Competitive Frame Research Articles

Experimental Analysis of Ductile Cutting Regime in Face Milling of Sintered Silicon Carbide.

In this study, sintered silicon carbide is machined on a high-precision milling machine with a high-speed spindle, closed-loop linear drives and friction-free micro gap hydrostatics. A series of experiments was undertaken varying the relevant process parameters such as feedrate, cutting speed and chip thickness. For this, the milled surfaces are characterized in a process via an acoustic emission sensor. The milled surfaces were analyzed via confocal laser scanning microscopy and the ISO 25178 areal surface quality parameters such as Sa, Sq and Smr are determined. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy was used to qualitatively characterize the surfaces, but also to identify sub-surface damages such as grooves, breakouts and pitting. Raman laser spectroscopy is used to identify possible amorphization and changes to crystal structure. We used grazing incidence XRD to analyze the crystallographic structure and scanning acoustic microscopy to analyze sub-surface damages. A polycrystalline diamond tool was able to produce superior surfaces compared to diamond grinding with an areal surface roughness Sa of below 100 nm in a very competitive time frame. The finished surface exhibits a high gloss and reflectance. It can be seen that chip thickness and cutting speed have a major influence on the resulting surface quality. The undamaged surface in combination with a small median chip thickness is indicative of a ductile cutting regime.

Social transformations of cultural heritage: from benefaction to sponsoring: Evidence from mountain regions in Greece

The concept of benefaction, as shaped in the pre-industrial society, has been altered and replaced by the modern term of sponsoring. The verbal transformation emerges from a deep cultural shift. Focusing on the dipole of benefactionsponsoring, we examine the cultural transition from the traditional communities of long duration to the modern societies of consumption, taking the Greek mountainous regions as an example. We investigate the cultural shift that generates the metastasis from the communities of benefaction to the modern brandplaces that consume their own cultural heritage, mainly, at the altar of the tourism industry. Modern society has adopted the concept of sponsoring, for the grace of which, culture has to prove evidence of economic value, in order to survive. In the extremely competitive frame of the free-market economy, mountain regions appear vulnerable. The selling and buying of their culture are tempting and attractive under a constantly shrinking welfare-state and narrowing development opportunities. It depends on local and national society to rediscover and regenerate those social mechanisms able to create culture or let the modern consumption-oriented forces prevail. However, authentic principles of benefaction may form an alternative perspective for social reorganization.

Microneedles Drug Delivery: Polymeric Microneedle Arrays: Versatile Tools for an Innovative Approach to Drug Administration (Adv. Therap. 8/2019)

Microneedle devices could play the role of a painless door to the human body. These devices enable high performance in both drug delivery and diagnostic analysis. While there has been a strong effort by the healthcare industry and applied research laboratories, the microneedles platform has not yet reached commercial success in the global market. In this competitive frame, the simplest fabrication processes and the best performing products will rise to the top of the market. In article number 1900036, Luca De Stefano and co-workers review recent advances in this field.

Framing Privatisation: The Dominance of Neoliberal Discourse and the Death of the Public Good

This paper looks at the privatisation Bórd Gáis Éireann (BGÉ) in 2014 and the treatment of this issue by the mainstream print media in Ireland. From a contextual perspective, this came in the wake of the global economic recession and its longer term implications for Ireland. The media’s coverage of the sale could not be found to be impartial: both the volume and thrust of the articles were inclined to portray privatisation in a favourable, non-critical light. The majority of content was presented within Neo-Liberal frames, with a competitive frame being dominant; in other words the topic was treated from a market or business perspective rather than the perspective of the public good or wider society. A consistent source bias was also found favouring business or market interests with almost no representation of workers or civil society. Theoretically the paper argues that the framing of privatisation as a business and consumer issue, rather than a political one or that of the public good, acts to detract from the political aspects of the appropriation of public assets by international capital, including the implications for infrastructure, economic development and accountability to democratic structures, none of which receive sufficient journalistic attention.

Quasi-Markets, Competition, and School Choice Lotteries

This article problematizes the lottery as a taken-for-granted concept, which is normatively understood as a neutral process rewarding its participant based on luck. The article adopts a policy problematization frame that interrogates the limits of normative concepts. To problematize the lottery system, this article engages with the two movies on school choice, The Lottery and Waiting for “Superman”, as “instances” through the conceptual lens of a quasi-market. The main argument is that the lottery is a particular discursive practice co-constituting the competitive frame of education quasi-markets. In identifying how the spirit of competitiveness underlies a competition, and by extension the lottery system, the article posits that in a competitive setting, competitors are primarily concerned with maximizing inequality among each other.

