Idiosyncratic Characteristics Research Articles

Variació per tema. El discurs especialitzat o la varietat funcional determinada per la temàtica: noves perspectives

Specialised communication is increasingly becoming an interesting subject of study among linguists, particularly in Textual Linguistics. These linguists refer to specialised languages to indicate the particular resources used by the speakers in communicative situations which are involved in specialised transfer of knowledge. In this paper, the concept of specialised languages is redefined and stablished by the reduction of a language to its functional registers as determined by the communication topic and as placed within a grammar of variation. Consequently, we do not treat these functional resources as alanguage strictu sensu, that is, as a system with units and rules of different descriptive levels; but as a particular selection of possibilities offered by a grammar system. We also present idiosyncratic characteristics acquired by linguistic resources in a specialised communicative situation, and we propose a renewed theory of terminological units in the framework of different specialities.

NAFTA and franchising: A comparison of franchisor perceptions of characteristics associated with franchisee success and failure in Canada, Mexico, and the United States

Business-format franchising, which includes the product or service, the brand name or trademark, and the operating system developed by a franchisor, has experienced significant growth over the past few decades. International franchising also is growing at a rapid pace, in part, because of market opportunities that include new trade agreements. The debate over North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) increased the focus on North American franchising. In spite of this attention, there are few, if any, comparative studies of franchising in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. At the same time that international franchising growth is extolled, there is an argument over the extent to which franchising increases business success. A number of studies support the success thesis, however, recently critics claim that franchising does not significantly increase survival rates of franchisee-owned units. The objectives of this study are, first, to extend the study of franchisee success and failure by analyzing franchise executives' perceptions of the importance of a number of characteristics associated with franchisee success and failure, and second, to examine differences among the executives' perceptions of these characteristics based on the location of the franchisor—Canada, Mexico, or the United States. We also analyze the effects of franchise strategy, type of franchise business, and size of the franchise on executive perceptions of the characteristics associated with franchisee success and failure. Franchisor executives rated the relative importance of 39 statements, taken from previous research, that are associated with perceptions of success. Results from a factor analysis indicate that 30 of the variables load on 5 significant factors. Examination of the content of the factors indicates that the first factor (system quality), and the second factor (brand name) consist of variables that directly relate to the core of business-format franchising, the quality of the operating system and the brand name of the franchise. The third factor (local environment) consists of statements that represent general characteristics of the local franchise environment. The fourth factor (communication) consists of variables that link the franchisee with the franchisor and other franchisees. The fifth factor (franchise activities) consists of variables that represent idiosyncratic characteristics or activities of a franchisee. Franchise executives also rated the relative importance of 16 statements associated with franchisee failure. Of these, 6 statements, associated with franchisor activities, are combined to form a scale of franchisor failure, and 10 statements, associated with franchisee activities, are combined to form a scale of franchisee failure. The findings indicate that there are significant differences in most of the scales of success and failure among franchisor executives' perceptions based on country location. In addition, there is also a significant effect of franchise strategy on perceptions. There are no significant differences by type of franchise business or size of the franchisor. This research contributes to two important areas of research in franchising; the study of perceptions of the characteristics associated with franchisee success and failure, and international franchising research. The study also has practical applications. Knowledge about country differences in perceived characteristics of success and failure will help franchisors to identify aspects of the business system that require increased monitoring and investment. Awareness of country differences will also influence the selection of relevant training and development. Finally, knowledge of differences in perceptions may assist franchisors in adapting systems and policies that are likely to increase the success of their international sites.

Options in mutually exclusive projects of unequal lives

Standard techniques advocated for choosing between mutually exclusive projects of unequal lives make an implicit assumption of continued project replication. While intuitively appealing, those techniques ignore the fact that project replication is one outcome of a repeated choice situation, and may not be the optimal outcome once stochastic features of the environment are taken into account. In essence, standard techniques ignore the real options relating to the subsequent choices inherent in each decision. By means of a simple example, assuming interest rate uncertainty, it is demonstrated that the standard techniques can lead to errors in a stochastic environment. Because of the idiosyncratic characteristics of project comparisons and the compound nature of the options involved, neat analytical solutions and techniques are not available to replace the elegant, but inadequate, textbook models. Financial managers need to model each choice on a case by case basis, appropriately identifying the key drivers of Net Present Value and specifying the stochastic environment pertaining to each.

