Companies that want to improve their service quality should take a cue from manufacturing and focus on their own kind of scrap heap: customers who won't come back. Because that scrap heap can be every bit as costly as broken parts and misfit components, service company managers should strive to reduce it. They should aim for "zero defections"--keeping every customer they can profitably serve. As companies reduce customer defection rates, amazing things happen to their financials. Although the magnitude of the change varies by company and industry, the pattern holds: profits rise sharply. Reducing the defection rate just 5% generates 85% more profits in one bank's branch system, 50% more in an insurance brokerage, and 30% more in an auto-service chain. And when MBNA America, a Delaware-based credit card company, cut its 10% defection rate in half, profits rose a whopping 125%. But defection rates are not just a measure of service quality; they are also a guide for achieving it. By listening to the reasons why customers defect, managers learn exactly where the company is falling short and where to direct their resources. Staples, the stationery supplies retailer, uses feedback from customers to pinpoint products that are priced too high. That way, the company avoids expensive broad-brush promotions that pitch everything to everyone. Like any important change, managing for zero defections requires training and reinforcement. Great-West Life Assurance Company pays a 50% premium to group health-insurance brokers that hit customer-retention targets, and MBNA America gives bonuses to departments that hit theirs.
As our justice system has embarked upon one of our time's greatest social experiments?responding to crime by expanding prisons?we have forgotten the iron law of imprisonment: they all come back. In 2002, more than 630,000 individuals left federal and state prisons. Thirty years ago, only 150,000 did. In the intense political debate over America's punishment policies, the impact of these returning prisoners on families and communities has been largely overlooked. In But They All Come Back, Jeremy Travis continues his pioneering work on the new realities of punishment in America vis-a-vis public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes organizing the criminal justice system around five principles of reentry to encourage change and spur innovation.
The purposes of this article are to position mixed methods research ( mixed research is a synonym) as the natural complement to traditional qualitative and quantitative research, to present pragmatism as offering an attractive philosophical partner for mixed methods research, and to provide a framework for designing and conducting mixed methods research. In doing this, we briefly review the paradigm “wars” and incompatibility thesis, we show some commonalities between quantitative and qualitative research, we explain the tenets of pragmatism, we explain the fundamental principle of mixed research and how to apply it, we provide specific sets of designs for the two major types of mixed methods research ( mixed-model designs and mixed-method designs), and, finally, we explain mixed methods research as following (recursively) an eight-step process. A key feature of mixed methods research is its methodological pluralism or eclecticism, which frequently results in superior research (compared to monomethod research). Mixed methods research will be successful as more investigators study and help advance its concepts and as they regularly practice it.
This title is winner of the CORINE International Book Award 2011. It is from one of the most important neuroscientists at work today, a path-breaking investigation of a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and psychologists for centuries: how is consciousness created? Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness - what we think of as a mind with a self - is in fact a biological process created by a living organism. The result is a groundbreaking investigative journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.
This book is about mathematical ideas, about what mathematics means-and why. Abstract ideas, for the most part, arise via conceptual metaphor-metaphorical ideas projecting from the way we function in the everyday physical world. Where Mathematics Comes From argues that conceptual metaphor plays a central role in mathematical ideas within the cognitive unconscious-from arithmetic and algebra to sets and logic to infinity in all of its forms.
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Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is a fast emerging technology with many unique attractive features that promotes major advances in wireless communications, networking, radar, imaging, and positioning systems. Research in UWB is still in its infancy stages, offering limited resources in handling the challenges facing the UWB communications. Understanding the unique properties and challenges of UWB communications as well as its application in competent signal processing techniques are vital in conquering the obstacles towards developing exciting UWB applications. UWB research and development has to cope with the challenges that limit their performance, capacity, throughput, network flexibility, implementation complexity, and cost. This tutorial focuses on UWB wireless communications at the physical layer. It overviews the state-of-the-art UWB in channel modeling, transmitters, and receivers of UWB radios, and outlines the research directions and challenges that needs to be overcome. Since a signal processing expertise is expected to have major impact in research and development of UWB systems, emphasis is placed on the DSP aspects.
