The macro-environment for liquid biofuels in the US mass media, science and government

The purpose of this study is to investigate under which dimensions the macro-environment for liquid biofuels has been structured during time, respectively by science, mass media, and government in Germany, and how these three social expressions related to each other. Research was carried out on German official government documents, mass media news, and scientific papers on the topic ‘liquid biofuels’. Text Mining was used to extract knowledge from their content. The results indicate that in configurating the macro-environment for liquid biofuels there is some degree of proximity between media and government, less between media and science, and the least between government and scienc

The macro-environment for liquid biofuels in the German science, mass, media and government

The purpose of this study is to investigate under which dimensions the macro-environment for liquid biofuels has been structured during time, respectively by science, mass media, and government in Germany, and how these three social expressions related to each other. Research was carried out on German official government documents, mass media news, and scientific papers on the topic 'liquid biofuels'. Text Mining was used to extract knowledge from their content. The results indicate that in configurating the macro-environment for liquid biofuels there is some degree of proximity between media and government, less between media and science, and the least between government and science

Brand promise and reputation against the campaign of a political party

The term “exchange” represents the core concept of marketing. Exchange occurs not only in commercial markets but also in political markets, such as electoral and government markets. Political marketing research typically focuses on electoral markets; therefore, this research integrates exchanges in electoral and government markets, which together form the permanent campaign. This model proposes that the realization of a promise affects the party’s brand reputation and permanent campaign, ultimately influencing the voter’s decision confidence and intent to support the political party. The brand promise indicator was developed from an exploratory factor analysis of Indonesian political party Twitter accounts. Tweets extracted from the 2014 electoral campaign were further analyzed using Provalis Research’s QDA Miner software. The indicators for brand reputation, permanent campaign, decision confidence, and intent to support the political party were adapted from political marketing and commercial marketing indicators. A questionnaire was created and delivered to students of three universities in Jakarta, with a total of 150 participants. The findings show that the permanent campaign variable as the process of promise realization during the term after the election has a significant influence on the voter’s intent to support a political party. The theoretical contribution of this research includes broadening the empirical results of social exchange theory studies on exchange in the government market, beyond existing research on the electoral market. The managerial implication of this research is the importance of the permanent campaign in increasing the intent to vote for a political party.peer-reviewe

Attitudes towards refugees in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia

As refugee flows have increased, western attitudes towards them have become conflicted. Attitudes towards refugees in non-western and in Muslim nations are rarely studied, though these nations accept most refugees. This study of attitudes towards refugees among tertiary students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Lebanon, Russia and Kyrgyzstan used Appraisal and content analysis frequencies and co-frequencies. Results showed that the Lebanese realised greater affect, possibly due to their experience of refugees. More generally, nationality shaped attitudes more than religion, tertiary students favour technocratic solutions by government actors despite realistically estimating the challenge, and while students critically analyse the problems created by refugee inflows, they retain a nativist stance and seem unaware of the optics and politics of this stance

Is biodiesel a more social fuel than ethanol? a comparative analysis from public policies in Brazil

As a promising source of renewable energy, biodiesel has received incentives through public policies in various countries. While some countries have adopted policies based on economic incentives for production and consumption, political discourse in Brazil has placed emphasis on the social role that biodiesel can play. The main goal of this paper is to carry out an analysis of public policies in Brazil to identify whether there is indeed a social bias associated with biodiesel or both ethanol and biodiesel, which has had its macro-environment configured from the same footprint. The methodology uses text mining techniques to extract information from policy and program documents of the Brazilian government involving these liquid biofuels. After collection and preparation, a total of 624 official documents published between 1997 and 2006 comprised the textual basis of the research. The results indicate some similarities when the configurations of the macro-environment for ethanol and biodiesel have been compared. However, it is clear that biodiesel is more strongly identified with the social dimension. In conclusion, this study suggests that public policy in Brazil has, in fact, characterized biodiesel as a social fuel

How to Normalize Co-Occurrence Data? An Analysis of Some Well-Known Similarity Measures

In scientometric research, the use of co-occurrence data is very common. In many cases, a similarity measure is employed to normalize the data. However, there is no consensus among researchers on which similarity measure is most appropriate for normalization purposes. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the properties of similarity measures for co-occurrence data, focusing in particular on four well-known measures: the association strength, the cosine, the inclusion index, and the Jaccard index. We also study the behavior of these measures empirically. Our analysis reveals that there exist two fundamentally different types of similarity measures, namely set-theoretic measures and probabilistic measures. The association strength is a probabilistic measure, while the cosine, the inclusion index, and the Jaccard index are set-theoretic measures. Both our theoretical and our empirical results indicate that co-occurrence data can best be normalized using a probabilistic measure. This provides strong support for the use of the association strength in scientometric research

Improving Recall of Browsing Sets in Image Retrieval from a Semiotics Perspective

The purpose of dissertation is to utilize connotative messages for enhancing image retrieval and browsing. By adopting semiotics as a theoretical tool, this study explores problems of image retrieval and proposes an image retrieval model. The semiotics approach conceptually demonstrates that: 1) a fundamental reason for the dissonance between retrieved images and user needs is representation of connotative messages, and 2) the image retrieval model which makes use of denotative index terms is able to facilitate users to browse connotatively related images effectively even when the users' needs are potentially expressed in the form of denotative query. Two experiments are performed for verifying the semiotic-based image retrieval model and evaluating the effectiveness of the model. As data sources, 5,199 records are collected from Artefacts Canada: Humanities by Canadian Heritage Information Network, and the candidate terms of connotation and denotation are extracted from Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The first experiment, by applying term association measures, verifies that the connotative messages of an image can be derived from denotative messages of the image. The second experiment reveals that the association thesaurus which is constructed based on the associations between connotation and denotation facilitates assigning connotative terms to image documents. In addition, the result of relevant judgments presents that the association thesaurus improves the relative recall of retrieved image documents as well as the relative recall of browsing sets. This study concludes that the association thesaurus indicating associations between connotation and denotation is able to improve the accessibility of the connotative messages. The results of the study are hoped to contribute to the conceptual knowledge of image retrieval by providing understandings of connotative messages within an image and to the practical design of image retrieval system by proposing an association thesaurus which can supplement the limitations of the current content-based image retrieval systems (CBIR)