EPA's pesticides-in-groundwater strategy; agency action in the face of congressional inaction

ABSTRACT. Photography industry has continued to improve. In Bandung the development of the photography industry is also increasing. Every business person must be able to devise a good strategy in order to compete with other competitors, as well as that done by Klasik Photography. Klasik Photography is one of the services of wedding photography in the city of Bandung, with intense competition and the many competitors that make Klasik Photography compose a good promotional strategy to be able to compete. This is included in the focus of research. The purpose of this research is to find out: promotional steps taken by Klasik Photography in facing the competition of wedding photography services in the city of Bandung; the obstacles facing Klasik Photography in facing the competition of wedding photography services in the city of Bandung; the difference between promotional strategies undertaken by Klasik Photography and other photography promotion strategies; Klasik Photography reasons make promotional strategies by improving the quality of wedding products. This research was designed as a qualitative study using the case study method. Data collection techniques in this study used in-depth interview instruments, documentation and direct observation in Klasik Photography. In testing the validity of the data and the results of research using triangulation techniques of data sources. The promotional steps undertaken by Klasik Photography in the face of competition in wedding photography services in the city of Bandung is by collaborating with one of the largest wedding and honeymoon communities in Indonesia, Weddingku, marketing their photos (albums), videos and outputs on social media, Instagram, and what is most focused on is improving the quality of wedding products, photo albums, the following things also make a difference between Klasik Photography promotion strategies and other photography. As well as the obstacles that Klasik Photography faces in facing competition in wedding photography services in the city of Bandung are the development of rapidly developing technology and other photographers installing relatively lower prices, and the reason Klasik Photography makes promotional strategies by improving the quality of wedding products is because in the present age, creativity or wedding product innovation also needs to be developed to support companies in order to continue to compete with emerging competitors or new photographers. Keywords: Promotion Strategy, Klasik Photography, Photography Industry Competition

This study was to investigate the influence of story face strategy and reading motivation towards reading comprehension achievement of the tenth grade students of State Islamic Senior High School Number 1 of Palembang. The population of this study was all the tenth grade students ofState Islamic Senior High School Number 1 of Palembang. The sample was 72 students were taken by using two-stage random sampling; cluster random sampling and simple random sampling technique. In carrying out the research, the writer used an experimental method; factorial design.The writer distributed pre-test, post-test, and reading motivation questionnaire in collecting the data. Then, in analyzing the data, the writer used t-test and two-way ANOVA. The result of this study analysis that; First, there was a significant difference on reading comprehension achievement between the students who had high reading motivation and those who had low reading motivation taught by using story face strategy.Second, there was not any significant difference on reading comprehension achievement between the students who had high reading motivation and those who had low reading motivation taught by using conventional strategy. Third, there was a significant difference on reading comprehension achievement between the students who had high reading motivation and those who had low reading motivation taught by using story face strategy and conventional teaching. The last, there was an interaction effect between story face strategy and students’ motivation on reading comprehension achievement of The Tenth Grade Students of State Islamic Senior High School Number 1 of Palembang. Keywords: Story face strategy, Motivation and Students’ Narrative Reading Comprehension Achievement.

How do we come to the decision that we like a face? This thesis investigates this important aspect of social processing and communication by examining preference decisions for faces and the role that visual behavior plays in the process. I present a series of studies designed to investigate face preference formation and gaze patterns using eye-tracking and self-reported preference ratings. I tested healthy control subjects and two clinical populations known to have deficits in social processing: people with autism and patients with amygdala lesions. In studies one and two, I explore whether known social cognition deficits in people with autism and amygdala lesions also impair subjective decision-making regarding the attractiveness of faces. In study three, I investigate the flexibility of rule-based visual strategies used by these populations during face perception. Additionally, I present a custom algorithm developed to process raw eyetracking data, which was used to analyze all eyetracking data in this thesis. People with autism and patients with amygdala lesions are known to have general deficits in social processing, including difficulty orienting toward and evaluating faces. Nevertheless, I find that their behavior is markedly similar in many areas where we would expect them to have abnormalities or deficiencies. Their preference decisions when judging facial attractiveness were highly correlated with those made by controls, and both groups showed the same biases for familiar faces over novel faces. In addition, people with autism exhibit the same visual sampling behavior linking preference and attentional orienting, but reach their decisions faster than controls and also appear insensitive to the difficulty of the choice. Finally, gaze to the eye region appears normal in the absence of an explicit decision-making task, but only when analyzed in a similar manner as previous studies. However, when face sub-regions were analyzed in greater detail, people with autism demonstrate abnormalities in face gaze patterns, failing to emphasize the most information-rich regions of the face. Furthermore, people with autism demonstrate impairments in their ability to update those gaze patterns to accommodate different viewing restrictions. Taken together, these findings support the idea that the normal formation of face preferences can be preserved in the presence of general social processing impairments. Patterns in the eyetracking and behavioral data indicate that this is made possible, in part, by compensatory atypical processing and visual strategies.

