READING

Please hold the line Nearly all of us known what it’s like to be put on ‘musical hold’ call almost any customer service number, and you can expect to hear at least a few bars of boring elevator music before an operator picks up. The question is: do you hang up or do you keep holding? That may depend on your gender and what type of music is playing, according to research reported by University of Cincinnati Associate Professor of Marketing, James Kellaris. Kellaris, who has studied the effects of music on consumers for more than 12 years, teamed with Sigma Research Management Group to evaluate the effects of ‘hold music’ for a company that operates a customer service line. The research tested four types of ‘on-hold’ music with 71 of the company’s clients, 30 of them women. Light Jazz, classical, rock and the company’s current format of adult alternative (a mix of contemporary) were all tested. The sample included individual consumers, small business and large business segments. Pa...

  Travel books There are many reasons why individuals have travelled beyond their knowledge own societies. Some travellers may have simply desired to satisfy curiosity about the larger world. Until recent times, however, travellers did start their journey for reasons other than mere curiosity. While the travellers accounts give much valuable information on these foreign lands and provide a window for the understanding of the local cultures and histories, they are also a mirror to the travellers themselves, for these accounts help them to have a better understanding of themselves. Records of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the formation of large, imperial states in the classical world, travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in many lands, and they held especially strong appeal for rulers desiring useful knowledge about their realms. The Greek...

  Coastal Archaeology of Britain The recognition of the wealth and diversity of England’s coastal archaeology has been one of the most important developments of recent years. Some elements of this enormous resource have long been known. The so-called ‘submerged forests’ off the coasts of England, sometimes with clear evidence of human activity, had attracted the interest of antiquaries since at least the eighteenth century, but serious and systematic attention has been given to the archaeological potential of the coast only since the early 1980s. It is possible to trace a variety of courses for this concentration of effort and interest. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientific research into climate changes and its environmental impact spilled over into a much broader public debate as awareness of these issues grew; the prospect of rising sea levels over the next century, and their impact on current coastal environments, has been a particular focus for concern. At the same time, archa...