Engaging suppliers in CRM: The role of justice in buyer–supplier relationships

Given the crucial role of suppliers in collaborative supply chains, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to the nature and management of supplier relationships in the implementation of a retailer's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. To address this gap in the extant literature, the theory of organizational justice is used to explore the extent to which perceived fairness in buyer–supplier relationships supports or inhibits supplier engagement with the CRM process. The rationale is that suppliers who feel fairly treated by key retail customers are more likely to invest resources in the acquisition and use of data central to the retailer's CRM strategy. By empirically testing a conceptual model linking downstream CRM to upstream SRM, the results provide evidence to indicate that customer data use is significantly influenced by perceptions of fairness, particularly with respect to the distribution of rewards, and the transparency of decision-making processes. As a key criticism of CRM centers upon the failure of organizations to exploit the full potential of customer data, the results highlight the usefulness of understanding the relational linkages between buyers and suppliers and the consequential behavior of suppliers in terms of engagement with customer data vital to the success of retailers’ CRM strategies.     

Navigation system for a smart wheelchair

Recent results on the development of a navigation system for a smart wheelchair are presented in this paper. In order to reduce the development cost, a modular solution is designed by using commercial and low cost devices. The functionalities of the tracking control system are described. Experimental results of the proposed assistive system are also presented and discussed.     

The impact of technology and a no remediation policy on non-traditional students

A Hunter College librarian, with public library experience, offered a series of drop-in workshops Saturday afternoons open to all students and questions regarding Web or Windows use in the academic year, 2000-2001. The intention of the workshops was to address the continuous needs of students lacking technological and informational literacy. The success of these workshops led to this investigation of the implications of 21st century technology on non-traditional students from the perspective of bibliographic instruction as well as reference desk service. The perspective is that of the urban educational environment of City University of New York and Hunter College. The histories of open admissions at CUNY and the current efforts to abolish remediation are examined.     

Child protection and justice systems processing of serious child abuse and neglect cases

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the trajectory of cases through four systems: child protection, law enforcement, the dependency courts, and the criminal courts. METHOD: This study focused on a county selected from a 41-county telephone survey conducted for the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3). For this analysis prospective samples were drawn from law enforcement (n=225) and the county child protection (CPS) agency (n=225) and followed through in-depth case tracking across all agencies and through both the dependency and criminal court systems. RESULTS: The percentage of CPS cases opened in dependency court was similar to prior studies (29%), but the acceptance and prosecution rates were much higher--92% of the cases referred from CPS, including many cases of physical abuse. Compared to referrals from CPS to law enforcement (93%), few cases were referred from law enforcement to CPS (17%). Anecdotally, case referral patterns appeared to be influenced by communication patterns and mutual positive regard, regardless of the collaborative protocols in place. One of the most instructive findings was the degree of difficulty in tracking cases across organizations and the types of obstacles that impeded success. Disorganization was not an issue, rather internal structures set up to facilitate intra-organizational processing were the same structures that actually impeded cross-organizational case finding. CONCLUSIONS: It is not sufficient to rely on the existence of multi-disciplinary teams or Child Advocacy Centers to ensure collaboration. More attention to daily tasks and activities as well as the nature and quality of communication is warranted. On the technical side, use of common case identifiers on cases that are cross-referred is strongly recommended. Future studies should broaden the scope of inquiry to include the consequences of all case trajectories, rather than solely focusing on the justice system.     

What was out of the frame? A dialogic look at youth media production in a cultural diversity and educational context in Chile

This article accounts for an experience of digital storytelling workshops with indigenous adolescents in Chile, and proposes a theoretical and methodological approach to analyze digital creations with a dialogic and ethnographic point of view. Based on this, it discusses the possibilities of digital media production as a strategy for the self-expression of children and adolescents, particularly immersed in unequal and ethnically diverse educational contexts. The specific case of two Mapuche girls reveals complex ways of organizing and positioning their voices, where ‘girl power’ and ‘post-girl power’ discourses are relevant, but not so their ethnicity. The results show that television, with its main audiovisual genres, styles and stereotypes, appears clearly on the teenagers’ creations, while the absence of Mapuche signs along the creation process and also into the digital stories seems to be related with two important features of the Chilean educational system: ethnic inequalities and its fierce attachment to neoliberalism.     

