Despite the body of research on textbook evaluation from the discourse analysis perspective, cohesive devices have rarely been analyzed in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) textbooks. The acquisition and use of cohesive devices is inherent to naturalistic communication, including business interactions. Hence, L2 learners of business English should be exposed to these devices through cohesion-...

In recent decades, theorists proposed the role of domestic components such as interior active groups, policies and macroeconomic indicators on determination of protection policies. In the context of recent studies, this study has investigated the effect of business cycle fluctuations on import protection for selected developing countries in 1995-2011 by using dynamic panel data method. Furtherm...

This annual article presents information on health care costs by business, households, and government. Households funded 35 percent of expenditures in 1990, government 33 percent, and business, 29 percent. During the last decade, health care costs continued to grow at annual rates of 8 to 16 percent. Burden measures show that rapidly rising costs faced by each sponsor sector are exceeding incre...

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of disclosures of information by profit-making enterprises. It excludes the costs and benefits of disclosure by governmental entities and private-sector, not-for-profit entities. Entirely different issues arise when disclosure must be related to the goals and effective functioning of democracy and charitable undertakings. Even when narrowed, however,...

The software assets that an enterprise applies toward the management of its business processes are bound to evolve in response to business model transformations dictated by changing management environments. Both a given set of software and its associated data form an asset portfolio that needs to be well managed to generate the greatest possible return over time. Tradeoffs between the TCO (Tota...

Energy management is becoming a priority in the design and operation of complex service-based information systems, as the energy costs of IT infrastructures increase. This paper aims at introducing a novel interdisciplinary approach for the development of advanced active energy-aware business process applications, based on expertise from several research areas: Web service technologies, data de...

In this paper we present Evaluate, a platform for learning performance monitoring. Evaluate manages a number of artefacts that can be used to monitor learning performance, like metrics, measures, surveys, questionnaires, or reports. The portal serves various types of users such as business process leaders, monitoring project leaders, learners, and instructors. Based on a powerful modular compon...