How much of philosophical, scientific, and political thought is caught up with the idea of continuity? What if it were otherwise? This paper experiments with the disruption of continuity. The reader is invited to participate in a performance of spacetime (re)configurings that are more akin to how electrons experience the world than any journey narrated though rhetorical forms that presume actors move along trajectories across a stage of spacetime (often called history). The electron is here invoked as our host, an interesting body to inhabit (not in order to inspire contemplation of flat-footed analogies between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ worlds, concepts that already presume a given spatial scale), but a way of thinking with and through dis/continuity – a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space, entanglements of here and there, now and then, that is, a ghostly sense of dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity. There is no overarching sense of temporality, of continuity, in place. Each scene diffracts various temporalities within and across the field of spacetimemattering. Scenes never rest, but are reconfigured within, dispersed across, and threaded through one another. The hope is that what comes across in this dis/jointed movement is a felt sense of différance, of intra-activity, of agential separability – differentiatings that cut together/apart – that is the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements.
Production markets have two sides: producers are a fully connected clique transacting with buyers as a separate but aggregated clique. Each producer is a distinctive firm with a distinctive product. Each side continually minotors reactions of the other through the medium of a joint social construction, the schedule of terms of trade. Each producer is guided in choice of volume by the tangible outcomes of other producers-not by speculation on hypothetical reactions of buyers to its actions. Each producer acts purely on self-interest based on observed actions of all others, summarized through a feedback process. The summary is the terms-of-trade schedule, which reduces to constant price only in limiting cases. The market emerges as a structure of roles with a differentiated niche for each firm. Explicit formulae-both for firms and for market aggregates-are obtained by comparative-statics methods for one family of assumptions about cost structures and about buyers' evaluations of differentiated products. Not just any set of firms can sustain terms of trade with any set of buyers. There prove to be there main kinds of markets, and three sorts of market failure, within a parameter space that is specified in detail. One sort of market (PARADOX) has a Madison Avenue flavor, another is more conventional (GRIND), and a third (CROWDED) is a new form not included in any existing theory of markets. Current American industrial markets are drawn on for 20 illustrations, of which three are presented in some detail. Inequality in firms' market shares (measured by Gini coefficients) is discussed.
Who Comes After the Subject? offers an overview of contemporary French thought on the question of the subject, as it is viewed in philosophy, politics, history and psychoanalysis. It represents the most recent research from a host of the foremost contemporary French figures in philosophy and theory, including Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Descombes, Kofman, Irigaray, and Balibar.
