Ethical Judgments of Sexual Appeals in Advertising Image - Based Products to Teens

The use of sexual appeals in advertising is increasingly prevalent in the United States. Perhaps the use is in response to the preponderance of advertisements in everyday life. The advertisements most often featuring such appeals are for image-based products. Actual images in ads can often convey emotions powerfully, which may explain the frequent use in marketing image-based products. These products include: candy, liquor, cigarettes, jewelry, fragrance, cosmetics and fashion goods. It is advertisements for products such as, but not limited to these, that often use sexual appeals. The use of such appeals is constantly scrutinized in terms of ethics, regardless of the target audience. Considerable research has been done on ethics in marketing, partly because marketing is the business function most often charged with unethical practices. Ethical judgments are subjective and complex, and deal with cultural norms. Yet, there is another dimension of ethical questions when sexual appeals are used to promote products to teens. Teens (12 – 17 year olds) are an increasingly attractive market segment for advertisers, as their disposable incomes are growing. Also, teens have an ability to influence the purchase decisions of their parents and friends, and often develop a brand loyalty, which continues into adulthood. Sexual appeals have the ability to get the attention of teens, and may help to sell products to that market segment. In an effort to quantitatively analyze the ways that sexual appeals are used in media targeting teens, I performed a content analysis. Magazines were used because of their clear targeting from a marketing standpoint: with a wide variety of titles, across large demographics, advertisers can use magazines to hone in on their target market. Using the Media Research Inc. (MRI) database, which compiles magazine readership statistics much like ACNielsen publishes television viewership, I selected magazines with comparatively high teen readership. 600 advertisements in eight leading magazines that reach teens were reviewed: four publications targeted at females and four with high teen male readership were selected. The results were analyzed in conjunction with the ethical questions about the use of sexual appeals. While 20% of the ads used a form of sexual appeal, they tended to use light innuendo, humor, and degree of fantasy that create a disconnect with real sexual behavior. Only 0.7% of all the advertisements showed models engaging in erotic behavior. Because there is virtually no pornographic or offensive content, these ads will continue to be used to sell products to teens. Advertisers are currently protected under the interpretation of the Constitution’s free speech first amendment as commercial speech. However, the influence of consumer watchdog groups in this country has proven their effectiveness in the past, and will continue to play a role in marketing responsibility

The Power of Being Present: Lessons from Diplomacy in Latin America and the Caribbean for the Private Sector

Successful modern diplomacy and private sector engagements require being physically present. Based on the experience of the authors in diplomacy and corporate government affairs, this article argues that the trust that forms the basis of effective diplomacy and corporate engagement with the communities in which they operate is established best through direct physical interaction. With examples from Latin America and the Caribbean, the article explores how both diplomacy and corporate government affairs have evolved into a model of being present that emphasizes seeking to empower local populations. The article delves into how and why the United States carries out its policy, engages with governments and societies overseas, and the lessons for the private sector that can be learned from how embassies operate and how diplomats practice the art of diplomacy. Using Microsoft’s approach as an example, the article shares cases of how companies also can seek to empower communities through their physical presence

EXPLORATION OF DOMAIN-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS FOR TESTABLE HYPOTHESIS GENERATION

In the span of a decade, we have brought about a fundamental shift in the way we structure, organize, store, and conceptualize biomedical datasets. Data which had previously been siloed has been gathered, organized, and aggregated into central repositories, interlinked with each other by categorizing these vast sums of knowledge into well defined ontologies. These interlinked databases, better known as knowledge graphs, have come to redefine our ability to explore the current state of our knowledge, answer complex questions about how objects relate to each other, and invent novel connections in vastly different research disciplines. With these knowledge graphs, new ideas can be quickly formulated, instead of relying upon the insight of a single scientist or small team of experts, these ideas can be made leveraging the vast historical catalog of research progress that has been captured in biomedical databases. Knowledge graphs can be used to propose hypotheses which narrow the nearly infinite array of possible explorations which can link any pair of ideas to only those which have some historical and practical considerations. In this way, we hope to utilize these knowledge graphs to produce hypotheses, promote those which are viable, and provide them to biomedical experts. In this work, we aim to develop methodologies to produce meaningful hypotheses using these graphs as inputs. We approach this problem by (i) utilizing intrinsic mathematical properties of the intermediate nodes along a pathways, (ii) translating existing biomedical ideas into graphical structures, and (iii) incorporating niche domain-specific biomedical datasets to explore domain problems. We have shown the ability of these methods to produce practical and useful hypotheses and pathways which can be utilized by experts for immediate exploration.Doctor of Philosoph

Facilitando “the cloud”: la regulación de la protección de datos como motor de la competitividad nacional en américa latina

