42,223 research outputs found
Marketing images and consumers' experiences in selling environments
In a well-functioning market, consumers exert choices not just in purchases of products but also in
selections of locations to enjoy shopping. Scholarly research has demonstrated that retail
atmospheres impact on shoppersâ pleasurable shopping experiences. Demonstrating the marketing
concept in action, shoppers consistently respond to this empowerment by for example, spending
more time shopping and spending more money in retail facilities that are perceived to offer a
pleasanter atmosphere and experience. This research pivots round an in-depth qualitative study that
evaluated the impact of a plasma screens and specific informational content on shopping centre
user behaviour. A phenomenological study of the effects of the medium, and the way in which
these systems influence behaviour, permitted a far deeper investigation of our sample group vis-Ă vis
increased browsing time and the propensity to spend. A series of eight focus discussions were
conducted with local user groups of varying age and gender. Key themes drawn from the group
discussions using axial coding indicated that the influence created by the images varied with
subjects and settings. The general consensus was that such âscreensâ created a certain ambience that
influenced the way our subjects felt about the selling environment under study. Moreover, for our
sample groups, there was clearly a link between the screened images and modern expectations of a
selling environment. The plasma screens provided added enjoyment to shoppersâ experiences,
providing them with more information enabling more informed shopping choices. The research
concludes with implications for strategic marketing, theory and practice
Interfaces (and Regional Congruence?) in Spin Glasses
We present a general theorem restricting properties of interfaces between
thermodynamic states and apply it to the spin glass excitations observed
numerically by Krzakala-Martin and Palassini-Young in spatial dimensions d=3
and 4. We show that such excitations, with interface dimension smaller than d,
cannot yield regionally congruent thermodynamic states. More generally, zero
density interfaces of translation-covariant excitations cannot be pinned (by
the disorder) in any d but rather must deflect to infinity in the thermodynamic
limit. Additional consequences concerning regional congruence in spin glasses
and other systems are discussed.Comment: 4 pages (ReVTeX); 1 figure; submitted to Physical Review Letter
Blocking and Persistence in the Zero-Temperature Dynamics of Homogeneous and Disordered Ising Models
A ``persistence'' exponent theta has been extensively used to describe the
nonequilibrium dynamics of spin systems following a deep quench: for
zero-temperature homogeneous Ising models on the d-dimensional cubic lattice,
the fraction p(t) of spins not flipped by time t decays to zero like
t^[-theta(d)] for low d; for high d, p(t) may decay to p(infinity)>0, because
of ``blocking'' (but perhaps still like a power). What are the effects of
disorder or changes of lattice? We show that these can quite generally lead to
blocking (and convergence to a metastable configuration) even for low d, and
then present two examples --- one disordered and one homogeneous --- where p(t)
decays exponentially to p(infinity).Comment: 8 pages (LaTeX); to appear in Physical Review Letter
Realistic spin glasses below eight dimensions: a highly disordered view
By connecting realistic spin glass models at low temperature to the highly
disordered model at zero temperature, we argue that ordinary Edwards-Anderson
spin glasses below eight dimensions have at most a single pair of physically
relevant pure states at nonzero low temperature. Less likely scenarios that
evade this conclusion are also discussed.Comment: 18 pages (RevTeX; 1 figure; to appear in Physical Review E
Citation Networks in High Energy Physics
The citation network constituted by the SPIRES data base is investigated
empirically. The probability that a given paper in the SPIRES data base has
citations is well described by simple power laws, ,
with for less than 50 citations and for 50 or more citations. Two models are presented that both represent the
data well, one which generates power laws and one which generates a stretched
exponential. It is not possible to discriminate between these models on the
present empirical basis. A consideration of citation distribution by subfield
shows that the citation patterns of high energy physics form a remarkably
homogeneous network. Further, we utilize the knowledge of the citation
distributions to demonstrate the extreme improbability that the citation
records of selected individuals and institutions have been obtained by a random
draw on the resulting distribution.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
Deep Inelastic Lepton-Nucleon Scattering at HERA
Data from the HERA collider experiments, H1 and ZEUS, have been fundamental
to the rapid recent development of our understanding of the partonic
composition of the proton and of QCD. This report focuses on inclusive
measurements of neutral and charged current cross sections at HERA, using the
full available data taken to date. The present precision on the proton parton
densities and the further requirements for future measurements at the Tevatron
and LHC are explored. Emphasis is also placed on the region of very low
Bjorken-x and Q^2. In this region, the `confinement' transition takes place
from partons to hadrons as the relevant degrees of freedom and novel or exotic
QCD effects associated with large parton densities are most likely to be
observed. Finally, prospects for the second phase of HERA running are
discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the XXI
International Symposium on lepton and Photon Interactions at High Energies,
Fermilab, August 200
Graph Metrics for Temporal Networks
Temporal networks, i.e., networks in which the interactions among a set of
elementary units change over time, can be modelled in terms of time-varying
graphs, which are time-ordered sequences of graphs over a set of nodes. In such
graphs, the concepts of node adjacency and reachability crucially depend on the
exact temporal ordering of the links. Consequently, all the concepts and
metrics proposed and used for the characterisation of static complex networks
have to be redefined or appropriately extended to time-varying graphs, in order
to take into account the effects of time ordering on causality. In this chapter
we discuss how to represent temporal networks and we review the definitions of
walks, paths, connectedness and connected components valid for graphs in which
the links fluctuate over time. We then focus on temporal node-node distance,
and we discuss how to characterise link persistence and the temporal
small-world behaviour in this class of networks. Finally, we discuss the
extension of classic centrality measures, including closeness, betweenness and
spectral centrality, to the case of time-varying graphs, and we review the work
on temporal motifs analysis and the definition of modularity for temporal
graphs.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, Chapter in Temporal Networks (Petter Holme and
Jari Saram\"aki editors). Springer. Berlin, Heidelberg 201
The worldwide air transportation network: Anomalous centrality, community structure, and cities' global roles
We analyze the global structure of the world-wide air transportation network,
a critical infrastructure with an enormous impact on local, national, and
international economies. We find that the world-wide air transportation network
is a scale-free small-world network. In contrast to the prediction of
scale-free network models, however, we find that the most connected cities are
not necessarily the most central, resulting in anomalous values of the
centrality. We demonstrate that these anomalies arise because of the
multi-community structure of the network. We identify the communities in the
air transportation network and show that the community structure cannot be
explained solely based on geographical constraints, and that geo-political
considerations have to be taken into account. We identify each city's global
role based on its pattern of inter- and intra-community connections, which
enables us to obtain scale-specific representations of the network.Comment: Revised versio
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