The Effects of the Internet on Marketing

With the use of the Internet, marketers are able to reach consumers where they work, play, shop, and live more efficiently than without it. Through e-commerce, social media, mobile phones, and much more, businesses are able to spread brand awareness, increase market share, and unveil new products. With this great opportunity comes an equally great responsibility, as businesses have now come under extreme scrutiny by their customers. In the Information Age, news travels faster and farther than ever before, with the news of ethical mishaps reaching even the smallest of shareholders. The most crucial element in e-commerce is trust and in order to build and maintain trust businesses ought to operate ethically. When trust is established, online business can flourish, bringing in revenue and loyal customers that might not have been earned elsewhere

Rebuilding the Prevent Defense: Why Unethical Agents Continue to Score and What Can Be Done to Change the Game

Despite decades of regulation, college athletics continues to face problems stemming from agents\u27 unethical and illegal tactics in recruiting student-athletes. The NCAA, Congress, state legislatures, and professional players unions have all sought to regulate the interaction between athletes and agents in various ways, often leading to conflicts and gaps within existing laws, which some agents readily exploit. Agents frequently slip through the law\u27s porous prevent defense while the brunt of enforcement and public opprobrium falls on unsophisticated student-athletes and their schools--who are frequently outsiders to the saga. This Note explores the causes resulting in an atmosphere of noncompliance, including the varying goals of regulators and the attitudes of student-athletes. This Note recommends changes within the current system to encourage agent compliance, ensure greater transparency in the interactions between agents and student-athletes, and lessen draconian NCAA restrictions on student-athlete behavior. A unified, streamlined, less restrictive system will be more protective of student-athletes interests and encourage ethical agent behavior

“Taking Up the Slack”: Penobscot Bay Women and the Netting Industry

Between 1860 and 1900 the economy of Penobscot Bay communities changed dramatically, from the steady growth and prosperity of their natural resource-based economy to the decline in population and a painful transition to manufacturing and service industries. Both men and women had enjoyed independence in their labor in the old economy. The new cash economy made it necessary for them to seek out new ways of supporting their families, with home manufacture, or putting out work, one way of earning an income. They remained independent from an employer’s direct supervision and earned cash payment, a change from the face-to-face economy of the earlier part of the century. Netting provided income that helped to take up the slack — a term in netting — in their family incomes while maintaining such remnants of their old way of life as best they could. Dr. Nancy Alexander is a 2006 graduate of the University of Maine’s History Department’s PhD program.She has a home on Islesboro and both her thesis and dissertation for her degree are related to women’s lives and work around Penobscot Bay

Beyond 'Interfering Greenies' and 'Intransigent Farmers': The Contested Place of Tenure Review in New Zealand's High Country.

