This chapter describes the role of trade credit in the functioning of enterprises. It presents the essence and the use of this form of finance, as well as placing it in a historical context. The chapter discusses the role of trade credit and the methods of trade credit management in business entities. It also describes the rules of trade credit administration, as well as the common reasons that…
Issues of race permeate virtually every corner of policy creation and implementation in the United States, yet theoretically driven research on interactions of policy, race, and ethnicity rarely offers practical tools that can be readily applied by current and future civil servants, private contractors, or nonprofit boards. Arguing that scholarship can and should inform practice to address issu…
Before new interventions can be used in disease control programmes, it is essential that they are carefully evaluated in “field trials”, which may be complex and expensive undertakings. Descriptions of the detailed procedures and methods used in trials that have been conducted in the past have generally not been published.
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a configurational comparative method that is still hotly debated among scholars. Nonetheless, the method has made major inroads into the field of International Relations. The present chapter has three main goals. First, it argues that QCA can add significantly to our accumulation of knowledge about cause-effect relations. Second, using an existing study…
This chapter introduces Discourse Network Analysis (DNA). DNA argues that actors are communicative agents that discursively seek to promote their policy preferences in a contested domestic political arena, by building coalitions of like-minded. Thus, DNA bridges the gap between Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and public policy by integrating domestic politics into the analysis of foreign policy d…
The use of assessment methodologies is becoming increasingly important in the decision making process under very different environments. There are increasing concerns about making the best possible use of the limited available resources. There is also an increasing will of justifying the decisions in a sound way. This is even more important when considering public spending, public scrutiny and …
The spectacular progress which was present in the past few years in the field of genome sequencing, together with the appearance on the market of some high performance devices in this field, the reduction of the costs regarding the analysis of the samples and the standardization of some protocols, has led to the establishment and introduction of the new generation of sequencing techniques in…
Contrasting conditions with and without awareness has been the preferred method for investigating the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) for decades, yet recently it has been suggested that further insights can be made by moving beyond this method, specifically by meticulously controlling that potential precursors and consequences of the NCC are not mistaken for an NCC
Large sparse linear systems of equations are ubiquitous in science, engineering and beyond. This open access monograph focuses on factorization algorithms for solving such systems. It presents classical techniques for complete factorizations that are used in sparse direct methods and discusses the computation of approximate direct and inverse factorizations that are key to constructing general-…
This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researcher…