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The purpose of this study is to advance the understanding of consumer innovativeness during aging. This study explores why older consumers have decreased innovativeness and how awareness of age-related change affects the adoption of innovation.

A survey was conducted on 200 older consumers aged 50 and older to investigate whether awareness of age-related change influences innovativeness.

The results show that awareness of age-related change causes older consumers to have a decreased tendency to adopt novel products. Moreover, the stereotype threat of older consumers is found to play a mediating role. Older individuals who sense they are negatively viewed as older people restrict their innovativeness to avoid situations that would confirm their incompetence to others. Furthermore, the effects of older consumers’ stereotype threat on innovativeness are moderated by self-monitoring. Older consumers who exhibit high self-monitoring cope with stereotype threat by showing increased innovativeness; however, the opposite effect occurs in older consumers with low self-monitors.

The findings deepen the understanding of older adults’ consumption behavior regarding innovative products and show why people are reluctant to adopt innovative products and services because they grow older by identifying the underlying process that hinders customer innovativeness.

Le possibilità di studio e di ricerca offerte dalla scienza dei sistemi si vanno sempre più affermando, quanto più l'analisi delle interconnessioni e interazioni fra varie discipline si dimostra valido strumento nella programmazione e nella operatività delle varie attività umane.

In this paper, I look at one of the most archetypal of children’s stories, that of Noah and the flood, to understand the classificatory schema it presents.

Drawing on an analysis of 47 children’s picture books based on the biblical story, including those held in the historical archive of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, I show that the single most consistent frame for the story is the trope of “two by two”, referencing both the animals and people in the story. The books in the sample, intended for children aged 4–10 years, were published between 1905 and 2006, and are between 14 and 60 pages long.

The repeated emphasis on mated pairs, one male and one female, serves to reproduce the twinned categories of gender and heterosexuality in an overtly “natural” fashion that ties the animal bodies to human social divisions. These constitutive categories of social division – gender and heterosexuality – then become central schemas for organizing people and experience. I draw on Martin (2000) arguing that children encounter picture books before they have had experience in actual social life. Therefore, the books help instill these primary categorization schemas in children, creating the social groupings and relations among them that order their worlds.

The argument makes a strongly causal role for culture and argues that the impact/importance of the content of children’s books may be subordinate to the role they play in helping establish classificatory schema that help construct children’s understandings of the social world.

The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

The depth and breadth of the market for contingent claims, including exotic options, has expanded dramatically. Regulators have expressed concern regarding the risks of exotics to the financial system, due to the difficulty of hedging these instruments. Recent literature focuses on the difficulties in hedging exotic options, e.g., liquidity risk and other violations of the standard Black‐Scholes model. This article provides insight into hedging problems associated with exotic options: 1) hedging in discrete versus continuous time, 2) transaction costs, 3) stochastic volatility, and 4) non‐constant correlation. The author applies simulation analysis of these problems to a variety of exotics, including Asian options, barrier options, look‐back options, and quanto options.

The purpose of this paper is to study the problem of fashion flat sketches classification and proposed an integrated approach. It aims to propose a fast, reliable method to handle multi-class fashion flat sketches classification problems and lay the foundation for the garment style query in the next step.

The proposed integrated approach adopts wavelet Fourier descriptor (WFD), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and extreme learning machine (ELM). First, the discrete wavelet and Fourier transform are adopted to extract the shape features of fashion flat sketches. Then, LDA is employed for multi-class classification to reduce dimensionality. Finally, ELM is used as the classifier.

The experimental results show that the classification accuracy of the integrated approach is obtained at about 100 percent. Contrary to the traditional approaches, efficiency and accuracy are the advantages of the present approach.

Fashion concept is conveyed often in the form of the fashion illustration or sketch. This type of sketch is useful to imply the style and overall feel of the design. However, this sketch gives no clue about the parts or sections that make up each garment. For this reason, this paper only studies the classification of flat sketches.

A new shape descriptor named WFD is proposed. The WFD acquires high classification accuracy comparing with Fourier descriptor (FD) and multiscale Fourier descriptor (MFD) without dimensionality reduction and nearly the same classification accuracy comparing with FD while MFD easily causes small sample size problem with dimensionality reduction using LDA. In addition, ELM is first used as the classifier in the textiles field related to the classification problem.

This general paper deals mainly with the military aspect of some of the major problems resulting from turbine stall. Four which are highlighted are the increase in weapon system development time, operational limits are imposed which may prevent an aircraft from successfully accomplishing a mission, field maintenance problems are increased, overhaul costs and accident rates go up.

North Carolina is one of fourteen states directly regulating and controlling milk markets. The regulations are administratively complex and vary from state to state, but the general pattern of regulation follows that set by the comprehensive Federal regulation which began in 1937 with the passage of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act. Milk markets in most of the country, including the major producing regions, are regulated and controlled by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As a result of both state and federal controls, virtually no markets are unregulated. The consequences of Federal regulation of milk markets have been studied intensively, notably by Kessel and more recently by Kwoka. Less is known about the form and effects of state regulation. In this paper we analyze the case of milk market regulation in North Carolina. Specifically, we (1) review the ongoing regulation and assess the market structure and conduct of market participants including regulators; (2) review and analyze the economic implications and legal developments in reconstituting milk; and (3) investigate the policy alternatives with the purpose of determining whether there are options which, if adopted, will generate more social gains than associated social losses.

Describe the design of a health information and technology educational intervention that promotes health information sharing and technology use for older adult African Americans to support access to health information. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The study team developed a novel method to design the intervention. It drew upon three approaches: intergenerational technology transfer, participatory design and community-based participatory research.

Older adult African Americans (55+) with diabetes and young adults (18–54) connected to them via familial or naturally occurring social networks designed the intervention, which was conducted in the two study sites in Michigan, USA. In total, 29 participants helped design the intervention. Four themes emerged concerning factors that promote intergenerational information exchange in the context of technology and health. First, focus on one technology skill. Second, working together in small groups is preferred. Third, patience is essential. Last, physical capabilities (i.e., eyesight, operating on relatively small screens) and literacy levels should be considered.

This novel method of having participants from the sample population select the health information materials and technology exercises serves as a guide for implementing health information and education interventions aimed at technology use to support self-management for vulnerable patient populations.

Nel riprendere come Libero Docente le mie lezioni presso la Facoltà di Giurisprudenza dopo un lungo intervallo di anni in cui il Corso è stato impartito per Incarico, cioè a titolo ufficiale, prima nella facoltà di Scienze Politiche e poi in quella di Economia e Commercie, ritengo opportuno accennare alle vicende di questo insegnamento che ha segnato in certo modo il punto di partenza ed insieme il banco di prova del primo tentativo di sistematica scientifica della trattazione del turismo dal punto di vista economico e statistico. E mancherei ad un preciso dovere e ad un impulso spontaneo del mio animo se in questa occasione non rivolgessi un memore e devoto pensiero al mio grande ed indimenticabile maestro, Augusto Graziani, che seppe inculcarmi la passione per gli studi di economia politica: debbo anzi a lui anche lo specifico orientamento verso l'indagine turistica, perchè il primo tema che egli mi propose nelle esercitazioni di seminario degli Istituti Giuridici dell'Università di Napoli (oh magnifica palestra per noi giovanissimi studenti appena usciti dal Liceo!) fu quello della bilancia dei pagamenti internazionali con particolare riguardo alle cosidette partite «invisibili».