In this paper, I will first present the concept of ‘face’ according to Thai culture. I will then describe the relationship of ‘face’ to shame in the Thai context. I will then discuss how politeness involves maintaining one’s ‘face’. It is necessary to view politeness within a framework of social interaction. Ide (1989: 225) noted that linguistic politeness is realised through the use of intentional strategies that allow one’s message to be favourably received by the addressee and also through the choice of expressions that conform to the norms of speech appropriate to the situation. Norms for social politeness, as well as the underlying value and belief systems, vary across cultures. Therefore, I will discuss some key themes and politeness strategies the Thai use in their social interaction. Finally, this paper will conclude with a discussion of the conceptual framework of shame.

بدون شک انواع بلایای طبیعی زندگی انسان را در طول تاریخ تهدید کرده و گاه تمدن‌های بشری را منقرض نموده است. این پدیده ها در هر زمانی از سال، روز و یا شب ممکن است رخ دهد، مهم‌ترین ویژگی‌های آن‌ها غیرقابل‌پیش‌بینی و ناگهانی بودن وقوع آن و هم‌چنین کوتاه بودن زمان برای عکس‌العمل در مقابل آن هاست. هدف این مقاله شناسایی عوامل مؤثر بر کاربرد راهبردهای تولیدی زراعی مدیریت ریسک توسط گندم کاران شهرستان بناب می‌باشد. جامعه آماری این پژوهش گندم کاران شهرستان بناب با 5695 بهره‌بردار و در قالب سه تعاونی فعال است. بر اساس جدول گرجسی و مورگان 400 نفر به‌عنوان نمونه مورد بررسی، تعیین گردید. بر اساس مشخصات جامعه روش نمونه‌گیری تصادفی ساده انتخاب شد. این تحقیق از نوع کاربردی و از لحاظ روش تحقیق توصیفی- همبستگی و تحلیلی از نوع علی- ارتباطی است. مطالعه راهنما در منطقه مشابه جامعه آماری با تعداد 50 پرسش‌نامه صورت گرفت و با داده‌های کسب‌شده و استفاده از فرمول ویژه کرونباخ آلفا، پایایی بخش‌های مختلف پرسش‌نامه تحقیق 87/0 الی 89/0 به دست آمد. تجزیه‌وتحلیل داده‌های پژوهش حاضر در دو بخش آمار توصیفی و استنباطی و با استفاده از نرم‌افزار SPSS انجام شد. بر اساس نتایج حاصل 15/57 درصد از گندم کاران شهرستان بناب در گروه متوسط از لحاظ کاربرد راهبردهای تولیدی زراعی مدیریت ریسک قرار داشتند. هم‌چنین یافته‌های تحقیق نشان داد که بین تمامی متغیرهای سرمایه روان شناختی و مدیریت ریسک در بین گندم کاران رابطه مثبت و معنی دار وجود دارد. بنابراین بهتر است که دوره های آموزشی جهت توانمندسازی و ظرفیت سازی به‌منظور به‌کارگیری مدیریت ریسک در بین گندم کاران مدنظر مسئولان قرار گیرد.

Face recognition has long been a goal of computer vision, but only in recent years reliable automated face recognition has become a realistic target of biometrics research. In this paper the contribution of classifier analysis to the Face Biometrics Verification performance is examined. It refers to the paradigm that in classification tasks, the use of multiple observations and their judicious fusion at the data, hence the decision fusions at different levels improve the correct decision performance. The fusion tasks reported in this work were carried through fusion of two well-known face recognizers, ICA I and ICA II. It incorporates the decision at matching score level, a novel fusion strategy is employed; the Likelihood Ratio Fusion within scores. This strategy increases the accuracy of the face recognition system and at the same time reduces the limitations of individual recognizer. The performance of the analysis studies were tested based on three different face databases ORL 94, Indian face database and eNTERFACE2005 Dynamic Face Database and the simulation results are showed a significant performance achievements.

