...Nicholas David Bowman Michigan State University Online Publication Date: April 26, 2008 Journal of Media Psychology, V 13, No. 2, Spring, 2008 Abstract With the growing popularity of online video games, there have been anecdotal reports suggesting that these games are highly addictive, with some gamers spending in excess of 40 to 50 hours per week playing. Thus, research into the individual characteristics that lead to excessive play is warranted. This paper examines two individual variables – personality and perceptions of media – and explores how they relate to online game play, specifically online game addiction. By presenting a revised metric for online game addiction, this paper explores the relationship between addiction and both personality and perception. Online addiction is presented in this paper as a process addiction with four unique factors: perceived social sanctions, excessive play, uncontrollable play, and displacement. Both personality and perception are found to be significantly associated with online game addiction. These results are interpreted and discussed, and future research direction is suggested. Keywords: online game addiction, Big Five personality traits, media perception, MMOs Perception and Addiction of Online Games as a Function of Personality Traits Computer games as a leisure activity have become an ever-increasing part of many young people’s day-to-day lives (Griffiths & Davis, 2005; Durkin, 2006). More recently, with the rapid...
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...Michigan State University Online Publication Date: April 26, 2008 Journal of Media Psychology, V 13, No. 2, Spring, 2008 Abstract With the growing popularity of online video games, there have been anecdotal reports suggesting that these games are highly addictive, with some gamers spending in excess of 40 to 50 hours per week playing. Thus, research into the individual characteristics that lead to excessive play is warranted. This paper examines two individual variables – personality and perceptions of media – and explores how they relate to online game play, specifically online game addiction. By presenting a revised metric for online game addiction, this paper explores the relationship between addiction and both personality and perception. Online addiction is presented in this paper as a process addiction with four unique factors: perceived social sanctions, excessive play, uncontrollable play, and displacement. Both personality and perception are found to be significantly associated with online game addiction. These results are interpreted and discussed, and future research direction is suggested. Keywords: online game addiction, Big Five personality traits, media perception, MMOs Perception and Addiction of Online Games as a Function of Personality Traits Computer games as a leisure activity have become an ever-increasing part of many young people’s day-to-day lives (Griffiths & Davis, 2005; Durkin, 2006). More recently, with the...
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... However, September 11, 2001, started chaotic market conditions for the financial services industry. A volatile climate has left many financial firms struggling to keep both their clients’ trust and investor’s credibility. In addition to the above, many factors including strong competition, technology, the economy, and social trends have started to have a significant impact on the financial industry. To succeed, investment companies need to offer a wide gamma of products coupled with expert advice. Therefore, Intersect Investments needs to consider carefully its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as part of its strategic planning process. This paper will analyze benchmarking research made on companies dealing with transformational issues such as Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Co. Apple Computers and Legion Paper Co. Some of those organizations are global leaders within their respective industry. Therefore, any benchmarking analysis is relevant to the current situation at Intersect Investments. Coca-Cola Synopsis by Bruce McCormack It has become a cliché to state that tough times demand tough measures. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 redefined this cliché for most businesses on Wall Street and throughout the world. One such Wall Street business, Intersect Investment Services, tried boldly to overcome the toughness of the times without making a drastic strategic shift, but found itself barely managing to survive. After four years of such struggles...
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...the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. '80ș Șțǻřș Ỳǿų Ẅǿň'ț Řěčǿģňįżě Țǿđǻỳ 5 Mįňǿř 'Șțǻř Ẅǻřș' Ǻčțǿřș Ỳǿų Đįđň'ț Řěǻŀįżě Ẅěřě İň Ěvěřỳțħįňģ Mųșįčįǻňș Ẅħǿ Ǻřěň’ț Ẅħǿ Ỳǿų Țħįňķ Țħěỳ Ǻřě Fǻmǿųș Șǿňģș Țħǻț Ẅěřě Ẅřįțțěň Ǻbǿųț Čěŀěbřįțįěș ȘİĐĚBǺŘ Invasion of the Home Snatchers By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously selfserving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former...
