Search results

This is an account of a training course consisting of six three‐hourly sessions held in 1989. Sixteen attended the course, all supervisors from a variety of disciplines. The majority were over 40 years old and with more than 15 years service with the company. Greene King Employee Relations Adviser, Rod McAlpine, and Training and Safety Manager, Peter Jackson, felt the need to develop a more formalised training programme at supervisory level and a first series in interpersonal skills was thought to be appropriate. At the same time Relate, formerly the Marriage Guidance Council, was extending its educational and training areas in the Eastern region. Greene King took advantage of this to use them in the organising, actioning and planning of the course. The article consists of two sections, the first written by Rod McAlpine and Peter Jackson giving background details of the company and its training requirements. The second is the work of Mary Pennock, Relate Training Organiser in West Suffolk. In it she recounts how Relate approached what is a logical but comparatively recent extension of their activities. It also covers the details of the course which was designed and packaged for Greene King, bearing in mind the background of those taking part and the particular needs of the company.

Learning objects strive for reusability in e‐Learning to reduce cost and allow personalization of content. We show why learning objects require adapted Information Retrieval systems. In the spirit of the Semantic Web, we discuss the semantic description, discovery, and composition of learning objects. As part of our project, we tag learning objects with both objective (e.g., title, date, and author) and subjective (e.g., quality and relevance) metadata. We present the RACOFI (Rule‐Applying Collaborative Filtering) Composer prototype with its novel combination of two libraries and their associated engines: a collaborative filtering system and an inference rule system. We developed RACOFI to generate context‐aware recommendation lists. Context is handled by multidimensional predictions produced from a database‐driven scalable collaborative filtering algorithm. Rules are then applied to the predictions to customize the recommendations according to user profiles. The RACOFI Composer architecture has been developed into the contextaware music portal inDiscover.

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the British public may be congratulated on the salutary, if rude, awakening which the gale raised in Chicago has given them. Peacefully slumbering, and content for years to accept as gospel truths the asseverations of all sorts and conditions of food‐fakers, both of home and foreign growth, the “Britisher” has suddenly received a shock from which it will take him a long time to recover. The abominable crime of milk‐adulteration—striking as it does at helpless infancy and at the vitality of the infirm and the weak; the “doctoring” of food products with a variety of pernicious drugs on the pleas of “preservation” and of meeting “public wants,” but in reality done for the sake of sordid gain; the gigantic meat and butter frauds, whereby largely the agricultural interest of this country has been brought to its present pass; the faking of beer and the wholesale arsenical poisoning which was one of its direct consequences; the denaturing of other foods by abstraction, substitution, and sophistication—all these things have been regarded by the “man in the street” with a sort of languid interest; have, at most, called forth passing comment from the lay press, and cheap sneers about faddery and faddists from various ignorant scribblers; while a succession of lethargic and feeble administrations have shelved the reports of their own Committees and Commissions, and, except under rare and abnormal pressure, have been content to adopt a policy of laissez faire.

The food standards of the Indiana State Board of Health, which appear on another page, show that it is quite possible to lay down official definitions of various articles of food; and a study of these regulations may be of assistance to those authorities who are striving to arrive at some form of order out of the chaos which at present exists in this country in matters relating to food standards. With reference to milk, it will be seen that not only is the question of composition dealt with, but strict directions are given that milk derived from a cow which can in any way be considered as diseased is regarded as impure, and must therefore, says the Board, be considered as adulterated. In regard to butter and margarine, limits are given for the total amount of fat—which must consist entirely of milk‐fat in the case of the former substance—water, and salt; and not only are all preservatives forbidden, but the colouring matters are restricted, only certain vegetable colouring matters and some few coal‐tar colours being permitted. All cheese containing less than 10 per cent, of fat derived from milk must be plainly labelled as “ skim‐milk cheese”; and if it contains fat other than milk‐fat, it must be described as “ filled cheese.” Some exception is taken to the use of preservatives in cheese, inasmuch as it appears that cheese may contain a preservative if the name of such preservative is duly notified upon the label ; and the rules for the colouring of cheese are the same as those which apply to butter and margarine. All articles of food containing preservatives are considered as adulterated unless the package bears a label, printed in plain type and quite visible to the purchaser, stating that a preservative is present, and also giving the name of the preservative which has been used. Articles of confectionery must not contain any ingredient deleterious to health, such as terra alba, barytes, talc, or other mineral substance, nor may they contain poisonous colours or flavours.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

The question has been recently raised as to how far the operation of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts of 1875, 1879, and 1899, and the Margarine Act, 1887, is affected by the Act 29 Charles II., cap. 7, “for the better observation of the Lord's Day, commonly called Sunday.” At first sight it would seem a palpable absurdity to suppose that a man could escape the penalties of one offence because he has committed another breach of the law at the same time, and in this respect law and common‐sense are, broadly speaking, in agreement; yet there are one or two cases in which at least some show of argument can be brought forward in favour of the opposite contention.

