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The main objective of this paper is to examine the views of four user‐groups to three important budget related issues. The four user‐groups comprise of accountants, managers, executives and other professionals. Even though there were some instances of apparent differences among the different user‐groups, there was a general consensus that the major roles of the budget in the company are to serve as forecasting and as a control device. Majority of the respondents in each group felt that using budget as a control device will put pressure on them. With respect to the pressure to meet the budget, noticeable differences were revealed among the different user‐groups. Contrary to most of the available literature, all user groups want a greater degree of participation by different levels of management. The general belief that accountants prefer greater centralized budget setting appears to be untrue.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how book group recommendations can be used as a meaningful way to suggest suitable books to users, given the increasing number of individuals engaging in sharing and discussing books on the web.

The authors propose reviews fine-grained classification (CFGC) and its related models such as CFGC1 for book group recommendation. These models can categorize reviews successively by function and role. Constructing the BERT-BiLSTM model to classify the reviews by function. The frequency characteristics of the reviews are mined by word frequency analysis, and the relationship between reviews and total book score is mined by correlation analysis. Then, the reviews are classified into three roles: celebrity, general and passerby. Finally, the authors can form user groups, mine group features and combine group features with book fine-grained ratings to make book group recommendations.

Overall, the best recommendations are made by Synopsis comments, with the accuracy, recall, F-value and Hellinger distance of 52.9%, 60.0%, 56.3% and 0.163, respectively. The F1 index of the recommendations based on the author and the writing comments is improved by 2.5% and 0.4%, respectively, compared to the Synopsis comments.

Previous studies on book recommendation often recommend relevant books for users by mining the similarity between books, so the set of book recommendations recommended to users, especially to groups, always focuses on the few types. The proposed method can effectively ensure the diversity of recommendations by mining users’ tendency to different review attributes of books and recommending books for the groups. In addition, this study also investigates which types of reviews should be used to make book recommendations when targeting groups with specific tendencies.

Starting at home base — The Houston Online User Group sponsored an October meeting: The Federal Government: Information On‐line. Topics covered included NIH‐EPA, NLM, NTIS and ASI/CIS … The first issue of the 1980–1981 Oregon Online User Group (OOUG) Newsletter provided a summary of past events, goals and objectives, and future plans. Other items included business news, upcoming national meetings, points of interests from other information organizations, and continuing education courses …. MIDLNET (Midwest Region Library Network announced the appointment of Dr. James E. Skipper as Executive Director, effective October 1, 1980 …. Bay Area User Group reports their October meeting held at Stanford's Math‐Computer Science Library with a presentation of their computer services program …. A tour of INFO MART treated the Santa Barbara Group …. Southern California's September meeting was ‘Suggestions for Improvement of Online Systems and Databases’ — a synopsis of the results will be distributed via the National Online Circuit …. But the biggest news out of sunny California is that the members of CLASS are able to communicate with each other via On Tyme. Various user groups have had training sessions on this electronic mail service which promises savings in cost, manpower, and time …. CLASS has also offered workshops on INSPEC, RLIN, BRS, MARC, Systems Refreshers, and Laboratory Animal Data Bank …. The North Carolina Online Users Group held a User Education/User Evaluation program which included a slide show ‘Computerized Search Services’ as used at the Burroughs Wellcome Company. Their recent newsletter provided a summary of their major spring workshop on current affairs databases … NCOLUG also sent a copy of their member directory — it's divided into three sections: List of members, organizations represented in NCOLUG, and a Database Index … MIDBUG (Michigan Database Users Group) sponsored BIOSIS (beginning and advanced) and Disclosure Seminars and co‐sponsored a Non‐Bibliographic Data Base Conference with the Western Michigan Chapter S.L.A. and the Upjohn Company …. The Columbus Area Online Users Group presented an ISI Databases Workshop instruction for online retrieval of Science and Social Science Citation Indexes …. Western Michigan University also presented an ISI Workshop in October …. San Antonio Area Online Users Group hosted Data Courier, Inc. and their newly revised Online Training Session …. Kansas City Online User Group has been active with a hands‐on workshop with The Source; reports have it that all attending found it a rewarding workshop.

In this study an attempt is made to provide empirical evidence on the usefulness of different aspects of the annual report to various Kuwaiti user groups. To do so, eight Kuwaiti user groups were surveyed through a questionnaire. The groups were individual investors; institutional investors, bank credit officers, government officials, financial analysts, academics, auditors and stock market brokers. The analyses indicate that the user groups surveyed in the study rely mainly on information made directly available by the company and do not consult intermediary sources of corporate information in order to make informative decisions. The analyses also revealed that credibility and timeliness are the most important features of useful corporate information and traditional financial statements are the most important and credible parts of corporate annual reports. Non‐financial information, however, proved to be less credible and of less importance to the Kuwaiti user groups.

