Art: Futures of the past

This essay makes a demand: it calls for a divorce between art and culture in order to reaffirm a future for art. It asks whether in a scenario in which political culture has surrendered to cultural politics, can art reaffirm and reconfigure itself as a site of exuberance, wonder, vitality, affect, memory and learning, and create a place of ethical and critical resistance?     

Financial services ads and viewer response profiles: Psychometric properties of a shortened scale

Schlinger's Viewer Response Profile is a widely used tool in advertising research, in both commercial and academic environments. It is used in ad testing to gauge viewer reactions to television commercials. Initial research on its psychometric properties was critical of the scale; however, more recent work using more sophisticated statistical techniques and larger, more realistic, samples has been much more complimentary. This article reports on the use of a shorter version of the Schlinger scale to test financial services advertisements. The findings generally indicate that the scale can be used with confidence in that environment, and that the shorter scale generally performed well. The limitations of the study are acknowledged, managerial implications are discussed, and avenues for future research are identified.     

Development management regions in South Africa: An empirical evaluation

In this study an attempt has been made to evaluate the validity of the boundaries of the officially approved ‘development regions’ of South Africa. A variety of statistical methods were used for the evaluation of the empirical validity of the boundaries of these regions. Firstly, two sets of homogeneous regions based on different sets of parameters were delimited. Secondly, two sets of regions indicating areas of different levels of economic development were determined. With the aid of this information, some changes in the boundaries of the existing regions are suggested. A historical account of attempts at regionalisation in South Africa for development management purposes is also given. A semantic assessment of definitions points to the need for a change in the use of the term ‘development region’ — for this specific purpose — to the term ‘development management region’.     

Financial services ads and viewer response profiles: Psychometric properties of a shortened scale

Schlinger's Viewer Response Profile is a widely used tool in advertising research, in both commercial and academic environments. It is used in ad testing to gauge viewer reactions to television commercials. Initial research on its psychometric properties was critical of the scale; however, more recent work using more sophisticated statistical techniques and larger, more realistic, samples has been much more complimentary. This article reports on the use of a shorter version of the Schlinger scale to test financial services advertisements. The findings generally indicate that the scale can be used with confidence in that environment, and that the shorter scale generally performed well. The limitations of the study are acknowledged, managerial implications are discussed, and avenues for future research are identified.     

Explaining the variance of price-dividend ratios

I report a bound on the variance of the-dividend ratios anda decomposition of their variance into terms that reflect changesin dividend growth and discount rates. The specification isnot restrictive. The test statistics do not require constructionof ex post present values; instead, they are restrictions onmeans, variances and covariances of price-dividend ratios, dividendgrowth, and discount rates. I consider implications for themean price-dividend ratio, and I evaluate whether a low meandiscount rate can rationalize the mean and variance of price-dividendratios. The results do not indicate any striking rejectionsof present value models. However, the bulk of the variance ofprice-dividend ratios must be accounted for by changing forecastsof discount rates, and discount rates must possess some unusualcharacteristics.