This paper aims to explore the parameters of Bulgarian cigarette advertising in the Cold War period. It contrasts the evolution of cigarette marketing in Bulgaria and the USA in the context of contrasting communist and capitalist notions of the “good life” versus the “common good”.

The paper is informed by a growing literature on advertising under communism, but also new work on consumption in the Soviet Union and Cold War Eastern Europe. It draws upon archival and printed Bulgarian, and some American, sources, and the memoir of a key player in the Bulgarian tobacco industry.

The paper concludes that marketing of cigarettes in communist Bulgaria gained momentum in the same period that cigarette advertising in the USA was severely curtailed. In Bulgaria, the notion that cigarettes were key to the promised “good life” and “building socialism”, out-weighed any notion of harm to the “common good”.

This study casts doubt on the common notion that there was no advertising under communism, by offering an in-depth study of an industry that was allowed to market and develop a quality product to an unusual degree. It undermines assumptions about “command” economy, industry behavior, contributing to a re-thinking of Eastern Bloc consumer culture. In addition, it sheds light on changes in the acceptability of cigarette advertising within the Cold War context, namely, how the process of advertising regulation in the West, and increased marketing in the East, fit into Cold War debates and interactions.

Organizations rely on social outreach campaigns to raise financial support, recruit volunteers, and increase public awareness. In order to maximize response rates, organizations face the challenging problem of designing appropriately tailored interactions for each user. An interaction consists of a specific combination of message, media channel, sender, tone, and possibly many other attributes. The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of how to design tailored interactions for each user to maximize the probability of a desired response.

A nearest-neighbor (NN) algorithm is developed for interaction design. Simulation-based experiments are then conducted to compare positive response rates obtained by two forms of this algorithm against that of several control interaction design strategies. A factorial experimental design is employed which varies three user population factors in a combinatorial manner, allowing the methods to be compared across eight distinct scenarios.

The NN algorithms significantly outperformed all three controls in seven out of the eight scenarios. Increases in response rates ranging from approximately 20 to 400 percent were observed.

This work proposes a data-oriented method for designing tailored interactions for individual users in social outreach campaigns which can enable significant increases in positive response rates. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is relatively easy to implement.

The problem of optimal interaction design in social outreach campaigns is scarcely addressed in the literature. This work proposes an effective and easy to implement solution approach for this problem.

The purpose of this paper is to trace Douglas McGregor's Theory Y thinking back from pre‐industrial revolution philosophers up through McGregor and his contemporaries and to explore how Theory Y evolved after its introduction.

This is a review article relying on literature reviews and synthesizing concepts and ideas from related sources.

This article examines the emergence of Theory Y as one of the hallmark relationship management principles of the last half of the 20th century. McGregor stands in a unique place in management history. He has one foot in the early human relations movement, and another foot in the movement of scholars who advocated a heightened awareness of management's responsibility for the human side of employer‐employee relations. McGregor serves as a true facilitator for growth and advancement in the field of management, in general, and human relations, in particular.

This paper holds value to management scholars and practitioners in its utility as a means of tracing the evolution of one of the most important management concepts of the last half of the 20th century. While it may lack in originality (a flaw in many historical reviews) it certainly addresses important issues and provides a path for understanding the development of a key management concept (Theory Y).

In the aftermath of the Enron scandal, the critics of free enterprise have blamed this system for inflated and out of control executive salaries, particularly those of the chief executive officer (CEO). The present paper defends the marketplace against these charges. In section I we argue that the market has passed the Enron test with flying colors. Section II gives the background of the financial situation relating to CEO salaries. Sections III and IV are devoted to, respectively, the tax court and the appellate court; section V looks at the reaction of the former to the latter; and in section VI we defend the “independent investor” test. We look at this issue from a political economic perspective in section VII and conclude in section VIII.