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Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is highly prevalent in the United States, yet is largely culturally invisible. This study examines what people know about their illness, both before and after diagnosis, and the relationship to race. The data are from in-depth interviews in 2004 with 53 persons, mostly white or African American, with HCV in the southeastern United States. The respondents have varying educational backgrounds, family incomes, and possible modes of transmission of HCV. Regardless of whether the diagnosis of HCV came as a surprise, respondents had a range of reactions including fear, shock, sadness, and ambivalence. Knowledge of the disease postdiagnosis varies as some people have expert knowledge, moderate knowledge, or inaccurate to no knowledge of the disease. Minority respondents have less knowledge of HCV than whites. This racial disparity in knowledge has profound implications for people with HCV and the larger society.

The aim of this paper is to determine chemical and sensory differences of between craft and industrial/or commercial beers. Beer market is nowadays booming and consumers are in the search of new and healthier products.

Here, commercial and craft beers were chemically analyzed and sensory evaluated. Chemical analysis included pH, bitterness, color, total polyphenol content and antioxidant activity. Likewise, 40 sensory descriptors were evaluated by trained panelists, including visual, olfactory and gustatory attributes. In addition, an electronic nose (e-nose) was tested to determine its suitability to discriminate beer type and/or style according to their volatiles profile.

Craft beers presented higher values of color, bitterness and antioxidant activity when compared to commercial beers. Sensory descriptors showed craft beers to be associated with the highest scores in visual, olfactory and gustatory descriptors. Data from e-nose explained 97% of the total variability of the volatile compounds in the analyzed beers, indicating the suitability of this device to discriminate beer types.

Results are of interest for design of marketing and selling techniques for craft brewery managers. In addition, cheap and easy-managing device as e-nose resulted in a valuable tool to monitoring beer quality.

Web site recommendation systems help to get high quality information. The modelling of recommendation systems involves the combination of many features: metrics of quality, quality criteria, recommendation criteria, user profile, and specific domain concepts, among others. At the moment of the specification of a recommendation system it must be guaranteed a right interrelation of all of these features. The purpose of this paper is to model a web site quality‐based recommendation system by an ontology network.

In this paper, the authors propose an ontology network based process for web site recommendation modelling. The ontology network conceptualizes the different domains (web site domain, quality assurance domain, user context domain, recommendation criteria domain, specific domain) in a set of interrelated ontologies. Particularly, this approach is illustrated for the health domain.

Basically, this work introduces the semantic relationships that were used to construct this ontology network. Moreover, it shows the usefulness of this ontology network for the detection of possible inconsistencies when specifying recommendation criteria.

Recommendation systems based on ontologies that model the user profile and the domain of resources to be recommended are quite common. However, it is uncommon to find models that explicitly represent the criteria used by the recommender systems, that express the quality dimensions of resources and on which criteria are applied, and consider the user context at the moment of the query.

The broader adoption of the internet along with web‐based systems has defined a new way of exchanging information. That advance added by the multiplication of mobile devices has required systems to be even more flexible and personalized. Maybe because of that, the traditional teaching‐controlled learning style has given up space to a new way of learning, which is more flexible and adequate to the learners needs. The purpose of this research is to go further into the semantic modeling of adaptive web based learning systems. Particularly, the paper focuses on those learning systems that consider in their definition the awareness of student's context in order to properly react to the student needs.

In this paper the authors introduce a semantic model of the student context in terms of an ontology network. This semantic model is explored in order to detect the “current situation” of students when they are navigating into e‐learning environments. The final objective is to enrich the adaptation functionality of e‐learning environments, being able to evaluate context data from personal profile, learning domain and technological situation.

In order to evaluate the semantic model defined, examples of detected situations are shown in accordance to specific e‐learning scenarios.

The paper covers definition of a flexible and modularized model by using ontology networks, which can be easily modified to incorporate new knowledge data, aiding the modeling of concepts from different learning environments.