許丙丁在創作《小封神》的過程中，不僅續衍、改編中國神魔小說的敘事傳統，以及挪用與轉化民間文化對神明的信仰，並以「在地化策略」，將台南一地的寺廟神佛納入小說之中，進而達到消解迷信的啟蒙目的，這也是歷來研究者關注的焦點。然而，眾多策略的運用，是造成了文本意義的一致，充分達到批判迷信，啟蒙讀者的效果？還是意外地造成文本的開放與對話，而讓迷信書寫與原本的啟蒙論述交匯並置，使文本的意義更加地分歧、多元，有不同的訊息從啟蒙論述的罅隙中流露出來，甚至是陷入原欲批判的意識形態之中而進退維谷？究竟我們該如何理解，《小封神》啟蒙論述與民間信仰書寫（或是許丙丁所認為的「迷信」）之間的關係？因此，我們將從以下幾個面向，觀察許丙丁原欲批判的迷信與啟蒙論述之間的關係：首先，是《小封神》對《封神演義》等神魔小說的承衍情形；接著，是《小封神》與神明或台南當地傳說、群眾心態之間的關係；最後，是讀者閱讀《小封神》後的反應。而相關版本在啟蒙論述上的差異亦將一併討論。

The most crucial aspect of a collaborative process, face to face or online, is the face of participants, which is the focus of this research. The face is a direct indicator of the importance for individuals to maintain face (self-esteem) for themselves and for their culture group. This research uses a qualitative interpretive approach of ethnomethodology. The subjects observed in this study are a virtual team of three universities: (one from Indonesia and two from the USA), which meets regularly via Skype videoconferencing. Conversation analysis is used to analyze how participants construct their conversation in collaborating to make decisions. The result of this study is the construction or mapping of the individual facework strategies from individualistic and collectivistic cultures. The implication of this research is a model constructing face strategy mapping of individuals, which explains how individuals negotiate their face in virtual collaboration inter-culturally and are very relevant in the advancement of Face-Negotiation Theory.

Writing is fundamental to effective communication particularly in this era in which e-mail and other word processed documents are the norm rather than the exception in a workplace. Writing apprehension is a result not a cause. It is a result of lacking knowledge or understanding necessary to complete the writing task and the students’ belief that writing is hard work. Writing is one of the four skills in Kiswahili language needed for written communication. However, previous studies point out that poor instructional strategies in Kiswahili language; not only limit the writing skills but also reduce students’ curiosity in writing. Until then, little was known about the influence of peer response groups’ strategy on students’ writing essays. The purpose of this Paper, therefore, was to determine the influence of peer response groups’ strategy on writing achievements in Kiswahili language among secondary school students in Kisii County, Kenya. To achieve this purpose, this paper sought to achieve the following objectives: to determine teachers’ competence in applying peer response strategy in classrooms and describe how response peer groups’ strategies impact writing in Kiswahili language. This paper adopted qualitative design. This paper was conducted in Kisii County secondary schools. The paper targeted secondary schools, teachers and form three students. The paper used interviews, observations and focus discussions to collect data. The paper held face to face interviews with teachers. Qualitative data was analysed thematically and findings were quoted directly in text. The major findings of this paper were that: peer response strategy enhance students’ drafts, lead to meaningful revisions, increase learners’ vocabulary and encourage students to write and revise drafts. This paper recommends that teachers ought to apply peer response groups’ strategy in the teaching of Kiswahili language in classrooms so that to enhance students’ writing achievements. Article visualizations:

Households plan strategically for facing risks associated with livelihood security. Choosing a particular set of coping strategies depends on a number of factors including the types of crisis households face and options available. Often, poor households risk future income generating capacity for maintaining current food consumption. This paper examines strategies used by rural households for coping with the shocks and investigates whether there is any distinctive pattern in adopting these strategies. Using a cross section data set covering 1600 households from the northwestern Bangladesh, we estimate a trivariate probit model for explaining the adoption of coping strategies. Results indicate that choice of coping strategies depend on diversity and stability of household income sources. Households with higher education have greater access to stable incomes sources and have more income sources, and so are less likely to adopt ex-post coping strategies. Households with more assets are more likely to divest assets or obtain secured loans rather than rely on unsecured loans. Wealthier households are not less likely to adopt current adjustment strategies, suggesting that there is a general sequence of coping strategies that all households follow, irrespective of the assets they own.