Cloud computing holds exceptional promise for governments and communities in Latin America to increase their national competitiveness, standards of living, and social inclusion. In this article written by two Microsoft executives, the authors describe the opportunities that cloud computing offers, with examples from many countries in the region. They recommend a public policy framework that would allow the maximization of those opportunities while highlighting how cloud computing can uplift economies by creating jobs, reducing costs, increasing agility, and enriching the capacity of governments to provide services to its citizens. Importantly, the authors highlight how cloud computing not only increases efficiency; it also increases equality. The article concludes with a vision that asserts the importance of achieving the confidence in the cloud that users require and how governments and the IT sector have the possibility to promote such trust so our societies can take advantage of the benefits of this innovative technology.El cómputo en la nube constituye una promesa excepcional para los gobiernos y las comunidades de los países de América Latina, como posibilidad de incrementar su competitividad nacional y su nivel de vida e inclusión social. En este artículo, escrito por dos directivos de Microsoft, se describen las oportunidades que el cómputo en la nube ofrece con ejemplos tomados de muchos países en la región. Los autores recomiendan un marco de políticas públicas que permitan maximizar dichas oportunidades, a la vez que resaltan cómo la nube fortalece las economías al generar empleo, reducir costos, incrementar la agilidad y mejorar la capacidad de los gobiernos para entregar servicios a sus ciudadanos. Asimismo, se enfatiza en que el cómputo en la nube no solo incrementa la eficiencia, sino que también aumenta la equidad. El artículo muestra la importancia de lograr que la nube brinde la confianza que los usuarios requieren, y explica que los gobiernos y el sector privado tienen la posibilidad de fomentar tal confianza para que nuestras sociedades aprovechen los beneficios de esta innovadora tecnología

Investigation of the Parasympathetic Effects of Lavender Essential Oil in Humans

The purpose of this study will be to investigate the claim that administration of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) essential oil (topically, orally, and/or respiratorily) produces a relaxative effect in human subjects. This investigation will theoretically be conducted in two stages. Stage one will focus primarily on determining the presence of therapeutic effects and the relative effectiveness of lavender in several application modalities. Stage two will proceed based on findings from stage one. If significant parasympathetic effects are observed in relation to one or more of the lavender oil modalities described above, a more focused investigation will be conducted in stage two to ascertain the specific active chemical component(s) in the oil that stimulate(s) the therapeutic effect

Marantic Endocarditis Associated with Pancreatic Cancer: A Case Series

Marantic endocarditis, otherwise known as nonbacterial thrombotic endocarditis (NBTE), is a well-documented phenomenon due to hypercoagulability from an underlying cause. It has been associated with a variety of inflammatory states including malignancy. Surprisingly, although hypercoagulability is often seen in patients with pancreatic cancer, marantic endocarditis has rarely been reported antemortem in this population. We report three cases of marantic endocarditis in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. In two instances, the patients’ neurological symptoms preceded the diagnosis of advanced pancreatic cancer. Health care professionals should be alert to the possibility of marantic endocarditis in any patient with cancer, especially pancreatic cancer, who presents with symptoms of neurological dysfunction or an arterial thrombotic event. Prompt diagnosis and treatment with heparin, unfractionated or low molecular weight, may prevent catastrophic CNS events and decrease morbidity in patients with pancreatic cancer and other malignancies

A Hardware Efficient Random Number Generator for Nonuniform Distributions with Arbitrary Precision

Nonuniform random numbers are key for many technical applications, and designing efficient hardware implementations of non-uniform random number generators is a very active research field. However, most state-of-the-art architectures are either tailored to specific distributions or use up a lot of hardware resources. At ReConFig 2010, we have presented a new design that saves up to 48% of area compared to state-of-the-art inversion-based implementation, usable for arbitrary distributions and precision. In this paper, we introduce a more flexible version together with a refined segmentation scheme that allows to further reduce the approximation error significantly. We provide a free software tool allowing users to implement their own distributions easily, and we have tested our random number generator thoroughly by statistic analysis and two application tests

Diamond Dicing

In OLAP, analysts often select an interesting sample of the data. For example, an analyst might focus on products bringing revenues of at least 100 000 dollars, or on shops having sales greater than 400 000 dollars. However, current systems do not allow the application of both of these thresholds simultaneously, selecting products and shops satisfying both thresholds. For such purposes, we introduce the diamond cube operator, filling a gap among existing data warehouse operations. Because of the interaction between dimensions the computation of diamond cubes is challenging. We compare and test various algorithms on large data sets of more than 100 million facts. We find that while it is possible to implement diamonds in SQL, it is inefficient. Indeed, our custom implementation can be a hundred times faster than popular database engines (including a row-store and a column-store).Comment: 29 page