Moving beyond the mechanistic model: An alternative approach to staffing for contemporary organizations

The currently accepted model of employee staffing is grounded in traditional principles of industrial psychology which stem from concepts associated with a view of organizations as machines. This perspective is incompatible with modern organizations that are frequently structured around networks and teams rather than around individuals performing jobs. A new staffing model based on the notion of organizing through emergent relationships is developed to explain how modern organizations select new members and develop agreements that define their roles. This model acknowledges the fact that individual roles emerge around idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals and can not be adequately defined through prehire job analysis. Implications of this model for research are discussed.

Individually distinctive odours represent individual conspecifics in rats

Individual recognition implies that a subject has the ability to discriminate between familiar conspecifics on the basis of their idiosyncratic characteristics. In this sense it is likely to be a more complex process than other forms of social recognition which involve classification of conspecifics into broad categories such as group, sex, age, kinship and familiarity. Using a go/no-go discrimination procedure, this study showed that rats,Rattus norvegicus, are indeed able to recognize conspecifics as individuals. Once rats had learned to discriminate a pair of conspecifics, they showed positive transfer on a series of discrimination problems involving novel conspecifics as stimuli. Furthermore, on a reversal test, rats were able to retain the memory of the individual identity of conspecifics to which they were exposed for the first time for at least 24h. Finally, using the individually distinctive odours of previously discriminated conspecifics in tests clearly demonstrated that rats perceive olfactory sig-natures as representations of known individuals. Taken together, these results provide evidence for true individual recognition in rats and invite further investigations to gain deeper insight into the cognitive processes used by rats to build up a representation of individual conspecifics.

Employment-Related Drug Testing: Idiosyncratic Characteristics and Issues

In the field of personnel and human resource management, many discussions of drug testing have taken a perspective which treats drug testing as analogous to the use of other common personnel selection devices, such as employment tests. This paper identifies and examines certain idiosyncratic issues and characteristics of drug testing compared to other selection devices. These unique features differentiate drug tests and testing, and their use from other types of pre-hire predictors of job performance. The implications of these idiosyncrasies for both human resource management professionals and public personnel management practitioners are highlighted and discussed.

An Essay on Isomorphic and Idiosyncratic Characteristics of Social and Natural Science

The schools of natural science, especially since Newton, have continuously influenced the social science in two ways. As seen in the example of the systems theory or social Darwinism, many social scientists have got insights from the ideas of natural science. It is quite natural that a scientist discovers a new way of thinking or an implication from a different academic discipline; however, the mainstream social scientists have trapped themselves by confining their science with the methodology obtained from natural science in order to validate it. This paper aims to reveal this methodological trap of social science by showing the influence of natural science to social science in the context of validation and by contrasting the differences between social and natural science issue by issue. The issues raised in this paper include the possibility of the monology and the normal science in social science, the debate over fact-value dichotomy and obtaining objectivity in social science, and the role of science and methodological reductionist issue. Considering such idiosyncrasies of social science, it is claimed that social science should keep its methodological uniqueness and autonomy.

Environmental refugees: a review

SummaryThe purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of ‘environmental refugees’. The emergence of refugees within the framework of international law and policy is examined briefly so as to provide insight into the juridical difficulties environmental refugees can expect to confront. The literature on environmental refugees is steadily growing and the very definition of who qualifies as an environmental refugee has undergone great changes. The evolving nature of the definition and its increasing complexity is reviewed; the result being that environmental refugees can now be placed into several well-defined groupings, each with its own idiosyncratic characteristics. These increasingly distinctive groups of refugees can have as debilitating consequences as other types for receiving societies. The nature of this threat must be looked at fully in order to emphasize the urgent need to arrive at appropriate solutions. Finding solutions to a new crisis is not a simple task as many people fiercely oppose recognition of environmental refugees. Yet, failure to act may prove detrimental to human well-being as the emerging evidence points to a state of affairs that may haunt humankind in the twenty-first century.

Modality dependency of familiarity ratings of Japanese words

Familiarity ratings for a large number of aurally and visually presented Japanese words wer measured for 11 subjects, in order to investigate the modality dependency of familiarity. The correlation coefficient between auditory and visual ratings was .808, which is lower than that observed for English words, suggesting that a substantial portion of the mental lexicon is modality dependent. It was shown that the modality dependency is greater for low-familiarity words than it is for medium- or high-familiarity words. This difference between the low- and the medium- or high-familiarity words has a relationship to orthography. That is, the dependency is larger in words consisting only of kanji, which may have multiple pronunciations and usually represent meaning, than it is in words consisting only of hiragana or katakana, which have a single pronunciation and usually do not represent meaning. These results indicate that the idiosyncratic characteristics of Japanese orthography contribute to the modality dependency.