A static method for obtaining a calibration factor for SRM bicycle power cranks

Many scientists and coaches are interested in mechanical power produced during cycling, and use Schoberer Rad Me\technik (SRM) bicycle power cranks to obtain this data. However, it has been expensive and difficult to calibrate SRM cranks, causing much of the collected data to be unreliable. We present a static method, derived from first principles, for obtaining a calibration factor for SRM cranks. A known mass and lever arm (chainring of a known diameter) are used to apply a known torque load to the instrument in four positions, and the output frequencies are used to calculate the calibration factor in Hz/Nm. The reproducibility of this method is ±0.01 Hz/Nm, which is acceptable for the application of the instrument, which is measurement of mechanical power application by cyclists at the crank. The method is reliable, inexpensive, and easy to set up, and will allow higher confidence in data collected using SRM power cranks. We recommend calibration of the power meter once every six months because of the measured drift of the calibration factor over time.     

“Inhabitants of the Earth”: Reasoning About Folkbiological Concepts in Wichi Children and Adults

Across the world, people form folkbiological categories to capture their commonsense organization of the natural world. Structured in accordance with universal principles, folkbiological categories are also shaped by experience. Here we provide new evidence from the Wichi—an understudied indigenous community who live in the Chaco rainforest and speak their heritage language. A total of 44 Wichi (6- to 8-year-olds, 9- to 12-year-olds, adults) participated in an induction task designed to identify how broadly they attribute an invisible biological property (e.g., an internal organ) from 1 individual (either a human, nonhuman animal, or plant) to other humans, nonhuman animals, plants, natural kinds, and artifacts. Research Findings: These results (a) clarify the content of the Wichi’s categories and the words they use to describe them, (b) showcase the power of covert (unnamed) categories, and (c) fortify the view that human-centered reasoning is not a universal starting point for reasoning about nature. Practice or Policy: Implications of these findings for early science education are discussed. In particular, we discuss (a) how the Wichi’s construal of the natural world may be best integrated when they reach the (Western science–inspired) classroom and (b) how the current results bear on central issues in early science education more broadly.     

Novel model reference adaptive control laws for improved transient dynamics and guaranteed saturation constraints

In classical model reference adaptive control (MRAC), the adaptive rates must be tuned to meet multiple competing objectives. Large adaptive rates guarantee rapid convergence of the trajectory tracking error to zero. However, large adaptive rates may also induce saturation of the actuators and excessive overshoots of the closed-loop system’s trajectory tracking error. Conversely, low adaptive rates may produce unsatisfactory trajectory tracking performances. To overcome these limitations, in the classical MRAC framework, the adaptive rates must be tuned through an iterative process. Alternative approaches require to modify the plant’s reference model or the reference command input. This paper presents the first MRAC laws for nonlinear dynamical systems affected by matched and parametric uncertainties that constrain both the closed-loop system’s trajectory tracking error and the control input at all times within user-defined bounds, and enforce a user-defined rate of convergence on the trajectory tracking error. By applying the proposed MRAC laws, the adaptive rates can be set arbitrarily large and both the plant’s reference model and the reference command input can be chosen arbitrarily. The user-defined rate of convergence of the closed-loop plant’s trajectory is enforced by introducing a user-defined auxiliary reference model, which converges to the trajectory tracking error obtained by applying the classical MRAC laws before its transient dynamics has decayed, and steering the trajectory tracking error to the auxiliary reference model at a rate of convergence that is higher than the rate of convergence of the plant’s reference model. The ability of the proposed MRAC laws to prescribe the performance of the closed-loop system’s trajectory tracking error and control input is guaranteed by barrier Lyapunov functions. Numerical simulations illustrate both the applicability of our theoretical results and their effectiveness compared to other techniques such as prescribed performance control, which allows to constrain both the rate of convergence and the maximum overshoot on the trajectory tracking error of uncertain systems.     

英国大学专利技术转移研究及其借鉴意义

英国大学不仅在研究水平方面而且在与产业界的合作方面均处于全球领先的地位.本文以英国大学专利技术转移活动为研究对象,首先介绍了英国大学专利技术转移活动在许可合同数量和收入两个方面的情况,继而提出英国大学的大学技术转移中心和国家大学技术转移协会是大学专利技术转移活动的重要组织保障,优秀的研究成果和商业化、国际化意识的培养是大学专利技术转移活动的先决条件,政府法律法规的设立和政府项目的支持是大学专利技术转移活动的指导因素.最后,提出了英国大学专利技术转移对我国大学专利技术转移活动的借鉴意义.