bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Occupational Stressors and Well‐being among Chinese Employees: The Role of Organisational Commitment
Authors: Siu Oi‐ling 
Published: March 2003

Cette recherche examine les éléments occupationnels stressants et le bien‐être pour des occupations de nature manuelles et intellectuelles, avec des échantillons provenant de la Chine et de Hong Kong et des instruments standards validés dans la recherche occidentale. Les résultats démontrent que les éléments occupationnels stressants jouent un rôle significatif dans la détermination de la satisfaction au travail et du bien‐être physique et mental. La fiabilité des instruments standards utilisés dans la recherche occidentale (incluant le “Occupational Stress Indicator‐2”[Williams & Cooper, 1996] et le questionnaire d’engagement organisationnel [Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979]) est démontrée. Les résultats démontrent aussi que l’engagement organisationnel et le bien‐être sont positivement reliés. Plusieurs régressions hiérarchiques sont utilisées pour démontrer les effets modérateurs de l’engagement organisationnel sur les résultats du stress qui sont mis en évidence dans les sociétés occidentales. L’étude répliquative avec des participants chinois contribue à la généralisation des théories en psychologie organisationnelle.This paper examines occupational stressors and well‐being for blue‐ and white‐collar occupations with Chinese and Hong Kong samples using standardised instruments validated in Western research. The study demonstrates that occupational stressors play a significant role in determining job satisfaction, mental and physical well‐being. The reliability of standardised instruments used in Western research (including the Occupational Stress Indicator‐2 [Williams & Cooper, 1996] and Organizational Commitment Questionnaire [Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979]) is demonstrated. The results of the study show that organisational commitment and well‐being are positively related. A number of hierarchical regressional analyses (Cohen & Cohen, 1983) are used to demonstrate the moderating effects of organisational commitment in the stress outcomes that are evidenced in Western societies. The replication of research with Chinese subjects contributes to the generalisability of theories in organisational psychology.
The Nigerian Capital Market: The First Three Decades of Operation, 1961–90
Authors: Yohannes Lulseged G. 
Published: March 2003

This paper examines the structure, evolution and performance of the Nigerian capital market. The number and branches of financial institutions increased significantly since its inception in 1960. So also did the listed companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange market. Some of the factors responsible for the increase are the indigenization programmes, various economic reforms and government imposition on banks to invest a significant portion of their reserve capital in priority sectors. However, the increase is only in naira terms since a rapidly depreciating naira pushed share prices lower in dollar terms. The pattern of growth is, therefore, far from impressive when compared with other emerging markets. In recent years, a combination of new listings, manifested by privatization and commercialization of state owned firms, as well as higher prices increased total market capitalization. Investor optimism, regulatory and tax benefits have contributed. The naira‐based performance is misleading, however, since the dollar‐based performance shows a decline rather than an increase. One endemic problem seems to be market liquidity. Using liquidity as a measure of stock market development, therefore, it seems that the Nigerian stock market is illiquid and that it has contributed very little to the growth of the Nigerian economy.Le document examine la structure, l’évolution et le comportement du marché des capitaux au Nigeria. Depuis la mise en place de ce marché en 1960, les institutions financières et les succursales se sont multipliées; il en est de même pour les entreprises cotées à la Bourse nigériane. Parmi les facteurs sous‐jacents à cette expansion figurent les programmes d’indigénisation, les réformes économiques et l’exigence faite aux banques par le gouvernement d’investir une importante fraction de leurs réserves dans les secteurs prioritaires de l’économie. Toutefois, l’expansion n’est réelle qu’en termes de nairas, les cours en dollars des actions évoluant à la baisse sous l’effet d’une rapide dépréciation de la monnaie locale. Le schéma d’expansion du marché nigérian n’est donc guère impressionnant par rapport à celui des autres marchés émergents. Ces dernières années, les nouvelles inscriptions à la cote – résultat des privatisations et d’une gestion commerciale des sociétés d’Etat – se sont conjuguées à une hausse des cours, augmentant la capitalisation totale du marché. Au nombre des autres facteurs figurent l’optimisme des investisseurs ainsi que les avantages réglementaires et fiscaux. Il convient néanmoins de souligner que les résultats exprimés en nairas sont trompeurs, les résultats en dollars dénotant un recul plutôt qu’une progression. L’une des difficultés endémiques du marché nigérian semble liée à sa liquidité. A en juger par la liquidité comme mesure de l’expansion des marchés boursiers, il apparaît que le marché boursier nigérian est illiquide et contribue très peu à la croissance de l’économie nigériane.
Self as verb and the metaphor of dance: An explanation of the self discovery experience within a constructivist framework
Authors: Lane Lisbeth G. , Marlow Beth 
Published: March 2003

