Scottish country of origin: its role and value in the identities of Scottish premium/luxury brands.

The focus of this study is the role and function of country of origin (COO) in the creation and communication of the brand identities of Scottish premium/luxury brands. It applies the identity concept which is well developed in the branding literature to the COO literature where the focus on the consumer perspective of country image has resulted in the area of origin management being underdeveloped. Recognising the paucity of COO literature which examines the mechanisms and processes used by luxury brands to communicate COO, these are also analysed. The study uses an innovative two stage sequential mixed methods research design. In the first stage, the macro perspective is gained from the analysis of a database of companies compiled specifically for the study covering six categories of Scottish premium/luxury brands. Additionally a postal survey and analysis of company web pages gather a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to examine the role of COO. The second stage gains strategic insights from semi structured interviews with business elites achieving in depth understanding of the decision making process regarding the strategic advantages of COO in brand identities. The value of the study lies in the contribution to knowledge from frameworks which identify: the characteristics which differentiate companies within and across luxury sectors and organisational structure models which reflect the dominant ownership structures in the Scottish food and beverage, textiles/cashmere and whisky sectors; the dimensions of Scottish premium/luxury brands across a range of product categories; the motivations and drivers for adopting a COO identity; the criteria which distinguish COO brands; the COO communication process. The importance of COO as a key differentiating device which conveys competitive advantage is developed using the metaphor of COO as the anchor which locates the brand in a place which evokes symbolic, emotional and psychological associations and provides the brand with protection and security

People with aphasia creating an aphasia friendly website: The DMU4 experience

People with aphasia creating an aphasia friendly website: The DMU4 experience Bixley,M., DMU4, Hall, R., Weale, R., Collingwood, J., Marshall, F. & Hamilton, C. Background Information The DMU4 Conversation group is part of Aphasia Leicester; a community based, voluntary sector, long term support organisation for People with Aphasia (PWA). Members of DMU4 have experienced being unable to access information about their condition because of the way in which the information is presented. These personal experiences are supported by research such as the Care Quality Commission’s (2011) report that suggested that only 40% of social services in Britain provided information in an accessible way for PWA post stroke. In 2011, DMU4 created a leaflet about aphasia that was designed to be used in acute hospitals to educate stroke survivors, relatives and hospital staff about aphasia (Bixley et al, 2011). This leaflet has been distributed to hospitals, surgeries and Speech and Language Therapy Departments in Leicestershire and Rutland. Last year DMU4 decided that they would like to embark on a new project; creating a website about aphasia that was also accessible to PWA. Method The group decided that there were three main factors that needed to guide the construction and structure of the website. Firstly, people with aphasia would appear on the website as aphasia experts. Secondly, navigation around the website should be aphasia friendly, based on visual images and accessible written language. Lastly, members of DMU4 would retain copyright over their own images. For this reason, the site was hosted on “Our DMU Commons” a self organising space that allows users to co construct their own website using open source software. The content of the website was agreed through group discussions. Following these discussions, nine DMU4 members attended a whole day filming session in which their perceptions of aphasia were recorded. Films were then transcribed and edited into eleven themes using a grounded approach. Skeat & Perry (2007) suggest this approach is useful when investigating information that is not available anywhere else, such as the information presented in this website. Informed consent was elicited through discussions, meetings, film and website screenings and signed agreement. Results and discussion The DMU4 website project has two tangible outcomes. The first is that the site will be available to people who want to learn about aphasia. The second is that the resource will be available for Speech and Language Therapy students. Learning activities will enable students to practise recognising and understand aphasia from the perspective of those who live with the loss of language post stroke. The practices of DMU4 are rooted firmly in the social approach to aphasia therapy (Pound, Parr, Lindsay and Woolf, 2000). It is hoped that the website’s third, less measurable, outcome will be a contribution to overcoming the attitudinal and informational barriers that are experienced by PWA post stoke. References BIXLEY, M., DMU4 & HAMILTON, C. (2011) Aphasia – an information leaflet designed by people with aphasia. British Aphasiology Society Biennial International Conference Book of Abstracts, 12. CARE QUALITY COMMISSION (2011) Supporting life after stroke: A review of services for people who have had a stroke and their carers. London: Care Quality Commission. SKEAT, J. & PERRY, A. (2008). Grounded theory as a method for research in speech and language therapy. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 43, 2, 95-109. POUND, C., PARR, S., LINDSAY, J. & WOOLF, C. (2000) Beyond Aphasia: Therapies for Living with Communication Disability. Bicester: Winslow

Impulse shopping in convenience stores does gender make a difference?

