas of advertising and food safety, it identifies conditions under which (the potential of) public regulatory intervention can bolster the capacity of private actors to enforce transnational private regulation. These involve the overlap between norms, objectives, and interests of public and private regulation; the institutional design of regulatory enforcement; compliance with due process standards; and information management and data sharing. The paper argues that while public intervention remains important for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation, governmental actors – both national and international – should create the necessary preconditions to strengthen private regulatory enforcement, as it can also enhance their own regulatory capacity, in particular, in transnational contexts.
Attitudes and Perceptions of Workers to Sexual Harassment

The authors investigated how individual factors (age, gender, gender role, past experiences of sexual harassment) and organizational factors (gender ratio, sexual harassment policies, the role of employers) related to workers' attitudes toward and perceptions of sexual harassment. In Study 1, participants were 176 workers from a large, white-collar organization. In Study 2, participants were 75 workers from a smaller, blue-collar organization. Individuals from Study 2 experienced more sexual harassment, were more tolerant of sexual harassment, and perceived less behavior as sexual harassment than did individuals from Study 1. For both samples, organizational and individual factors predicted workers' attitudes toward and experiences of sexual harassment. Individual factors—such as age, gender, gender role, past experiences of sexual harassment, and perceptions of management's tolerance of sexual harassment—predicted attitudes toward sexual harassment. Workers' attitudes, the behavioral context, and the gender of the victim and perpetrator predicted perceptions of sexual harassment. The authors discussed the broader implications of these findings and suggested recommendations for future research.
Information and Communications Technology Research in the Travel and Tourism Domain: Perspective and Direction

This article explores the research corpus emerging through the application and interaction of information and communications technologies (ICT) with tourism. The purpose is to place such research within current perceptions of this overall ICT area, giving a framework through which to position a perspective and to offer both the prospect of a rational foundation and a catalyst for further applied research—a research agenda.
An Archival Study of the Existence, Cause, and Discovery of Income‐Affecting Financial Statement Misstatements*

Abstract. This paper reports the results of an archival study of the existence, cause, and discovery of income-affecting financial statement misstatements documented in the working papers of a major Canadian public accounting firm. In addition, it provides finer evidence than prior U.S. studies as to the audit procedures that first signaled the misstatements. Large dollar-value misstatements, found to be concentrated in relatively few accounts, arose primarily from judgment errors or biases (poor or unreasonable estimates made in the presence of adequate accounting information) or errors made in the performance of cutoff or accrual procedures. Substantive tests of detail and three sets of attention-directing procedures initially signaled the majority of the large dollar-value misstatements. The results suggest that nonrecurring activities such as cutoffs and valuations appear to be inherently more risky than recurring transactions and, therefore, warrant special attention when planning and performing audit procedures. Furthermore, the use of attention-directing procedures may improve the effectiveness of public accounting firms' audit approaches. Resume. Les auteurs font etat des resultats d'une etude d'archives portant sur l'existence, la cause et la decouverte d'inexactitudes contenues dans les etats financiers, et ayant une incidence sur les benefices, documentees dans les feuilles de travail d'un cabinet d'experts-comptables canadien majeur. Ils demontrent en outre, de facon plus probante que les etudes americaines precedentes, quels sont les procedes de verification qui, les premiers, ont permis de relever ces inexactitudes. Les inexactitudes representant des sommes d'argent importantes, qui, selon les observations des auteurs, sont concentrees dans un nombre de comptes relativement restreint, decoulent principalement d'erreurs de jugement ou de distorsions (estimations de pietre qualite ou deraisonnables formulees en presence d'information comptable adequate) ou d'erreurs commises dans l'application de procedes de demarcation ou de coupure de l'exercice. Les procedes de corroboration appliques a des elements particuliers ainsi que trois series de procedes de sensibilisation ont permis de diagnostiquer, au depart, la majorite des inexactitudes representant des sommes d'argent importantes. Les resultats donnent a penser que les operations non recurrentes telles que les demarcations et les evaluations semblent presenter, par essence, davantage de risque que les operations recurrentes et, par consequent, meritent une attention particuliere dans la planification et l'application des procedes de verification. De plus, l'utilisation de procedes de sensibilisation peut ameliorer l'efficacite des methodes de verification des cabinets d'experts-comptables.
Perceptions of Alternative Therapies Available for Women Facing Hysterectomy or Menopause

ABSTRACT Women's perceptions of alternative therapies available for managing symptoms related to menopause and to the need for hysterectomy were explored. Data are reported from 17 focus groups of peri- and menopausal aged women (n = 82) living in two southern U.S. coastal counties. Analysis showed that emergent themes did not vary by race or surgery experience. Herbal preparations, vitamin supplements, “healthy living” (diet & exercise), and mind/body practices (prayer & “mental healing”) were mentioned as possible alternatives for managing symptoms. Participants more frequently identified “other” conventional medical approaches—prescription medication, laser surgery, dilation and curettage, and “watchful waiting—as alternatives to hysterectomy”. Alternative therapies are linked to women's desire to gain control over their own health care decisions and practices.
On the Propensity to Surrender a Variable Annuity Contract: An Empirical Analysis of Dynamic Policyholder Behavior