The concept of self discovery within a constructivist framework is difficult to explain given the central assumption of constructivism that self is a created construct rather than an entity to be discovered. Two problems are identified as impediments to constructivist accounts of the self discovery experience: first, their failure to adequately account for the embodied experience of self, and second, the difficulties inherent in using self as a noun to express a process.It is proposed that if self is considered as a verb, as the action of a body‐subject, the verbal contortionism of referring to self as a process in a language that places self as an entity may be overcome. The notion of self as verb places the individual firmly in the role of active embodied participant in the experience of self. The metaphor of “self'” as “dance” is explored to emphasize the materiality of the human animal that is argued to be central to the experience of self discovery.
Transporting Values by Technology Transfer
Authors: De Castro Leonardo D. 
Published: March 2003

The introduction of new medical technologies into a developing country is usually greeted with enthusiasm as the possible benefits become an object of great anticipation and provide new hope for therapy or relief. The prompt utilization of new discoveries and inventions by a medical practitioner serves as a positive indicator of high standing in the professional community.But the transfer of medical technology also involves a transfer of concomitant values. There is a danger that, in the process of adopting a particular technology, the user takes for granted the general utility and desirability of the implements and procedures under consideration without recognizing the socio‐cultural peculiarities of the adopting country. A sensitivity to the social conditions and cultural traditions is important so that the emergence of new values can be examined critically and the transfer of necessary technology can be effected smoothly.In the Philippines, efforts to boost patronage of transplant technology appear to have overlooked this need for socio‐cultural sensitivity. Legislative fiat cannot be used to override deep‐seated values.There is a need to be more sensitive to the possible confrontation of values that the transfer of technology brings in order to avoid the erosion of indigenous socio‐cultural values and minimize the intrusiveness of beneficial medical technology.
Birds Do It. Bees Do It. So Why Not Single Women and Lesbians?
Authors: Robinson Bambi E.S. 
Published: March 2003

Infertile couples have come to take assisted reproductive technologies (ART) for granted. An increasing number of single women and lesbian couples also desire to have children and turn to ART, especially donor insemination, to fulfill this desire. While most married couples find that access to ART is limited primarily by the ability to pay, for single women and lesbian couples, the story may be much different. In the United States, they may find that doctors and infertility clinics view their desires as immoral and refuse to accept them as patients, although other doctors and clinics readily accept them. In most other countries, however, it is against the law for single women and lesbian couples to make use of ART, including donor insemination.In this paper I will argue that marital status and sexual orientation should not serve as a barrier to accessing the world of reproductive medicine. I will base this conclusion on two arguments. First, that justice requires that we treat like cases alike. Just as we would not accept or reject patients for cardiac rehabilitation programs based on factors such as a history of poor eating habits, so too we should not look at nonmedical factors such as marital status when deciding whether to treat infertility. For the second justification for the conclusion of equal access to ART, I will examine the concept of the family. I will argue that it is morally acceptable for single women and lesbian couples to have children and to head families.
Computer based simulation of laboratory experiments
Authors: Edward Norrie S. 
Published: March 2003

The author is currently developing computer based simulations of practical laboratory experiments in engineering. He takes the view that the aim of computer based simulations is to provide a learning experience as close to that of the lab as possible. This requires that the learning outcomes and methodology of practical work be established.The paper starts with a review of published opinions on the intended learning outcomes of practical work. The views of staff and students of the School were established by conducting an internal survey. The paper then outlines the types of simulations possible on the computer before concentrating on the development of the operational simulations being used in the present context. The approach to obtaining fidelity in operation forms the main part of the paper.The author is currently engaged in evaluating the effectiveness of one of the packages. He discusses the approach being taken and his views on the advantages and disadvantages of simulation. It is hoped that a subsequent paper will publish the results of the evaluation.
The Perception and Effects of Share Ownership: Empirical Evidence from Employee Buy‐Outs
Authors: Pendleton Andrew , Wilson Nicholas , Wright Mike 
Published: March 2003

Forward Links to Citing Articles

Apology
British Journal of Industrial Relations 43:4, 751 This paper explores the impact of employee ownership on employee attitudes, using attitudinal data obtained from four UK bus companies which had adopted the ESOP form of employee share ownership. After reviewing the recent UK literature, the paper highlights the findings from US literature that a ‘sense of ownership’ is an important intervening variable between actual ownership and attitudinal change, and that opportunities for participating in decision‐making are more important than ownership per se in generating feelings of ownership. The paper incorporates these possibilities in using a two‐stage ordered probit model to explore the relationships between ownership and attitudinal outcomes. The findings support intrinsic and instrumental models of ownership, and indicate that feelings of ownership are significantly associated with higher levels of commitment and satisfaction.
Model Selection in an Information Economy: Choosing What to Learn
Authors: Brooks Christopher H. , Gazzale Robert S. , Das Rajarshi , Kephart Jeffrey O. , MacKie–Mason Jeffrey K. , Durfee Edmund H. 
Published: March 2003