Rank and response: A field experiment on peer information and water use behavior

Perception of peer rank, or how we perform relative to our peers, can be a powerful motivator. While research exists on the effect of social information on decision making, there is less work on how ranked comparisons with our peers influence our behavior. This paper outlines a field experiment conducted with 3896 households in Castro Valley, California, which uses household mailers with various forms of social information and peer rank messaging to motivate water conservation. The experiment tests the effect of a visible peer rank on water use, and how the competitive framing of rank information influences behavioral response. The results show that households with relatively low or high water use in the pre-treatment period responded differently to how rank information was framed. I find that a neutrally-framed peer rank caused a small “boomerang effect” (i.e., an increase in average water use) for low water use households, but this effect was eliminated by competitive framing. At the same time, a competitively-framed peer rank demotivated high water use households, increasing their average water use over the full period of the experiment. This result is supported by evidence that the competitive frame on rank information increased water use for households who ranked “last” in the peer group – a detrimental “last place effect” from competitively-framed rankings.

Lululemon Athletica

The case traces the development of Lululemon Athletica (Lulu) from founder Chip Wilson's first post-yoga euphoria in 1997 through the sale of all his shares in 2015. Officially founded in 1998, Lulu was built on the foundation of its “miracle” figure-enhancing yoga pants made from a proprietary stretch fiber. The case outlines Wilson's early experience in technical performance wear, which gave him the expertise needed to launch the Lululemon brand with its premium-priced, fashion-designed product line targeted at upscale women. The case also highlights the retailing and promotion approach that drove Lulu's first decade of success. The snapshot of how the Lulu brand cult was born and diffused provides the backdrop for assessing whether the brand has already hit its peak or whether it can sustain the explosive growth that effectively created the athleisure category. To aid in this determination, the case presents two competitors as comparative foils (Under Armour and Athleta) to contextualize Lulu's growth prospects. The Lululemon case highlights the importance of the competitive frame of reference when positioning a brand and describes how this may differ for the three competitors. The case also allows for a discussion of the challenges of maintaining the congruence of a retail brand with a diverse product line. This struggle is unique to retailers who must fit ever-varied product assortments (not just a single product line) under the umbrella of a single brand proposition, and is particularly relevant to vertically integrated brands such as Lululemon.

Positioning the Tata Nano (B)

The case focuses on positioning a new brand, the Tata Nano. The car has been widely publicized as the world's cheapest car at Rs.1 lakh. Students must consider the gap between the ultimate target, the huge emerging middle class of Indian consumers, and the limited capacity and distribution available in choosing a target. They also must select between alternative competitive frames and the various points of difference they highlight. The case unfolds in two stages. The first decision point is in 2009, at the launch of the time of the product launch. The second decision point is 18 months later, after production capacity has increased and some product safety issues have arisen.The primary goal of the case is to illustrate the choices made in developing a strong brand positioning and the interrelationship between these choices. Students select a target and an appropriate competitive frame of reference and point of difference for that target and summarize these elements in a positioning statement. The case also highlights importance of making promotion and distribution decisions that are consistent with the positioning.

Positioning the Tata Nano (A)

The case focuses on positioning a new brand, the Tata Nano. The car has been widely publicized as the world's cheapest car at Rs.1 lakh. Students must consider the gap between the ultimate target, the huge emerging middle class of Indian consumers, and the limited capacity and distribution available in choosing a target. They also must select between alternative competitive frames and the various points of difference they highlight. The case unfolds in two stages. The first decision point is in 2009, at the launch of the time of the product launch. The second decision point is 18 months later, after production capacity has increased and some product safety issues have arisen.The primary goal of the case is to illustrate the choices made in developing a strong brand positioning and the interrelationship between these choices. Students select a target and an appropriate competitive frame of reference and point of difference for that target and summarize these elements in a positioning statement. The case also highlights importance of making promotion and distribution decisions that are consistent with the positioning.

Hybrid Transmittance Fitting for Rendering Transparency on the GPU

In real-time rendering transparency is an important multi-fragment effect to visualize the structure of three-dimensional models. The per-pixel transmittance implicitly describes how the light is attenuated by traveling through several transparent fragments. We present a hybrid approach to fit the transmittance using the Heaviside step function and the trigonometric function. The k fragments with the largest contribution are exactly composited and the remaining ones are accurately compressed in an unified formulation. With a single geometry pass, fragments are sorted into a fixed-size array and overflowing ones are expanded by a truncated Fourier series. Then the transmittance is reconstructed on the fly to modulate the surface color in another geometry pass. Our approach favors high scene complexity but operates in bounded memory without losing noticeable high-frequency detail. We demonstrate that it is able to closely match the image quality at competitive frame rate, comparing to a realtime A-buffer implementation and other approximate transparency techniques.