Over the past decade, Taiwan businesses are more likely to invest either in mainland China and/or in Vietnam. Due to situations such as rapid economic growth, Yuan appreciation or substantial depreciation of the Vietnamese Dong, inflation and local labor policies make businesses face many complex environmental uncertainties. Therefore based on the comparative advantages of Taiwan businessmen with the global layout, the external environment facing the political, economical, social culture, science and technology and other of high degree of environmental uncertainties, how to take appropriate trans-national business strategies and through an efficient financial management co-ordination mechanism to create its overseas businesses operating performance are inevitable. In this study, e-mails by the network selected senior managements or financial directors as the sample objects. 120 questionnaires had been sent out via email to collect empirical data as the initial screening aimed for Taiwan businessmen in mainland China and Vietnam, only 49 were recovered as valid questionnaires, 40.8% recovery rate. The main research methods adopted correlation analysis and regression analysis to explore whether there are significant correlations in the corporate identities, environmental uncertainties, business strategies and multinational financial management mechanisms or not, as well as the business performance impact between the cross-border financial management mechanisms and corporate strategic managements. The results of this study found that: 1. Taiwan businessmen in the host countries faced with environmental uncertainties such as the integrated co-operation tax policies, funds scheduling and inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, tend to be under the parent company’s control; however, in contrary financial and accounting staff personnel tend to localize. 2. Trans-national business strategies of Taiwan businessmen tend to take foreseeable and defensive methods. Both foreseeable and defensive strategies, financial and accounting staffs tend to localize. For those Taiwan businessmen take foreseeable strategy, the financial and accounting management are more likely to adopt an “integrated co-operation”way. 3. Sales or business capital of the greater scale, financial and accounting management are more likely to adopt an‘integrated co-operation’way. 4. Financial management mechanisms that adopt an integrated approach and defensive strategy, as a result, the financial performance show more positive.

Purpose : The online shopping sector in Kenya is still not well developed and online commercial activities contribute to just over 1% of Kenya’s GDP. Kenya’s rate of online shopping is 23% and currently lags behind the global rate of online shopping which is 59%. The different level of development in online shopping between Kenya and other developed economies shows that the sector still has a long way to go in Kenya. Online shops face competition from the conventional ‘brick-and-mortar’ stores and supermarkets. In order to deal with the competition most online shops market their products using internet marketing, which is defined as advertising of a company’s products or services over the internet with the view of increasing profits or market share. Market share is the percentage of an industry acquired by a company during a certain period of time. This study aimed to establish the influence of internet marketing strategies on the market share of online shops in Kenya. The specific objectives of the study were: to determine the influence of website design strategies on the market share of online shops in Nairobi County in Kenya; to establish the influence of content marketing strategies on the market share of online shops in Nairobi County in Kenya; to assess the influence of affiliate marketing strategies on the market share of online shops in Nairobi County in Kenya and to establish the influence of social media marketing strategies on the market share of online shops in Nairobi County in Kenya. Methodology: This study adopted descriptive research design. The study covered 68 respondents drawn from a population of 34 online shops operating within Nairobi County, with an average of 2 respondents selected per organization. The study relied on data collected using a questionnaire comprising of both open-ended and close-ended questions, structured to meet the objectives of the study. The data was analyzed using inferential statistics by means of Statistical Packages for Social Sciences version 20. Results: The results indicated a P-value of 0.0002, which is less than 0.05 against all the variables in the study. This indicated that website design marketing strategies, content marketing strategies, affiliate marketing strategies and social media marketing strategies had a significant influence on the market share of online shops in Nairobi County. The study revealed a positive correlation between website design and market share with a correlation coefficient of 0.015, a positive correlation between content marketing and market share with a correlation coefficient of 0.163, a positive correlation between affiliate marketing and market share with a correlation coefficient of 0.057, and a positive correlation between social media marketing and market share with a correlation coefficient of 0.923. The study concluded that social media marketing strategies contributed the most to the overall market share of online shops in Nairobi, followed by content marketing strategies, affiliate marketing strategies and finally website design marketing strategies. Unique contribution to policy and practice: The study recommended that online shops needed to come up with an internet marketing mix that incorporated all the different strategies given that the respondents gave varied views on which internet marketing strategies were more influential. The County governments were encouraged to look into ways of making internet connectivity more affordable since most online shops indicated unreliable and expensive internet as a challenge when trying to conduct internet marketing. The ‘brick-and-mortar’ shops that were not making a profit were also urged to consider the online business model. Retail customers were advised to be willing to accept change and embrace online shopping.