As online markets for the exchange of goods and services become more common, the study of markets composed, at least in part, of autonomous agents has taken on increasing importance. In contrast to traditional complete–information economic scenarios, agents that are operating in an electronic marketplace often do so under considerable uncertainty. In order to reduce their uncertainty, these agents must learn about the world around them. When an agent producer is engaged in a learning task in which data collection is costly, such as learning the preferences of a consumer population, it is faced with a classic decision problem: when to explore and when to exploit. If the agent has a limited number of chances to experiment, it must explicitly consider the cost of learning (in terms of foregone profit) against the value of the information acquired. Information goods add an additional dimension to this problem; due to their flexibility, they can be bundled and priced according to a number of different price schedules. An optimizing producer should consider the profit each price schedule can extract, as well as the difficulty of learning of this schedule.In this paper, we demonstrate the tradeoff between complexity and profitability for a number of common price schedules. We begin with a one–shot decision as to which schedule to learn. Schedules with moderate complexity are preferred in the short and medium term, as they are learned quickly, yet extract a significant fraction of the available profit. We then turn to the repeated version of this one–shot decision and show that moderate complexity schedules, in particular two–part tariff, perform well when the producer must adapt to nonstationarity in the consumer population. When a producer can dynamically change schedules as it learns, it can use an explicit decision–theoretic formulation to greedily select the schedule which appears to yield the greatest profit in the next period. By explicitly considering both the learnability and the profit extracted by different price schedules, a producer can extract more profit as it learns than if it naively chose models that are accurate once learned.
Modeling with Time and Events in Computer Animation
Authors: Kalra Devendra , Barr Alan H. 
Published: March 2003

AbstractIn this paper, we present a general, systematic and consistent treatment of time and events for computer animation. We first formalize the concepts of events and create a time primitive called an event unit. We then present a succession of organization schemes to compose event units for generating complex motion sequences. We present a directed graph representation for the organization of time and events that suggests the form of an event‐based time programming language. Details of implementation of a general event simulation system are given. Our approach provides a clean partitioning for the problem of motion design, a hierarchical scheme to compose motion behaviors from time primitives and a programming model for organizing animation. Traditional methods of kinematic controls and key frame interpolation are special cases of our general scheme. In addition, our treatment of events can be combined with kinematics, dynamics or constraint‐based systems to generate powerful motion modeling systems.
Accurate Image Generation and Interactive Image Editing with the A‐buffer
Authors: Lau Wing Hung , Wiseman Neil 
Published: March 2003

AbstractThe A‐buffer suggested by Carpenter [2] is a hidden surface removal method which deals with arbitrary overlapping edges in a pixel. In this paper, we suggest a way of increasing the subpixel resolution by storing the bitmask index rather than the bitmask. This allows much more accurate images to be generated while at the same time, minimising memory usage. It also allows zooming to reveal more information. We also suggest an enhancement to the A‐buffer by allowing the creation of dynamic objects. These dynamic objects can then be edited (deleted, moved, etc.) interactively as image modification and assembly is going on. This new buffer forms part of the image composition system we have been working on.
Computing Dynamic Changes to BSP Trees
Authors: Chrysanthou Y. , Slater M. 
Published: March 2003

AbstractThis paper investigates a new method for dynamically changing Binary Space Partition (BSP) trees. A BSP tree representation of a 3D polygonal scene provides an ideal data structure for rapidly performing the hidden surface computations involved in changing the viewpoint. However, BSP trees have generally been thought to be unsuitable for applications where the geometry of objects in the scene changes dynamically. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a dynamic BSP tree algorithm which does allow for such changes, and which maintains the simplicity and integrity of the BSP tree representation. The algorithm is extended to include dynamic changes to shadows. We calibrate the algorithms by transforming a range of objects in a scene, and reporting on the observed timing results.
Realistic Generation and Real Time Animation of Images of the Human Colon
Authors: Haritsis Angelo , Gillies Duncan , Williams Christopher 
Published: March 2003

