Guangdong FTZ — a Boon to SAR

【正】Closer ties with Hong Kong and Macao Hong Kong is set to benefit greatly from the launch of the proposed Guangdong FTZ,which is expected to be modeled after ...     

Karl Pearson's Influence in the United States

Karl Pearson, the founder of mathematical statistics, was the leading statistical researcher from the 1890s up to about 1920. His interests were wide-ranging and so his impact on statistics in the United States was also wide-ranging. Many American researchers came to University College London to study with him. Others studied his work from afar. In the United States, Pearsonian statistics first penetrated the academic landscape in biology. This was soon followed by the fields of economics and psychology. It was not until relatively late in Pearson's career that several American mathematicians took up statistics as a serious research topic.     

Comparative evaluation of empirical response functions in sales management decision making

Although the potential value of an empirical response function as a sales management decision-making tool is evident, the question of whether functions with different properties will provide comparable decision guidelines has not been investigated. One important property of these functions is their ability to explain variation in sales response relationships. The present study develops and comparatively evaluates two response functions that differ in explanatory power as expressed by their R² values. Each function is used to make sales forecasts and determine optimal call levels to the same set of randomly selected retail accounts, and the two functions provide different decision guidelines. This article discusses the implications of these results and future research directions.     

Leisure pursuits: uncovering the ‘selective tradition’ in culture and well-being evidence for policy

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders the value of leisure studies to well-being evidence for policy-making. It presents secondary analyses of Office for National Statistics data from the Measuring National Well-being (MNW) debate (2010). It finds that leisure is more important to the nation than accounted for in official reports. Using Raymond Williams’ framework of ‘lived culture’ and ‘recorded culture’, the article interprets this analytical discrepancy as demonstrating the culture of ‘selective tradition’.

Raymond Williams’ work is used to understand the sidelining of leisure in the MNW programme in two ways. Firstly, the article addresses survey design and analysis. It finds a methodological bias against free text data as evidence, affecting which aspects of cultural and social life appear central to well-being. Secondly, the article takes a discourse approach to cultural sector advocacy, which, in arguing the value of arts-related activity, relegates aspects of ‘culture as ordinary’ by default. These two selective traditions mean that ‘everyday participation’ is not valued in discussions of well-being evidence, advocacy or in the final MNW measures, despite its value to the public. This article prioritises everyday understandings of well-being over those of experts, offering an ethical and practical contribution to leisure studies and policy-making for well-being.     

Steps in selling effort deployment

Sales deployment decisions are among the most important and most difficult decisions facing sales organizations. Sales- force decision models have been developed as analytical tools for deployment analysis, but model use poses difficult problems for many firms. We propose an operational approach for the strategic analysis of selling effort deployment and provide three examples of how it might be used in deployment analysis.