ABC Cost Driver Framing and Altering the Balance of Power in Customer-Supplier Negotiations

This study examines how activity-based costing (ABC) cost driver framing affects suppliers’ ability to increase their bargaining power when facing powerful customers. Results of an experiment show that suppliers with high potential to contribute to increasing joint profits are able to increase their power and earn a higher share of joint profits than suppliers with low contribution potential. However, providing suppliers with externally framed cost drivers (cost drivers represented as customers’ activities) instead of internally framed cost drivers (cost drivers represented as suppliers’ own activities) reduces their ability to utilize contribution potential as a source of power. Analyses of negotiators’ behavior show that suppliers with high contribution potential and internally framed cost drivers use more integrative tactics to increase joint profits, allowing them to earn higher shares of joint profits. This study shows that the how firms frame cost drivers affects negotiators’ ability to improve joint profits and negotiation power.

Mutual impact of acoustic and linguistic representations for continuous emotion recognition in call-center conversations

<div> <div> <div> <p>The goal of our research is to automaticaly retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Mutual impact of acoustic and linguistic representations for continuous emotion recognition in call-center conversations

<div> <div> <div> <p>The goal of our research is to automaticaly retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task. </p> </div> </div> </div>

THE PHENOMENON OF GREEN TRADE PROTECTIONISM: ANALYSIS OF THE EU PALM OIL IMPORT BAN IN THE ASEAN REGION

Introduction: The policy issued by the European Union is the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) that turn creates barriers to palm oil exports from other countries to the European Union. The policy to ban palm oil under the pretext of protecting the environment is considered to be a new obstacle to trade. One of the rejection responses came from the ASEAN region. However, even though it has received a lot of protests and rejections, until 2020 the European Union has not changed its policy regarding the ban on the use of palm oil for biodiesel in the European region.Methods: This article focuses on the reasons for the European Union implementing protectionism policies towards the Palm Oil sector in the ASEAN region. The explanation regarding this focus is explained using the Neo Mercantilism approach.Results: The policy to ban palm oil imports can be analyzed to respond to the EU's ambition and concern that the climate emergency will jeopardize the trade process in the future. The European Union research group considers that oil palm plants have a high contribution to the problem of deforestation and forest and peatland diversion in the world, especially ASEAN. Howeever, it can also be seen that there are ambitions to protect the domestic production of biofuels from the EU sunflower and radishes from global competition. The above concerns and motivations then prompted the European Union to formulate protectionism for regional economic stability.Conclusion and suggestion: ASEAN, especially Indonesia and Malaysia, have become quite vocal actors in responding to this policy. Indonesia and Malaysia are the biggest contributors of palm oil exports to Europe. As well as causing an oversupply of global palm oil supplies, this policy is considered to discriminate against and violate free-trade norms.

Development of Based Biology Modules Discovery Learning to Improve Critical Thinking of Class Xi High School Student’s

Critical thinking is one aspect of thinking skills that have to be developed in the 4.0 century. Critical thinking has an important role in the learning process. Students with high critical thinking skills will make a high contribution in increasing mastery of concepts. Therefore, an initial investigation was carried out by interviewing biology teachers and giving questions to students of class XI science at SMA 12 Negeri Padang. It is known that critical thinking in students is still low. One of the causes is an inadequate module. Therefore, students need appropriate modules to improve critical thinking. This type of research is development research using the Ploompdevelopment model. The model stage consists of the initial investigation, prototyping, and assessment. The research data were obtained from validity, practicality, and effectiveness tests. The results showed that the biology module that was developed according to the expert review obtained a value of 87.70% very valid category. The results of the practicality test by the teacher obtained a value of 93.97% in the very practical category and the results of the practicality test by the students obtained a score of 86.67% in the very practical category. The results of the effectiveness test of the critical thinking aspect in six categories showed a significant increase in students' critical thinking based on the N-Gain test carried out on the respiratory system. While the excretory system results in the N-Gain value of the experimental class 0.36 medium category and controls 0.30 medium categories

Seasonal Variability of Photosynthetic Microbial Eukaryotes (<3 µm) in the Kara Sea Revealed by 18S rDNA Metabarcoding of Sediment Trap Fluxes

This survey is the first to explore the seasonal cycle of microbial eukaryote diversity (<3 µm) using the NGS method and a 10-month sediment trap (2018–2019). The long-term trap was deployed from September to June in the northwestern part of the Kara Sea. A water sample collected before the sediment trap was deployed and also analyzed. The taxonomic composition of microbial eukaryotes in the water sample significantly differed from sediment trap samples, characterized by a high abundance of Ciliophora reads and low abundance of Fungi while trap samples contained an order of magnitude less Ciliophora sequences and high contribution of Fungi. Photosynthetic eukaryotes (PEs) accounting for about 34% of total protists reads were assigned to five major divisions: Chlorophyta, Cryptophyta, Dinoflagellata, Haptophyta, and Ochrophyta. The domination of phototrophic algae was revealed in late autumn. Mamiellophyceae and Trebouxiophyceae were the predominant PEs in mostly all of the studied seasons. Micromonas polaris was constantly present throughout the September–June period in the PE community. The obtained results determine the seasonal dynamics of picoplankton in order to improve our understanding of their role in polar ecosystems.

Infants' attention to eyes is an independent, heritable trait predicting later verbal competence

From birth, infants orient preferentially to faces, and when looking at the face, they attend primarily to eyes and mouth — two areas that convey different types of information. Here, in a sample of 535 5-month-old infant twins, we assessed eye (relative to mouth) preference in early infancy. Eye preference was independent from all other concurrent traits measured, and had a moderate-to-high contribution from genetic influences (A = .57; 95% CI: .45, .66). Preference for eyes over mouth at 5 months predicted higher parent ratings of verbal competence in toddlerhood, but did not predict autistic traits. These results suggest that variation in eye looking reflects a type of biological niche picking emerging before infants can select their environments by other means (crawling or walking).