Toward a conceptual framework of emotional relationship marketing: an examination of two UK political parties

The purpose of this paper is to review the notion of branding and evaluate its applicability to political parties. As ideological politics is in decline, branding may provide a consistent narrative where voters feel a sense of warmth and belonging. The paper aims to build an understanding of the complexity of building a political brand where a combination of image, logo, leadership, and values can all contribute to a compelling brand narrative. It investigates how competing positive and negative messages attempt to build and distort the brand identity. A critical review of bran ding, relationship marketing, and political science literature articulates the conceptual development of branding and its applicability to political parties. The success or failure of negative campaigning is due to the authenticity of a political party’s brand values — creating a coherent brand story — if there is no distance between the brand values articulated by the political party and the values their community perceives then this creates an "authentic" brand. However, if there is a gap this paper illustrates how negative campaigning can be used to build a "doppelganger brand," which undermines the credibility of the authentic political brand. The paper argues that political parties need to understand how brand stories are developed but also how they can be used to protect against negative advertising. This has implications for political marketing strategists and political parties. This paper draws together branding theory and relationship marketing and incorporates them into a framework that makes a contribution to the political marketing literature

The first WASP public data release

The WASP (wide angle search for planets) project is an exoplanet transit survey that has been automatically taking wide field images since 2004. Two instruments, one in La Palma and the other in South Africa, continually monitor the night sky, building up light curves of millions of unique objects. These light curves are used to search for the characteristics of exoplanetary transits. This first public data release (DR1) of the WASP archive makes available all the light curve data and images from 2004 up to 2008 in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. A web interface () to the data allows easy access over the Internet. The data set contains 3 631 972 raw images and 17 970 937 light curves. In total the light curves have 119 930 299 362 data points available between them

Fuzzy approximate entropy analysis of resting state fMRI signal complexity across the adult life span

Acknowledgment The authors would like to acknowledge the work of the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) fMRI community in creating the resting state database and making it publicly available within the framework of the 1000 Functional Connectomes project (https://www.nitrc.org/projects/fcon_1000/). M.O. Sokunbi was supported by an MRC grant G1100629.Peer reviewedPreprin

How bias correction goes wrong: measurement of X_(CO_2) affected by erroneous surface pressure estimates

All measurements of X_(CO_2) from space have systematic errors. To reduce a large fraction of these errors, a bias correction is applied to X_(CO_2) retrieved from GOSAT and OCO-2 spectra using the ACOS retrieval algorithm. The bias correction uses, among other parameters, the surface pressure difference between the retrieval and the meteorological reanalysis. Relative errors in the surface pressure estimates, however, propagate nearly 1:1 into relative errors in bias-corrected X_(CO_2). For OCO-2, small errors in the knowledge of the pointing of the observatory (up to ∼130 arcsec) introduce a bias in X_(CO_2) in regions with rough topography. Erroneous surface pressure estimates are also caused by a coding error in ACOS version 8, sampling meteorological analyses at wrong times (up to 3 h after the overpass time). Here, we derive new geolocations for OCO-2's eight footprints and show how using improved knowledge of surface pressure estimates in the bias correction reduces errors in OCO-2's v9 X_(CO_2) data

Survey for Transiting Extrasolar Planets in Stellar Systems. II. Spectrophotometry and Metallicities of Open Clusters

We present metallicity estimates for seven open clusters based on spectrophotometric indices from moderate-resolution spectroscopy. Observations of field giants of known metallicity provide a correlation between the spectroscopic indices and the metallicity of open cluster giants. We use \chi^2 analysis to fit the relation of spectrophotometric indices to metallicity in field giants. The resulting function allows an estimate of the target-cluster giants' metallicities with an error in the method of \pm0.08 dex. We derive the following metallicities for the seven open clusters: NGC 1245, [m/H]=-0.14\pm0.04; NGC 2099, [m/H]=+0.05\pm0.05; NGC 2324, [m/H]=-0.06\pm0.04; NGC 2539, [m/H]=-0.04\pm0.03; NGC 2682 (M67), [m/H]=-0.05\pm0.02; NGC 6705, [m/H]=+0.14\pm0.08; NGC 6819, [m/H]=-0.07\pm0.12. These metallicity estimates will be useful in planning future extra-solar planet transit searches since planets may form more readily in metal-rich environments.Comment: 38 pages, including 12 figures. Accepted for publication in A