PENGARUH BRAND POSITIONING “EVERYDAY IS HOLIDAY” TETHADAP KEPUTUSAN PEMBELIAN PAKET WISATA DI MARGA TOUR BANDUNG (Survei terhadap pengambil keputusan pembelian paket wisata tahun 2011-2013 di Marga Tour Bandung)

The development of tourism in the Bandung become great opportunities for entrepreneurs in the tourism industry including tour and travel business, including Tour Operator. Tour Operator is a company that has activities on planning and organizing the trip for the purpose of tourism (tours). Marga Tour which is under the auspices of PT Marga Indonesia is offering tour packages as its products and services. In the years 2011-2013 the tour packages sales Marga Tour has decline. The solutions fot that problems, the managements of Marga Tour have strategy to put the name Marga Tour in the minds of consumers or in marketing theory called as brand positioning. Through the brand positioning “everyday is holiday”, Marga Tour hopes to increase sales of tour packages. The type of this study is descriptive and verificative, the sampling technique that is used is proportionate stratified random sampling. The sample size was calculated with the formula of Slovin and the result is 90 respondents. The data analysis technique used is the technique of path analysis. Based on the results of the statistical test result, the brand positioning “everyday is a holiday” which consists of defining and communicating the competitive frame of reference, points of parity and points of difference has influence towards purchase decisions of tour packages in Marga Tour Bandung, either simultaneously or partially.

Stolt's f-k migration for plane wave ultrasound imaging

Ultrafast ultrasound is an emerging modality that offers new perspectives and opportunities in medical imaging. Plane wave imaging (PWI) allows one to attain very high frame rates by transmission of planar ultrasound wave-fronts. As a plane wave reaches a given scatterer, the latter becomes a secondary source emitting upward spherical waves and creating a diffraction hyperbola in the received RF signals. To produce an image of the scatterers, all the hyperbolas must be migrated back to their apexes. To perform beamforming of plane wave echo RFs and return high-quality images at high frame rates, we propose a new migration method carried out in the frequency-wavenumber (f-k) domain. The f-k migration for PWI has been adapted from the Stolt migration for seismic imaging. This migration technique is based on the exploding reflector model (ERM), which consists in assuming that all the scatterers explode in concert and become acoustic sources. The classical ERM model, however, is not appropriate for PWI. We showed that the ERM can be made suitable for PWI by a spatial transformation of the hyperbolic traces present in the RF data. In vitro experiments were performed to outline the advantages of PWI with Stolt's f-k migration over the conventional delay-and-sum (DAS) approach. The Stolt's f-k migration was also compared with the Fourier-based method developed by J.-Y. Lu. Our findings show that multi-angle compounded f-k migrated images are of quality similar to those obtained with a stateof- the-art dynamic focusing mode. This remained true even with a very small number of steering angles, thus ensuring a highly competitive frame rate. In addition, the new FFT-based f-k migration provides comparable or better contrast-to-noise ratio and lateral resolution than the Lu's and DAS migration schemes. Matlab codes for the Stolt's f-k migration for PWI are provided.

Relazioni Industriali Eni e Modelli Europei: Francia e Germania

By describing the changes in industrial relations (energy sector), we have shown the equilibrium that Italy, Germany and France have build to adapt their collective bargaining agreement models to the more competitive international economic frame.

Extinction-Based Shading and Illumination in GPU Volume Ray-Casting

Direct volume rendering has become a popular method for visualizing volumetric datasets. Even though computers are continually getting faster, it remains a challenge to incorporate sophisticated illumination models into direct volume rendering while maintaining interactive frame rates. In this paper, we present a novel approach for advanced illumination in direct volume rendering based on GPU ray-casting. Our approach features directional soft shadows taking scattering into account, ambient occlusion and color bleeding effects while achieving very competitive frame rates. In particular, multiple dynamic lights and interactive transfer function changes are fully supported. Commonly, direct volume rendering is based on a very simplified discrete version of the original volume rendering integral, including the development of the original exponential extinction into a-blending. In contrast to a-blending forming a product when sampling along a ray, the original exponential extinction coefficient is an integral and its discretization a Riemann sum. The fact that it is a sum can cleverly be exploited to implement volume lighting effects, i.e. soft directional shadows, ambient occlusion and color bleeding. We will show how this can be achieved and how it can be implemented on the GPU.

