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The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.

“Economics is a Serious Subject.” Edwin Cannan.

To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.

The prediction of a context, especially of a user’s location, is a fundamental task in the field of pervasive computing. Such predictions open up a new and rich field of proactive adaptation for context-aware applications. This study/paper aims to propose a methodology that predicts a user’s location on the basis of a user’s mobility history.

Contextual information is used to find the points of interest that a user visits frequently and to determine the sequence of these visits with the aid of spatial clustering, temporal segmentation and speed filtering.

The proposed method was tested with a real data set using several supervised classification algorithms, which yielded very interesting results.

The method uses contextual information (current position, day of the week, time and speed) that can be acquired easily and accurately with the help of common sensors such as GPS.

The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to study the application of feature‐based image matching algorithm for PCB matching without using special fiducial marks.

Speed‐up robust feature (SURF) is applied to extract the interest points in PCB images. An advanced threshold is set to reject the interest points with low responses to speed up feature computation. In order to improve the performance for rotation, the descriptors are based on multi‐orientations. The many‐to‐many tentative correspondences are determined with a maximum distance. Hough transform is used to reject the mismatches and the affine parameters are computed with a square‐least solution.

Results show that the method proposed in this paper can match the PCB images without using special fiducial marks effectively. The image matching algorithm shows a better performance for image rotation than the standard SURF and it succeeds in matching the image including repetitive patterns which will deteriorate the distinctiveness of feature descriptors.

Additional orientations produce more descriptors so that it takes extra time for feature description and matching.

The paper proposes a SURF‐based image matching algorithm to match the PCB images without special fiducial marks. This can reduce the complexity of PCB production. The image matching algorithm is robust to image rotation and repetitive patterns and can be used in other applications of image matching.

This paper examines whether target returns act as specific goals that impact risk-taking when individuals make investment decisions.

Using an experimental setting, the authors assign either a low or a high target return to participants and ask them to make independent investment decisions as the risk-free rate fluctuates around their target return and, for some of them, becomes negative.

Building on cumulative prospect theory, the authors find that the prevailing reference point of participants is the target return, regardless of the level of the risk-free rate. This result still holds even when the risk-free rate is negative, suggesting that (1) the target return drives risk-taking more than does a zero-threshold and (2) negative rates are limited as a tool to stimulate appetites for risk. In a follow-up study, the authors show that these conclusions remain valid when the target return is endogenously determined.

The authors' original approach, which pioneers the use of target returns in both the positive and negative interest rate contexts, provides insightful results about the “reach for yield” among regular people.