Social and individual recognition in rodents: Methodological aspects and neurobiological bases

What animals know about each other, and how they construct and use knowledge of their social world involves at least an ability to recognise different social categories. Although much evidence has accumulated that animals are able to identify and classify other individuals into different categories, few studies have definitively demonstrated true individual recognition, i.e. discrimination between individuals on the basis of their idiosyncratic characteristics. Furthermore, the neural structures and pathways involved in social and, a fortiori, individual recognition have as yet been poorly investigated. This paper discusses various methods and measures currently used to assess different forms of social categorisations in animals, with special reference to rodents. Recent progress concerning the neurobiological bases involved in social recognition is also discussed. Finally, integrative perspectives for studying individual recognition in the context of social cognition is underlined in relation to different approaches investigating rodents' ability to use learned olfactory information.

Evidence of behaviour from refitting‐a case study

A re‐examination of the lithic remains from the preboreal site of R⊘rmyr II by means of the method of refitting has shown that the site represents the remains from a single occupation. In this article the authors focus on various behavioural aspects recognized within three contemporaneous activity areas on the site. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic knapping characteristics of the people who produced the material will be discussed. By distinguishing between the various types of refits represented, in addition to examining the implications of the typological inventory, the site of R⊘rmyr II has been characterized as a short‐term hunter's camp‐site, and not as a specialized hunting station.

Patterns of Visitation by Animal Pollinators

I measured the relative rates of pollination visitation at various points during the blooming periods of several species of animal-pollinated plants in Rocky Mountain subalpine meadows. The most common pattern was for visitation to be low early in the flowering period, but then to increase and remain high for the duration of flowering. Relative visitation rate on a species was uncorrelated with the amount of flowering time overlap experienced from species with similar pollinators; thus overlap is not a good indicator of competition for visits. I also measured visitation rates on three species in artificial and natural competition experiments. In one species, pressure of a potential competitor decreased visitation, but in two others increased it. Whether interspecific overlap increases or decreases visitation probably depends on floral similarity, pollinator constancy, spatial proximity of interactants, and other idiosyncratic characteristics of the interaction. I discuss the role of competition for visits as one component of competition for successful pollination service.

Identification of speakers by use of nasal coarticulation.

A new approach, based on the statistical properties of the nasal spectra, has been used to quantitatively study the coarticulation of nasal consonants, with the vowels following them in isolated /hə′CVd/ utterances. The spectral differences between the mean spectra of nasals followed by front vowels and those of nasals followed by back vowels were used as the acoustic measure of the coarticulation of [m] and [n] with the following vowel [V]. The coarticulation between [n] and [V] was found to be only about one-third of that between [m] and [V]. The coarticulated nasal spectrum, particularly between [m] and [V], was found to have strongly idiosyncratic characteristics, which are not likely to be modified in natural speech. A method was therefore developed by which the coarticulation between [m] and [V] was taken as the acoustic clue and the speaker was identified by use of a correlation decision criterion. Coarticulation was found to give more reliable clues than the nasal spectrum alone, which had earlier been found to be one of the best acoustic clues for identifying speakers.

Speaker Identification Using Nasal Coarticulation

A new approach which used the statistical properties of the nasal spectra was used to quantitatively study the coarticulation of nasal consonants with the vowels in the isolated /h ə′ CVd/ utterances. The Euclidean distance between two nasal spectra means followed by front vowels and by back vowels along each frequency dimension was used as the acoustic measure of the coarticulation of [m,n] and the following vowel context. The coarticulation of [m] was found to to be about 50% larger than that of [n]. Moreover, the strong speaker idiosyncratic characteristics were found for the coarticulation process, which is not likely to be modified in natural speech. Speaker identification was performed using the [m] coarticulation measure and a correlation decision criterion. The results indicated that the coarticulation cues are much better than nasal spectrum alone, which has already been demonstrated to be one of the best acoustic cues for speaker identification. [This work was supported by the AFOSR Grant 69-1776.]

Elastic wave generation. (High power high efficiency source of elastic waves in which noise present in a solid-state amplifier is synchronized into coupled coherent modes of oscillation): Quate, C.F. US Patent 3,411,023 (1968) (Filed 27 December 1965) (1012)

Do children with visual impairments outperform their sighted cohorts in reading and auditory comprehension tasks?We address this question by applying panel regression techniques on a comprehensive sample of 16 children with visual impairments from a Greek special school for students with visual impairments.By comparing the reader comprehender profile for both children types, we find that the children with visual impairments perform better than their sighted counterparts. The better performance is supported both unconditionally and conditionally on idiosyncratic characteristics, such as age, text complexity, modality, sex and reading ability.Decomposing the reader comprehender profile into a literal, global and local type of questions we find that the results are mainly driven by the superior performance of the children with VI in the literal questions.