This article presents a theoretical framework for applying an identity approach to personal naming. It also presents some results from a doctoral thesis project in which this framework has been applied in an analysis of parents’ choices of first names for their children. Questions discussed in this article include: To what extent do choices of first names function as acts of identity? Which asp...

The meanings of brand and branding have been evolving over the past several decades. This evolution is converging on a new conceptual logic, which views brand in terms of collaborative, value co-creation activities of firms and all of their stakeholders and brand value in terms of the stakeholders’ collectively perceived value-in-use. The authors argue that this new logic parallels and reflects...

Individuals are able to effect massive online social change through the viral sharing of memes. Sharing is initially influenced by meme creators and secondarily by meme consumers, whose individual sharing decisions accumulate to determine total meme sharing. By investigating meme creation as a separate process from meme sharing, we hope to create an account of online sharing that includes featu...

Title of Document: ON THE REPRESENTATION OF OBJECTS IN THE VISUAL SYSTEM Dimiter Iavorov Kirilov, Ph.D., 2012 Directed By: Professor Georges Rey, Philosophy Department, UMCP There is evidence in the psychological literature for representations of objects (Pylyshyn’s visual indexes) that refer to and track, not properties, but what in our sort of world typically turn out to be individual physica...

The benefit of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for corporate performance is almost ignored at earlier works. To advance earlier researches, this work employs financial data to explore factors of performance advance by illustrating the association between operation management and ERP installation. A two-stage analysis is made to achieve the aim. Firstly, input-output efficiency of a fi...

with the economy’s progressive loss of competitiveness with regard to the foreign sector. Given the importance that the external sector has taken on, both for determining the financing needs of the economy and for future potential growth, the aim of this article is to explore the pattern of competitiveness that the Spanish economy has shown in comparison with its chief trading partners, along w...

Responding to the PIN cracking attacks from Berkman and Ostrovsky (FC 2007), we outline a simple solution called salted-PIN. Instead of sending the regular user PIN, salted-PIN requires an ATM to generate a Transport Final PIN from a user PIN, account number, and a salt value (stored on the bank card) through, e.g., a pseudo-random function. We explore different attacks on this solution, and pr...

be "comprehensively followed from the official reports". Fortunately, official publications and actual events at local level frequently show interesting discrepancies and nineteenth-century provincial newspapers are full of detailed and useful accounts of the epidemic that certainly deserve setting alongside these official records. Pattison clearly has veterinary heroes and villains, not all of...

The classification of uncertain datasets is an emerging research problem that has recently attracted significant attention. Some attempts to devise a classification model with uncertain training data have been proposed using decision trees, neural networks, or other approaches. Among those, the associative classifiers have inspired some of the uncertain classification algorithms given their pro...

I have chosen the title of this paper with some care. I am not undertaking to set out the conceptual foundations of cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a body of practical techniques. Although it is clear enough that these techniques are largely derived from neo-classical economic theory, what we take the conceptual foundations of CBA to be is still to some extent a matter of ...