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...The version of mid-May, 2009, will appear as the editorial of the June 2009 issue of the AJM, under the title “Anatomy of a Credit Crisis.” I include below the June preamble, in which I assay a framework for understanding the genesis of the crisis. December, 2008: IN ITS LEADER of October 13, 2008, the Financial Times characterized the western world’s banking system as suffering “the equivalent of a cardiac arrest.” The collapse of confidence in the system means that “it is now virtually impossible for any institution to finance itself in the markets longer than overnight.” This occurred less than a month after Lehman Brothers (LB) collapsed, without bailout. Six months earlier Bear Stearns (BS) had been bailed out after JP Morgan Chase (JPM Chase) had bought it for $10 a share, at the regulator’s urging. After LB fell, who would be next? And if LB, who was not at risk? Despite the earlier U.S. government bailouts of the erstwhile government mortgage originators (and still seen as government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), and the later bailout of the world’s largest insurer, American International Group (AIG), everything changed with the demise of LB. The FT was describing the freezing of the interbank credit market. After LB’s fall, so-called counterparty risk was seen as prohibitive to prospective lenders, at any price. This was revealed in the TED spread,...
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...ARTICLES Sociology o Sport Journal, 1998, 15, 1-20 f O 1998 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. "Disciplining the Body": HIV-Positive Male Athletes, Media Surveillance,and the Policing of Sexuality Shari Lee Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs University of Southern California This paper analyzes how mainstream print media polices sexuality through framings of HIV-positive male athletes. We analyze the HN-positive announcements of Magic Johnson, Greg Louganis, and Tommy Morrison. Specifically, we discuss differences between the framing of gay men (Louganis) and self-identifiedheterosexual men (Johnson and Morrison). First, there is an extensive search for the ways Magic Johnson and Tommy Morrison contracted HIVIAIDS. Media coverage emphasizes that "straights can get it too" through promiscuity and a "fast lane" lifestyle. Consistent with the historically automatic conflation of HIVIAIDS with gay identity, the media pose no inquiries into the cause of Louganis' HIV transmission. We close our discussion by focusing on the meaning of extending the signifier of HIVIAIDS beyond gay bodies to include working class and black male bodies. Media surveillance of sexual identity and the body reinforces hegemonic masculinity in sport while feeding into the current sexual hierarchy in U.S. culture. Cette Ctude porte sur la f a ~ o n les mCdias Ccrits surveillent et contr6lent la sexualit6 par dont le biais de leur traitement des athlktes masculins skro-positifs.Nous analysons les annonces de skro-positivitk...
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...The Journey From Deregulation to Regulation - Are We Walking In Circles? Executive Summary This paper attempts to explore the cycle from deregulation to regulation against the backdrop of events from 2001 to 2008, with some reference to later laws such as Dodd-Frank. The context is against the quote from Aristotle that “law is order, and good law is good order”. A Brief history of Deregulation: Regulations have been considered a blessing and a curse since time immemorial. It could be argued, especially with those of a theological mindset, that religions introduced the first forms of regulations. The penalty for deviations were well laid out, and often times had precedent, but exceptions were always sought and loopholes were often explored. Modern economics, regardless of which school of thought is followed, can be compared to a religion1. There are tenets, or commandments. There are different religions, from Keynes, to Marx to Milton. Without extending this analogy, it is relevant to point out that economic theories either rely on governments to participate wholeheartedly in the state of economic affairs by regulating businesses, corporations and industries, or to let the system weed out the weaker in favor of the stronger. In the United States, bitter past experience shaped the regulations surrounding businesses. The Great Depression was the first indicator that the system needed to be made more robust, which in turn led to regulations that formed the base of what our current...
