This research compares the effectiveness of commitment and normative strategies to promote towel reuse among hotel guests. We used a 2 (commitment vs no commitment) 2 (norm vs no norm) between-participants quasi-experimental design to create four communication strategies. The first strategy consisted of a simple in-room message reminding guests that they could contribute to environmental conservation by reusing their towels. The second added a normative appeal to this message (i.e., “75% of guests reuse their towels”). The third used a commitment strategy whereby the initial message (simple in-room message) was combined with a preparatory request (i.e., hang a card on room door to show you support the hotel's initiative). Finally, the fourth included both the normative appeal and the preparatory request. The results demonstrate that the isolated use of norms and commitment has a positive effect on guests' pro-environmental behavior. We also observe that the combined use of these two strategies does not result in increased pro-environmental behavior in comparison to when they are used separately.
We examine the association between online apartment rental searches and fundamental real estate market variables namely, vacancy rates, rental rates and real estate asset price returns. We find that consumer real estate searches are significantly associated with the market fundamentals after controlling for known determinants of these variables. In particular, we show that apartment rental-related online searches are endogenously and contemporaneously associated with reduced vacancy rate. However, the association between the searches and rental rates is not significant. The searches are also contemporaneously associated with positive returns on the appraised values of multifamily assets. There is some evidence that the searches are fundamentally associated with REIT returns in the short run and that REIT investors watch the online search trends to inform their stock pricing decisions
Relatively little practice-based research explores situated learning beyond the level of basic skill development. This article seeks to expand our understanding by focusing on the situated development of high-level creativity in the practice of haute cuisine and the role of the master–apprentice relationship in this development. Much has been written on what creativity is and where it happens, but little is known about how it is developed. By using an insider to investigate highly creative practitioners, namely, world-renowned chefs, this research provides the necessary contextual understanding for studying and explaining the development of high-level creativity in this field.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report 2013 on Switzerland illustrates national differences in entrepreneurial attitudes, activity, and aspirations between economies, revealing the factors that determine the nature and level of national entrepreneurial activity, and identifying policy implications for enhancing entrepreneurship in Switzerland. The GEM data complement already existing indicators of competitiveness and innovation. In the 2013 census, perceived opportunities to start a business were higher in Switzerland than in previous years. Switzerland ranks above the average of innovationbased countries. What is particularly noticeable is the fact that Fear of Failure has clearly lessened in the past few years, and in 2013 was even lower than in the USA.
Ce livre analyse les opérations comptables spécifiques aux différentes formes juridiques d’entreprises, telles que la raison individuelle, les sociétés de personnes et de capitaux. Les fusions, les scissions et les transformations d’entreprises sont également traitées. Il fait suite au livre de comptabilité générale et s’adresse aussi bien aux praticiens qu’aux étudiants universitaires et des hautes écoles de gestion ou en préparation aux brevets fédéraux.
The analysis of large data sets can help to gain knowledge about specific organs or on specific diseases, just as big data analysis does in many non-medical areas. This article aims to gain information from 3D volumes, so the visual content of lung CT scans of a large number of patients. In the case of the described data set, only little annotation is available on the patients that were all part of an ongoing screening program and besides age and gender no information on the patient and the findings was available for this work. This is a scenario that can happen regularly as image data sets are produced and become available in increasingly large quantities but manual annotations are often not available and also clinical data such as text reports are often harder to share. We extracted a set of visual features from 12,414 CT scans of 9,348 patients that had CT scans of the lung taken in the context of a national lung screening program in Belarus. Lung fields were segmented by two segmentation algorithms and only cases where both algorithms were able to find left and right lung and had a Dice coefficient above 0.95 were analyzed. This assures that only segmentations of good quality were used to extract features of the lung. Patients ranged in age from 0 to 106 years. Data analysis shows that age can be predicted with a fairly high accuracy for persons under 15 years. Relatively good results were also obtained between 30 and 65 years where a steady trend is seen. For young adults and older people the results are not as good as variability is very high in these groups. Several visualizations of the data show the evolution patters of the lung texture, size and density with age. The experiments allow learning the evolution of the lung and the gained results show that even with limited metadata we can extract interesting information from large-scale visual data. These age-related changes (for example of the lung volume, the density histogram of the tissue) can also be taken into account for the interpretation of new cases. The database used includes patients that had suspicions on a chest X-ray, so it is not a group of healthy people, and only tendencies and not a model of a healthy lung at a specific age can be derived.
This issue features not just one but two conference reports. The first covers the 14th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI 16), while the second covers the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2016). For both, find out what hot topics and key themes were discussed, which submissions earned the Best Paper awards, and more.
This paper suggests a tentative conceptual framework to study the internationalization of foreign/OECD-based SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) attracted by fast growing emerging markets, such as China and other Asian economies, and the supportive role of global cities as market gate focal points providing a wide range of financial and non-financial services facilitating emerging market entry. In other words, the hypothesis is that a number of global cities (about 75 cities are classified and ranked as such worldwide) play an important business intermediation role, including vis-à-vis distant and difficult regional emerging markets. This proposed research is to bring up added value to the study of global cities, which has been envisaged so far exclusively in terms of their global growth as contributed by transnational corporations. The existing literature reveals that the business intermediation role of global cities has been studied in terms of services provided to transnational corporations and their affiliates, which tend to concentrate their regional offices and other business coordinating logistics and management in such cities. The first part of this contribution aims to proposea conceptual framework that combines studies in international business management with a strong focus on SME internationalization on the one hand, together with knowledge from economic geography and urban studies with a focus on global cities on the other hand. In the second part of this contribution, an empirical study of Swiss SME internationalization vis-a-vis distant Asian emerging markets and their relative direct and indirect presence in so-called alpha-type global cities provides some first-hand scientific evidence illustrating the proposed conceptual framework. The findingsderived from the empirical study tend to demonstrate the high importance of global cities for European internationalizing SMEs –as illustrated in the Swiss case- especially when it comes to far distant emerging market penetration and market development in countries with strong cultural differences from the SMEs home market.
