Knowledge Update

​Consumer buying process does not always consider economic rationale, product utility, functional performance and is sometimes not even subject to price sensitivity. Instead it is based on social acceptability, perceptible status and is used as a tool of symbolic communication with their immediate neighborhood and social groups to seek affiliation and create impression management.

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Ports play a significant role in the development of a country since it links the domestic economy with the rest of the world and thus help in promoting international trade. As a result, port development becomes a major issue for policy making and ongoing economic reforms and trade liberalization. It is well known fact that the port development and

London, Sep 22 (IANS) Individual beliefs can play a potential role in worsening insomnia and pain experiences in patients with chronic pain conditions like back pain, fibromyalgia and arthritis, a team of researchers has found.

"I won't be able to cope with my pain if I don't sleep well," is the common way patients with chronic pain conditions think, the researchers said.

"Thoughts can have a direct and/or indirect impact on our emotion, behaviour and even physiology. The way how we think about sleep and its interaction with pain can influence the way how we cope with pain and manage sleeplessness," said Nicole Tang from the University of Warwick in Britain.

While some of these beliefs are healthy and useful, others are rigid and misinformed. Such conditions can be effectively managed by cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), the study added.

Based on these beliefs, the team developed a scale -- pain-related beliefs and attitudes about sleep (PBAS) -- to measure beliefs about sleep and pain.

The scale, when tested on four groups of patients suffering from long-term pain and bad sleeping patterns, showed that people who believe they won't be able to sleep as a result of their pain are more likely to suffer from insomnia, thus causing worse pain.

Further, the scale was vital in predicting patients' level of insomnia and pain difficulties. 

Current psychological treatments for chronic pain have mostly focused on pain management and a lesser emphasis on sleep.

However, the "PBAS scale provides a useful clinical tool to assess and monitor treatment progress during these therapies", noted Esther Afolalu from the University of Warwick. 

The study has provided therapists the means with which to identify and monitor rigid thoughts about sleep and pain that are sleep-interfering, allowing the application of the proven effective CBT for insomnia in people with chronic pain.

With better sleep, pain problems are significantly reduced, especially after receiving a short course of CBT for both pain and insomnia, the researchers concluded in the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Project evaluation in a private sector is purely based on the returns on cost factors but it is not the same in the case of public projects. The issue of selecting and implementing public projects is predominated by the political, social and economic dimensions. In the bargain methodological issues pertaining to the evaluation and objectivity take a back seat when political perspectives dominate the social and economic perspectives. International funding agencies and planned economies have emphasized the need for developing effective methodologies to give objective orientation to investments and the accrual of social benefits to the stakeholders who deserve the most. In this paper an attempt is made to evaluate the public projects by double scoring method which incorporates national priorities and the selection of public projects so that objectivity is maintained purely on the rationality of priority ranking. This method would be more meaningful to serve the community on need basis and increase their satisfaction. 

New York, Sep 22 (IANS) Studying hundreds of new genomes from across the globe, researchers, one of them of Indian-origin, have found compelling evidence that essentially all non-Africans alive today descend from a single migration out of Africa some 72,000 years ago.

The findings are supported by three new genome sequencing studies published in the journal Nature.

One of the studies led by Harvard Medical School (HMS) geneticists sequenced samples from 142 smaller populations, most of which were previously understudied.

"We wanted to go out into the world and pull together as many of the ethnically, linguistically and anthropologically diverse samples as we possibly could," said first author of the study Swapan Mallick from Harvard Medical School. 

The Harvard geneticists and their international team of colleagues began by selecting two genomes each from 51 populations represented in a collection called the Human Genome Diversity Project. 

Next, they assembled samples from members of 91 other groups, including diverse Native American, South Asian, and African populations not previously included in genome-wide studies, and sent the DNA for sequencing. In all, the project analysed the genomes of 300 people.

A key conclusion -- that the vast majority of modern human ancestry in non-Africans derives from a single population that migrated out of Africa -- is also supported by two other whole-genome sequencing studies appearing simultaneously in Nature. 

One, led by an Estonian group, focused on 379 whole genome sequences; the other, led by a Danish group, analysed 108 Australians and New Guineans.

Together, the three studies put to rest a lingering question about whether indigenous peoples of Australia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands descend in large part from a second group that left Africa earlier and skirted the coast of the Indian Ocean. 

They do not, the Harvard researchers said.

"Our best estimate for the proportion of ancestry from an early-exit population is zero," David Reich, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

The study that analysed 108 Australians and New Guineans estimated that around 72,000 years ago, an ancestral population common to Aborginal Australians, Europeans and East Asians left the African continent. 

"Discussions have been intense as to what extent Aboriginal Australians represent a separate Out-of-Africa exit to those of Asians and Europeans," said Professor Laurent Excoffier of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Bern said. 

"We find that, once we take into account admixture with archaic humans, the vast majority of the Aboriginal Australian genetic makeup comes from the same African exit as other non-Africans," Excoffier explained.

The HMS-led study further revealed that the common ancestors of modern humans began to differentiate at least 200,000 years ago, long before the out-of-Africa dispersal occurred.

"It had been unclear whether the group that expanded out of Africa represented a large subset of the populations within Africa," said Mallick. 

"This really shows that there was a lot of substructure prior to the expansion," Mallick noted.

Creativity in advertisements in the form, structure, content and the technology is required to hold the attention span of the viewers. Product placement or embedded advertisements is an alternative strategy adopted by advertisers to overcome limitations of effectiveness and legal restrictions of traditional commercial communication. The paper describes the communication effectiveness of product placement of three different types of products placed in three different movies and resumes the small body of research in the field with the help of a empirical research. A quasi-experimental study is carried out in UAE was designed in order to identify awareness and attitude effects of the product placements as well as general evaluations of conventional advertisements. The results indicate small effectiveness of communication by the product placement especially in recognizing the brand, though not always it leads to product enquire, but it generates awareness and interest in the product because of realistic appeal produced by the product placement in a world of realism. Product Placement in movies enhances the effects of celebrity endorsement of the products because it is in a movie setting and reveals the product utility and its features without directing the consumer unlike in a conventional advertisement. Therefore it makes product placement more acceptable. The research highlighted the enhancement of product assessment in the new form of advertisements.

Succession planning is an important activity for continuing businesses without which organizations starts fading out due to absence of leaders who can lead the organization after the successfull leader. In this article a five step process of succession planning is discussed and provides guidelines for organizations to think in the direction of succession planning. The five steps begin with identify critical positions that can shape the organization, identify competencies of incumbent leaders, identify strategies of succession planning, document and implement succesion plan, evaluate the effectiveness of the process and the leader. This process can be equally applicable in small, medium and large organizations with appropriate modification to the context.