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...11/12/2009 MANAGEMENT 573 GOLDMAN SACHS CASE STUDY Brady Gear, Adam Heying, Maxwell Kagan, Kelly Schilling, & Joseph Quinn Wingerd Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 4 History ........................................................................................................................................................... 4 The Nineteenth Century ............................................................................................................................ 4 The Twentieth Century .............................................................................................................................. 5 More Recent Times ................................................................................................................................... 6 Who’s Who List of Former Goldman Sachs Executives ................................................................................ 7 Business Segments ........................................................................................................................................ 9 Investment Banking ................................................................................................................................ 10 Financial Advisory ............................................................................................................
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...Are the current corporate social responsibility policies employed by online gambling companies proportional to the psychological impact the industry has on its consumers? A critical review of the UK online gambling industry. Andrew Macdonald March 2013 MA (Soc) Business and Management University of Glasgow 1 CONTENTS 1 Introduction.....................................................................................................3 2 Literature Review............................................................................................5 Introduction and Definitions.................................................................................5 Justification of Research.....................................................................................8 CSR within Online Gambling.............................................................................10 Psychological Aspects of Online Gambling........................................................13 3 Methods.........................................................................................................19 4 Findings.........................................................................................................25 Survey Results...................................................................................................25 CSR Policies......................................................................................................30 Socially Irresponsible Practices............
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...robin blackburn THE SUBPRIME CRISIS I n the summer of 2007 many leading banks in the us and Europe were hit by a collapse in the value of mortgage-backed securities which they had themselves been responsible for packaging.* To the surprise of many, the poisonous securities turned out to constitute a major portion of their ultimate asset base. The defaults fostered a credit crunch as all financial institutions hoarded cash and required ever widening premiums before lending to one another. The Wall Street investment banks and brokerages haemorrhaged $175 billion of capital in the period July 2007 to March 2008, and Bear Stearns, the fifth largest, was ‘rescued’ in March, at a fire-sale price, by JP Morgan Chase with the help of $29 billion of guarantees from the Federal Reserve. Many of the rest only survived by selling huge chunks of preferred stock, with guaranteed premium rates of return, to a string of ‘sovereign funds’, owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi, Singapore, South Korea and China, among others. By the end of January 2008, $75 billion of new capital had been injected into the banks, but it was not enough. In the uk the sharply rising cost of liquidity destroyed the business model of a large mortgage house, leading to the first bank run in the uk for 150 years and obliging the British Chancellor first to extend nearly £60 billion in loans and guarantees to its depositors and then to take the concern, Northern Rock, into public ownership. In late January Société...
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...Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Pattern Recognition Letters 29 (2008) 1024–1032 www.elsevier.com/locate/patrec Learning to learn: From smart machines to intelligent machines B. Raducanu b a,* ` , J. Vitria a,b a Computer Vision Center, Edifici ‘‘O’’ – Campus UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain Computer Science Department, Autonomous University of Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain Available online 14 September 2007 Abstract Since its birth, more than five decades ago, one of the biggest challenges of artificial intelligence remained the building of intelligent machines. Despite amazing advancements, we are still far from having machines that reach human intelligence level. The current paper tries to offer a possible explanation of this situation. For this purpose, we make a review of different learning strategies and context types that are involved in the learning process. We also present the results of a study on cognitive development applied to the problem of face recognition for social robotics. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Intelligent systems; Cognitive development; Context; Social robotics; Face recognition 1. Introduction The golden dream of artificial intelligence (AI) remains to design and build systems showing human-like intelligence. Nowadays, the machines can perform remarkable things: there are chess algorithms able to play at international masters complexity levels, applications to coordinate...
