738 research outputs found
An exploratory study looking at the relationship marketing techniques used in the music festival industry
There are current issues and trends in the music festival
market, which may affect the success of an event, and market saturation
is at the forefront of these issues. Previous literature, maintaining
the need for a marketing approach to festivals, identifi es the need
for maintaining strong stakeholder relationships in order to succeed
in a business environment; attention has been focused to the theory
of relationship marketing (RM) because of the recognition that this
practice is complementary to the marketing of festivals. The very nature
of the music festival as an annual, usually, 4-day event means that
effective marketing is needed to keep connections with the consumer
throughout the year. This article focuses on the RM techniques
utilised within the music festival industry from the viewpoint of the
festival organiser in an attempt to establish how festival organisations
value and monitor organisational relationships. This article explores
the extent to which these relationships are valued and managed;
furthermore, the variations between these intricate relationships
are considered by focusing on those held with the organisation ’ s
consumers and sponsors, the results of which have provided the
ability to establish the importance and relevance of RM to the industry
and further identify the marketing communication methods employed
to establish and maintain such relationships. In-depth, convergent
interviews have been conducted with a segment of music festival
organisers from a range of events. The results have been integrated
with the study of current literature to best exemplify these issues. It
has been established that RM has a strong role in today ’ s commercial
and independent music festival industry; technological advances are
enabling the organiser to support online relationships further and
increase consumer loyalty. There is a need to expand the research
further because of the complexity of organisational relationships and
the varying categories of festivals
Abrupt Convergence and Escape Behavior for Birth and Death Chains
We link two phenomena concerning the asymptotical behavior of stochastic
processes: (i) abrupt convergence or cut-off phenomenon, and (ii) the escape
behavior usually associated to exit from metastability. The former is
characterized by convergence at asymptotically deterministic times, while the
convergence times for the latter are exponentially distributed. We compare and
study both phenomena for discrete-time birth-and-death chains on Z with drift
towards zero. In particular, this includes energy-driven evolutions with energy
functions in the form of a single well. Under suitable drift hypotheses, we
show that there is both an abrupt convergence towards zero and escape behavior
in the other direction. Furthermore, as the evolutions are reversible, the law
of the final escape trajectory coincides with the time reverse of the law of
cut-off paths. Thus, for evolutions defined by one-dimensional energy wells
with sufficiently steep walls, cut-off and escape behavior are related by time
inversion.Comment: 2 figure
Neuron-to-neuron wild-type Tau protein transfer through a trans-synaptic mechanism: relevance to sporadic tauopathies.
BACKGROUND: In sporadic Tauopathies, neurofibrillary degeneration (NFD) is characterised by the intraneuronal aggregation of wild-type Tau proteins. In the human brain, the hierarchical pathways of this neurodegeneration have been well established in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other sporadic tauopathies such as argyrophilic grain disorder and progressive supranuclear palsy but the molecular and cellular mechanisms supporting this progression are yet not known. These pathways appear to be associated with the intercellular transmission of pathology, as recently suggested in Tau transgenic mice. However, these conclusions remain ill-defined due to a lack of toxicity data and difficulties associated with the use of mutant Tau.
RESULTS: Using a lentiviral-mediated rat model of hippocampal NFD, we demonstrated that wild-type human Tau protein is axonally transferred from ventral hippocampus neurons to connected secondary neurons even at distant brain areas such as olfactory and limbic systems indicating a trans-synaptic protein transfer. Using different immunological tools to follow phospho-Tau species, it was clear that Tau pathology generated using mutated Tau remains near the IS whereas it spreads much further using the wild-type one.
CONCLUSION: Taken together, these results support a novel mechanism for Tau protein transfer compared to previous reports based on transgenic models with mutant cDNA. It also demonstrates that mutant Tau proteins are not suitable for the development of experimental models helpful to validate therapeutic intervention interfering with Tau spreading
Unsupervised Polygonal Reconstruction of Noisy Contours by a Discrete Irregular Approach
International audienceIn this paper, we present an original algorithm to build a polygonal reconstruction of noisy digital contours. For this purpose, we first improve an algorithm devoted to the vectorization of discrete irregular isothetic objects. Afterwards we propose to use it to define a reconstruction process of noisy digital contours. More precisely, we use a local noise detector, introduced by Kerautret and Lachaud in IWCIA 2009, that builds a multi-scale representation of the digital contour, which is composed of pixels of various size depending of the local amount of noise. Finally, we compare our approach with previous works, by con- sidering the Hausdorff distance and the error on tangent orientations of the computed line segments to the original perfect contour. Thanks to both synthetic and real noisy objects, we show that our approach has interesting performance, and could be applied in document analysis systems
Pyrolysis Gas Composition for a Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator Heatshield
Published physical properties of phenolic impregnated carbon ablator (PICA) are compiled, and the composition of the pyrolysis gases that form at high temperatures internal to a heatshield is investigated. A link between the composition of the solid resin, and the composition of the pyrolysis gases created is provided. This link, combined with a detailed investigation into a reacting pyrolysis gas mixture, allows a consistent, and thorough description of many of the physical phenomena occurring in a PICA heatshield, and their implications, to be presented
Search for the exotic resonance in the NOMAD experiment
A search for exotic Theta baryon via Theta -> proton +Ks decay mode in the
NOMAD muon neutrino DIS data is reported. The special background generation
procedure was developed. The proton identification criteria are tuned to
maximize the sensitivity to the Theta signal as a function of xF which allows
to study the Theta production mechanism. We do not observe any evidence for the
Theta state in the NOMAD data. We provide an upper limit on Theta production
rate at 90% CL as 2.13 per 1000 of neutrino interactions.Comment: Accepted to European Physics Journal
Production properties of K*(892) vector mesons and their spin alignment as measured in the NOMAD experiment
First measurements of K*(892) mesons production properties and their spin
alignment in nu_mu charged current (CC) and neutral current (NC) interactions
are presented. The analysis of the full data sample of the NOMAD experiment is
performed in different kinematic regions. For K*+ and K*- mesons produced in
nu_mu CC interactions and decaying into K0 pi+/- we have found the following
yields per event: (2.6 +/- 0.2 (stat.) +/- 0.2 (syst.))% and (1.6 +/- 0.1
(stat.) +/- 0.1 (syst.))% respectively, while for the K*+ and K*- mesons
produced in nu NC interactions the corresponding yields per event are: (2.5 +/-
0.3 (stat.) +/- 0.3 (syst.))% and (1.0 +/- 0.3 (stat.) +/- 0.2 (syst.))%. The
results obtained for the rho00 parameter, 0.40 +/- 0.06 (stat) +/- 0.03 (syst)
and 0.28 +/- 0.07 (stat) +/- 0.03 (syst) for K*+ and K*- produced in nu_mu CC
interactions, are compared to theoretical predictions tuned on LEP measurements
in e+e- annihilation at the Z0 pole. For K*+ mesons produced in nu NC
interactions the measured rho00 parameter is 0.66 +/- 0.10 (stat) +/- 0.05
(syst).Comment: 20 p
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