The Blue Obelisk Community

Poster presented at the VSMF symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The Internet has brought together a group of chemists who are driven by wanting to do things better, but are frustrated with the Closed systems that chemists currently have to work with. they share a belief in the concepts of Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source. And they express this in software, data, algorithms, specifications, tutorials, demonstrations, articles and anything that helps get the message across. [http://www.blueobelisk.org/

A Multimodal Analysis Using an Exemplar from Japanese Television Advertising

A multimodal analysis is used to investigate for the presence of situated meanings of uchi/soto in Japanese advertising. The analysis supports the proposition that discourses of gendered relations of uchi/soto may be found in contemporary Japanese television advertising. The article argues that relations of uchi/soto provide a unique window into Japanese consumption behavior. I advocate for multimodal critical discourse analysis as a preferred methodology and theoretical framework for multimodal advertising research applications. I discuss social and economic implications of reproducing gendered relations of uchi/soto in advertising and offer suggestions for future research on situated meanings

Development and Validation of Probabilistic Fatigue Models Containing Out-life Suspensions

Author\u27s abstract: In the area of reliability engineering it is necessary to be confident that a component or system of components will not fail under use for safety and cost reasons. One major mechanism of failure to a mechanical component is fatigue. This is the repetitious motion of loading and unloading of the material, typically below the ultimate tensile strength of the material, which ultimately leads to a catastrophic failure. To ensure this does not happen, engineers design components based on tests to determine the life of these components. These tests are typically conducted on a bench type tester in which a sample it subjected to tension and compression, or supported in a rotational machine in which a load is applied to one end to simulate constant bending. The results from these tests tell how long it is predicted that the part will last. This data however is not always complete. It sometimes happens that not every specimen tested actually makes it to failure; the un-failed specimens are known as suspensions. This can occur for numerous reasons. Methods currently exist for handling suspensions; however these methods require tedious hand calculations and interpolations from multiple graphs which are limited in availability. Presented here are five methods utilizing the Monte Carlo technique in a computer simulation based on Weibull-Johnson confidence numbers that take into account suspensions. This simulation allows for data from an existing experiment to be used as inputs and either validate the findings or bring attention for more testing. The model allows for two different data sets containing suspensions to be analyzed and determine with statistical confidence whether or not there is a difference between the two populations

A Frame Analysis Approach To Cross-Cultural Television Advertising

The role of visuals in advertising research is examined. An argument is developed to support a theory of frame analysis for cross-cultural television advertising.  Frame analysis is explained and commercials from Japan and the Dominican Republic are used to illustrate application of the theory. It is hoped that frame analysis will supplement content analysis as a methodological approach to cross-cultural television advertising

Cultural Discontinuity In Post-Mao China: An Itinerant Ethnography Of McDonald's Beijing

Universalistic approaches cannot account for the diversity of culture in a rapidly changing post-communist society. Different age cohorts within countries may exhibit dissimilar values and behavioral orientations.  This article lays a foundation for the use of broader philosophical and methodological frameworks for the study of culture in an age of globalization. Bourdieu’s concepts of “habitus” and “hysteresis effect” are described and applied to a study of post-Mao consumer food culture in China. Food consumption in China is situated in a historical, political and ideological context. McDonald’s Beijing is examined as part of an itinerant ethnography to illustrate the contested meanings of a popular transnational cultural icon.

Bayesian Learning and Predictability in a Stochastic Nonlinear Dynamical Model

Bayesian inference methods are applied within a Bayesian hierarchical modelling framework to the problems of joint state and parameter estimation, and of state forecasting. We explore and demonstrate the ideas in the context of a simple nonlinear marine biogeochemical model. A novel approach is proposed to the formulation of the stochastic process model, in which ecophysiological properties of plankton communities are represented by autoregressive stochastic processes. This approach captures the effects of changes in plankton communities over time, and it allows the incorporation of literature metadata on individual species into prior distributions for process model parameters. The approach is applied to a case study at Ocean Station Papa, using Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo computational techniques. The results suggest that, by drawing on objective prior information, it is possible to extract useful information about model state and a subset of parameters, and even to make useful long-term forecasts, based on sparse and noisy observations

Situational reasoning for road driving in an urban environment

Robot navigation in urban environments requires situational reasoning. Given the complexity of the environment and the behavior specified by traffic rules, it is necessary to recognize the current situation to impose the correct traffic rules. In an attempt to manage the complexity of the situational reasoning subsystem, this paper describes a finite state machine model to govern the situational reasoning process. The logic state machine and its interaction with the planning system are discussed. The approach was implemented on Alice, Team Caltech’s entry into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Results from the qualifying rounds are discussed. The approach is validated and the shortcomings of the implementation are identified

After the Crash: Examining Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Business Ethics

Research has shown that business students are less ethical than students in other disciplines (Segal et al., 2011), which is a worrying finding, considering that unethical business practices are seen as a major feature leading to the world economic recession in 2008. However, business schools across the globe have consistently taught the subject of ethics in order to instil an ethical mind-set in their graduates. The way business ethics is embedded in the curriculum has been the subject of much debate, with a range of pedagogical approaches taken. This paper examines the current teaching of ethics, by examining two business programmes that take different pedagogical approaches at Cork Institute of Technology. The findings suggest that there is little difference in how business ethics is perceived by students regardless of how it is taught, and points to ethical values and principles being formed much earlier in a person’s life

Probing the circulation of ring-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates

This paper reports the results of a theoretical and experimental study of how the initial circulation of ring-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) can be probed by time-of-flight (TOF) images. We have studied theoretically the dynamics of a BEC after release from a toroidal trap potential by solving the 3D Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation. The trap and condensate characteristics matched those of a recent experiment. The circulation, experimentally imparted to the condensate by stirring, was simulated theoretically by imprinting a linear azimuthal phase on the initial condensate wave function. The theoretical TOF images were in good agreement with the experimental data. We find that upon release the dynamics of the ring--shaped condensate proceeds in two distinct phases. First, the condensate expands rapidly inward, filling in the initial hole until it reaches a minimum radius that depends on the initial circulation. In the second phase, the density at the inner radius increases to a maximum after which the hole radius begins slowly to expand. During this second phase a series of concentric rings appears due to the interference of ingoing and outgoing matter waves from the inner radius. The results of the GP equation predict that the hole area is a quadratic function of the initial circulation when the condensate is released directly from the trap in which it was stirred and is a linear function of the circulation if the trap is relaxed before release. These scalings matched the data. Thus, hole size after TOF can be used as a reliable probe of initial condensate circulation. This connection between circulation and hole size after TOF will facilitate future studies of atomtronic systems that are implemented in ultracold quantum gases.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

How Super Are Video Supers? A Test Of Communication Efficacy

Interest in the role of video supers-superimposed video presentations of verbal information-has grouwn among consumers, advertisers, the television networks, and public policymakers, as supers have become prevalent in television commercials. The authors empirically address the communications efficacy of video supers in a sample of 200 different commercials that contain video supers Drawing on a theory of modality effects, the authors examine the comprehensive of video supers relative to commercial content. The authors develop hypotheses and analyze structural determinants of video super comprehension, such as presence of a voice-over, rate of presentation, and presentation size. The findings are supportive of the predictions and suggest that viewer opportunity to process information in a video super might be a critical element in any strategy to increase viewer comprehension rates