Customer lifetime value (LTV, see e.g. Bauer et al. 2005 and Rosset et al. 2003), which measures the profit generating potential, or value, of a customer, is increasingly being considered a touchstone for administering the CRM (Customer relationship management) process. This in order to provide attractive benefits and retain high-value customers, while maximizing profits from a business standpo...

Louis D. Brandeis is the presiding eminence in the story of the encounter of Jewish with the American legal order. In the centuries since Brandeis started practicing law, Jews have flourished exceedingly in both the legal professional mainstream (practitioners, judiciaries, academics) and the public interest sector. Can this extravagant participation in both hemispheres of the world of American...

David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher who challenged many of the metaphysical and epistemological orthodoxies of the Modern age. His primary targets were his predecessors Descartes and John Locke. Rather than penetrating to the true essence of reality, Hume saw human thought as largely a practical faculty much imbued with habit. His critique of human knowledge, in particular, remain...

The Socratic method is a common touchstone in conversations about classroom pedagogy, widely believed to enhance student engagement and promote critical thinking. Understood as the historical inheritance of antiquity, the method is generally accepted by teachers, administrators, and scholars as a legitimate approach to instruction. As this article reveals, however, the Socratic method was not p...

The purpose of this paper is to problematize the idea of the ethnographic field that is usually taken for granted in Information Systems (IS) field research. The field is the touchstone of reality which the ethnographer encounters yet it is often thought of something fixed and merely ‘out there’ where the ethnographer goes to conduct the research. However, recent advances in anthropological sch...

Biological nitrogen fixation by the nitrogenase enzymes has long been a touchstone for dinitrogen chemists.1,2 Both the enzymatic reduction and protonation of N2 mediated by these metalloenzymes (eq 1)3,4 and the industrial hydrogenation of N2 exemplified by the Haber-Bosch process (eq 2)5-7 employ transition metal-based catalysts to accelerate the thermodynamically feasible production of ammonia.

Cognitive Science, whose genesis was interdisciplinary, shows signs of reverting to a disjoint collection of elds. This paper presents a compact, theory-free task that inherently requires an integrated solution. The basic problem is learning a subset of an arbitrary natural language from picture-sentence pairs. We describe a very speci c instance of this task and show how it presents fundamenta...