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An analysis of the learning relationships amongst micro-firm owner/managers and stakeholders in a small-firm learning network in the Irish tourism sector
Get PDFThis thesis reports the findings from an action research project carried out over a two year period, exploring micro-firm owner/manager learning in a small-firm learning network in the Irish tourism sector. Learning networks are cited in contemporary literature as a key means for creating and sustaining competitive advantage in micro-firms. Specifically, national and international research studies acknowledge the importance of micro-firm network-centred learning in the tourism sector, where an integral part of this learning process is the network of relationships participants cultivate through involvement in formal learning programmes of this nature. Despite their importance in the context of small business development, networks have traditionally been relatively neglected as an area of academic study. This thesis commences with a comprehensive review of literature relating to micro-firm learning, outlining a range of unique features and influences on learning in this environment. The influence that participation in a learning network has on micro-firm owner/manager learning is then considered. The primary research focuses on the south and south east County Based Tourism Learning Network (CBTLN). This initiative is facilitated by Fáilte Ireland and Waterford Institute of Technology and is the learning catalyst in the context of this study. The adopted research methodology is preceded by a review of alternative research methods. The motivations and rationale for adopting an interpretive stance are discussed before the rationale for choosing an action research approach is outlined. The key contribution of this research is the development of a framework for micro-firm owner/manager learning in a learning network environment. Adopting an action research methodology, the author sought to establish, catalogue and analyse the learning relationships amongst micro-firm owner/managers and stakeholders within a small-firm learning network. The thesis concludes by providing an outline of the study‟s contribution to knowledge and its research limitations. Finally recommendations for future research are outlined
An Exploration of Female Undergraduates' Attitudes Towards and Perceptions of Entrepreneurship
Get PDFThe objective of this research was to add knowledge and insight to the very under researched topic of female undergraduates and their attitudes towards and perceptions of entrepreneurship. The reason for this research was to obtain a better understanding of why so few female undergraduates consider entrepreneurship as a career. This is of particular relevance in Ireland as female entrepreneurial activity is relatively low, therefore leading to the under utilisation of a potentially valuable resource in the economy. This lack of female business owners has particular significance as entrepreneurial activity has been recognised as a valuable means to help develop and sustain a country’s economic growth.
The primary data for the research were gathered over a three week period, through the administration of a self-completion questionnaire delivered to 273 female undergraduate students from five of the six schools in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). This allowed for quantitative data analysis using SPSS.
There are a number of interesting findings emerging from this research. Notably, there was almost unanimous agreement (97%) by students, who expressed a wish to own a business, that that they would like to be their own boss. They also perceived entrepreneurship as enabling them to do things their way and therefore allowing them to have more control over their lives. Interestingly, these students were also more likely to believe they had the business skills and knowledge required for business ownership than students who did not want to start a business.
The most inhibiting factor for students who do not want to start a business is the fear of the risk involved. Strikingly, in contrast to students that want to start a business they perceive business ownership as giving them less control over their lives and therefore, believe it would be easier to work for someone else. Interestingly, 79% of these undergraduates expressed the belief that a good business support structure would encourage more women to start a business.
When the attitudes and perceptions of the collective group of students (273) towards entrepreneurship were examined more interesting issues emerged. The most prominent being that one needs to be very determined and work extra hard to run a successful business. When one adds to this their belief that one requires special characteristics or traits to start a business, one can see how respondents may selfselect themselves out of entrepreneurship.
The current research has highlighted some of the principal perceived advantages and disadvantages of female business ownership along with the prominent general attitudes and perceptions as expressed by female undergraduates towards entrepreneurship. Therefore, these findings have implications for academics, educators in entrepreneurship, policy makers, enterprise support agencies and future female entrepreneurs
A Model For IM and Media Driven Communication Services
Get PDFConstructing graphical client applications for the Instant Messaging (IM) domain can be complex
and error prone. As well as coping with the details of a specific IM protocol, the developer must
also master specific user interface toolkits, deal with media streaming protocols and codecs,
handle capability negotiation and deploy a robust event handling strategy for this highly
asynchronous application style. These often competing concerns must be encapsulated in a clean
design that can be evolved to cater for an ever expanding set of capabilities now viable for IM
client applications. This paper proposes an architecture, component set and pattern based
framework to encapsulate this domain, which facilitates the rapid construction of rich media client
IM applications. These may be conventional or specialised IM clients or add-on components for
existing applications
BUILDING LOYALTY: CREATING VALUE THROUGH CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES - RIKON Group
Get PDFA review of the academic and practitioner literature on customer relationship management indicates a general consensus that quality, value, and satisfaction are critical variables in explaining customer loyalty in tourism services, yet, although much is known about the relationship between the aforementioned variables and customer loyalty, they don’t fully explain how customer loyalty is built. This paper argues that one critical variable has been excluded from consideration that impacts on customer loyalty, explicitly customer experiences. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to rectify this significant gap in the literature and present a relatively new perspective of customer loyalty that recognises that the customer has to interact with the components of a service in order for the service to become ‘real’ (Echeverri 2005) and that the successful management of customer experiences leads to a differentiated competitive advantage (Smith and Wheeler 2002). Based on the literature reviewed, observations are drawn for future theoretical and empirical development in the field of customer loyalty