AbstractA simulator has been built to teach doctors the skill of handling a flexible endoscope for gastrointestinal investigations. Trainees use a dummy endoscope in which the control actions are transduced into voltages and sensed by the computer. The simulator computes the position and viewing direction of the endoscope within an internal model of the human colon. Then a renderer draws the view, reproducing as far as possible what would be seen during a real colonoscopy. Since the system must generate at least ten frames per second for realistic animation, standard rendering techniques, such as ray tracing, could not be used. Consequently a new method was devised, based on identifying coherent regions along each scan line which can be rendered by table lookup. The method allows shaded Lambertian surfaces to be drawn at a frame rate of 15 per second, using modest computing resources. Although several approximations were required in the analysis, the computer images of the internal surfaces of the human colon present a high degree of visual realism.
Normal orientation methods for 3D offset curves, sweep surfaces and skinning
Authors: Siltanen Pekka , Woodward Charles 
Published: March 2003

Abstract:Computing an offset curve to a 3D curve involves the basic problem of normal orientation in space. The same thing is encountered when interpolating surfaces with 3D sweep or skinning methods. Different methods for normal orientation are discussed an this article. A new method is presented for normal orientation on general parametric curves.
X: Why Z?
Authors: Bowen Jonathan P. 
Published: March 2003

AbstractWindow management systems are now used extensively for user interfaces to computer systems. In particular, X11 has come to dominate the workstation market as a widely accepted industry standard on many different hardware platforms. However, no formal standard currently exists for this window system, both in terms of an international standards body (although this is being addressed), and in terms of a precise (mathematical) specification of what the interface is intended to do. This paper advocates the use of a formal notation to describe such an important system to avoid ambiguity and undesired or unintended variations between different implementations of the same system.Theformal notation used for demonstration purposes, Z, is based on set theory, and has been developed at the Programming Research Group in Oxford.
A Cooperative Architecture for Hypermedia Editing – CoMEdiA
Authors: Santos Adelino 
Published: March 2003

AbstractCoMEdiA is a cooperative hypermedia editing prototype, which enables co‐authors to cooperatively produce hypermedia documents. It allows co‐authors to communicate their ideas, drafts, guidelines, constraints, and annotations with other co‐authors in order to exchange information (remotely or face‐to‐face), improvepassages and modify notes until a final document is achieved. We did not concentrate on the depth but on the breadth of the features. Our efforts were on integrating and coordinating concepts from collaboration, multimedia, and hyper organization rather than on making a specialized system in any of them. Our first step was to investigate issues in group editing and cooperation. Then we started by having text in our documents, later static images, and 2D‐Graphics. This procedure was adopted because we felt these were the most simple media to integrate and process.
DIGIS A Graphical User Interface Design Environment for Non‐Programmers
Authors: de Bruin Hans , Bouwman Peter , van den Bos Jan 
Published: March 2003

AbstractDIGIS (Direct Interactive Generation of Interactive Systems) is a graphical UI design environment for non‐programmers that facilitates the design of all aspects of a UI with direct manipulation techniques. DIGIS is based on four models: an object model, a system task model, an interaction model and a dialogue control model. These four models describe an interactive system at a high conceptual level which allows a UI designer to quickly construct a high quality direct manipulation UI that supports undo‐redo, context‐sensitive help and guidance, and connect the UI with the (existing) application.
Abstract Interaction Objects
Authors: Duke D.J. , Harrison M.D. 
Published: March 2003

AbstractThe concept of an ‘interactor’ has been introduced by Faconti and Paterno' [6] as an abstraction of an entity in interactive graphics capable of both input and output. However the notion of interaction object need not be confined to graphics systems; it represents a useful structure for thinking and reasoning about the behaviour of interactive systems in general. As part of Esprit Basic Research Action 7040 (Amodeus‐2) we are using the concept of interactor, and existing work on state‐based processes and agents, to develop a model and theory of interactive systems. In this paper we describe two formal models for interaction objects and sketch how they can be used to build a small vocabulary of operators to support the rigorous specification of a graphics system. Our model differs from the approach of Faconti and Paterno' in that it abstracts away from any specific graphics framework and is thus suited to the level of abstraction demanded by formal approaches to system development.
Fast Spheres
Authors: Patterson John W. 
Published: March 2003

AbstractA new method for generating sphere‐like images, using parabolic surfaces delimited by Bresenham's circle‐ generation algorithm, is presented. In many cases the resultant images are indistinguishable from spheres illuminated from a given single direction. The main form of the algorithm uses first and second integer differences to minimise computation and uses typically not more than one floating‐point calculation per sphere. Two variants of the algorithm are given, one optimized for the special case of the light‐source being behind the view‐point, and one in which values are calculated for a z‐buffer hidden‐surface algorithm at the same time as the pixel values. The difference formulae can be exploited by differencing hardware or digital signal processors although very little arithmetic, typically five low‐weight integer operations, including address calculation operations, is required per pixel on a conventional architecture.