Search

In recent years, the commercial catalogues of businesses that produce teaching aids – which, prompted by the spread of a pedagogical vision linked to activism, first appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century in parallel with the first production of school objects – have acquired increasing importance as a research source in the field of historical pedagogy. Their versatile nature makes them a rich, varied and precious research tool that can make a considerable contribution to the field of studies related to school materials. The aim of this article is to define the characteristics of this source to subsequently show how recent research grants have been able to offer a first instance of comparative reflection on the issue. From a review of the data that has emerged, a methodological framework for studying commercial catalogues of teaching aids as a research source is being traced out, with plans for future steps on an international level to reinforce its study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A electromechanical servo-axis model is defined to evaluate axis losses. • A continuous optimization procedure is defined by interpolating discrete catalogs. • The optimal motor-reducer is found minimizing energy consumption, axis size. • Optimization is applied to two case studies, choosing optimal motor-reducer pairs. Abstract This papers deals with the optimal selection of motors and reducers in servo-controlled machines. A model of an electromechanical servo-axis is developed, which allows electrical and mechanical losses to be evaluated. The model is based on data that can be extracted from commercial catalogs, thus requiring no experimental characterization. Then, a novel optimal selection procedure is presented, called continuous optimization, based on the extension of a discrete commercial catalog to a continuous one, by means of data fitting on the electromechanical parameters that influence the motor and reducer operation. A non-linear constrained optimization problem is solved in order to find the optimal motor-reducer unit with respect to a variety of objective functions, such as motor size, overall energetic efficiency, total mass, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When constructing reinforced concrete building structures, shores are normally used to transmit the loads from freshly poured slabs to lower floors. However, certain problems are involved in this process, including: (a) the loads on the shores may be higher than expected, which can lead to the collapse of the shoring system or even of the whole structure, and (b) the limited range of shore types in commercial catalogues, which often means that the shores used are oversized. This paper describes the study carried out on the development of a new load-limiter (LL) that can be fitted to shores to improve safety and reduce the cost of constructing building structures. The study shows that combining mechanical and civil engineering fields made it possible to produce a novel device that could revolutionise the shoring techniques at present in use. The method of designing and implementing the LLs involved: (a) the design of prototypes by using numerical simulations, (b) the use of the design of experiments technique, (c) an ambitious experimental campaign in which LL were tested, (d) the detailed simulation of the final design, and (e) the formulation of a simplified model that considers the behaviour of the shore-LL as a unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her essay in the most recent Re: Sources column, Sharon Marcus argues for the importance of theatrical scrapbooks as historical resources and notes that, to date, they have been largely neglected. I offer the current essay as a companion piece to Marcus's in that I would like to argue for the importance of another largely neglected resource for theatre researchers: trade catalogs. Specifically, I will focus on the mail-order trade catalogs of magic supply houses that were prevalent throughout the twentieth century until Web sites took over as the primary marketing tools for these establishments. I also draw upon Christopher B. Balme's idea that historiographic rewards can be earned by paying close attention to the information contained in theatrical playbills. Balme posits that one reason playbills have been neglected is because they are considered to be further removed from a theatrical performance than visual evidence such as photographs, designs, or videos:In comparison to theatre iconography—which in superficial readings would seem to offer the promise of access to the theatrical event, a performance on the stage (which of course it seldom does)—the playbill is foreplay but not the act itself. Like most foreplay, the playbill is clearly designed to excite, to stimulate; but for the scholar in search of the real thing, the transcendent experience and enchantment that is the “performance,” playbills represent a kind of archival ludus interruptus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Language is not only a communication tool but it also has the function communicating social and cultural experience and values. Stimulative or key words represent a compressed verbal expression of the current social values and its development tendencies. Such words in advertising texts have been the subject of a lot of research. According to the analysis, social, cultural and historical changes are reflected also at the language level of advertising. This analysis aims at presenting the application of stimulative or key words in a corpus, made of texts in a German travel wellness catalogue. The selection of verbal and non-verbal means, used in such texts, which have