The animal welfare debate has been developing in the UK since the 18 century and for much of that time the emphasis has been on the use of legislation to protect animals. More recently in farm animals there has been a focus on using market-led approaches to improve animal welfare. In this paper we argue that there is a strong case for examining more closely supply-side solutions to improving an...

The rapid rise of online sales has introduced technologies that promise better targeting of consumers for specific ads. Thus far the literature has not differentiated between online advertising strategies and, instead, explores whether one strategy is more effective than another in identifying a consumer with a propensity to buy a particular product, in the belief that a higher transaction rate...

The unprecedented volume of data captured by modern hospitality firms during the co-production of the service experience can be used to create economic value. In this article we describe two frameworks grounded in the cross-disciplinary literature in information systems, strategy and marketing, that can help in conceptualizing future research directions in this area. In the first framework, the...

The quality of static phones (e.g. vowels, fricatives, nasals, laterals) generated by articulatory speech synthesizers has reached a high level in the last years. Our goal is to expand this high quality to dynamic speech, i.e. whole syllables, words, and utterances by re-synthesizing natural acoustic speech data. Re-synthesis means that vocal tract action units or articulatory gestures, describ...

During the late 1990s, China introduced the gaizhi process for privatizing stateowned firms. Under gaizhi, managers could acquire their firms at a price that was based on recent profitability. Systematic analysis of longitudinal data reveals the following: (1) There is a statistically significant 4 percent decrease in net margin relative to trend in the one year period immediately prior to priv...

In this article an experience of the utilization of PRC (Public Resource Computation) in research projects that needs large quantities of CPU time is presented. We have developed a distributed architecture based on middleware BOINC and LilGP Genetic Programming tool. In order to run LilGP applications under BOINC platforms, some core LilGP functions has been adapted to BOINC requirements. We ha...

Geographical information is of strategic importance, when comes to land use management decision-making and GIS are essential resources for the production of land use management instruments, commonly known as plans. To build them, local authorities require multi-disciplinary teams with different competences and responsibilities. Many of these teams are external to the municipality and in the pos...

In Statistical Machine Translation, words that were not seen during training are unknown words, that is, words that the system will not know how to translate. In this paper we contribute to this research problem by profiting from orthographic cues given by words. Thus, we report a study of the impact of word distance metrics in cognates’ detection and, in addition, on the possibility of obtaini...

This paper presents a health smart home (HSH) system represent a temporary or durable alternative to the hospitalization or the recourse to the establishments of lodging of long life – elderly people's homes or specialized centers. The patient is not then constrained any more to give up his residence and the life in society. He preserves a broad autonomy in his social environment and privative,...