Consumers, Play and Communitas—an Anthropological View on Building Consumer Involvement on a Mass Scale

There is an increasing interest in effective methods for building consumer involvement on a mass scale. This paper offers an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for consumer involvement analysis and forwards an anthropological approach to this issue. It uses categories of play and communitas to examine cultural dynamics underlying consumer involvement. It summarizes and extends theoretical understanding of the topic and provides numerous examples from contemporary marketplace such as Heineken Open’er Festival and Volkswagen ‘Fun Theory’ initiative. Several research propositions are formulated for future empirical endeavors and implications for practice are defined

Prankvertising – Pranks as a New Form of Brand Advertising Online

A practical joke (i.e. a prank) belongs to a category of disparagement humor, as it is a playful act held to amuse, tease or even mock the victim, and to entertain the audience. Alt-hough humor has been long exploited in broadcast and print advertising, the use of practical jokes is a more recent phenomenon esp. in digital marketing. The development of the Inter-net and social media creates new opportunities for using pranks as disguised adverts embed-ded in online strategies and there is an increasing number of companies which exploit pranks as a creative content solution for their on-line presence. As there is little academic endeavor devoted to this subject, this paper forwards a theoretical and practical framework for pranks. It recognizes pranks as innovative forms of digital advertising and it analyses their potential in terms of branding effectiveness (e.g. in maximizing brand reach, exposure, brand visibility, drawing consumer attention, eliciting strong emotions etc.). Possible prank effects are inferred from the theory of humor and from the secondary data collected by the authors of this paper. Key challenges, risks and limitations are discussed and relevant exam-ples are provided. The paper concludes with several research areas and questions to be ad-dressed in future empirical studies

On the connectivity of the Julia sets of meromorphic functions

We prove that every transcendental meromorphic map f with a disconnected Julia set has a weakly repelling fixed point. This implies that the Julia set of Newton's method for finding zeroes of an entire map is connected. Moreover, extending a result of Cowen for holomorphic self-maps of the disc, we show the existence of absorbing domains for holomorphic self-maps of hyperbolic regions whose iterates tend to a boundary point. In particular, the results imply that periodic Baker domains of Newton's method for entire maps are simply connected, which solves a well-known open question.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figure

Hyperbolic dimension of Julia sets of meromorphic maps with logarithmic tracts

We prove that for meromorphic maps with logarithmic tracts (e.g. entire or meromorphic maps with a finite number of poles from class $\mathcal B$), the Julia set contains a compact invariant hyperbolic Cantor set of Hausdorff dimension greater than 1. Hence, the hyperbolic dimension of the Julia set is greater than 1.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Ratings or pairwise comparisons? An experimental study on scale usability

A series of experiments was run in order to evaluate the usability of two different measurement approaches: ratings and ranks (pairwise comparisons). Respondents were asked to assess perceived characteristics (i.e. height and length) of different physical objects by using either a rating or a ranking scale. An artificial neural network model was built to analyse the ranks and standard statistical tests were applied to analyse the ratings. The results were then statistically compared with actual (real) characteristics of objects (i.e. their real height and length). Both systems for measuring values were found equally valid in projecting reality. Such findings offer some methodological and epistemological insights, as they provide information on the measurement power of each scale in terms of approximating real-life phenomena

CFD as a tool to optimize aeration tank design and operation

YesIn a novel development on previous computational fluid dynamics studies, the work reported here used an Eulerian two-fluid model with the shear stress transport k–ω turbulence closure model and bubble interaction models to simulate aeration tank performance at full scale and to identify process performance issues resulting from design parameters and operating conditions. The current operating scenario was found to produce a fully developed spiral flow. Reduction of the airflow rates to the average and minimum design values led to a deterioration of the mixing conditions and formation of extended unaerated fluid regions. The influence of bubble-induced mixing on the reactor performance was further assessed via simulations of the residence time distribution of the fluid. Internal flow recirculation ensured long contact times between the phases; however, hindered axial mixing and the presence of dead zones were also identified. Finally, two optimization schemes based on modified design and operating scenarios were evaluated. The adjustment of the airflow distribution between the control zones led to improved mixing and a 20% improvement to the mass transfer coefficient. Upgrading the diffuser grid was found to be an expensive and ineffective solution, leading to worsening of the mixing conditions and yielding the lowest mass transfer coefficient compared with the other optimization schemes studied.College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Birmingham, U

Large language models effectively leverage document-level context for literary translation, but critical errors persist

Large language models (LLMs) are competitive with the state of the art on a wide range of sentence-level translation datasets. However, their ability to translate paragraphs and documents remains unexplored because evaluation in these settings is costly and difficult. We show through a rigorous human evaluation that asking the Gpt-3.5 (text-davinci-003) LLM to translate an entire literary paragraph (e.g., from a novel) at once results in higher-quality translations than standard sentence-by-sentence translation across 18 linguistically-diverse language pairs (e.g., translating into and out of Japanese, Polish, and English). Our evaluation, which took approximately 350 hours of effort for annotation and analysis, is conducted by hiring translators fluent in both the source and target language and asking them to provide both span-level error annotations as well as preference judgments of which system's translations are better. We observe that discourse-level LLM translators commit fewer mistranslations, grammar errors, and stylistic inconsistencies than sentence-level approaches. With that said, critical errors still abound, including occasional content omissions, and a human translator's intervention remains necessary to ensure that the author's voice remains intact. We publicly release our dataset and error annotations to spur future research on evaluation of document-level literary translation.Comment: preprint (31 pages