The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer

Snap-n-Snack: a Food Image Recognition Application

Many people desire to be informed about the nutritional specifics of the food they consume. Current popular dietary tracking methods are too slow and tedious for a lot of consumers due to requiring manual data entry for everything eaten. We propose a system that will take advantage of image recognition and the internal camera of Android phones to identify food based off of a picture of a user’s plate. Over the course the last year, we trained an object detection model with images of different types of food, built a mobile application around it, and tested their integration and performance. We believe that our program meets the requirements we set out for it at its conception and delivers a simple, fast, and efficient way of tracking one’s diet

Economic valuation of marine and coastal ecosystems: is it currently fit for purpose?

In this paper, we consider whether the current “state of the art” of environmental valuation is suitable for producing policy-relevant estimates of the benefits or costs of changes in marine and coastal ecosystems. We review recent changes in European legislation which has meant an increasing demand for economic valuation from the policy and regulatory community. The next section considers, at a more conceptual level, whether the economic “toolbox” and scientific evidence is up to the task of meeting the demand for more evidence-based policy. Finally, three case studies are used to explore the nature of the valuation task and review what is currently known. These case studies are of salt-marsh restoration, marine renewable energy investments, and deep sea conservation

The Effectiveness of Top Management Groups in Manufacturing Organisations

We test whether demographic characteristics and team processes in top management teams predict the subsequent productivity and profitability of their companies in 42 UK manufacturing organisation. The results that there are independent effects of both demographic characteristics and team processes. Team member mean educational level and team tenure both predict the subsequent productivity and profitability of the companies positively, while age diversity in the team is a negative predictor of company performance. Team processes (clarity of and commitment to objectives, participation, task orientation, and support for innovation) predict (positively) company performance. Only mean educational level, of the demographic variables, also predicts team processes, suggesting that the effects of demographic variables on company performance are not strongly mediated by team processes. The implications of these findings for the composition and development of top management teams are discussed.

Corticosterone as a mediator of the tradeoff between survival and reproduction

Organisms cannot simultaneously maximize their investment in survival and reproductive success, thus these traits are said to trade off against one another. The physiological mechanisms that help guide these investment decisions are not fully understood. Stress-induced corticosterone is a strong candidate mechanism, because it is thought to promote survival-oriented behavior and physiology at the expense of non-critical functions such as reproduction. In this dissertation, I studied multiple components of corticosterone physiology (baseline corticosterone and stress-induced corticosterone) in several species of passerine birds to address this question from a variety of angels. I first provide direct support for corticosterone playing a role in the reproduction-survival tradeoff. Stress-induced measures of corticosterone predicted greater survival and lower reproductive performance. Baseline corticosterone, however, appears to reflect quality, with greater baseline levels associated with greater survival and reproduction. I then explore the relationship between corticosterone and reproduction at a finer scale, using both correlative and experimental approaches. Individual variation in corticosterone was negatively associated with both brooding behavior and offspring feeding rate, but experimental manipulation of corticosterone in the latter study had no effect. And finally, I evaluated the relationship between environment and endogenous corticosterone levels, finding no support for any relationship between the two. Altogether these results show that corticosterone is closely tied to survival and reproduction and should be considered when evaluating mechanisms of investment in fitness

Letter from Stephen Patterson to his father, Jefferson Patterson on March 3, 1862

Stephen Patterson wrote this letter to his father Jefferson on March 3, 1862 from school at Oxford. Stephen writes that he has been ill with measles and that the students were glad to hear of the occupation of Nashville.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/special_ms236_correspond/1032/thumbnail.jp

Deregulation of conveyancing markets in England and Wales

There has been much concern in recent years with whether the ‘privilege’ of self- regulation accorded to the professions works for or against the public interest (Federal Trade Commission, 1984; Monopolies and Mergers Commission, 1970, 1976a and 1976b; Department of Trade and Industry, 1989; Courts and Legal Services Act, 1990). Ogus (1993) argues that ‘Self-regulation has had a bad press’ and that ‘most of this criticism is well-founded in relation to some forms of self- regulation’. Economists have been, traditionally, highly critical of many aspects of professional self-regulation.2 More recently, there has been a greater awareness of the informational asymmetry inherent in professional markets which demands some protection for the (infrequent) consumer of personal professional services (see, for example, Dingwall and Fenn (1987)). Commentators have identified three principal instruments of such selfregulators which work against the public interest: (1) restrictions on entry; (2) restrictions on fee competition; and (3) restrictions on advertising and other means of promoting a competitive process within the profession.

Spatial Competition in Private Labels

Previous studies find that private labels increase retailers' bargaining power with manufacturers and allow retailers to price discriminate. We use a spatial discrete choice model to show that retailers also use store brands to create market power through store differentiation, but not as a means of building market share.Marketing,

Film Speed or the ISO

Light is energy. Brighter light is more energy than dimmer light. This concept is central to understanding film speed, or ISO