2,762 research outputs found
Li\u27L Dan, The Drummer Boy A Civil War Story
No full textLi\u27l Dan, The Drummer Boy: Interviews with Dr. Maya Angelou and Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley by Leah Wood Jewett Maya Angelou is a celebrated poet, writer, and educator. The author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor. She...
The Role of Experiential Marketing in a Retail Chain Repositioning. A Field Experiment
No full textExperiential marketing is nowadays considered the most innovative way to differ strategically from competitors. By creating new and holistic consumers’ experiences, it aims at brand positioning or re-posizioning. Different tools to succeed with the experiential perspective are suggested to firms. Within these tools, the design of a high involvement shopping experience plays a key role, since it represents a valuable approach to change consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. By the way, while the relevance of experiential marketing is well recognized in the international literature, there is an evident lack of rigorous measurement with reference to their results. Our assumption is that if we adopt the perspective of experiential marketing and emotional brand management, which state that these marketing policies aim at improving the brand positioning, we should deeply look at the experience that consumers go through, and their attitudes towards the brand. This project aims at filling this gap between experiential marketing strategies and management, and the measurement of strategic performance. Measuring the performance of marketing policies aimed at improving the brand positioning, therefore, becomes important for driving their investments. Our research question is: What is the contribution of experiential marketing investments to brand positioning? In order to give answer to the research question, we realized a field experiment. In particular, since we are interested in specific marketing investments based on creating direct interactions and immersions in physical environments, we will focus on events and product tests in store. Indeed, they are recognized as very powerful instruments to involve consumers and to communicate firms’ ideas, concepts and values by immerging them in a particular environment which delivers those elements considered to be relevant (Schmitt, 1999). We analyze a retail chain of electronic product; some stores of the retail chain analyzed planned to improve their image, leaving the low-profile mass-market positioning to become the "luxury outlets for electronics". This goal is pursued through investments in the realization, according to the principles of experiential marketing, of an area devoted to the "domotic home where consumers would be immersed in the environment, touching, using and experiencing all the characteristics of the offer. Our study uses a two-group pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design, with the visit to the shop as experimental treatment. The positioning goals have been measured with three dependent variables: Attitude Toward Brand (Sengupta, Fitzimons, 2004 and Kirmani, Shiv, 1998), Brand Claim Recognition (Garretson and Burton, 2005), and Purchase Intention and in the pre-event survey includes a series of variables related to individuals: Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo, Petty and Keng Fao 1984), Interpersonal Influence Scale (Bearden, Netemeyer and Teel 1989), Fashion Leadership Scale (Goldsmith, Freiden and Kilsheimer 1993). The questionnaire we use on the post-event survey includes a series of variables concerning the emotional intensity of the event and product test, namely Richins Consumption Emotion Set (1997), the involvement toward the generated experience, measured with Unger and Kernan (1983) Involvement in the Activity Scale, along with the three dependent variables used in the pre-event questionnaire. This work aims at contributing to the marketing literature with regard to the following topics: the definition of a possible measurement of experiential marketing investments efficacy for brand positioning. The rigorous marketing methodology applied here is unusual for such stream of research, which traditionally adopts classical qualitative and widely applied tools. The link between experiential marketing and brand management, by pointing out the contribution of the experiential providers to brand positioning, is explored. The results of the experiment will be presented, as well as the managerial implications for those willing to adopt experiential marketing principles to differentiate their brand
Neurocognitive phenomics: examining the genetic basis of cognitive abilities
No full textCognitive deficits are core to the disability associated with many psychiatric disorders. Both variation in cognition and psychiatric risk show substantial heritability, with overlapping genetic variants contributing to both. Unsurprisingly, therefore, these fields have been mutually beneficial : just as cognitive studies of psychiatric risk variants may identify genes involved in cognition, so too can genome-wide studies based on cognitive phenotypes lead to genes relevant to psychiatric aetiology. The purpose of this review is to consider the main issues involved in the phenotypic characterization of cognition, and to describe the challenges associated with the transition to genome-wide approaches. We conclude by describing the approaches currently being taken by the international consortia involving many investigators in the field internationally (e. g. Cognitive Genomics Consortium; COGENT) to overcome these challenges.</p
