In recent years, outsourcing has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. Despite extensive research, several examples of outsourcing failure are prevalent. In this paper, complimenting the strategic and economic studies on outsourcing, we focus on the operational execution challenges by examining transition phase, which starts immediately after contract signing and involves the critical transfer of out...

This study applies the techniques of contrastive ethnopragmatics to communicative style in initial conversational interactions in three varieties of Anglo English: Australian English, American English, and English English. It proposes for each variety a distinctive suite of cultural scripts concerning matters such as presumed stance in relation to sameness and difference, degree of attention to...

The internal pith of a high energy plant, Elephant grass (EG), was more extensively degraded (>50% dry matter) compared to the outer cortex (31%) or the whole stem (35%) by an enzyme preparation from Humicola insolens, Ultraflo. Reducing sugars and acetic acid release from the pith was also higher compared to the cortex. Supplementation of Ultraflo with a type-C feruloyl esterase increased the ...

The predicates that are used to encode a planning domain in PDDL often do not include concepts that are important for effectively reasoning about problems in the domain. In particular, the effectiveness of rule-based policies in a domain depend on the concepts that can be expressed in the language used to capture those policies. In this work we investigate complimenting planning domain descript...

With the advent of web services standards and a service-oriented Grid architecture, it is foreseeable that competing as well as complimenting computational services will proliferate. Current efforts in standardising service interface focuses on how one can execute these services in terms of their syntactic descriptions. Their capabilities and relations with other service types are only articula...

Most of the literature on impression management considers direct tactics such as selfpromoting by mentioning personal achievements and ingratiating by complimenting others. These direct tactics can backfire if the target recognizes the hidden motive behind them. Therefore, people often use indirect impression management tactics. Previous research has shown that people promote themselves indirec...

The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL lea...

Theories of attention are compatible with the idea that we can bias attention to avoid selecting objects that have known nontarget features. Although this may underlie several existing phenomena, the explicit guidance of attention away from known nontargets has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show that observers can use feature cues (i.e., color) to bias attention away from nontarget items duri...

Compliment responses in face-to-face interaction have been extensively studied in different languages and cultures. Studies on complimenting behaviour in virtual contexts are beginning to emerge (cf. Cirillo 2012; Placencia and Lower 2013; Maíz-Arévalo 2013). This paper aims to contribute to this emerging body of work by examining the responses to compliments made on Facebook by a group of wome...