Portfolio diversification using subspace factorizations
Get PDFSuccessful investment management relies on allocating
assets so as to beat the stock market. Asset classes are affected
by different market dynamics or latent trends. These interactions
are crucial to the successful allocation of monies. The seminal
work on portfolio management by Markowitz prompts the adroit
investment manager to consider the correlation between the assets
in his portfolio and to vary his selection so as to optimize his riskreturn
profile. The factor model, a popular model for the return
generating process has been used for portfolio construction and
assumes that there is a low rank representation of the stocks. In
this work we contribute a new approach to portfolio diversification
by comparing a recently developed clustering technique,
SemiNMF, with a new sparse low-rank approximate factorization
technique, Sparse-semiNMF, for clustering stocks into latent
trend based groupings as opposed to the traditional sector based
groupings. We evaluate these techniques using a diffusion model
based on the Black-Scholes options pricing model. We conclude
that Sparse-semiNMF outperforms semiNMF when applied to
synthetic stocks as the contribution of each trend to each stock
is more disjoint for Sparse-semiNMF than for semiNMF, in an
inter-class sense, meaning that the underlying trends for each
stock are more readily apparent, whilst preserving the accuracy
of the factorization. We conclude that the trend-based asset
classes generated by Sparse-semiNMF should be considered in
the investment management process to reduce the risk in portfolio
selection
Spatial Profile of Macular Pigment and its Relationship with Foveal Architecture
Get PDFPurpose. Macular Pigment (MP) is composed of two dietary carotenoids, lutein and zeaxanthin, and a carotenoid generated by the retina, meso-zeaxanthin. There is large intersubject variability in peak optical density, spatial profile, and lateral extent of macular pigment, and it has been suggested that foveal architecture may play a role in in this variability. This study is an initial investigation of the relationship between the spatial profile of macular pigment and foveal architecture
An Analysis of Break Time Active Play in Irish Primary Schools
Get PDFSchool break time is one of the few times of the day for children to engage in selfdirected play with peers. The primary school curriculum recommends breaks of 10 minutes duration per day and a daily recreation period of 30 minutes. A survey questionnaire examined the policies and practices that influence the physical activity (PA) break time habits of children in 391 Irish primary schools. The response rate was 54.5%. Children’s PA levels were observed in three Irish primary schools at break time using the SOPLAY system of observation (McKenzie, 2002).
The study found that boys were more active than girls at break time. The highest proportion of children was sedentary (39.3%) with the lowest proportion in the vigorous activity category (26.4%). Small schools ( 100 pupils) were less likely to provide school equipment to children to play with at all break times (p<0.05). Small schools (<101 pupils) experience fewer barriers than larger schools specifically with respect to storage space, equipment cost or risk of equipment loss/damage and provision of loose equipment (p<0.05). Boys schools were more likely than girls schools to provide loose equipment at all break times (p<0.05).
Given the 40% PA break time threshold proposed by Ridgers and Stratton (2005), Irish primary schools should recognise the value of break time in providing 16 minutes of PA. This study suggests that safety is a barrier to PA promotion in relation to restrictive playground size and equipment. Schools promote certain practices at break time that influence children’s PA behaviour from implicit and or explicit policies. While the school is not solely responsible for children’s PA levels, simple strategic changes in practices may encourage and stimulate more children to be active
Demystifying the Interface for Young Learners with Autism
Get PDFThis study illustrates a design framework for a social routine instructional prototype for young learners with autism. Requirements and user profile data were previously gathered from an Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) school. Software currently available for young learners with cognitive impairments and web accessibility guidelines have been reviewed. The early design phases of the usability engineering lifecycle are documented, to construct initial design sketches of the software and social routine lesson interface. Image editing software is used to create a graphical representation of the design sketches. The paper prototypes are evaluated by tutors in the ABA school. Comparisons are made between different prototypes, and recommendations for further design and development are established. We conclude that colour and animation should be minimized, and an individual windowed interface should represent the main navigational display of the prototype. A customizable option for colour, font type and font size should be integrated to accommodate for the specific needs of individual learners with cognitive impairments. Multi-modal input such as a touchscreen, switch and mouse should be incorporated into the design. A further computer-based implementation is recommended to provide for an additional investigation into the needs of the learner
Measurement based quality of service control for communications networks
Get PDFThis thesis presents a purely empirical approach for the estimation of effective bandwidth of aggregated traffic flows, suitably accurate for use within traffic engineering based network performance optimisation strategies, such as QoS-aware network planning and admission control. The effective bandwidth estimation algorithm proposed, is an off-line approach, which uses a packet trace collected from the network and processes it through a FIFO queue. Based on queue buffer analysis, an appropriate queue service rate for the FIFO queue that ensures stated QoS targets on packet delay are maintained is chosen to represent the effective bandwidth estimation of the packet trace. The algorithm is evaluated in two traffic engineering based scenarios. The first is a cost efficient process for establishing a network-wide demand matrix from available network accounting data. We use effective bandwidth coefficients to enhance such a demand matrix for QoS-aware network planning. This process is demonstrated to be reasonably accurate for the scenarios we consider, and importantly at a fraction of the operational and capital expenditure that would be incurred by the deployment and operation of a direct measurement approach. Secondly, we propose two empirical effective bandwidth estimation based IPTV focussed admission control algorithms suitable for optimising utilisation of bandwidth while maintaining QoS targets on packet delay of admitted traffic. The first algorithm employs a simple evaluation of whether there is sufficient bandwidth available to ensure, with an appropriate degree of confidence, that QoS targets will not be violated if a requested ow is admitted. The second algorithm utilises information within the admission control process relating to the cost, duration and request frequency of specific IPTV content to prioritise flows that maximise revenue