We empirically analyze surrender behavior for variable annuity contracts using Japanese individual policy data. For traditional life insurance products, surrender behavior is typically explained by the interest rate and the emergency fund hypotheses. For variable annuities, the interest rate hypothesis is not directly applicable. For these products, we expect the value of the financial options and guarantees provided to the policyholder to drive surrender behavior. We define this expectation as the “moneyness hypothesis. ” The statistical analysis confirms our moneyness hypothesis: the value of the embedded financial options and guarantees has the largest explanatory power for the surrender rate. The extent to which this finding holds depends on the single premium paid, which we consider a proxy for the policyholder's financial literacy. Moreover, our data set weakly supports the emergency fund hypothesis for the case of variable annuities.
Major sport events and participation legacy: the case of the 2003 Rugby World Cup

Internationally, the past three decades has seen a significant growth in the staging of major sport events (Cashman, 2006). These events are staged by host organizers and supported by governments for many varied reasons. One rationale often provided by governments to justify their investment in such events is that they will encourage their population to become more physically active through sport participation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact hosting major sport events has on sport participation for a host nation. To address this research question, a recent major sport event hosted in Australia, namely the 2003 Rugby World Cup, is investigated. The findings from the study suggest that the sport of rugby witnessed an increase in sport registrations following the staging of the event. The increase, however, was substantially greater for the junior rugby category than the senior rugby category.
Real-Time Presentation Tracking Using Semantic Keyword Spotting

Given presentation slides with detailed written speaking notes, automatic tracking of oral presentations can help speakers ensure they cover their planned content, and can reduce their anxiety during the speech. Tracking is a more complex problem than speech-to-text alignment, since presenters rarely follow their exact presentation notes, and it must be performed in real-time. In this paper, we propose a novel system that can track the current degree of coverage of each slide’s contents. To do this, the presentation notes for each slide are segmented into sentences, and the words are filtered into keyword candidates. These candidates are then scored based on word specificity and semantic similarity measures to find the most useful keywords for the tracking task. Real-time automatic speech recognition results are matched against the keywords and their synonyms. Sentences are scored based on detected keywords, and the ones with scores higher than a threshold are tagged as covered. We manually and automatically annotated 150 slide presentation recordings to evaluate the system. A simple tracking method, matching speech recognition results against the notes, was used as the baseline. The results show that our approach led to higher accuracy measures compared to the baseline method.
Microeconomic Evidence on Price-Setting

The last decade has seen a burst of micro price studies. Many studies analyze data underlying national CPIs and PPIs. Others focus on more granular sub-national grocery store data. We review these studies with an eye toward the role of price setting in business cycles. We summarize with ten stylized facts: Prices change at least once a year, with temporary price discounts and product turnover often playing an important role. After excluding many short-lived prices, prices change closer to once a year. The frequency of price changes differs widely across goods, however, with more cyclical goods exhibiting greater price flexibility. The timing of price changes is little synchronized across sellers. The hazard (and size) of price changes does not increase with the age of the price. The cross-sectional distribution of price changes is thick-tailed, but contains many small price changes too. Finally, strong linkages exist between price changes and wage changes.
Functional Disabilities Profile of Chinese Elderly People with Alzheimer’s Disease – A Validation Study on the Chinese Version of the Disability Assessment for Dementia

This study aimed to determine the validity and applicability of the Chinese version of the Disability Assessment for Dementia (CDAD) in the Chinese elderly population. The original English version was translated and modified to a 47-item scale to suit the societal and cultural background of the Chinese population. The CDAD was administered to 169 community-residing Chinese elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.91), excellent test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation, ICC = 0.99) and excellent interrater reliability (ICC = 0.98). The functional disabilities profile of the same sample was examined. The CDAD had a high negative correlation with the Global Deterioration Scale (GDS; Spearman’s ρ = –0.89, p< 0.001). ANOVA and post hoc comparisons showed there were significant differences in the mean CDAD scores across different GDS stages. To study the construct validity, the CDAD was administered concurrently with several instruments. The Instrumental Activities of Daily Living subscore of the CDAD had a high correlation with the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Scale (r = 0.94,p< 0.001), and the Activities of Daily Living subscore of the CDAD had a high correlation with the Modified Barthel Index (r = 0.82, p < 0.001). A moderate correlation (r = 0.60, p < 0.001) with the Cantonese version of the Mini Mental State Examination was also found. Analysis of the relationship with sociodemographic factors indicated that the CDAD was not correlated with gender and education, and that the correlation with age was low. The CDAD was shown to be a reliable and valid instrument in assessing the functional disabilities of community-residing elderly subjects with AD in the Chinese population.
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity in panic disorder: prediction of long-term outcome by pretreatment cortisol levels.

