Antisemitism in a City Without Jews: Crime,Print and a Used-Clothes Dealer in Early Modern Paris

Seventeenth-century Paris had not had a Jewish community for centuries, yet Parisians created and circulated textual, and occasionally visual, anti-Jewish representations. Parisians made these concrete by projecting them onto a group of Christians, the used-garment dealers. Parisians were able to avoid questioning their society’s moral and Christian identity by associating theft, deceit and murder with the supposedly non-Christian dealers. The article examines the historical background to this, analyzes the representations and, through one dealer and her family, suggests their social and legal impact. This contributes to our understanding of early modern anti-Jewish representations, views of crime, identity and marginalization.     

Going beyond technology: Knowledge sharing as a tool for enhancing customer-oriented attitudes

Numerous articles, books and essays have shown that ongoing efforts to meet customers’ needs characterize market leaders. For a firm to successfully develop customer-oriented attitudes throughout the entire organization, employees at all levels and sections need to be committed to providing a high level of service. It is therefore essential to understand what drives employees – especially those who do not interact daily with customers – to adopt a customer-oriented attitude. The aim of this study is to shed some light on one facet of this relationship, namely the mechanism of knowledge sharing that may impact employee customer orientation. The underlying notion is that technology, in its various advanced forms of CRM software, enhances and enables client “knowing.” In other words, it leads to a greater ability on the part of employees to share knowledge, which brings about real customer orientation.This paper provides empirical evidence, based on a sample of 345 Hi-Tech workers from a telecommunication company, of a link between sharing explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge to enhance customer orientation. The findings indicate that sharing tacit knowledge has a positive effect on increasing employee customer orientation and increases sharing of explicit knowledge, while also strengthening communication about customers in the organization. It is concluded that firms should encourage tacit knowledge sharing and its transformation by technology into explicit knowledge to augment employees’ customer-oriented attitudes.     

Design and evaluation of awareness mechanisms in CiteSeer

Awareness has been extensively studied in human computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). The success of many collaborative systems hinges on effectively supporting awareness of different collaborators, their actions, and the process of creating shared work products. As digital libraries are increasingly becoming more than just repositories for information search and retrieval – essentially fostering collaboration among its community of users – awareness remains an unexplored research area in this domain. We are investigating awareness mechanisms in CiteSeer, a scholarly digital library for the computer and information science domain. CiteSeer users can be notified of new publication events (e.g., publication of a paper that cites one of their papers) using feeds as notification systems. We present three cumulative user studies – requirements elicitation, prototype evaluation, and naturalistic study – in the context of supporting CiteSeer feeds. Our results indicate that users prefer feeds that place target items in query-relevant contexts, and that preferred context varies with type of publication event. We found that users integrated feeds as part of their broader, everyday activities and used them as planning tools to collaborate with others.     

The accuracy of teacher predictions of student reward preferences

This study investigated the accuracy of teacher predictions of student reward preferences on the Children's Reinforcement Survey Schedules. Student-participants were 49 5th and 6th graders. Correlation coefficients calculated for each student-teacher pair indicated that teachers were only moderately successful in selecting rein-forcers consistent with individual student self-selections. Teachers as a group predicted the reward preferences of students as a group with a high degree of accuracy, however. The correlation between teacher selections and the reward preferences of girls was higher than that between teacher selections and the preferences of boys as a group. Comparison of teacher and student choices suggested that teachers tended to overrate the popularity of certain classroom-related rewards. Findings suggest that students need to be involved in selecting their own rewards when planning behavioral interventions, and that for some students, particularly boys, rewards available outside the classroom may be most effective in changing behavior.