We offer a way to test to what extent double-entry book-keeping is the vector of rationalization of merchant activity that was described by Weber, and explore alternative possible motivations. We move the focus away from the structure and theory of accounts into the daily practice of the agents themselves. We use the new, unique database of eighteenth-century merchant accounts developed in Fran...

Disclaimer ©Institute for Retail Studies. All rights reserved. 1 The views and opinions expressed in this Working Paper are strictly the responsibility of the authors. 3 INTRODUCTION Charity retailing has grown over the last five years into a thriving and expanding sector and can no longer be ignored by academic researchers. Corporate Intelligence Group (1992) report that there are now over 5,0...

We show that every uniformly asymptotically affine circle endomorphism has a uniformly asymptotically conformal (UAC) extension to the complex plane. Then we use the UAC extension to construct the dual dynamical system, the dual annulus, and the dual circle expanding map.

The activities developed in this paper were aimed at providing an awareness of the elements that should be considered in quality learning objects instructional design for elearning systems. We thus propose our own LO definition taking into account aggregation level number 2. On this basis, we analyze cognitive theories for promoting learning and we explain issues relating to the LO characterist...

Research on the role of local institutions in confl ict management is still limited. This study highlights various inter-settlement confl icts over the issue of unclear resource boundaries in Danau Sentarum National Park, Indonesia. The park is home to two major ethnic groups (Dayak Iban and Malay) whose livelihoods are highly dependent on fi sh and forest resources available in the park area. ...

The focus of this research is to develop a method for building Text to Speech Systems for resource poor languages by using data from other languages to fine tune a general template polyglot TTS architecture. Our method involves three main componants: language clustering, phoneme mappings and prosody modelling. As a proof of concept, four TTS have been implemented for English, Spanish, Malay and...

The so-called Exclusion argument (Kim 2000; Papineau 2004) about mental causation applies one premise that is typically accepted without much discussion: the thesis of causal completeness of the physical domain (CCP). In part one I evaluate Papineau’s (2001) argument for the CCP. I argue that this argument is not satisfying and that it is incomplete. The rest of the thesis is dedicated to an al...

In this paper we describe a system that uses natural language dialogue to provide customer service for a financial domain both over the phone as well as over the Internet. Some sample transactions include checking one’s account balance, transferring money from one account to another, buying, selling, and trading stocks, etc. The system described is robust enough to handle speech recognition err...

This paper presents a model of a card payment system to address the pricing and rules that govern such systems. It evaluates the social optimality of privately set interchange fees and the adoption of a rule by payment systems to prevent merchants surcharging for card transactions using two extremes of merchant pricing—monopolistic pricing and perfect competition. Both types of merchant pricing...