Conservation tillage (CT) systems have a number of potential benefits including lower crop production costs and the ability to reduce soil erosion that have made them common in several regions of the world. Although CT systems have been researched and successfully implemented on some farms in California's San Joaquin Valley (SJV), overall adoption is low and the reasons for the region's compara...

Customer complaint management is becoming a critical key success factor in today's business environment. This study introduces a methodology to improve complaint-handling strategies through an automatic email-classification system that distinguishes complaints from non-complaints. As such, complaint handling becomes less time-consuming and more successful. The classification system combines tra...

Learners sometimes have incoherent and fragmented intuitive prior knowledge that is (partly) "incompatible" with the to-be-learned contents. Such knowledge in pieces can cause conceptual disorientation and cognitive overload while learning. We hypothesized that a pre-training intervention providing a generalized schema as a structuring framework for such knowledge in pieces would support (re)or...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate the pursuit of achievement goals in medical students and to assess the relationship between achievement goals, learning strategy, and motivation. METHODS Two hundred seventy freshman and sophomore premedical students and sophomore medical school students participated in this study, which used the Achievement Goals Scale and the Self-Regulate...

Making a complaint in any language is not an easy task. The complainer might run the risk of impairing relationship between him/her and hearer. In Thailand, international students use English as medium communication among one another with local people. This lingua franca (ELF) context was considered appropriate to investigate rhetorical structure politeness strategies used letters written by or...