This research aims to know the strategy of the central government and local in the face of MEA 2015. By knowing the strategy of the central government and local Indonesian society is expected to be able to prepare themselves to face MEA 2015. This study used a descriptive analytical and literature study with secondary data which source books, journals, literature, reports and official information from ASEAN secretary in Jakarta or other sources obtained from the internet related to the above theme. Strategy and preparation Indonesia in order to deal with liberalization of the system applied ASEAN still less than optimal. But Indonesia with potential resources abundant have brought the movement to a more advanced again. This is evidenced by the growing recognition of international environmental against the existence of Indonesia on a positive track. It can be concluded that Indonesia is able to and ready to face the realization AEC 2015. Keywords: AEC, ASEAN Community, Strategy of national and local government to face MEA

The present study investigates the semantic formulas used in compliment giving and the strategies in compliment responses in both Malay and English produced by Malay ESL speakers. Using the semantic formula categories, an analysis of more than 2000 compliment tokens obtained from Discourse Completion Task and open roleplays was conducted. It was discovered that explicit compliments were widely used but are often bounded with information questions and requests. Non-formulaic compliments such as teasing in interactions are adopted for the purpose of maintaining solidarity and preservation of face. In relation to compliment responses, it was found that the preferred strategy in Malay compliment response is acceptance, followed by amendment. This is in contrast to the previous literatures in Malay discourse which suggest that rejection is the preferred strategy in compliment response. Such findings seem to reflect a tendency for a shift away from Malay traditional discourse to a more Western style of accepting compliments. However, a much closer investigation revealed that even in accepting a compliment, elements of malu still persist in that Malay speakers maintains a preference to shy away from upgrading the praises or would simply amend the complimentary force conveyed to them. In this way, positive face politeness will be maintained not only between individuals but also with the society and particularly with God which allows for the creation of religious face – another dimension to the framework of politeness principle All of the strategies adopted reflect the intricacies of Malay cultural values in compliment behaviour, particularly niat, malu and ikhlas, which can be interpreted in a form of a cultural-pragmatic model. These discoveries clearly have important implications in cross-cultural communication and in the field of English as an International Language because they provide insights to further enhance the understanding of the socio-pragmatic principles of Malay language use.

The main contribution of this thesis is a novel algorithm for fitting a Three-Dimensional Morphable Model of faces to a 2D input image. This fitting algorithm enables the estimation of the 3D shape, the texture, the 3D pose and the light direction from a single input image. Generally, the algorithms tackling the problem of 3D shape estimation from image data use only the pixels intensity as input to drive the estimation process. This was previously achieved using either a simple model, such as the Lambertian reflectance model, leading to a linear fitting algorithm. Alternatively, this problem was addressed using a more precise model and minimizing a non-convex cost function with many local minima. One way to reduce the local minima problem is to use a stochastic optimization algorithm. However, the convergence properties (such as the radius of convergence) of such algorithms, are limited. Here, as well as the pixel intensity, we use various image features such as the edges or the location of the specular highlights. The 3D shape, texture and imaging parameters are then estimated by maximizing the posterior of the parameters given these image features. The overall cost function obtained is smoother and, hence, a stochastic optimization algorithm is not needed to avoid the local minima problem. This leads to the Multi-Features Fitting algorithm that has a wider radius of convergence and a higher level of precision. The new Multi-Feature Fitting algorithm is applied for such tasks as face identification, facial expression transfer from one image to another image (of different individuals) and face tracking across 3D pose and expression variations. The second contribution of this thesis is a careful comparison of well known fitting algorithms used in the context of face modelling and recognition. It is shown that these algorithms achieve high run time efficiency at the cost of accuracy and generality (few face images may be analysed). The third and last contribution is the Matlab Morphable Model toolbox, a set of software tools developed in the Matlab programing environment. It allows (i) the generation of 3D faces from model parameters, (ii) the rendering of 3D faces, (iii) the fitting of an input image using the Multi-Features Fitting algorithm and (iv) identification from model parameters. The toolbox has a modular design that allows anyone to builds on it and, for instance, to improve the fitting algorithm by incorporating new features in the cost function.