Social bookmarking is a system which allows users to share, organise, search and manage bookmarks of web resources. However, with the rapid growth in the production of online documents, people are facing the problem of information overload. Social bookmarking web sites offer a solution to this by providing push counts, which are counts of users’ recommendations of articles, and thus indicate the popularity and interest thereof. In this way, users can use the push counts to find popular and interesting articles. A measure of popularity-based solely on push counts, however, cannot be considered a true reflection of popularity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors propose to derive the degree of popularity of an article by considering the reputation of the users who push the article. Moreover, the authors propose a novel personalised blog article recommendation approach which combines reputation-based group popularity with content-based filtering (CBF), for the recommendation of popular blog articles which satisfy users’ personal preferences.

The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional CBF, item-based and user-based collaborative filtering approaches. The proposed approach considering reputation-based group popularity scores on neighbouring articles indeed can improve the recommendation quality of traditional CBF method.

The recommendation approach modifies CBF method by considering the target user's group preferences, to overcome the limitation of CBF which arises from the recommending only items similar to those the user has previously liked. Users with similar article preferences (profiles) may form a group of users with similar interests. A group's preferences may also reflect an individual's preferences. The reputation-based group preferences of the target user's group can be used to complement the target user's preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the symbolic representations of non-users compared to the life experiences of users related to a luxury brand. In particular, the study examines whether product design mediates the relationship between antecedent factors of country-of-origin effect and product experience, and it also investigates the moderating effects of reference groups (non-users vs users) on the relationship between antecedent factors of country-of-origin effect and product design related to a luxury brand, namely, the Mercedes-Benz C-Class or E-Series.

A sample of convenience of 272 persons classified as non-users and users is investigated. An online questionnaire was used and 28 statements are included in the analysis based on a seven-point Likert scale.

The study reveals that the country-of-origin effect for the model of non-users and users has a very good fit with current data and is statistically significant. It also reveals that all relationships are significant except for price consciousness to product design and for brand familiarity to price consciousness. There is also partial mediation of product design between antecedent factors and product experience. Furthermore, the moderating effect of reference groups appears to play an important role, as it impacts the relationship between antecedent factors of the country-of-origin effect and product design/product experience.

This study indicates that the non-users’ group based on the hypothetical purchases of a luxury brand with a strong country image has a different country-of-origin effect to the users’ group of the same luxury brand. Moreover, the study concludes that there are statistically significant differences between the non-users’ group versus users’ group of a luxury brand (Mercedes-Benz), and these differences are concerned with the constructs of brand familiarity, brand commitment, product design and product experience. Finally, the study reveals that “price consciousness” is not relevant for luxury brands. Managerial implications, limitations of the study and future research directions are discussed.

This study aims to investigate the differences in security-conscious (group A) and regular (group B) users’ behaviors and practices on mobile devices.

A survey was used to investigate the differences in behaviors and practices of security-conscious users (group A) and regular users (group B) on mobile devices. Each group will have 50 participants for a total of 100.

The analysis revealed differences in the behaviors and practices of security-conscious and regular users. The results indicated that security-conscious users engage in behaviors and practices that are more secure on mobile devices when compared with regular users.

The results will help recommend the best behaviors and practices for mobile device users, increasing mobile device security.

The results will help society to be more aware of security behaviors and practices on mobile devices.

This study answers the call for addressing the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in mobile device security. It develops a research instrument to measure the differences in behaviors and practices of security-conscious and regular mobile device users.

The purpose of this paper is to present a model of democratic therapeutic community (DTC) for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and psychotic disorder, namely the Group-Apartment (GA). The authors will describe it in more detail, discussing the ideas which lie behind it, considering the relative cost of treating people in larger residential DTCs and in GAs, outlining findings from the first data gathered on a GA and looking at the usefulness of this model in post-modern societies, with particular reference to Sicily.

In brief a GA is a flat, located in an urban apartment building, inhabited by a small group of people. In this paper the authors consider an apartment inhabited by a group of three or four patients with the presence of clinical social workers who work in shifts for several hours a day on all or most days of the week (Barone et al., 2009, 2010). GA is also inspired by the pioneering work of Pullen (1999, 2003), in the UK tradition of the apartment post TC for psychosis.

GAs in Italy have become one of the main methods of support housing in recovery-oriented treatment, because it allows the empowerment of the users and fights against the stigma of mental illness (Barone et al., 2014; Bruschetta et al., 2014). The main therapeutic activities provided in the GA depend on the type of recovery route being supported, on the level of autonomy being developed and on the level of participation in the democratic life of the local community.

GAs appear better, cheaper and a more appropriate treatment for mental problems in the current financial and social climate than larger institutions. Where they have been tried out, they have been found to be effective, by users and by stakeholders. They exemplify the advantages of the DTC for encouraging recovery, but cost less to run. In accordance with DTC principles, the social democratic process is used not only to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of GAs, but also to build a network to support the development of innovative mental health services and new enabling environments (Haigh et al., 2012).