Reading New Zealand Within The New Global Order: Sport and the Visualisation of National Identity

Globalization has emerged as one of the most controversial and debated issues of our times. In particular the potential impact of global products and processes on political, economic and cultural life in all of the world’s ‘global villages’ has met with a range of responses from celebration to condemnation. This essay examines the relationship between globalization and national identity with respect the phenomenon of corporate nationalism. Focusing on New Zealand, the analysis provides a preliminary examination of how global and local corporations appropriate dominant cultural themes, moments and stereotypes as part of their advertising and marketing campaigns. Such strategies enable corporations to localize and establish a sense of loyalty amongst citizens and consumers. Overall, the paper highlights the implications of the corporatization of contemporary life with respect to local, national and indigenous cultures.Peer Reviewe

The Application of Sports Technology and Sports Data for Commercial Purposes

Contemporary professional football (and sports) entities have embraced technology and data to boost sporting quality. However, this development has gone beyond the playing field as technology and data also start to play a larger role in improving business performances in the football (sports) industry. This chapter looks into how technology and data in the form of sports tracking systems, cf. based on (but not totally limited to) the case of the ZXY sports tracking system, are capable of helping to translate improved sporting performances into enhanced business performances. The intensified commercialization in football from technology and data takes fandom to new heights and bring about new revenue generating opportunities. However, harnessing the increased amounts of data is associated with technical challenges and financial and human resource constraints. In some instances, the context of applying ‘big data’ in football is still premature. Therefore, the technology and data implementation in professional football needs to undergo a qualification process to secure that the applied data co-exists with a context of competent knowledge-sharing, individual and organizational learning in order to positively develop sporting and business performances

Stroboscopic Visual Training for Coaching Practitioners: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Background: The importance of vision and its impact upon an athlete’s performance has long been recognized by elite athletic communities. In recent decades, stroboscopic training methods have been developed to help train athletes from a visual, perceptual, and cognitive perspective using strobe glasses. Objective: Herein a comprehensive literature review was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of strobe glasses in training collegiate and professional athletes. Methods: This comprehensive literature review investigates the origins, attention influences, tasks, practitioner takeaways, and cost feasibility of stroboscopic visual training.Results: The findings from this review show promise of benefits from utilizing strobe glasses during training scenarios, particularly for improving fast or impulsive tasks. Strobe glasses can be accommodated into varying sporting environments and training regimens while being affordable to athletic, coaching, and training departments or centers. Studies investigating the direct influence of stroboscopic training on subsequent performance demonstrate viable methods for strengthening fundamental visual abilities. Notably, these fundamental abilities have been shown to correlate with improved game performance. Though early results are promising, there are still significant areas for further research and more comprehensive designs of stroboscopic training studies. Conclusion: This review highlights potential benefits and existing research gaps concerning the use of stroboscopic eyewear as an intervention method in sports. The delineation of optimal applications for strobe glasses is undetermined; however, information presented in this review can be meaningfully applied by coaching practitioners who are considering adopting the technology

Unified Software Engineering Reuse: A Methodology for Effective Software Reuse

Software is a necessity in the modern world, and that need is continuously growing. As expensive as the creation of all this new software is, the maintenance costs are even greater. One solution to this problem is software reuse, whereby already written software can be applied to new problems after some modification, thus reducing the overall input of new code. The goal in traditional software reuse is to produce a piece of software with enough flexibility to be used at least twice. Unfortunately, there are many difficulties in achieving software reuse using modern programming techniques. Even software built specifically for reuse is severely restricted in its utility for new applications. It is easy for new programs to require entirely new logic or new objects. Because of this, they become quickly outdated, and any labor spent creating reusable software is nullified. The solution is a method to vastly increase the reusability of software by concentrating on the base knowledge and overall goals of software rather than the details on a case-by-case basis. Finding patterns in the problem and solution spaces allows unification into a smaller solution set. Instead of each problem receiving its own solution from marginally reusable components, multiple problems are resolved with the same architecture and object set. As an added benefit, this solution will not only vastly improve software reuse, but it will make feasible systems that can construct software architecture on demand and provide the first steps to fully automated software development