not only information but also advertising nature, and the related appealing function, depends on the target group, the product or service which is being offered, and the communication or advertising objective. The analysis is focused on the use, if any, of key or stimulative words, typical of such texts. The applied verbal means, affected by culture -- key words or stimulative words can serve as a semantic expression of social values and social characteristics. By using them, the current social trends are transferred to the product or service offered or to the potential user. At the same time, the stimulative or key words should awake the need for the product or service offered, aiming at satisfying social stereotypes. The analysed corpus is characterised by short and brief expressing, and memorable and well-founded presentation of a product or service. Stimulative or key words that are used, comply with the current social trends, characteristics of the register used, characteristics of the product or service offered, language laws, and the receiver's beliefs, views and experience. The latter depend on cultural, social and historical factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. By the use of this modeling procedure, creating a general statistical scheme was possible. Such model could be standardized for the company's whole products catalog, aiming to make simulations and predictions with a high confidence degree concerning the evolutions in time established by the same company. Objective. To show an innovative estimation system created to predict the demand of the products, which are segmented by their inventorial reference numbers, SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). Materials and methods. A statistical model was made to predict the products' demand in a time period determined by the company. A static multiple regression model was used, taking into account especial marketing variables for direct sales companies. Results. In the studies performed, R2 adjustment levels between 70% and 80% were achieved, with a minimal multicollinearity between variables and a statistical behavior of statistically acceptable residuals under randomness and normality terms, and with wide variance stability. Conclusion. This multiple regression model is an option that can be the base for prediction in catalog selling multinational companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karol Estreicher (1827–1908) compiled Bibliografia polska [Polish bibliography], an extraordinary retrospective national bibliography of the body of written works of Poland. Chronologically covering the entire history of printing in Poland up to 1900, it consisted of three distinct parts: the nineteenth century; a universal chronological bibliography of Polish publications; and pre-nineteenth century, conventionally called Bibliografia staropolska [Bibliography of old Poland]. So far a total of 56 volumes of Bibliografia polska have been published. That total includes the 35 volumes that constitute parts 1, 2, and 3; the four volumes that, covering 1891–1900, were published outside the framework of the three parts; and the seventeen volumes that constitute the second edition of part 1, the nineteenth-century bibliography. It was an exhaustive but also complicated bibliographic opus. A prolific writer and literary scholar himself, Estreicher devoted—with remarkable endurance and resilience—50 years of his life to its making. Much of the complexity of his bibliography reflected the cultural and intellectual roots of the author and the way he interpreted the meaning of his project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how medical practitioners read, used, and experienced medical trade catalogs in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. Reader responses to the catalog, a book-like publication promoting medical tools, appliances, and pharmaceuticals, have been chronically understudied, as have professional reading practices within medicine more generally. Yet, evidence suggests that clinicians frequently used the catalog and did so in three main ways: to order medical products, to acquire new information about these products, and to display their own product endorsements and product designs. The seemingly widespread nature of these practices demonstrates an individual and collective professional desire to improve medical practice and highlights the importance of studying professional reading practices in the cultural history of medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the material culture of kindergarten in the United States in relation to the production and consumption of materials and kindergarten theory and pedagogy. The focus is on Friedrich Froebel's building gifts as they were manufactured and sold by the Milton Bradley Company from 1869 to 1939. A review of trade catalogues over the 70-year period found that the gifts were available along with larger blocks and materials supporting progressive pedagogies. The presence of items in the catalogues supporting different and conflicting ideas is explained as a reflection of the enduring popularity of a conservative kindergarten pedagogy aligned with Froebel's original ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the Lincoln Lumberyard Project that she uses in teaching primary-grade students to count coins. She notes that she built a lumberyard where the students may purchase building materials to build their own miniature log cabins. She says that she made a pricing catalog with price points and pictures of the building materials to enable the students to determine algebraic patterns using money. She adds that the students used plastic coins to model amounts.