Fe-substituted mullite powders for the in situ synthesis of carbon nanotubes by catalytic chemical vapor deposition

Powders of iron-substituted mullite were prepared by combustion and further calcination in air at different temperatures. A detailed study involving notably Mo¨ssbauer spectroscopy showed that the Fe3+ ions are distributed between the mullite phase and a corundum phase that progressively dissolves into mullite upon the increase in calcination temperature. Carbon nanotube-Fe-mullite nanocomposites were prepared for the first time by a direct method involving a reduction of these powders in H2-CH4 and without any mechanical mixing step. The carbon nanotubes formed by the catalytic decomposition of CH4 on the smallest metal particles are mostly double-walled and multiwalled, although some carbon nanofibers are also observed

The Magnetic Fields of Classical T Tauri Stars

We report new magnetic field measurements for 14 classical T Tauri stars (CTTSs). We combine these data with one previous field determination in order to compare our observed field strengths with the field strengths predicted by magnetospheric accretion models. We use literature data on the stellar mass, radius, rotation period, and disk accretion rate to predict the field strength that should be present on each of our stars according to these magnetospheric accretion models. We show that our measured field values do not correlate with the field strengths predicted by simple magnetospheric accretion theory. We also use our field strength measurements and literature X-ray luminosity data to test a recent relationship expressing X-ray luminosity as a function of surface magnetic flux derived from various solar feature and main sequence star measurements. We find that the T Tauri stars we have observed have weaker than expected X-ray emission by over an order of magnitude on average using this relationship. We suggest the cause for this is actually a result of the very strong fields on these stars which decreases the efficiency with which gas motions in the photosphere can tangle magnetic flux tubes in the corona.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure

Identification of Novel Fibrosis Modifiers by In Vivo siRNA Silencing.

Fibrotic diseases contribute to 45% of deaths in the industrialized world, and therefore a better understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying tissue fibrosis is sorely needed. We aimed to identify novel modifiers of tissue fibrosis expressed by myofibroblasts and their progenitors in their disease microenvironment through RNA silencing in vivo. We leveraged novel biology, targeting genes upregulated during liver and kidney fibrosis in this cell lineage, and employed small interfering RNA (siRNA)-formulated lipid nanoparticles technology to silence these genes in carbon-tetrachloride-induced liver fibrosis in mice. We identified five genes, Egr2, Atp1a2, Fkbp10, Fstl1, and Has2, which modified fibrogenesis based on their silencing, resulting in reduced Col1a1 mRNA levels and collagen accumulation in the liver. These genes fell into different groups based on the effects of their silencing on a transcriptional mini-array and histological outcomes. Silencing of Egr2 had the broadest effects in vivo and also reduced fibrogenic gene expression in a human fibroblast cell line. Prior to our study, Egr2, Atp1a2, and Fkbp10 had not been functionally validated in fibrosis in vivo. Thus, our results provide a major advance over the existing knowledge of fibrogenic pathways. Our study is the first example of a targeted siRNA assay to identify novel fibrosis modifiers in vivo

Homeostatic competition drives tumor growth and metastasis nucleation

We propose a mechanism for tumor growth emphasizing the role of homeostatic regulation and tissue stability. We show that competition between surface and bulk effects leads to the existence of a critical size that must be overcome by metastases to reach macroscopic sizes. This property can qualitatively explain the observed size distributions of metastases, while size-independent growth rates cannot account for clinical and experimental data. In addition, it potentially explains the observed preferential growth of metastases on tissue surfaces and membranes such as the pleural and peritoneal layers, suggests a mechanism underlying the seed and soil hypothesis introduced by Stephen Paget in 1889 and yields realistic values for metastatic inefficiency. We propose a number of key experiments to test these concepts. The homeostatic pressure as introduced in this work could constitute a quantitative, experimentally accessible measure for the metastatic potential of early malignant growths.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to be published in the HFSP Journa