Advice to Entrepreneurs and Small Business focuses on the CEO advice taking process and examines the case where advisers provide strategic advice to the top management of the firm. The review suggests that the process of business advice could be divided into attraction, engagement, exit and extension. The first section describes the different perspectives that have discussed business advice from economics, psychology, sociology and management. Next, the monograph turns to the attraction of advice and the reasons why entrepreneurs seek advice. Then, it ...

Toward More Effective Science and Technology Advice for Congress traces the historical roots of science and technology advice for Congress and chronicles the creation and evolution of the four organizations that provided this advice over the past half century -- (1) the National Research Council, (2) the Congressional Research Service, (3) the former Office of Technology Assessment, and (4) the Government Accountability Office. Key characteristics for providing effective S'T advice for Congress are defined and then used to evaluate the relative strengths ...

Any design process involves an imaginative act, a picturing of the world as other than it is. Fiction has long played a part in design research in the form of scenarios, personas, sketches, paper-based prototypes, simulations, prototypes, and speculative design. The term “design fiction” has been recently adopted to describe more elaborate and detailed representations of products and services that do not exist yet. Design fiction is an emerging practice and there are several competing definitions and forms. Research Fiction and Thought Experiments ...

Persistent Preferences in Market Place Choices has as its primary focus the type of brand loyalty that is not deeply rooted in values, emotions, and intense person-brand relationships. While some view that loyalty cannot exist without strong emotional involvement and bonding, the author suggests a milder phenomenon - persistent preference - for the chosen brand and its attributes. Persistent preferences refer to preferring a previously chosen brand to other brands even when a subset of these are superior to the previously chosen brand in terms of attributes ...

The Role of Stakeholders in Corporate Governance: A View from Accounting Research reviews the empirical evidence on stakeholders’ influence on managerial behavior focusing on stakeholders – employees, the general public, the media, related firms, the government, private regulators, gatekeepers, and foreigners – rather than shareholders and debt-holders. In analyzing the role of stakeholders in corporate governance, the focus is on their ability and incentives to discipline corporate managers. The question addressed is whether under the ...

The firm's capital structure - how it funds operations by raising capital from a variety of sources -- has attracted considerable attention from both academics and practitioners. The empirical capital structure literature explores both the cross-sectional determinants of capital structure as well as time-series changes. Empirical Capital Structure reviews both aspects of this literature. Empirical Capital Structure is organized around a simple framework that contains three key ingredients: · the costs and benefits that determine a firm's capital ...

In an increasingly networked world in which information is becoming increasingly actual, how can a system know with certainty just how fresh the information on a remote system is? Much work has been done on delay or latency in systems, but only recently has the concept of the freshness of information in or about a system become quantifiable. This is termed the Age of Information. Age of Information provides a whole new set of metrics and tools that can be used to characterize the freshness of information in communications, control and, indeed, information ...

Despite remarkable advances in the algebraic and iterative codes used in modern communication systems, finding codes that operate at rates close to capacity; have low computational complexity; and have provable reliability guarantees was an elusive goal until recently. Polar Codes have all of these desirable properties. The design philosophy of polar codes is fundamentally different from those of both algebraic codes and iterative codes. The technique underlying polar codes is 'channel polarization': creating extremal channels - those that are either noiseless ...

The increasing complexity of systems and technologies in everyday use, make it hard or even impossible for humans to comprehend their function and behavior, and justify surprising observations. Explanation support can ease humans' interactions with technology: explanations can help users understand a system's function, justify system results, and increase their trust in automated decisions.   In this book the authors provide an overview of existing work in explanation support for data-driven processes. In doing so, they classify explainability requirements ...

Drawing is the starting point for many kinds of tasks, for everyone from children making pictures to professional architects sketching ideas. Drawing seems to be fundamentally connected to how we represent the world visually. Most computer graphics focuses on realistic visual simulation, but over the past few decades, line drawing algorithms have matured, providing the ability to automatically create reasonable line drawings from 3D geometry. This tutorial provides a detailed guide to the mathematical theory and computer algorithms for line drawing of 3D ...