Bosco, Liu, and West's chapter on underground lotteries in rural China is one that begs permission to cross the boundaries between parts of this volume, for it deals with the integration of the Chinese economy with others, and it also poses certain moral questions about the nature of markets and rationality in economic exchanges (see also Suarez, this volume). But the authors, after reviewing the evidence, ultimately conclude that China's underground lotteries must be viewed in relation to that country's phenomenal economic development in recent decades. They show that the rise of illegal underground lotteries in China is tightly connected to the development of the modern capitalist economy there, and that although it seems at first glance to be powered by irrationality and superstition, it actually functions according to capitalist principles – at least as viewed by the participants. They also argue that rural villagers who place bets in them are not mere victims of nonsensical beliefs or of opportunistic “outsiders,” but rather that they are participating in their own way in a system in which luck clearly plays a very large role, but one over which they have little control, and one that is grounded in the historical commercialized economy of China (see also Richardson, 1999). It is interesting to note the way that participants rationalize the lottery and their actions through their assumption that it is rigged – their approach to it is markedly different from that of someone from, for example, Japan or the United States, where such a lottery is assumed from the start to not be rigged. Bosco and co-authors well demonstrate here the importance of viewing a cultural phenomenon as part of a greater whole, and one in a constant state of flux.

This study, carried out in the bilingual and bicultural border area of South Texas, is an exploration of bilingual preservice teachers’ identity formation and their experiences and beliefs about literacy and biliteracy during an undergraduate class focused on learning about emergent literacy in the bilingual classroom. This study is based on a sociocultural approach to learning and identity development, and research that explores how bilingual teachers’ identity is shaped through their participation in cultural and linguistic practices. The purpose of this practitioner research is to provide insights into preservice teachers’ identities as they start to explore literacy and biliteracy practices. Two research questions guide the study: What experiences about literacy and biliteracy development do prospective teachers identify as meaningful? How do these experiences contribute to define bilingual preservice teachers’ identities? Findings indicate that bilingual preservice teachers’ identities are shaped by cultural and linguistic experiences that define the bilingual and bicultural dynamics of the region. Two predominant types of experiences impact bilingual preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching, learning, and literacy/biliteracy development. Particularly significant in defining their perceptions are the lessons learned from meaningful others – especially mothers and teachers – and certain relevant memories regarding effective practices they experienced when learning to read and write. Implications for teacher education preparation of bilingual teachers are identified.

We extend theories of the firm to the entrepreneurial finance setting and argue that R&D-focused start-up firms will have a greater likelihood of financing themselves with equity rather than debt. We argue that mechanisms which reduce information asymmetry, including owner work experience and financier reputation, will increase the probability of funding with more debt. We also argue that start-ups that correctly align their financing mix to their R&D focus will perform better than firms that are misaligned. We study these ideas using a large nationally representative dataset on start-up firms in the United States.

Academic literature calls for research on the impact of psychological states derived from mental illness on detrimental consumer behaviour. The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of anxiety on the consumer’s buying processes (compulsive and impulsive) and emotional regulation.

To carry out the statistical analysis, the data were obtained through an online survey (n = 726) of supermarket consumers. The treatment of the data was using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The results obtained show that anxiety influences the generation of harmful behaviour, as it has a positive impact on compulsive and impulsive buying. In addition, compulsive and impulsive buying generate higher levels of consumers’ emotional regulation.

This study contributes to the management of anxiety as a priority element to reduce harmful behaviour. Therefore, it provides useful information for marketing managers and professionals in psychological and healthy consumer processes.

學術文獻不斷呼籲研究人員和學者去探討來自精神病的心理狀態如何產生有害的消費者行為。本研究擬評定焦慮對消費者購買流程 (強迫性購物和衝動購物) 和情緒調節所產生的影響。

為能進行統計分析,研究人員透過超級市場消費者的在線調查 (n = 726) 取得數據,繼而以結構方程 (PLS-SEM) 處理數據。

研究結果顯示,焦慮會導致有害行為的產生,這是因為焦慮對強迫性購物和衝動購物均產生積極的影響; 而且,強迫性購物和衝動購物會產生較高水平的消費者情緒調節。

本研究的貢獻在於把焦慮視為減少有害行為的優先元素而予以管理; 因此,本研究為市場經理以及於心理上的和健康的消費者進程的專業人員提供了有用的資料。