Technical catalogues are a form of communication that has informational and commercial objectives. They are responsible for presenting clear, safe technical content and instructions to their users, parallelly to meeting the corporation's interests in divulging products, brands or technologies. Using information design concepts and principles, in this article we will present criteria for the assessment of printed technical catalogue pages, considering the balance among three factors which, combined in different proportions, must qualify any design product: utility, satisfaction and reliability. We emphasize that the development of communications by technically prepared professionals, allied to resources coming from information design, can result in materials that are capable of blending the informative and ethical requirements of technical communications with the persuasive appeals of commercial communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Because of recent diversity in consumer demands and the decrease in popularity of mass media, one-to-one database marketing is being increasingly used by companies to increase their competitiveness. Many studies have addressed the issue of inter-purchase time, but few have considered the impact of multiple categories of products on inter-purchase time, which may vary for different products. The aim of the present study was to build a one-to-one multi-category inter-purchase time model using a hierarchical Bayesian model based on a generalized gamma distribution and multiplicative model formulations. Using a hazard rate function, the model was applied to derive a purchase probability for individual customers. To validate the proposed model, field data were collected from a local catalog company and prediction hit rates were compared for different models. The multi-category inter-purchase time model exhibited better prediction hit rates than a basic model. Using the multiplicative model, our multi-category model can estimate the influence of product category on customers’ inter-purchase time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Catalog segmentation is an important issue in data mining in business from the microeconomic point of view. In catalog segmentation, an enterprise tries to develop k catalogs with r products that are sent to corresponding customers in order to maximize the overall number of catalog products purchased. In this paper, a novel model called catalog segmentation problem with double constraints (DCCSP) is presented. In this model, the interest constraint is minimized and the profit constraint is maximized so that the profit of products purchased by customers who have at least t interesting products in receiving catalogs is maximized. The complexity of the DCCSP is analyzed, and a DCCS algorithm to solve the optimization is proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and can be used to solve the DCCSP effectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Nursery production contributed $18.1 billion to the U.S. economy in 2002 and created nearly two million jobs. A U.S. Department of Agriculture multistate research committee on economics and marketing has conducted The National Nursery Survey four times at 5-year intervals (1988, 1993, 1998, and 2003) to help fill the void of publicly available information on production, marketing, and management for the nursery industry. In 2003, the committee conducted the National Nursery Survey using a standard sampling methodology targeting 15,588 total firms representing 44 states with 2,485 nurseries responding. The objective of this analysis was to provide a regional profile of the marketing practices of nursery producers. Regional differences were present in several areas of sales management, selling practices, pricing, and advertising. Generally, the coastal regions had a higher percentage of wholesale sales, whereas interior regions had a higher percentage of retail sales. Newsletters and yellow pages were the most important form of advertising in the Great Plains; trade journals were the most important method in the south central and southeast regions; and catalogs were the most important advertising method for all other regions. The percentage of sales to repeat customers varied from a low of 65.6% in the Great Plains to a high of 76.2% in the southeast. The Appalachian (26.9%) and southeast (26.8%) regions had the highest percentage of negotiated sales, whereas the northeast had the lowest. Although significant differences generally existed among regions in the percentage of sales spent on various transaction methods, nurseries in all regions used in-person, telephone, and mail order as their three most important sales transaction methods, except for the southeast where trade shows were the third most important method of sales transactions. Landscape professionals, rewholesalers, and single-location garden centers were the major market outlets in all regions. Respondents in all regions identified production, personnel, and marketing as limitations for expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article cites some provisional findings from a census of publishers' and booksellers' catalogs up to 1600. It includes an in-depth analysis of roughly 260 to 270 editions of catalogs in various categories that are included in the census, as well as a discussion on the importance of the catalogs in the reconstruction of the stock of a bookseller and the production of a publisher.

