The impact on and responses of viewers to product placement: a study of mainstream films.

Product placement is a promotional tool within the discipline of marketing whereby branded items feature in entertainment vehicles such as video games, television programmes, stage plays, music videos, books and films. This thesis investigates this practice in relation to mainstream, commercial films. The nature of this research gives it a multidisciplinary approach across two key themes, namely Celebrity Status and Product Placement - with Marketing Communications being the element that links them. Determining which product placements in films make the most impact upon consumers for the commercial benefit of the stakeholders is, primarily, this focus of this thesis. In total eighty-six individuals were interviewed, and the researcher used a qualitative approach, informed with a grounded theory methodology. This yielded an abundance of responses with participants providing a wealth of mixed and, at times, contradictory feedback relating to the acceptance, rejection and ethical concerns regarding product placements. As part of the research process, close attention was paid to the attraction and fascination that actors hold for research participants and how this celebrity-focus, combined with having an audience in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind, informs outcomes in terms of brand recall, enhanced brand values and eventual sales. The study concludes that film placements remain an elusive practice to assess despite it being a long-established marketing technique that has a growing, multi-billion dollar annual spend. This thesis provides insights into the practice and suggests that key variables such as the placement presentation styles and the diversity of consumers, make the commercial assessment of placements hard to determine. Thus, any measures of the success of product placement in mainstream films appear to be limited and difficult to predict

Australian Organic Market Report 2008

Being four years since the publication of a similar research document, the Australian Organic Market Report (AOMR) 2008 is a landmark report for the organic industry. The report will be invaluable for monitoring and planning the industry development during a period of high growth. Delivering consistent data for benchmarking growth across the various sectors of the industry, it will be a key tool for decision making by organic producers and marketers, along with interested parties such as government and media, in assisting in understanding the nature, size and development of the organic industry in Australia. Supply chain development has been hindered over many years by a lack of basic information about volumes, seasonality, continuity and quality, not only making it difficult for potentially new members of industry to feel confident about investing in organic, however also likely to cause overseas buyers to look for other countries with more comprehensive industry information. The report is an important base research document required by any growing industry. It has been commissioned by Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA), and has been carried out independently by the University of New England’s Organic Research Group. The report has the financial support of major sponsor Westpac Bank, all State Governments in Australia as well as many dedicated industry businesses

Observing a Light CP-Violating Higgs Boson in Diffraction

Light CP-violating Higgs bosons with mass lower than 70 GeV might have escaped detection in direct searches at the LEP collider. They may remain undetected in conventional search channels at the Tevatron and LHC. In this Letter we show that exclusive diffractive reactions may be able to probe for the existence of these otherwise elusive Higgs particles. As a prototype example, we calculate diffractive production cross-sections of the lightest Higgs boson within the framework of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with explicit CP violation. Our analysis shows that the challenging regions of parameter space corresponding to a light CP-violating Higgs boson might be accessible at the LHC provided suitable proton tagging detectors are installed.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures, version as to appear in Phys. Rev.

Two dimensional eye tracking: Sampling rate of forcing function

A study was conducted to determine the minimum update rate of a forcing function display required for the operator to approximate the tracking performance obtained on a continuous display. In this study, frequency analysis was used to determine whether there was an associated change in the transfer function characteristics of the operator. It was expected that as the forcing function display update rate was reduced, from 120 to 15 samples per second, the operator's response to the high frequency components of the forcing function would show a decrease in gain, an increase in phase lag, and a decrease in coherence

Head tracking at large angles from the straight ahead position

One of the big advantages of a helmet sight in a high performance aircraft is its off-boresight capability in aiming a fire control system. However, tracking data using a target that is moving rapidly and randomly for an extended period of time is missing. This study is intended to provide data in this area that will be of value to engineers in designing head control systems

Pattern formation by lateral inhibition with feedback: a mathematical model of Delta-Notch intercellular signalling

In many developing tissues, adjacent cells diverge in character so as to create a fine-grained pattern of cells in contrasting states of differentiation. It has been proposed that such patterns can be generated through lateral inhibition—a type cells–cell interaction whereby a cell that adopts a particular fate inhibits its immediate neighbours from doing likewise. Lateral inhibition is well documented in flies, worms and vertebrates. In all of these organisms, the transmembrane proteins Notch and Delta (or their homologues) have been identified as mediators of the interaction—Notch as receptor, Delta as its ligand on adjacent cells. However, it is not clear under precisely what conditions the Delta-Notch mechanism of lateral inhibition can generate the observed types of pattern, or indeed whether this mechanism is capable of generating such patterns by itself. Here we construct and analyse a simple and general mathematical model of such contact-mediated lateral inhibition. In accordance with experimental data, the model postulates that receipt of inhibition (i.e. activation of Notch) diminishes the ability to deliver inhibition (i.e. to produce active Delta). This gives rise to a feedback loop that can amplify differences between adjacent cells. We investigate the pattern-forming potential and temporal behavior of this model both analytically and through numerical simulation. Inhomogeneities are self-amplifying and develop without need of any other machinery, provided the feedback is sufficiently strong. For a wide range of initial and boundary conditions, the model generates fine-grained patterns similar to those observed in living systems