Reality Branding

Artiklen tager ’reality branding’ som udgangspunkt for at diskutere markedsføringens kultur- og livsstilsproducerende potentialer på en mediearena, hvor den kommercielle og hverdagslige virkelighed smelter sammen i virksomheders og konsumenters ’joint effort’ i at skabe meningsfyldte historier. Tankegangen er, at forbrugere har gennemskuet reklamernes mere eller mindre fantasifulde tegnkon- struktioner og forholder sig blasert til budskaberne. Som modsvar til denne ligegyldighed forsøger den moderne og avancerede markeds- føring at skabe nye involverende mediemiljøer og nye brugssituatio- ner for produktet – for eksempel er Polle fra Snave debuteret i film- mediet, og Starbucks skabte et nyt fysisk og symbolsk rum for kaffe og kaffedrikning så godt som uden hjælp af traditionel reklame. Artik- lens ærinde er at diskutere denne udvikling i markedsføringen – ikke ud fra traditionelle sociologiske og psykologiske antagelser om foran- dringer i mentalitetsformer, men ud fra en historisk belysning af mar- kedsføringens diskurser set i relation til udviklingen i mediesystemerne

Partial methane oxidation: insights from first principles and micro-kinetics calculations

Partial methane oxidation is a much-desired reaction with some intriguing challenges. Not only is there a need to activate methane and oxygen, but there is also a need to control the selectivity and prevent over-oxidation to thermodynamically more stable products, like carbon dioxide and water. In fact, this is so difficult that at many oil extraction sites, methane, which inevitably accompanies the welled crude oil, is today flared since gas-phase methane is too inconvenient to store and transport. In nature, there are enzymes that can partially oxidize methane to methanol at ambient pressure and temperature, although at a very slow rate. An often studied class of material with the potential of being an inorganic analogue to these enzymes are zeolites. Zeolites are a porous class of material that can readily be synthesized and that have been shown to convert methane to methanol at ambient conditions with a high selectivity, but with a low conversion. Unravelling the bottlenecks of this, as of yet, inefficient reaction, calls for an atomistic understanding of what is in fact controlling activity and selectivity of the catalysts at hand.In this thesis, zeolites and chemically related structures, zeotypes, are studied using first-principles calculations combined with micro-kinetic modelling. As a first step, a candidate for the active site in these materials, the [Cu-O-Cu]2+ motif, which is found primarily in the ZSM-5 zeolite, and its relevance for Cu, Ni, Co, Fe, Ag, and Au is investigated. Using a straightforward first-principles based micro-kinetic model, we find that this motif is only relevant for copper. Vibrational IR-spectra and temperature programmed desorption spectra are also calculated for monomer and dimer copper motifs in the ZSM-5 and SSZ-13 zeolites, and the results support experimental conclusions. When studying the continued reaction of methanol to dimethyl ether, large-scale trends in activity correlated to the acidity of the acid sites in three zeolite framework types have been determined, indicating that tuning acidity will change the selectivity between methanol and dimethyl ether.The partial oxidation of methane is also studied using molybdenum sulfide clusters, Mo6S8 . These small clusters enables studies of a wider reaction network, similar to the one in zeolites, where the oxygenated species are replaced by their sulfur-contaning counterparts. In this way, it allows investigation of the activity and selectivity towards methanethiol and dimethyl sulfide using different reaction mechanisms and different promoters. The reaction of methane with H2S is used when cleaning sour natural gas, which is why, in this case, H2S is used as the oxidant instead of oxygen. Our results show that the presence of some promoters on the sulfide clusters affect activity, while others affect selectivity. Furthermore, the results show that diffusion is important to include in the kinetic model

The unsustainable Makers

The Makers is the latest novel of the American science fiction writer, blogger and Silicon Valley intellectual Cory Doctorow. Set in the 2010s, the novel describes the possible impact of the present trend towards the migration of modes of production and organization that have emerged online into the sphere of material production. Called New Work, this movement is indebted to a new maker culture that attracts people into a kind of neo-artisan, high tech mode of production. The question is: can a corporate-funded New Work movement be sustainable? Doctorow seems to suggest that a capitalist economy of abundance is unsustainable because it tends to restrict the reach of its value flows to a privileged managerial elite

Reaction mechanism for methane-to-methanol in CU-SSZ-13: First-principles study of the Z2[Cu2O] and Z2[Cu2oh] motifs

As transportation continues to increase world-wide, there is a need for more efficient utilization of fossil fuel. One possibility is direct conversion of the solution gas bi-product CH4 into an energy-rich, easily usable liquid fuel such as CH3OH. However, new catalytic materials to facilitate the methane-to-methanol reaction are needed. Using density functional calculations, the partial oxidation of methane is investigated over the small-pore copper-exchanged zeolite SSZ-13. The reaction pathway is identified and the energy landscape elucidated over the proposed motifs Z2 [Cu2O] and Z2 [Cu2OH]. It is shown that the Z2[Cu2O] motif has an exergonic reaction path, provided water is added as a solvent for the desorption step. However, a micro-kinetic model shows that neither Z2 [Cu2O] nor Z2 [Cu2OH] has any notable activity under the reaction conditions. These findings highlight the importance of the detailed structure of the active site and that the most stable motif is not necessarily the most active

