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Strategy, competitive analysis, remittance industry.

Undergraduate and postgraduate business and management.

This case study examines the money transfer and foreign exchange industry in the Middle East context particularly United Arab Emirates. It focuses on the strategy making process. Possible business level strategies different firms can employ will be a consideration in the process of strategy making. Also, the stakeholder perspectives in the strategy making process are also dealt with. The characteristic required for cost leadership, differentiation, and focus needs to be matched with the context to arrive at an optimal strategy. The importance of arriving at a strategy to avoid being stuck in the middle during a period of financial crisis is one of the key areas of discussion.

This case can be used to teach: the stakeholder perspective, business level strategy, cost leadership, differentiation, remittance industry, foreign exchange business, and strategy process.

A teaching note is available on request.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the role that consumer desire plays in the creation of new culture forms.

This paper is an opinion piece based on the author’s reflections on hundreds of in-depth ethnographic interviews, each generally of three to four hours length, carried out over the past 20 years, concerning a range of product categories and services, on behalf of a wide range of business clients.

The most significant finding is that a desire for new forms of sociality is driving the creation of new forms of commercial culture and of communication in culture.

This paper takes the novel approach of considering consumer desire as an engine of culture creation and of culture change.

The study of deception and the theories, which have been developed have relied heavily on laboratory experiments in controlled environments, using American college students participating in mock scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to validate previous deception detection research in a real-world, high stakes environment where the unit of analysis is the question–response pair.

The study used previously confirmed linguistic and paralinguistic speech cues and the constructs of deception in an attempt to validate a leading deception theory, interpersonal deception theory (IDT). A combination of descriptive and predictive analysis was conducted to best understand the relationship between speech cues and changes in the subjects’ behavior.

The result validates IDT with mixed results on individual measures and their constructs. However, there is clear evidence across the 711 question-response pairs that not only was it possible to differentiate truth from deceptive behavior but also patterns of behavior can be seen over time.

Because of the real-world nature of the study, it is difficult to generalize the results to a larger population. However, one implication for future research is the development of methods to capture, process and prepare raw speech into data ready for analysis.

This paper attempts to fill the gap between the controlled mock scenarios and the harsh reality of real-world deception.

This is a commentary on educating leaders within the constraints of a highly technical curriculum. The U.S. Naval Academy’s mission is to produce leaders for the nation. Many things compete for the time and attention of Midshipmen (the Academy’s students). Greater attention must be paid to interpersonal communications skills in the formal and informal curriculum.

Topography is a problem in West Virginia. “If you took all the mountains of West Virginia and made them flat, West Virginia would be larger than Texas” is our boast and our network curse. Those mountains provide spectacular views, and stunning areas for our citizens who wish to maintain their independence. Those mountains and that remoteness also create difficulties in information equity, which we are just beginning to address.

Globally, higher education institutions have become reliant on a quality assurance (QA) system over the past four decades. QA is considered to be one of the most important drivers of continuous improvement and an essential tool for promoting excellence in teaching, learning, and research. It provides a framework for establishing and maintaining standards, and for assuring stakeholders that programs and services meet or exceed these standards. Despite the wide range of quality assurance models available to higher education institutions, there remains considerable debate over which model is the most effective, as well as what criteria should be used for evaluating the effectiveness of these models. Universities in the Middle East have tried to adopt different models of QA that can meet their needs and expectations and provide a framework for continuous improvement. A major objective of this book is to provide an overview account of the QA process as implemented in the higher education systems of a number of Middle East countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. This book lays out essential theoretical and practical insights into the role of QA policies and practices in higher education in the Middle East countries and builds upon this idea to provide a blueprint for future academic leaders in these countries and other Middle Eastern countries to enhance their QA policies and practices and drive higher education in those countries forward.

It is now forty years since there appeared H. R. Plomer's first volume Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. This has been followed by additional Bibliographical Society publications covering similarly the years up to 1775. From the short sketches given in this series, indicating changes of imprint and type of work undertaken, scholars working with English books issued before the closing years of the eighteenth century have had great assistance in dating the undated and in determining the colour and calibre of any work before it is consulted.

The purpose of this paper is to present the review of natural fibre composites as well as a specific type of fibre, i.e., sugar palm fibre and its composites.

The approach of this review paper is to present previous work on natural fibres and their composites. Then a review of several important aspects such as history, origin, botanic description, distribution, application and characterisation of sugar palm tree, and its fibre is presented. Finally a review of properties and characterisation of sugar palm composites is presented.

Findings of this review include the potential application of natural fibres and their composites for engineering application, the use of sugar palm and its fibres, as well as the suitability of sugar palm composites in engineering application after conducting review of their performance and characterisation.

The value of this review is to highlight the potential of natural fibres, natural fibre composites, sugar palm, sugar palm fibres and sugar palm composites as materials for engineering applications.