The impact of user- and system-initiated personalization on the user experience at large sports events

This article describes an experimental study investigating the impact on user experience of two approaches of personalization of content provided on a mobile device, for spectators at large sports events. A lab-based experiment showed that a system-driven approach to personalization was generally preferable, but that there were advantages to retaining some user control over the process. Usability implications for a hybrid approach, and design implications are discussed, with general support for countermeasures designed to overcome recognised limitations of adaptive systems

Eye quietness and quiet eye in expert and novice golf performance: an electrooculographic analysis

Quiet eye (QE) is the final ocular fixation on the target of an action (e.g., the ball in golf putting). Camerabased eye-tracking studies have consistently found longer QE durations in experts than novices; however, mechanisms underlying QE are not known. To offer a new perspective we examined the feasibility of measuring the QE using electrooculography (EOG) and developed an index to assess ocular activity across time: eye quietness (EQ). Ten expert and ten novice golfers putted 60 balls to a 2.4 m distant hole. Horizontal EOG (2ms resolution) was recorded from two electrodes placed on the outer sides of the eyes. QE duration was measured using a EOG voltage threshold and comprised the sum of the pre-movement and post-movement initiation components. EQ was computed as the standard deviation of the EOG in 0.5 s bins from –4 to +2 s, relative to backswing initiation: lower values indicate less movement of the eyes, hence greater quietness. Finally, we measured club-ball address and swing durations. T-tests showed that total QE did not differ between groups (p = .31); however, experts had marginally shorter pre-movement QE (p = .08) and longer post-movement QE (p < .001) than novices. A group × time ANOVA revealed that experts had less EQ before backswing initiation and greater EQ after backswing initiation (p = .002). QE durations were inversely correlated with EQ from –1.5 to 1 s (rs = –.48 - –.90, ps = .03 - .001). Experts had longer swing durations than novices (p = .01) and, importantly, swing durations correlated positively with post-movement QE (r = .52, p = .02) and negatively with EQ from 0.5 to 1s (r = –.63, p = .003). This study demonstrates the feasibility of measuring ocular activity using EOG and validates EQ as an index of ocular activity. Its findings challenge the dominant perspective on QE and provide new evidence that expert-novice differences in ocular activity may reflect differences in the kinematics of how experts and novices execute skills

Stakeholder engagement in the design of scenarios of technology-enhanced tourism services

The rapid uptake of mobile and digital technologies has the potential to radically transform city-visiting experiences. This will result in a transition from technology that is owned and delivered by tourism organisations towards software developed by third party organisations that is owned and managed directly by tourists. Tourism providers in destinations must collaborate in service provision in order to develop integrated services to meet the needs of tourists and remain competitive. This paper argues that scenario-based design (SBD) offers a useful tool to generate innovative ideas for destination service development and to break down barriers to collaboration amongst tourism stakeholders. We report a study, which engaged city stakeholders in envisioning innovative, technology-based tourism services. We outline this process, discuss the value of SBD in multi-stakeholder service design, and make recommendations for future work in this area

Informing Students about Information: Seven Semantic Exercises

Information is a term widely but carelessly used in our day-to-day language While used poorly as a common expression, a growing number of recent publications on information have identified the importance of the term for both IS research and practice. Most of these publications, seeking to anchor the term more specifically, attribute meaning to information to distinguish it from data. In this paper, we present several in-class exercises we have developed to help students understand the implications of this semantic distinction. While one can use these exercises to teach and explain any semantic theory of information, they were originally designed to reinforce a particular semantic theory of information—the difference theory of information (McKinney & Yoos, n.d.). We discuss the lessons we learned and the paper’s limitations and implications