The landscapes spanning north to south along the hinterland and mountains of New Zealand’s South Island are a fast evolving focus of national contestation over their use, aesthetics and value. This region known as the ‘high country’ provides an interesting backdrop to my research into the dynamics of protecting ecological values alongside a socially and politically powerful agriculture. Neoliberalism, as an objective of political-economic restructuring since 1984, has significantly impacted on how the high country is conceptualised spatially. Instigated in 1989, the policy of tenure review is an on-going process. It has entailed converting the generally large Crown perpetual pastoral leases (originally totalling 303 properties) on a voluntary basis, to privatised freehold held by the original lessees in exchange for the return of land holding Significant Inherent Values, foreseen to require extrinsic protection, and public access values, to Department of Conservation control and management. The process has operated to alienate vast areas of leasehold from crown management control, which in some regions and on some landholdings has facilitated landscape transformation and different productive models. The thesis discusses the orthodoxy central to tenure review, which sought to separate the protection of ecological values and public access from productive use. In particular, the study foregrounds thinking in contemporary, constructionist geographies and social theory acutely aware of the issues stemming from Western environmentalisms that rely on the resilient duality erected between nature and society. Such logic systems conceive of ‘nature’ contained within one sphere, and the economy, society and politics in another and subsequently seek isolation between the two. However, this fails to understand or make room for complex interactions and linkages between nature and society within ever increasingly ‘hybrid’ landscapes. Emphasising Bourdieu’s methodological principles, a locally grounded research approach was employed to understand how ‘the landscape’ is socially constructed and valued within a defined geographical region. Three basins within the mid-Canterbury high country were selected as the case study region for research. A rich sample of ethnographic data regarding values, inter-subjective experiences, attitudes towards tenure review and changing productive and protective habitus was explored by interviewing 84 participants from farming and conservation groupings involved within the region. Early in analysis it became clear that negotiation of values and knowledge claims was occurring locally between actor groups. However, at a macro-level, tenure review, as a politically contested and difficult process of separation is transforming at least two sets of processes: 1) relationships with nature and the landscape, which has previously been held as a relatively integrated pastoral system; 2) dividing between production and protection interests is modifying the habitus of practice and relationships between ‘productivist’ and ‘protectionist’ interests. In this thesis I argue that both processes are complex but tenure review has operated in a way that further alienates powerful productivist and protectionist orders within the current constitution of New Zealand society. What analysis highlighted is that division with tenure review categorises separated spaces as either 'for production' or 'for protection', leading to narrowed habitus that may undermine the potential to look towards or maintain more sensitive forms of production. An impasse arises, where ‘locking away’ purified nature in externalised parks and reserves may negate social responsibility for ‘other’ natures, especially those produced from and more obviously ‘human impacted’. Concluding the thesis, the important argument gained from concepts of hybridity and multi-naturalism, is that removing humans and production from ‘nature’, will not necessarily ‘save’ or restore pre-human nature, as is politically mobilised in some conservation discourse. But removing humans will transform and direct nature in a different, human influenced trajectory of change (Braun, 2006b). This is because humans are intricately tied with biophysical nature in complex material, social-semiotic and political ways. As Harvey (1996: 186) asserts, removing humans from nature would be “disastrous for all species and all forms [of life] that have become dependent on it”. Hence, by acknowledging how all global natures are hybrid in form postmodern eco-politics becomes about navigating diverse trajectories of social-spatial change. Interrogating tensions between productivist and protectionist objectives, as dominant interests within high country space, is therefore important for promoting socially justified and supported conservation outcomes

Highly automatic quantification of myocardial oedema in patients with acute myocardial infarction using bright blood T2-weighted CMR

<p>Background: T2-weighted cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is clinically-useful for imaging the ischemic area-at-risk and amount of salvageable myocardium in patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI). However, to date, quantification of oedema is user-defined and potentially subjective.</p> <p>Methods: We describe a highly automatic framework for quantifying myocardial oedema from bright blood T2-weighted CMR in patients with acute MI. Our approach retains user input (i.e. clinical judgment) to confirm the presence of oedema on an image which is then subjected to an automatic analysis. The new method was tested on 25 consecutive acute MI patients who had a CMR within 48 hours of hospital admission. Left ventricular wall boundaries were delineated automatically by variational level set methods followed by automatic detection of myocardial oedema by fitting a Rayleigh-Gaussian mixture statistical model. These data were compared with results from manual segmentation of the left ventricular wall and oedema, the current standard approach.</p> <p>Results: The mean perpendicular distances between automatically detected left ventricular boundaries and corresponding manual delineated boundaries were in the range of 1-2 mm. Dice similarity coefficients for agreement (0=no agreement, 1=perfect agreement) between manual delineation and automatic segmentation of the left ventricular wall boundaries and oedema regions were 0.86 and 0.74, respectively.</p&gt

SB82-16/17: Resolution Recommending Changes to the Financial Aid Appeals Process

SB82-16/17: Resolution Recommending Changes to the Financial Aid Appeals Process. This resolution passed 22Y-0N-2A at the April 26, 2017 meeting of the Associated Students of the University of Montana (ASUM)