The article discusses key issues concerning book dealers' catalogs and their role as sources for provenance research in the book trades. It includes an analysis of the historical use of dealers' catalogs as proof of where specific book copies were located at particular times, as well as a discussion on the issues' implications for the book trades.

The article discusses the conditions that encouraged the creation of booksellers' catalogs and the publication of plays in England during the 17th century. It includes a systematic examination of the catalogs of bookseller William Leake, as well as a discussion on the role played by catalogs in distinguishing plays from other literary genres and in the rise of dramatic criticism.

How do we demonstrate the value of cataloging to doubting library administrators? What sort of data need to be gathered to support this effort? Catalogers face a dilemma in that they often have to endure misunderstanding of their jobs from colleagues, patrons, and, most unfortunately, administrators. If the library cataloging practice is to continue evolving then administrators should be informed of the long- and short-term effects of investing in professional catalogers and cataloging departments. This paper examines cataloging practice from the point of view of library administrators with the aim of clarifying strategies that will ensure both quality of cataloging and the longevity of the cataloging process. In order to do this, we must demonstrate the quality of our work as it relates to funding, information systems, and the indispensable library patrons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building intuitive web sites is important for online businesses as positive experiences toward the virtual storefront could translate to customer goodwill and repeat visits. Streamlining web-site navigation is further motivated by the availability of comprehensive site-visit traces such as shopping carts and click-stream logs. We incorporate such sales and browsing patterns for the autonomous design of web catalogs by reducing the expected click count it takes to find related items. We first model catalog design as a task of placing items onto catalog pages, leading to a quadratic assignment formulation. For a more extensive redesign, such as when the number and location of links on each page are also decision variables, we propose a two-stage optimization procedure to ensure that click-count reduction is not achieved at the cost of excessive page cluttering. Our analysis reveals that an optimized catalog is robust against shifts in browsing behavior and that simplistic interfaces are preferred for users at either end of the experience spectrum. Using genetic algorithms, we find catalog designs that significantly outperform those found with a traditional greedy heuristic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic Product Catalogs (EPCs) are becoming more and more important as businesses interact electronically with one another and with customers. EPCs are the databases in which businesses store information about their products. EPCs allow customers to locate items they wish to purchase and business partners to access a business's offerings. Typically each business's EPC is organized to meet the requirements of one of many competing standards. Problems arise when various business partners use different standards to organize their EPC. Translating a product catalog from one standard to another manually is no easy task, even for a single item, and the typical EPC contains thousands of items. This situation is known as the reclassification problem. The paper describes the problem in greater details and also proposes a solution, which we dub "the Apricot approach". The article starts with a brief overview about EPCs and classification systems. It then provides a description of the reclassification problem and describes existing solutions. Next, the Apricot-approach and its implementation are described. This article provides evidence that the Apricot Approach is useful and fruitful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several pamphlets released by companies offering pharmaceutical products. Chiral Technologies Inc.'s product catalogue features the DAICEL chromatography products. Sequant AB has produced a free guide book that describes the fundamentals of hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography. Guava Technologies Inc. has released a technical poster that describes a non-radioactive assay designed to improve the performance and sensitivity of cell proliferation assays.

Presents a reprint of an article by Fred Janson on identifying fruit varieties which appeared in the January 1982 issue of "Pomona." Use of fruit cabinets or replicas during the latter part of the 19th century; Illustrations from nursery catalogs; Identification of varieties through the help of books.

Introduces the list of all the mail-order catalogs listed on the Internet. Total number of catalogs listed; Accessibility of the list online.

Assesses the growth of the market for European art films in the United States. Proliferation of mail order catalogs for horror and cult films; Catalog information and the consumers' purchasing considerations; Category of European art and experimental films in catalogs; Various European film genres; Features of the genres.

Visual information search is a combination of two distinct types of behavior. Goal-directed search behavior occurs when consumers use stored search routines to collect information in a deliberate manner. In contrast, exploratory search behavior occurs when consumers are confronted with multiple pieces of information but have little stored knowledge about how to proceed with the information gathering. This article reports on an investigation into exploratory search behavior and attempts to establish a connection between the layout of objects in a display and the amount of attention devoted to each of these objects. The research has implications for catalog page layout and visual merchandising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the inventory management policies in the catalog sales industry. Global and hierarchical models; Development of feedback strategy between tactical and operational levels.