this study empirically examines whether managers manipulate reported income through the timing of sales of long-lived assets and investments. several empirical implications of the income-smoothing and debt-equity hypothesis in the context of asset sales were tested. the findings are consistent with the timing of asset sales by managers so that the recognized accounting income from these sales s...

The sale of tickets, premium seating, and sponsorship is fundamental to the financial viability of professional sport organizations. With ticket sales as the most important source of local revenue for most sport organizations and the sale of premium suites and sponsorships unshared amongst other franchises (Smith & Roy, 2011; Howard & Crompton, 2004), recruiting, training, and retaining high qu...

BACKGROUND Water utilities continue to be interested in implementing syndromic surveillance for the enhanced detection of waterborne disease outbreaks. The authors evaluated the ability of sales of over-the-counter diarrheal remedies available from the National Retail Data Monitor to predict endemic and epidemic gastrointestinal disease in the San Francisco Bay Area. METHODS Time series model...

Sales talks between customers and sales personnel are efficient and preferred means for exchanging information that is relevant for purchase decisions on non-commodity products. Dialogs used in sales talks are governed by complex and in many respects conflicting intentions on both sides. While previous Decision Support Systems (DSS) are designed by the principle of congruent intentions of commu...

RFID has been regarded as a time and money-saving solution for a wide variety of applications, such as manufacturing, supply chain management, and inventory control, etc. However, there are some security problems on RFID in the product managements. The most concerned issues are the tracking and the location privacy. Numerous scholars tried to solve these problems, but their proposals do not inc...

Case-based reasoning technology opens a very promising and enriching new field for electronic commerce applications. However, current CBR applications for sales support in electronic commerce are limited to fixed, unchangeable products. In order to implement sales support for configurable products, the customization of base products must be supported as well. For this purpose, an interactive op...

BACKGROUND Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is associated with morbidity and mortality. The retail food environment influences food and beverage purchasing and consumption. This study assesses the impact of a community pharmacy's removal of sweet beverages on overall community sales of carbonated soft drinks (CSD) in a rural setting. We also examined whether the pharmacy intervention affect...

We apply Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) to image sequences generated from natural images using a range of spatial transformations. An analysis of the resulting receptive fields shows that they have a rich spectrum of invariances and share many properties with complex and hypercomplex cells of the primary visual cortex. Furthermore, the dependence of the solutions on the statistics of the transform...