Proton excitations in the superdeformed well of 193Tl
No full textTwo superdeformed bands of 13 transitions each have been found in 93T1 with the 60Gd (37Cl, 4n) reaction. The dynamic moments of inertia for the two bands are found to rise with rotational frequency, as for all observed superdeformed bands in other nuclei in this region. The two bands can be interpreted as signature partners which exhibit some signature splitting for rotational frequencies above 0.2 MeV. The data are interpreted with cranked Woods-Saxon calculations and illustrate the role of the proton i13/2 (Omega = 5/2) intruder orbital
Novel decay modes of high-K isomers: Tunneling in a triaxial landscape
No full textThe nucleus 176W has been studied using the reaction 150Nd(30Si,4n), with prompt and delayed γ-γ coincidence techniques. A K=14 isomer (t1/2≊70 ns) is found to exhibit a unique decay pattern, primarily decaying to K=0 states, in contrast to all previously studied high-K isomers. Calculations have been perfomed of both Coriolis mixing and tunneling through a potential barrier in the triaxial degree of freedom to understand these unusual decays. While Coriolis mixing models do not reproduce the variations in the decay patterns in neighboring nuclei, the tunneling calculations are remarkably successful
Identification of 183Hg. Identical bands in 183,185Hg
No full textIn-beam γ-ray transitions in 183Hg have been identified from fragment-γ and γ-γ coincidence measurements using the Argonne Fragment Mass Analyzer (FMA). The γ-ray transitions in 183Hg were placed into five bands. Two of these have been associated with the orbital and exhibit signature splitting, as expected for i excitations built on a prolate shape moderate deformation. Two other bands which do not show signature splitting have been associated with the orbital and exhibit transition energies “identical” to the bands with the same configuration in 185Hg
Approximation properties for dynamical W*-correspondences
No full textLet be a locally compact quantum group, and von Neumann algebras on which acts. We refer to these as -dynamical W-algebras. We make a study of -equivariant --correspondences, that is, Hilbert spaces with an --bimodule structure by -preserving normal maps, and equipped with a unitary representation of which is equivariant with respect to the above bimodule structure. Such structures are a Hilbert space version of the theory of -equivariant Hilbert C-bimodules. We show that there is a well-defined Fell topology on equivariant correspondences, and use this to formulate approximation properties for them. Within this formalism, we then characterize amenability of the action of a locally compact group on a von Neumann algebra, using recent results due to Bearden and Crann. We further consider natural operations on equivariant correspondences such as taking opposites, composites and crossed products, and examine the continuity of these operations with respect to the Fell topology.49 pages. Author accepted version, for publication in Advances in Mathematic
ALICE: Physics performance report, volume I
No full textCortese P, Dellacasa G, Ramello L, et al. ALICE: Physics performance report, volume I. Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. 2004;30(11):1517-1763.ALICE is a general-purpose heavy-ion experiment designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC. It currently includes more than 900 physicists and senior engineers, from both nuclear and high-energy physics, from about 80 institutions in 28 countries. The experiment was approved in February 1997. The detailed design of the different detector systems has been laid down in a number of Technical Design Reports issued between mid-1998 and the end of 2001 and construction has started for most detectors. Since the last comprehensive information on detector and physics performance was published in the ALICE Technical Proposal in 1996, the detector as well as simulation, reconstruction and analysis software have undergone significant development. The Physics Performance Report (PPR) will give an updated and comprehensive summary of the current status and performance of the various ALICE subsystems, including updates to the Technical Design Reports, where appropriate, as well as a description of systems which have not been published in a Technical Design Report. The PPR will be published in two volumes. The current Volume I contains: 1. a short theoretical overview and an extensive reference list concerning the physics topics of interest to ALICE, 2. relevant experimental conditions at the LHC, 3. a short summary and update of the subsystem designs, and 4. a description of the offline framework and Monte Carlo generators. Volume II, which will be published separately, will contain detailed simulations of combined detector performance, event reconstruction, and analysis of a representative sample of relevant physics observables from global event characteristics to hard processes. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version.
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