Remaking African CitiesAfrican cities don't work, or at least their characterizations are conventionally replete with depictions ranging from the valiant, if mostly misguided, struggles of the poor to eke out some minimal livelihood to the more insidious descriptions of bodies engaged in near-constant liminality, decadence, or religious and ethnic conflict.A more generous point of view concedes that African cities are works in progress, at the same time exceedingly creative and extremely stalled.In city after city, one can witness an incessant throbbing produced by the intense proximity of hundreds of activities: cooking, reciting, selling, loading and unloading, fighting, praying, relaxing, pounding, and buying, all side by side on stages too cramped, too deteriorated, too clogged with waste, history, and disparate energy, and sweat to sustain all of them.And yet they persist.Sony Labou Tansi, the Congolese writer and one of the continent's renowned observers of urban life, talks about the African love affair with the ''hodgepodge''-the tugs and pulls of life in all directions from which provisional orders are hastily assembled and demolished, which in turn attempt to ''borrow'' all that is in sight.It may be that such a making use of whatever comes along as well as keeping hundreds of diversities in some kind of close attachment give many African cities their appearance of vitality.But as Tansi also implies in his novel The Antipeople, as well as in much of his theater, the very sense of throwing things together does not necessarily make a society more flexible or productive.∞ Sometimes the hodgepodge freezes the elements in place and makes cultures static and slow to
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In recent years, many new cortical areas have been identified in the macaque monkey. The number of identified connections between areas has increased even more dramatically. We report here on (1) a summary of the layout of cortical areas associated with vision and with other modalities, (2) a computerized database for storing and representing large amounts of information on connectivity patterns, and (3) the application of these data to the analysis of hierarchical organization of the cerebral cortex. Our analysis concentrates on the visual system, which includes 25 neocortical areas that are predominantly or exclusively visual in function, plus an additional 7 areas that we regard as visual-association areas on the basis of their extensive visual inputs. A total of 305 connections among these 32 visual and visual-association areas have been reported. This represents 31% of the possible number of pathways if each area were connected with all others. The actual degree of connectivity is likely to be closer to 40%. The great majority of pathways involve reciprocal connections between areas. There are also extensive connections with cortical areas outside the visual system proper, including the somatosensory cortex, as well as neocortical, transitional, and archicortical regions in the temporal and frontal lobes. In the somatosensory/motor system, there are 62 identified pathways linking 13 cortical areas, suggesting an overall connectivity of about 40%. Based on the laminar patterns of connections between areas, we propose a hierarchy of visual areas and of somatosensory/motor areas that is more comprehensive than those suggested in other recent studies. The current version of the visual hierarchy includes 10 levels of cortical processing. Altogether, it contains 14 levels if one includes the retina and lateral geniculate nucleus at the bottom as well as the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus at the top. Within this hierarchy, there are multiple, intertwined processing streams, which, at a low level, are related to the compartmental organization of areas V1 and V2 and, at a high level, are related to the distinction between processing centers in the temporal and parietal lobes. However, there are some pathways and relationships (about 10% of the total) whose descriptions do not fit cleanly into this hierarchical scheme for one reason or another. In most instances, though, it is unclear whether these represent genuine exceptions to a strict hierarchy rather than inaccuracies or uncertainities in the reported assignment.
The general technique of parallel transmission on many carriers, called multicarrier modulation (MCM), is explained. The performance that can be achieved on an undistorted channel and algorithms for achieving that performance are discussed. Ways of dealing with channel impairments and of improving the performance through coding are described, and implementation methods are considered. Duplex operation of MCM and the possible use of this on the general switched telephone network are examined.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>
On being a person dementia as a psychiatric category how personhood is undermined personhood maintained the experiences of dementia improving care - the next step forward the caring organization requirements of a caregiver the task of cultural transformation.
Organizations enter alliances with each other to access critical resources, but they rely on information from the network of prior alliances to determine with whom to cooperate. These new alliances modify the existing network, prompting an endogenous dynamic between organizational action and network structure that drives the emergence of interorganizational networks. Testing these ideas on alliances formed in three industries over nine years, the authors show that the probability of a new alliance between specific organizations increases with their interdependence, but also with their prior mutual alliances, common third parties, and joint centrality in the alliance network. The differentiation of the emerging network structure, however, mitigates the effect of interdependence and enhances the effect of joint centrality on new alliance formation.
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This essay attempts to discern some of the general features of a legal system like the American by drawing on (and rearranging) commonplaces and less than systematic gleanings from the literature. The speculative and tentative nature of the assertions here will be apparent and is acknowledged here wholesale to spare myself and the reader repeated disclaimers. I would like to try to put forward some conjectures about the way in which the basic architecture of the legal system creates and limits the possibilities of using the system ;as a means of redistributive (that is, systemically equalizing) change. Our question, specifically, is, under what conditions can Iitigation be redistributive, taking litigation in the broadest sense of the presentation of claims to be decided by courts (or court-like agencies) and the whole penumbra of threats, feints, and so forth, surrounding such presentation.
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