How the Internet Ate the World!

We often think of branding in association with products, personalities and organizations. And of course the internet is one of the major tools used to achieve this. The internet and social media have opened up a whole universe of applications. And already the critics are lining up to remind us that there is sinister potential in the monolithic wealth it has created. So much so some believe that this phenomenon is going to devour the world! Our paper looks at this from a number of different perspectives and we believe there is some real potential here to go beyond the usual orthodoxies and consider how it may well be useful. We seldom think of the value of branding in association to concepts like immigration. Whilst we mostly believe that the digital world of the internet is a powerful and useful resource to aid and support many endeavors, we seldom think of how consuming and potentially negative these applications can be

Courses for Horses: A Systematic Approach to Making Change Stick in the Workplace

In this paper, we will argue that systems theory is more accessible and acceptable in the development and sustaining of change in the workplace. Consideration and attention must be given to the importance of finding a common language and using the same currency

Courses for Horses, The In-Side Track, Part II

At the 2013 NBEA conference we introduced and presented our paper “Courses for Horses, Making Change Stick in the Workplace” and we laid out the framework for our systemic cybernetically informed process model to enable organizations to achieve second order change (Alanson, 1971) or “change that sticks”. We also addressed issues of language (Koestler, 1979) and currency (Llopis, 2012)

The Trump Branding Machine

The 2016 presidential election is like no other. The Donald Trump campaign has thrown all traditional and conventional wisdom of campaigning out of the window. The use of social media and creation of special events drives the Donald Trump branding machine – with little funding from the usual sources – one important one being the GOP coffers. Although we have had celebrity leaders in politics the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even a president, Ronald Regan – we have never seen such a blatant celebrity approach to seeking the presidency of the United States. An estimated $3 billion worth of media coverage without an advertising dollar spent tells us we have something to learn from the Trump branding machine. (Schroeder, 2016

The Branding of Fake News and its Economic Consequences

In our 2016 Northeast Business and Economics Association paper, “The Trump Branding Machine,” we pointed out that the Trump Presidential campaign was unlike any we have ever witnessed. Donald Trump is now the President of the United States of America. This paper examines some of the extra and unusual dimensions he brings to the office of the Presidency, the White House and the public consciousness. (Vitale/Sutcliffe, 2016) Trump’s Presidency has raised the level of political awareness – whether it is dividing or unifying. These conversations point to heightened levels of consciousness as it relates to political discourse within industry, classroom, and just about everywhere else

The c-terminal extension of a hybrid immunoglobulin A/G heavy chain is responsible for its Golgi-mediated sorting to the vacuole

We have assessed the ability of the plant secretory pathway to handle the expression of complex heterologous proteins by investigating the fate of a hybrid immunoglobulin A/G in tobacco cells. Although plant cells can express large amounts of the antibody, a relevant proportion is normally lost to vacuolar sorting and degradation. Here we show that the synthesis of high amounts of IgA/G does not impose stress on the plant secretory pathway. Plant cells can assemble antibody chains with high efficiency and vacuolar transport occurs only after the assembled immunoglobulins have traveled through the Golgi complex. We prove that vacuolar delivery of IgA/G depends on the presence of a cryptic sorting signal in the tailpiece of the IgA/G heavy chain. We also show that unassembled light chains are efficiently secreted as monomers by the plant secretory pathway

Azumaya Objects in Triangulated Bicategories

We introduce the notion of Azumaya object in general homotopy-theoretic settings. We give a self-contained account of Azumaya objects and Brauer groups in bicategorical contexts, generalizing the Brauer group of a commutative ring. We go on to describe triangulated bicategories and prove a characterization theorem for Azumaya objects therein. This theory applies to give a homotopical Brauer group for derived categories of rings and ring spectra. We show that the homotopical Brauer group of an Eilenberg-Mac Lane spectrum is isomorphic to the homotopical Brauer group of its underlying commutative ring. We also discuss tilting theory as an application of invertibility in triangulated bicategories.Comment: 23 pages; final version; to appear in Journal of Homotopy and Related Structure

Would you like to sample'l Robot engagement in a shopping centre

© 2017 IEEE. Nowadays, robots are gradually appearing in public spaces such as libraries, train stations, airports and shopping centres. Only a limited percentage of research literature explores robot applications in public spaces. Studying robot applications in the wild is particularly important for designing commercially viable applications able to meet a specific goal. Therefore, in this paper we conduct an experiment to test a robot application in a shopping centre, aiming to provide results relevant for today's technological capability and market. We compared the performance of a robot and a human in promoting food samples in a shopping centre, a well known commercial application, and then analysed the effects of the type of engagement used to achieve this goal. Our results show that the robot is able to engage customers similarly to a human as expected. However unexpectedly, while an actively engaging human was able to perform better than a passively engaging human, we found the opposite effect for the robot. In this paper we investigate this phenomenon, with possible explanation ready to be explored and tested in subsequent research

Directing human attention with pointing

© 2014 IEEE. Pointing is a typical means of directing a human's attention to a specific object or event. Robot pointing behaviours that direct the attention of humans are critical for human-robot interaction, communication and collaboration. In this paper, we describe an experiment undertaken to investigate human comprehension of a humanoid robot's pointing behaviour. We programmed a NAO robot to point to markers on a large screen and asked untrained human subjects to identify the target of the robots pointing gesture. We found that humans are able to identify robot pointing gestures. Human subjects achieved higher levels of comprehension when the robot pointed at objects closer to the gesturing arm and when they stood behind the robot. In addition, we found that subjects performance improved with each assessment task. These new results can be used to guide the design of effective robot pointing behaviours that enable more effective robot to human communication and improve human-robot collaborative performance