Whalesong

O'Dowd addresses House Finance Committee -- Southeast group discuss university restructuring -- UAJ Accreditation reaffirmed -- University Fund: Stability in Future? -- A Generation in Hock -- LETTERS -- To Live and Die in L.A. - "must see" -- Kayak; film based on Siberian and Alaskan kayaks -- Alaskameut -- UAJ's Tussel Jordan-"We have a lot of hustle" -- Halleen: "Wanted to ski race" -- Student leaders address issues -- Full-time student enrollment rises -- Chess Club still going strong -- Legislators seek university fund -- CLASSIFIED

STRATEGIES OF CONSTRUCTING APPEALS IN OBAMA’S VICTORY SPEECH

One of important things that a speaker should pay attention in delivering a speech is constructing appeals. By constructing appeals in the speech, it will make the well-organized content of speech to be more influencing and convincing. In addition, constructing appeals in the speech is also primarily essential as it particularly impacts to the audience’s feeling. As Baird stated (1981: 19) the feelings toward the speaker are important determinants of listeners’ acceptance of the speaker’s message. Constructing audience’s appeals is an important point in communication in the objective of persuading audience (Baird, 1981:199). By constructing appeals in the message, the speaker can also motivate the listeners to attend the message and to persuade them. In addition, the speaker not only needs to give people reasons for doing or thinking things, we also need to stir their emotions so that those actions or thought are strong and long lasting. As a matured politician having well experienced in public speaking, Obama has many inspiring speeches which achieved immediate popularity around the world. Many of his speeches are broadcasted in video sharing web site like YouTube, garnering many views and being watched by million views around the world. One of his inspiring speeches is his victory speech delivered right after he won U.S. presidential election. Obama's victory speech is a powerful example speech in communication on how to connect with and inspire audiences. He gave his victory speech at Grant Park in his home city of Chicago, Illinois. There were tears of joy in Chicago when America's new president-elect Barack Obama took to the stage to speak to his supporters. It was watched by an estimated crowd of 240,000. Considered one of the most widely-watched and repeated political addresses in recent history, Obama's speech focused on the major issues facing the United States and the world, all echoed through his campaign slogan of change. Obama’s victory speech consists of influencing people's beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors. He persuaded people when he somehow convinced them, to think what he wanted them to think, feel what he wanted them to feel, or do what he wanted them to do. As a learner, I am interestingly interested to analyze strategies of constructing appeals in Obama’s victory speech as it is a model of great powerfully inspiring speech

Sovereign Debt Reform and the Best Interest of Creditors

In April 2002 the International Monetary Fund introduced a sovereign bankruptcy proposal only to be rebuffed by the United States Treasury. Where the IMF wanted a mandatory bankruptcy regime, the Treasury wanted to solve distress problems with contractual devices. Sovereign bondholders and sovereign issuers themselves flatly rejected both proposals, even though they were nominally the beneficiaries of both proponents. This Article addresses and explains this bondholder reaction. In so doing, it takes a highly skeptical view of the IMF\u27s proposal even as it shows that the incentive structure surrounding sovereign lending renders untenable the Treasury\u27s contractarian proposal. The Article\u27s analysis follows from a review and restatement of the economic learning on sovereign debt relationships. The IMF and the Treasury share the objective facilitating restructuring by substituting a regime of collective action for the prevailing practice of requiring unanimous bondholder consent to significant amendments of bond contracts. In so doing they follow a conventional wisdom respecting bond contracts under which standard unanimity provisions are inefficient and irrational. The Article shows that this dismissal of the unanimity requirement comes too quickly. Under our analysis of the problem the debtor distress, bondholders rationally may prefer to make compositions harder to conclude. There is no first best equilibrium bond contract; instead bondholders select from a menu of second best forms, making trade offs between unanimous action and collective action provisions in an imperfect world. One factor leading lenders to favor unanimous action is the need to self protect. In a world without a good faith backstop, creditors motivated by side deals can take advantage of majority rule to impose suboptimal compositions. Holding out is the only weapon available to the minority creditor. The Article argues that, given such side deals, a stable majoritarian regime cannot be achieved as a matter of free contract. Mandate will be necessary. It follows that the Treasury\u27s contractarian approach is implausible absent a backstop regime of intercreditor good faith duties. The Article draws on the history of corporate reorganization prior to the enactment of the section 77B of the Bankruptcy Act of 1934 to show that courts have grappled with these questions before, intervening aggressively on equitable principles

Building brands through experiential events: when entertainment meets education

Experiential marketing is increasingly getting companies’ attention as a strategy to interact with consumers and engage them to better convey their brand image and positioning. However, its effects are still unclear both at the aggregate and at the individual levels. This paper addresses this topic and presents a field experiment investigating the effects of experiential marketing on brand image in retailing. Two similar consumer electronics stores with different strategies – traditional vs. experiential – constitutes the setting in which a field experiment has been run. Two similar samples of consumers took part in our study by visiting one of these two stores, and answering a questionnaire before and after the visit with the primary goal to investigate the brand image and its changes due to the shopping visit. Brand image was measured as the overall brand attitude – via four items – and five specific desired brand claims that the company wanted to convey to consumers. Findings show that engaged consumers through the multisensory and interactive event arranged in the experiential store register higher levels of both brand attitude and all brand claims than those visiting the traditional store, and that the increase in both the dependent variables after the visit of the experiential store is higher than the increase in the traditional store. Thus, experiential stores are not only able to entertain consumers, but they are also able to educate them, by conveying them a set of brand claims more effectively than the traditional stor

Catching and displaying memory cues for a mobile augmented memory system

This report goes over and details the progress of the 2013 COMP477 project “Augmenting Memory: The Digital Parrot on Mobile Devices” undertaken by Jake Bellamy and supervised by Annika Hinze at the University of Waikato. The report begins with an overview on the problem with remembering events in people’s lives and details the background information on the Digital Parrot system. It also describes the previous project that preceded this one, which began to conceptualize the Digital Parrot on mobile devices. It analyses problems with the current design of the system and addresses them. The report then goes on to conduct an in depth user study with the functioning version of the software. The user study finds design flaws and incorrect functionality in the application that would not have otherwise been apparent. Finally, the report concludes with a proposed user interface concept that addresses all of the issues found in the user study and describes how the system would work. It describes the initial implementation that has begun in building this system

Master of sheets: A tale of compromised cloud documents

As of 2014, a fifth of EU citizens relied on cloud accounts to store their documents according to a Eurostat report. Although useful, there are downsides to the use of cloud documents. They often accumulate sensitive information over time, including financial information. This makes them attractive targets to cybercriminals. To understand what happens to compromised cloud documents that contain financial information, we set up 100 fake payroll sheets comprising 1000 fake records of fictional individuals. We populated the sheets with traditional bank payment information, cryptocurrency details, and payment URLs. To lure cybercriminals and other visitors into visiting the sheets, we leaked links pointing to the sheets via paste sites. We collected data from the sheets for a month, during which we observed 235 accesses across 98 sheets. Two sheets were not opened. We also recorded 38 modifications in 7 sheets. We present detailed measurements and analysis of accesses, modifications, edits, and devices that visited payment URLs in the sheets. Contrary to our expectations, bank payment URLs received many more clicks than cryptocurrency payment URLs despite the popularity of cryptocurrencies and emerging blockchain technologies. On the other hand, sheets that contained cryptocurrency details recorded more modifications than sheets that contained traditional banking information. In summary, we present a comprehensive picture of what happens to compromised cloud spreadsheets.Accepted manuscrip