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...Foreclosure Crisis in Florida and Beyond: Suggested Conflict Resolution Framework For Resolving this Crisis American Dream (or) American Nightmare [pic] [pic] David W. Puckett Email: dpuckett@dvergence.com Skype: david.w.puckett Twitter: davepuckett@twitter.com Phone: 813.727.3583 Introduction Each day there are stories reported in the news about mortgage foreclosures, detailing the single biggest financial crisis to hit the nation that is creating a strangle-hold on our economy and preventing economic recovery. While the entire nation has been stunned, the crisis has disproportionately affected the states of Florida, Nevada, Arizona, California and Georgia; these states were hit with an unprecedented loss of value in residential real estate. According to the leading provider of real estate industry statistics, Realtytrac.com (2011), one in every 611 United States housing units had a foreclosure filing during the month of July 2011 and it appears that the foreclosure processing delays, combined with the smorgasbord of national and state-level foreclosure prevention efforts such as loan modifications, lender-borrower mediations and mortgage payment assistance for the unemployed may be allowing more distressed homeowners to stave off foreclosure.. A CNBC report said that the falloff in foreclosures is not based on a “robust recovery in the housing market but on short-term interventions and delays that will extend the current housing market...
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...Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Licensed to: CengageBrain User Leadership: Theory, Application, & Skill Development, Fifth Edition Robert N. Lussier, Christopher F. Achua Vice President of Editorial, Business: Jack W. Calhoun Publisher: Erin Joyner Acquisitions Editor: Scott Person Senior Developmental Editor: Julia Chase Marketing Manager: Jonathan Monahan Marketing Coordinator: Julia Tucker Media Editor: Rob Ellington Manufacturing Planner: Ron Montgomery Senior Art Director: Stacy Jenkins Shirley Rights Acquisition Director: Audrey Pettengill Interior Design, Production Management, and Composition: PreMediaGlobal Cover Designer: Red Hangar Design LLC Cover Image: © John Kershner, Shutterstock © 2013, 2010 South-Western, Cengage Learning ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part...
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...Junod Perron et al. BMC Family Practice 2010, 11:79 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2296/11/79 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Reduction of missed appointments at an urban primary care clinic: a randomised controlled study Noelle Junod Perron1*, Melissa Dominicé Dao1, Michel P Kossovsky1, Valerie Miserez1, Carmen Chuard1, Alexandra Calmy2, Jean-Michel Gaspoz1 Abstract Background: Missed appointments are known to interfere with appropriate care and to misspend medical and administrative resources. The aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of a sequential intervention reminding patients of their upcoming appointment and to identify the profile of patients missing their appointments. Methods: We conducted a randomised controlled study in an urban primary care clinic at the Geneva University Hospitals serving a majority of vulnerable patients. All patients booked in a primary care or HIV clinic at the Geneva University Hospitals were sent a reminder 48 hrs prior to their appointment according to the following sequential intervention: 1. Phone call (fixed or mobile) reminder; 2. If no phone response: a Short Message Service (SMS) reminder; 3. If no available mobile phone number: a postal reminder. The rate of missed appointment, the cost of the intervention, and the profile of patients missing their appointment were recorded. Results: 2123 patients were included: 1052 in the intervention group, 1071 in the control group. Only 61.7% patients had a mobile phone...
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...Introduction Aktel is a joint venture of Telecom Malaysia and A.K. Khan and Company Ltd of Bangladesh. It has started its commercial operation in Dhaka as a Global system for mobile communication (GSM) 900 cellular operators on 15th November 1997. Moreover, Aktel has commenced its operation in Chittagong on March 26, 1998. Aktel is the market follower in telecommunication service in Bangladesh having more than 1 million subscribers and is controlling approximately 23% of the market share. According to Islam, Khan, and Rahman (2002), the market share of Aktel is now decreasing at a great extent as the customer loyalty level is decreasing. As the socioeconomic status of the country does not provide further possibilities to enhance the growth of the industry, as a market follower, Aktel should strive to retain its existing subscribers and penetrate other operator’s subscriber. Therefore, there is an emergence of studying the related facets of the customer loyalty in the context of Bangladesh GSM telecommunication system for Aktel to retain and increase its market share. Hence, in the current study, the researchers intend to examine whether there are relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction, trust, and customer loyalty in Aktel in Bangladesh or not. Statement of the problem Customer satisfaction and trust are positively related with customer loyalty (Bruhn & Grund, 2000; Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2002; Gronholdt, Martensen, & kristensen...
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