It is widely recognized that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are some of the core elements involved in increasing levels of employment in most economies, and that these companies can also play a relevant role in the development of new sources of innovation and the creation of competitive advantages in new productive activities or service areas. Only through the strengthening of SMEs c...

Since the mid nineteen nineties most Latin American nations have implemented free market policies. The ensuing economic stability has attracted investment from non-Latin corporations, thereby causing the transfer of non-Latin executives to Latin nations. For many of these executives, their Latin assignments include an unexpected challenge: Dealing with Latin America’s subtle but pervasive racis...

This qualitative study examined concept formation of Latin prefixes in three students diagnosed with learning disabilities through a theme-based analysis. The study had two purposes. Conceptual processes underlying the learning of Latin prefixes were explored through dynamic assessment and Vygotsky’s stages of concept formation were empirically tested. There were five major findings in this stu...

Zbigniew Puchała, Łukasz Rudnicki, Karol Życzkowski Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Bałtycka 5, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, ul. Reymonta 4, 30-059 Kraków, Poland Center for Theoretical Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, al. Lotników 32/46, 02-668 Warszawa, Poland Freiburg Insitute for Advanced Studies, Alb...

The adoption of the stress-majorization method from multi-dimensional scaling into graph layout has provided an improved mathematical basis and better convergence properties for so-called “force-directed placement” techniques. In this paper we explore algorithms for augmenting such stress-majorization techniques with simple linear constraints using gradient-projection optimization techniques. O...

A general framework based on majorization, Schur-concavity, and concavity is given that facilitates the analysis of algorithm performance and clarifies the relationships between existing proposed diversity measures useful for best basis selection. Admissible sparsity measures are given by the Schur-concave functions, which are the class of functions consistent with the partial ordering on vecto...