“Names doing rounds”: On brands in the bazaar economy

This article draws on fieldwork form Delhi’s garment and electronics bazaars to articulate an alternative perspective on the role of brands in the global bazaar economy. Knockoffs and counterfeit brands have mostly been viewed as problematic manifestations of counterfeiting and piracy, or framed in terms of authenticity or marginal practices of imitation. In this article, we suggest that bazaar brands also function as central to a growing popular innovation system able to provide material goods as well as immaterial experiences to the world’s poorer consumers in ways that stay in close contacts with the mediated fluctuations of popular affects. Bazaar brands develop a unique relationship with consumers based on an ability to seize the moment rather than the creation of enduring loyalties. We suggest that bazaar brands can be understood as central to an emerging postcapitalist consumer economy that has been substantially empowered by the spread of digital technologies

Desorption products during linear heating of copper zeolites with pre-adsorbed methanol

Desorption products from zeolites with medium (MFI) and small (CHA) pores and with and without ion-exchanged copper were studied during linear heating after the pre-adsorption of methanol using a chemical flow reactor with a gas phase Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. The methanol desorption profiles were deconvoluted and compared with those predicted from first-principles calculations. In situ diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy was used to study the samples during methanol desorption following a step-wise increase of the sample temperature. It is shown that well-dispersed copper species in the Cu-zeolite samples interact more strongly with methanol and its derivatives as compared to the bare zeolites, resulting in methanol desorption at higher temperatures. Moreover, the introduction of Cu leads to CO formation and desorption in larger amounts at lower temperatures compared to the bare zeolites. The formation and desorption of dimethyl ether (DME) from pre-adsorbed methanol takes place at different temperatures depending on both the influence of Cu and the zeolite topology. The Cu sites in zeolites lead to higher DME formation/desorption temperatures, while a small shift of DME desorption towards higher temperatures is observed for the CHA framework structure compared to the MFI framework structure

Discovery of Oxygen Carriers by Mining a First-Principle Database

Chemical looping is an innovative technique that relies, to a large extent, on the possibility of finding new oxygen carriers. Until now, these materials have primarily been identified via experimental techniques and therefrom derived insights. However, this is both costly and time-consuming. To speed-up this process, we have applied a computational screening approach based on energetic data retrieved from the Open Quantum Materials Database. In particular, we have considered combinations of all mono-, bi-, and trimetallic alloys and mixed oxides with up to three distinctive phases. Here, we specifically focus on a technique referred to as chemical looping oxygen uncoupling, which is especially suitable for solid fuels, e.g., combustion of biomass for negative CO2 emissions. The formation energies obtained for the materials of interest were used to identify phase transitions that are likely to occur under conditions relevant for chemical looping oxygen uncoupling. Given these criteria, the initial list of 300000 materials is reduced by a factor of 20, and after filtering out rare, radioactive, toxic, or harmful elements only 1000 remain. When considering the abundance of elements in the ranking criteria, most of the highest ranking phases include Cu, Mn, and Fe. This adds credibility to the procedure, as many viable oxygen carriers for chemical looping oxygen uncoupling that have been studied experimentally contain these elements. While Cr-based materials have not been widely explored for this application, our study suggests that this might be worthwhile since these occur more frequently than Fe. Other elements that would be interesting as additional components include Ba, K, Na, Al, and Si

Measuring Corporate Reputation using Sentiment Analysis

In recent years, new digital media have become important for social networking and content sharing. Due to their large diffusion, social media platforms have also both increased the strategic importance of managing corporate reputation and rendered this more difficult. Companies are increasingly apprehensive about information and opinions that can spread through online communities rapidly without any control. While social media platforms increase the power of stakeholders, they also represent a large-scale source of information about feelings, opinions and sentiments of people that allow us to measure and monitor reputation through the analysis of user generated content in real-time. In this paper, we show how social media content can be used to measure the online reputation of a company. Furthermore, we present an open platform that uses a sentiment analysis algorithm on twitter traffic to monitor the real time evolution of company reputation

Digital methods for ethnography: analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments

The aim of this article is to introduce some analytical concepts suitable for ethnographers dealing with social media environments. As a result of the growth of social media, the Internet structure has become a very complex, fluid, and fragmented space. Within this space, it is not always possible to consider the 'classical' online community as the privileged field site for the ethnographer, in which s/he immerses him/herself. Differently, taking inspiration from some methodological principles of the Digital Methods paradigm, I suggest that the main task for the ethnographer moving across social media environments should not be exclusively that of identifying an online community to delve into but of mapping the practices through which Internet users and digital devices structure social formations around a focal object (e.g., a brand). In order to support the ethnographer in the mapping of social formations within social media environments, I propose five analytical concepts: community, public, crowd, self-presentation as a tool, and user as a device