The paper explores the phenomenon of impulse purchasing, which accounts for a growing proportion of total retail spend. The study investigates whether males and females act differently in respect of impulse purchasing. Impulse purchasing has been previously investigated in a range of settings and across a range of product types. The retail setting selected here is the convenience store (c-store) sector because c-stores depend traditionally on top-up, distress and impulse purchases. The types of purchases made at convenience stores are generally smaller items. An objective of c-stores is to get customers to increase their spending on higher value items. C-stores have a core user group of 26% of adults. Differences in purchasing behaviour between genders are explored in the paper. Literature on comparisons between male and female shopping behaviour is reviewed and related to findings on variations in shopping behaviour previously identified in the c-store sector. Within the above context, quantitative primary research was undertaken. 300 postal questionnaires (150 each to males and females) were carried out with consumers from a Scottish locality. Attitudes towards their local convenience store and their purchasing habits when shopping there were investigated. The majority of respondents were female (59.8%) aged 36-50 (26.2%). Males and females had similar rank orders for choice of c-store attributes, with satisfaction of impulse needs being ranked equally unimportant by both groups. Their expectations of c-stores were similar; however there were some differences in purchasing habits. Results indicated gender differences concerning purchasing behaviour within convenience stores, both for planned and unplanned purchases. The most significant variances were females having a higher level of agreement that impulse purchasing is related to trying new products and having a higher level of satisfaction with the majority of impulse purchases. Recommendations for c-store retailers are that the merchandising techniques used to stimulate impulse purchases may have to be reconsidered in relation to gender

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: the transition to large-scale cosmic homogeneity

We have made the largest-volume measurement to date of the transition to large-scale homogeneity in the distribution of galaxies. We use the WiggleZ survey, a spectroscopic survey of over 200,000 blue galaxies in a cosmic volume of ~1 (Gpc/h)^3. A new method of defining the 'homogeneity scale' is presented, which is more robust than methods previously used in the literature, and which can be easily compared between different surveys. Due to the large cosmic depth of WiggleZ (up to z=1) we are able to make the first measurement of the transition to homogeneity over a range of cosmic epochs. The mean number of galaxies N(<r) in spheres of comoving radius r is proportional to r^3 within 1%, or equivalently the fractal dimension of the sample is within 1% of D_2=3, at radii larger than 71 \pm 8 Mpc/h at z~0.2, 70 \pm 5 Mpc/h at z~0.4, 81 \pm 5 Mpc/h at z~0.6, and 75 \pm 4 Mpc/h at z~0.8. We demonstrate the robustness of our results against selection function effects, using a LCDM N-body simulation and a suite of inhomogeneous fractal distributions. The results are in excellent agreement with both the LCDM N-body simulation and an analytical LCDM prediction. We can exclude a fractal distribution with fractal dimension below D_2=2.97 on scales from ~80 Mpc/h up to the largest scales probed by our measurement, ~300 Mpc/h, at 99.99% confidence.Comment: 21 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Upper limits on the strength of periodic gravitational waves from PSR J1939+2134

The first science run of the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors presented the opportunity to test methods of searching for gravitational waves from known pulsars. Here we present new direct upper limits on the strength of waves from the pulsar PSR J1939+2134 using two independent analysis methods, one in the frequency domain using frequentist statistics and one in the time domain using Bayesian inference. Both methods show that the strain amplitude at Earth from this pulsar is less than a few times $10^{-22}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the Proceedings of the 5th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves, Tirrenia, Pisa, Italy, 6-11 July 200

Improving the sensitivity to gravitational-wave sources by modifying the input-output optics of advanced interferometers

We study frequency dependent (FD) input-output schemes for signal-recycling interferometers, the baseline design of Advanced LIGO and the current configuration of GEO 600. Complementary to a recent proposal by Harms et al. to use FD input squeezing and ordinary homodyne detection, we explore a scheme which uses ordinary squeezed vacuum, but FD readout. Both schemes, which are sub-optimal among all possible input-output schemes, provide a global noise suppression by the power squeeze factor, while being realizable by using detuned Fabry-Perot cavities as input/output filters. At high frequencies, the two schemes are shown to be equivalent, while at low frequencies our scheme gives better performance than that of Harms et al., and is nearly fully optimal. We then study the sensitivity improvement achievable by these schemes in Advanced LIGO era (with 30-m filter cavities and current estimates of filter-mirror losses and thermal noise), for neutron star binary inspirals, and for narrowband GW sources such as low-mass X-ray binaries and known radio pulsars. Optical losses are shown to be a major obstacle for the actual implementation of these techniques in Advanced LIGO. On time scales of third-generation interferometers, like EURO/LIGO-III (~2012), with kilometer-scale filter cavities, a signal-recycling interferometer with the FD readout scheme explored in this paper can have performances comparable to existing proposals. [abridged]Comment: Figs. 9 and 12 corrected; Appendix added for narrowband data analysi

Associations among physiological and subjective sexual response, sexual desire, and salivary steroid hormones in healthy premenopausal women.