OBJECTIVE The authors sought to determine whether hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity in patients before their treatment for panic disorder can predict follow-up functional status. Although baseline HPA axis disturbances in patients with panic disorder appear to attenuate with treatment, there is evidence that they may be linked to poorer long-term outcomes. METHOD Follow-up clinical data were obtained for 18 of 20 patients with panic disorder who participated in a detailed study of HPA axis activity in panic, both before and during their treatment with alprazolam. HPA axis assessment included monitoring of adrenocorticotropin and cortisol over a full circadian cycle. The relationships between disability and clinical status at 2-year follow-up and HPA axis overactivity at entry were examined. RESULTS Mean 24-hour cortisol levels before treatment provided a strong, positive predictor of disability scores at follow-up. Those patients who achieved the treatment goal of medication-free remissions had less evidence of HPA axis overactivity at entry than those who were not in remission. CONCLUSIONS HPA axis activity before treatment did predict outcome 2 years later. This relationship appears robust and reproducible. Further work is needed to define the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying the HPA axis markers that are linked to long-term functioning and to determine the biological, psychological, and social processes that link HPA axis disturbance to poorer outcomes.
High and Volatile Real Interest Rates: Where Does the Fed Fit In?

THE FEDERAL RESERVE'S NEW PROCEDURES FOR THE CONDUCT of monetary policy, introduced on October 6, 1979, have been the subject not only of considerable academic and political interest but also of intense debate (B. Friedman 1982; Roley 1982; Walsh 1982, 1984; Mascaro and Meltzer 1983; among others). The Fed's new operating procedures generally are perceived to have resulted in abnormally high and volatile real interest rates, and thus to have contributed to, if not been totally responsible for, the deepest recession in postwar history. In this paper we address the following question: was the advent of the increased volatility and level of the real rate of interest concurrent with the Fed's October 1979 change in operating procedures? That is, was the real rate of interest high and more volatile immediately after the October 1979 change in policy procedures, in which case we might infer a connection between the Fed's change in policy procedures and the increased volatility and level of the real rate. Or, did the real rate become high and more volatile some time following the policy change, which might lead us to conclude that the increased volatility and the increased level of the real rate was connected to some other event(s) occurring after the October 1979 policy change.
Influence of Risk Perception on Attitudes and Norms Regarding Electronic Cigarettes

The use of electronic cigarettes has grown substantially over the last few years. Currently, about 4% of adults use electronic cigarettes, about 16% of high school students report use in the past 30 days, as do approximately 11–25% of college students. A hallmark of the reduction in tobacco use has been the shift in social norms concerning smoking in public. Such norms may also drive views on acceptability of public electronic cigarette use. While normative factors have been given attention, little substantive application of the literature on risk perception has been brought to bear. The overall aim of this study was to place a cognitive–affective measure of risk perception within a model that also includes social cues for e‐cigarettes, addictiveness beliefs, and tobacco use to predict perceived social acceptability for public use of e‐cigarettes. To do so, a cross‐sectional study using an online survey was conducted among a sample of undergraduate students at a Western university (n = 395). A structural equation model showed that the acceptability of public e‐cigarette use was influenced by social cues, beliefs about addiction, and cognitive risk perception, even after controlling for nicotine use. What is revealed is that cognitive assessment of e‐cigarette risk and perception of addictiveness had a suppressing effect on perceived acceptability of public vaping, while greater exposure to social cues exerted a countervailing effect. This is evidence of the role that risk perception and social norms may play in the increases in electronic cigarette use that have been observed.
The Dynamics of FDI Location: A Markov Analysis for British Regions

The paper uses the framework of Markov chains to examine convergence in the location of inward foreign direct investment across the regions of Great Britain over 1985-2005. An analysis is undertaken by industry group that disaggregates manufacturing and services. It finds convergence in regional FDI shares, both overall and by industry, which supports agglomeration. As explanations, a weakening of regional policy has led manufacturing FDI to spread-out from ‘north’ to ‘south’, but in services there is a shift in FDI location within the ‘south’ from core to contiguous regions, suggesting diseconomies at the core. The paper finds different spatial processes and draws implications for regional policy.
Stock Returns, Money, and Fiscal Deficits

Abstract Using the FPE/multivariate Granger-causality modeling technique, this paper tests whether changes in Canadian stock returns are caused by a number of economic variables, including base money and fiscal deficits. The empirical results from monthly data show that lagged changes in fiscal deficits, in particular, Granger-cause stock returns. If expected returns to equity are not time-varying, such a finding appears inconsistent with market efficiency.
Tourism Demand Modeling: A Time-Varying Parameter Approach

Traditional tourism demand analysis uses ordinary least squares or maximum likelihood methods to estimate demand models, assuming that the parameters of the models remain constant over the sample period. This assumption is too restrictive, as it does not allow for behavioral changes of tourists over time. This study proposes a new methodology—the time-varying parameter (TVP) approach to tourism demand modeling. This method relaxes the assumption of parameter constancy, and the behavioral change of tourists over time is traced using a statistical estimator known as a Kalman filter. The appropriateness of the TVP approach to tourism demand modeling is then tested based on a data set of the demand for Hong Kong tourism by residents from six major tourism origin countries.