A measuring instrument to evaluate e-service quality in a revenue authority setting

Tax revenue forms the backbone of any economy. The quality of the e-services provided by a revenue authority is therefore crucial, as e-service quality directly influences the burden of complying with tax obligations, and hence affects the tax compliance climate in a country. The aim of the study is the development of a measuring instrument that encapsulates the ‘lens of a tax practitioner’ in an e-service revenue authority setting. In order to develop a conceptual framework, an in-depth, qualitative approach was used to identify a comprehensive range of service attributes and dimensions that potentially drive e-service quality in the revenue authority setting. This framework is then compared with other relevant service quality models to derive at a proposed e-service quality-measuring instrument. Findings from this study may advance the understanding and the management of the e-service quality of the e-services in a revenue authority setting.     

“People in Stockholm are smarter than countryside folks” – Reproducing urban and rural imaginaries in film and life

This article explores the celebrated film The Hunters (Swedish title: Jägarna) within the context of the discourse of Internal Orientalism. By juxtaposing a contemporary Swedish film with historical accounts and contemporary news media, I demonstrate how the film reworks and (re)produces representations of the rural North (Norrland), constructing stereotypes enmeshed with familiar and global genre-specific stereotypes of a traditional and intransigent population positioned in rural areas and a modern and progressive population in urban areas. This paper shows how the representation in popular culture becomes enmeshed with the representation in news media and politics and how this helps obscure geography, gender, ethnicity and class by way of positioning representations of the middle class in urban spaces and white male working class in rural spaces, and by way of constructing class as a choice of lifestyle or culture.     

Childhood malaria in the Gambia: a case-study in model-based geostatistics

Summary. The paper develops a spatial generalized linear mixed model to describe the variation in the prevalence of malaria among a sample of village resident children in the Gambia. The response from each child is a binary indicator of the presence of malarial parasites in a blood sample. The model includes terms for the effects of child level covariates (age and bed net use), village level covariates (inclusion or exclusion from the primary health care system and greenness of surrounding vegetation as derived from satellite information) and separate components for residual spatial and non-spatial extrabinomial variation. The results confirm and quantify the progressive increase in prevalence with age, and the protective effects of bed nets. They also show that the extrabinomial variation is spatially structured, suggesting an environmental effect rather than variation in familial susceptibility. Neither inclusion in the primary health care system nor the greenness of the surrounding vegetation appeared to affect the prevalence of malaria. The method of inference was Bayesian using vague priors and a Markov chain Monte Carlo implementation.     

你是否绘制了自己的关系图？

不要担心画得太多,你总是可以把多余的人删掉聪明人最不容易认识到的一件事情是,当自己承担更多领导责任时,就必须在更大程度上依靠别人的帮助。为了让这些“别人”充分发挥价值,领导人必须对其个人加以观察、聆听、理解。因此,身为领导人,你必须描绘自己的重要关系,以了解每个关系对自身目标的贡献。当你规划新项目,担任     

Inter‐professional collaboration and conceptualisations of practice

This article discusses the inter‐professional collaborative experiences of professionals working with children and their families in two areas of high social need. The findings suggest that, although the way that professionals conceptualise their practice may hinder attempts to collaborate effectively, a complex interplay of several factors is involved. A typology of the various collaborations reported is then constructed. Finally, integrating this work with the findings of other studies, an explanatory model is developed. These have particular relevance given the current rhetoric of ‘joined‐up government’. The project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Ref. R000221542). Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A review of the research priorities of practitioners working with children in social care

It has been argued both that research in social care is insufficiently relevant to practice, and that a clearer steer is needed from the social work community in shaping national research priorities. The work reported here systematically searched for and analysed findings from studies that asked practitioners working with children for their suggestions for research. Eight studies were found, and authors gave us access to the primary data from four of these, to which we added responses from the What Works for Children? website survey of practitioners’ research priorities. Responses were analysed in terms of both topic and type of research. Family support, parenting and child protection research were among the most frequently requested child‐focused topics. In terms of question type, almost half the research suggestions concerned the effectiveness of interventions. These findings suggest that a commitment to outcomes, and to robustly researched interventions to attain those outcomes, are increasingly important to practitioners. These views from the front line may well be useful in assisting decision‐makers in social work, and research funders, to set priorities.     

Une condition nécessaire d'admissibilité et ses conséquences sur les estimateurs à rétrécisseur de la moyenne d'un vecteur normal

Considering exponential families of distributions, we estimate parameters which are not the natural parameters. We prove that the admissible estimators of these parameters are limits of Bayes estimators and can be expressed through a given functional form. An important particular case of this model pertains to the estimation of the mean of a multidimensional normal distribution when the variance is known up to a multiplicative factor. We deduce from the main result a necessry condition for the admissibility of matricial shrinkage estimators.