The Influence of Feedback on Cooperation

This study investigates three hypotheses that can account for the different impact of input and outcome feedback on cooperation in an interdependent setting. First, we expect the type of feedback to dictate the equality norm that is preferred; the effect of equality norms on cooperation is argued to be dependent on the type of asymmetry in the setting. Second, we hypothesize that input feedback induces a cooperative frame in contrast to outcome feedback which invokes a competitive frame. Third, we propose that input feedback is easier to process due to the cognitive limitations of individuals which increases there use for coordinating cooperative efforts. We conduct two experiments in an adapted prisoners’ dilemma setting. Participant’s information about the other is limited so that participants cannot infer the others input when they have outcome feedback and vice versa. The first experiment separates the equality effect from the other two effects by introducing input and outcome asymmetry in the traditional prisoner’s dilemma. The second experiment disentangles the framing and the cognitive limitations effect by introducing revenue feedback which combines the ease of processing from the input feedback and the result orientation of the outcome feedback. Our results are consistent with the framing and the cognitive limitations hypothesis but we do not find any support for the equality hypothesis. We attribute the latter finding to a lack of social presence in our experiments. In conclusion, our study successfully identifies two information effects of feedback which informs the incentive literature on possible drawbacks of accounting measures such as the difficulty to process aggregated measures and the competitive frame induced by result measures.

Identification of a Target Consumer in Process Of Positioning - Theoretical and Practical Aspects

Positioning is an important tool of marketing strategic planning and of a brand building process. Brand positioning development incorporates analyses and definition of four major elements - target consumer (target group), consumer benefit, brand image and competitive frame of reference. All elements of positioning are interconnected and all of them are influenced by selection of target consumer. The article is concentrated on major steps of identification of the target consumer as a part of brand positioning strategy development. It demonstrates application of the theoretical attitude of segmentation on practical example of Bosch home appliances brand. Summary contains comparison of theory and practical case of segmentation and targeting process as a part of brand positioning development.

Diversity training in a sport management class: the effects of different frames on students' attitudes towards organisational diversity

This study drew upon the framing literature to design and test two differently framed diversity modules for effects on students' attitudes towards organisational diversity. Two classes of masters degree students (N = 27 and N = 25) at a Midwestern university served as subjects in the experimental study. Results indicated that both modules positively influenced students' attitudes towards organisational diversity. However, students exposed to the diversity as a competitive advantage frame had significantly higher mean scores regarding diversity in organisations than those exposed to the social justice frame. Results are discussed relative to social identity theory as well as a more critical perspective regarding the dominant pedagogies of US universities.

An analysis of trust among globally distributed work teams in an organizational setting

AbstractRegardless of whether a project team is located in the same workplace or distributed around the world, trust remains an important element deemed necessary to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaborative work. At the same time, distribution across sites presents challenges to trust building that are not present among co‐located teams. A further complicating factor in trust building among distributed teams is national culture. As we demonstrate, the impact of nationality can be increased when organizations put the distributed sites in a competitive frame. Using the Newell and Swan threefold typology of trust, this paper analyzes trust among IT work teams whose members are located at sites that are distributed in the United States, Ireland, and India. Our case analysis confirms the problematic nature of trust building among globally distributed teams. Specifically, we found that due to situational factors and socio‐psychological dynamics an ‘Us versus Them’ attitude prevails among the distributed sites. This paper concludes that the traditional approaches used by organizations to address the challenges of global collaboration are insufficient and that trust building in an organizational setting requires project managers to actively work on relationship management to minimize the impact of an inter‐group perspective. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

USING HIGH‐LEVEL CONSUMER‐RESEARCH METHODS TO CREATE A TOOL‐DRIVEN GUIDEBOOK AND DATABASE FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING

ABSTRACT We present aspects and data for a tool‐driven database for marketing and product development, which are publicly accessible. The objective is to create a method whereby knowledge of concepts and products can be archived using overviews of a specific product category. The first phase of the database comprises systematic analysis of product concepts, which contain elements dealing both with features and emotions. The concept phase provides an idea about responses to statements about product features, along with responses to emotional elements and brands. The second phase comprises an analysis of the competitive frame of products, even before systematic product development is initiated. This second phase identifies expected and thus reasonable ranges of product‐sensory features, levels of acceptance of typical products, relations between liking and sensory attributes and segmentation of sensory preferences. Together, the two phases provide a guide to product developers new in a category, archive current knowledge and provide a sourcebook for marketers and developers alike, which is accessible using research tools. The two phases allow product development to become more scientific, more based on common experience rather than individual expertise and thus more efficient, without compromising corporate knowledge of specific ingredients, processes or business opportunities.

Does Competition Affect Giving? An Experimental Study

We explore whether natural human competitiveness can be exploited to stimulate charitable giving in a controlled laboratory experiment involving three different treatments of a sequential dictator game. Without disclosing the actual amounts given and kept, in each period players are publicly ranked - by the amount they give away, by the amount they keep for themselves, or spuriously. Our results are generally supportive of the hypothesis that competitive urges can encourage or frustrate altruistic behavior, depending on the competitive frame. We find some support for an alternative hypothesis that relative concerns are due to information-gathering rather than competition.