Introducing a Cross-Course Teaching Innovation to Enhance Group Project Performance

[EN] Marketing educators and students recognize the benefits derived from group assignments. Nonetheless, serious problems that occur frequently in student groups are diminished effort by some free-riding team members or disassociation from the group by lone wolf team members. In a highly innovative manner, the American Marketing Association’s integrated marketing plan international competition was concurrently adopted by Principles of Marketing, Marketing Research and Advanced Advertising courses in an attempt to leverage the many benefits of team projects while minimizing their drawbacks.Defanti, M. (2017). Introducing a Cross-Course Teaching Innovation to Enhance Group Project Performance. En Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 750-757. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD17.2017.539975075

The effect of a corporate name change related to a change in corporate image upon a firm's stock price

This dissertation utilizes the event study methodology from the modern theory of finance to examine corporate name changes (CNCs). Data sources include press releases and articles announcing CNCs compiled by Lexis Nexis, annual reports collected from the SEC File microfiche database compiled by Q-Data and the EDGAR database compiled online by Mergent, and the Center for Research on Stock Prices and COMPUSTAT compiled by Wharton Research Data Services. These data sources are used to answer three primary research questions. First, what is the effect of a CNC related to a change in corporate image, as opposed to a change in corporate entity (e.g., acquisition), on a firm’s stock price? Second, what is the effect of a major change versus a minor change to the corporate name during a CNC related to a change in corporate image? Third, what is the effect of a non-brand name altering CNC versus a brand name altering CNC on a firm’s stock price? This dissertation makes its primary contribution to the study of CNCs by finding that CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on stock price whereas CNCs related to a change in corporate entity will not. Moreover, it finds that major changes to the corporate name during CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on a firm’s stock price whereas minor changes to the corporate name during CNCs related to a change in corporate image will not. Finally, it is the first study to examine the effect of CNCs on firms’ brand names and finds that non-brand name altering CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on a firm’s stock price whereas brand name altering CNCs related to a change in corporate image will not

The OptIPuter: A National and Global-Scale Cyberinfrastructure for Enabling LambdaGrid Computing

To facilitate the interactive visualization, analysis, and correlation of massive amounts of data from multiple sites, the NSF-funded OptIPuter project is designing a powerful distributed cyberinfrastructure to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. This research exploits a new world in which the central architectural element is optical networking, not computers. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating supernetworks. Dedicated 1- to 10-Gigabit deterministic network connections are being deployed internationally by the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), nationally by the National LambdaRail (NLR), regionally by academic consortia, and locally on campuses, connecting scientists’ laboratories to collaborators and/or data sources all over the world, providing researchers with guaranteed bandwidth for data movement, guaranteed latency for visualization/collaboration and data analysis, and guaranteed scheduling for remote instrument control. Bandwidth alone isn’t the solution; the OptIPuter is working on new grid-computing paradigms − that is, new middleware, transport protocols and optical signaling, control and management software − to enable applications to dynamically manage lambda resources just as they do any grid resource, creating a Lambda-Grid of interconnected high-performance computers, data storage devices, and instrumentation. This paper summarizes some of the OptIPuter’s developments over dedicated end-to-end lightpaths among partner sites in San Diego, Chicago and Amsterdam. ENABLING E-SCIENCE Doctors want to better study the flow dynamics of the human body’s circulatory system. Ecologists want to better study entire ecosystems in estuaries, lakes and along coastlines. Biologists want to perform multiscale, correlated microscopy experiments, zooming from an entire system, such as a rat cerebellum, to a