Few studies have examined how sexual arousal influences healthy premenopausal women’s hormones, limiting our understanding of basic physiology and our ability to transfer knowledge from clinical and nonhuman populations. Aim: To examine how sexual arousal and steroid hormones (testosterone [T], cortisol [C], estradiol [E]) were linked, to see whether hormone levels influenced and/or changed in response to sexual arousal elicited via visual erotic stimuli in healthy women. Methods: Participants included 40 healthy premenopausal women not using exogenous hormones. Main Outcome Measures: Change in genital sexual arousal (vaginal pulse amplitude), change in subjective sexual arousal, sexual desire (via the Sexual Desire Inventory and Female Sexual Function Index scales), as well as T, C, and E via saliva samples taken before and following viewing of erotic stimuli as genital arousal was recorded via a vaginal photoplethysmograph. Results: E increased in response to sexual stimuli but this was not statistically associated with genital sexual arousal, whereas C decreased in association with genital sexual arousal, and T showed no statistically significant change. Relationship status was linked to genital but not subjective sexual arousal such that dating women exhibited higher genital sexual arousal than single or partnered women. Results indicated that all three hormones were associated with self-reported genital arousal (via the Detailed Assessment of Sexual Arousal scales) and sexual desire in different domains, and both T and E were associated with self-reported orgasms. Conclusion: Findings point to the need to examine multiple hormones in multiple ways (e.g., baseline, changes, stimulated) and question using erotic stimuli-induced arousal as a model for women’s endocrine responses to sexuality.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83877/1/associations_among_physiological.pd

Search for gravitational wave bursts in LIGO's third science run

We report on a search for gravitational wave bursts in data from the three LIGO interferometric detectors during their third science run. The search targets subsecond bursts in the frequency range 100-1100 Hz for which no waveform model is assumed, and has a sensitivity in terms of the root-sum-square (rss) strain amplitude of hrss ~ 10^{-20} / sqrt(Hz). No gravitational wave signals were detected in the 8 days of analyzed data.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Amaldi-6 conference proceedings to be published in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Prospective cohort study reveals unexpected aetiologies of livestock abortion in northern Tanzania

Livestock abortion is an important cause of productivity losses worldwide and many infectious causes of abortion are zoonotic pathogens that impact on human health. Little is known about the relative importance of infectious causes of livestock abortion in Africa, including in subsistence farming communities that are critically dependent on livestock for food, income, and wellbeing. We conducted a prospective cohort study of livestock abortion, supported by cross-sectional serosurveillance, to determine aetiologies of livestock abortions in livestock in Tanzania. This approach generated several important findings including detection of a Rift Valley fever virus outbreak in cattle; high prevalence of C. burnetii infection in livestock; and the first report of Neospora caninum, Toxoplasma gondii, and pestiviruses associated with livestock abortion in Tanzania. Our approach provides a model for abortion surveillance in resource-limited settings. Our findings add substantially to current knowledge in sub-Saharan Africa, providing important evidence from which to prioritise disease interventions

Allele-Specific HLA Loss and Immune Escape in Lung Cancer Evolution

Immune evasion is a hallmark of cancer. Losing the ability to present neoantigens through human leukocyte antigen (HLA) loss may facilitate immune evasion. However, the polymorphic nature of the locus has precluded accurate HLA copy-number analysis. Here, we present loss of heterozygosity in human leukocyte antigen (LOHHLA), a computational tool to determine HLA allele-specific copy number from sequencing data. Using LOHHLA, we find that HLA LOH occurs in 40% of non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) and is associated with a high subclonal neoantigen burden, APOBEC-mediated mutagenesis, upregulation of cytolytic activity, and PD-L1 positivity. The focal nature of HLA LOH alterations, their subclonal frequencies, enrichment in metastatic sites, and occurrence as parallel events suggests that HLA LOH is an immune escape mechanism that is subject to strong microenvironmental selection pressures later in tumor evolution. Characterizing HLA LOH with LOHHLA refines neoantigen prediction and may have implications for our understanding of resistance mechanisms and immunotherapeutic approaches targeting neoantigens. Video Abstract [Figure presented] Development of the bioinformatics tool LOHHLA allows precise measurement of allele-specific HLA copy number, improves the accuracy in neoantigen prediction, and uncovers insights into how immune escape contributes to tumor evolution in non-small-cell lung cancer