Search

Today's practicing marketers and scholars are confronted with a wide array of conflicting and imprecise information about best practices by which to search, gather, consolidate and interpret market information. Consequently, the need has never been greater to optimize market sensing to generate managerial actions that efficiently and effectively utilize knowledge of emerging consumer needs and competitive threats. This book addresses these urgent concerns. In essence, Market Sensing Today will cover, in ground-breaking ways, the following marketing managerial areas: * marketing opportunities associated with conventional and progressive bases of segmentation. * trends in market segment size and growth affecting long-range planning. * strategic direction for reaching future goals. * managerial understanding of assumptions competitors make about themselves. * the direction of current market strategies. * adding to the knowledge of a firm's core competencies. * how new market knowledge is best integrated into a firm's market intelligence system. * best ways to ensure the quality of information underlying decisions. * how benchmarking improves with market sensing. * best approaches for translating business issues into projects. * ways that key information may be disseminated within firms. * how proposed strategic changes are promoted by market sensing. * roles customer satisfaction insights play in policy. This book will address these key issues and more, to advance theory, research and practice based on latest developments in this vital field. It will show how to re-formulate traditional models that no longer work.

Thinking "Green" has become a significant economic trend lately. This research paper offers a better understanding of the background facts of the current hype surrounding "Green Energy." First, the problem of global warming is investigated. Europe has taken a lead role in the fight against global warming in order to meet their objective of 20% renewable energy production by 2020. Many possibilities exist to transform raw biomass into bioenergy fuels, which can then be used for specific energy production purposes: electricity production, warming or transport. Biodiesel, bioethanol, biogas and many other fuels can be produced from biomass.

Consumers and businesses have an ethical obligation to do their part to reuse or recycle unwanted items. However, while some consumers and businesses do reuse or recycle e-waste, glass, metal, plastic, paper or textiles, more could be done. Even with environmentalists warning of potential chemical hazards these items produce in landfills, an estimated 85 percent of landfills are filled with unwanted waste. The recycling industry along with local government run media campaigns to raise awareness; however, as a result consumers and businesses may be experiencing information overload which may have a negative impact on consumers ' recycling efforts.

The data sets have a variety of content, including farmers market locations, school absentee rates and crime statistics. START SIMPLE The downloadable data can be as simple as a spreadsheet chronicling one data point over time - for example, the amount of money the federal government has spent on school food programs since 1969.

The still photographs incorporate subtle movement, such as wind blowing grass or eyes blinking, that play on repeat through an animated GIF. [...]don't make your readers seasick with too much movement or too many GIFs on the same page.t

The primary purpose of this book is to help students understand the principles of multimedia interface design to develop essential skills. The underlying philosophy of the approach of this text is that concepts are learned and remembered better when learned in a real work environment.

This study developed a framework for predicting usability factors through an understanding of how cognitive traits relate to human interaction with a computer system. Specifically, this study examined the relationship of field-independence, spatial visualization, logical reasoning, and integrative reasoning to interaction process and outcome. The research hypothesis was tested through correlation to determine the relationships among variables. As a post hoc analysis, multiple regression analysis was used to examine the predictive power of four cognitive variables on interaction outcome. The results of the study emphasize the importance of considering cognitive variables as important predictors to human interaction process and outcome. © 2024 IEEE.

As the population of Aotearoa New Zealand ages, informal family carers will play an increasingly important role in caring for older adults at home. Multi-generational living arrangements are a growing trend, particularly among Māori communities, where caring for older relatives within the family home is widespread. This article uses in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Māori whānau (extended family members) caring for kaumātua (older family members) at home to explore how carers experienced care coordination in the broader care collective. The findings centred on three interconnected factors that described the collective organisation of care: (1) whānau care as normal; (2) whānau care as collective coordination; and (3) whānau carer knowledge and needs as unseen. The findings show that although whānau care of kaumātua is highly valued, ‘structural holes’ within care systems contribute to challenges in care coordination. Despite extensive whānau support for kaumātua, primary carers often felt that their knowledge, preferences and self-care needs remained unseen and not translatable to those outside the everyday care situation. Rather than assuming an artificial binary difference between ‘collective’ and ‘individually oriented’ care contexts and cultures, analysing the cultural norms surrounding whānau care-giving confirms that collective care system members face similar and different challenges to carers with smaller caring capacities. © The Author(s), 2024.

We report multi-differential measurements of strange hadron production ranging from mid- to target-rapidity in Au+Au collisions at a center-of-momentum energy per nucleon pair of sNN = 3 GeV with the STAR experiment at RHIC. KS0 meson and Λ hyperon yields are measured via their weak decay channels. Collision centrality and rapidity dependences of the transverse momentum spectra and particle ratios are presented. Particle mass and centrality dependence of the average transverse momenta of Λ and KS0 are compared with other strange particles, providing evidence of the development of hadronic rescattering in such collisions. The 4π yields of each of these strange hadrons show a consistent centrality dependence. Discussions on radial flow, the strange hadron production mechanism, and properties of the medium created in such collisions are presented together with results from hadronic transport and thermal model calculations. © The Author(s) 2024.

Historians have long recognized Matthew Fontaine Maury as an important if controversial figure in the histories of science and of maritime and naval affairs. These assessments, however, rest on scholarship that is by now more than a half-century old. It is therefore appropriate to look at Maury’s significance from fresh perspectives, incorporating recent historiographical trends in the history of science and cartography, environmental history, cultural history and military history. This article focuses on the ways in which Maury’s cartographic work reframed mariners’ understanding of the marine environment away from what he perceived to be a watery wilderness towards an ordered environment safe and favourable to American commerce. Maury was long known as ‘The Pathfinder of the Seas’, but I argue that his significance, in fact, lies in the ways he and his staff at the Naval Observatory organized the sea as a ‘common highway’, tracing paths, but also imposing narratives and constructing new meanings. Maury’s tool was the nautical chart and, particularly, his Wind and Current Charts series that by the 1850s reimagined the ways mariners, navigators and naval officers understood and harnessed the ocean environment. The article briefly considers these charts from three perspectives – method, process and representation – in order to see the ways in which Maury was pushing the boundaries of the cartographic medium to usher in revolutionary ways of envisioning the ocean environment. By quantifying winds, symbolizing whales and infusing the sea with ship tracks, among other things, Maury was imposing potent, if sometimes flawed, new ways of understanding and imagining the sea that were central to American maritime expansion in the antebellum era. In this and other ways, we can see Maury anew, a figure central to the growth of American commercial empire and to new ways of understanding and thinking about the sea.

Looking at colour can be a way not only to think within or about culture but also to probe the boundaries of cultural approaches. The "Cultural Turn," as it has been called, has made an impact across disciplines. In history, it replaced long-established explanatory models provided by Marxism and modernisation theory. Even fields like art history and literature, which always considered themselves allied to the arts rather than to the sciences, were reshaped by new understandings of culture - for instance, as a much larger system of meaning in which the works they studied were a part. But "culture" is notoriously murky, and its analytical use can obfuscate patterns of causality. This volume analyses how looking at colour can take us further.

La historia fue tan importante para la construcción de la identidad comunitaria y la legitimidad política en el siglo XV como lo es hoy, y en los reinos de España igualmente tenso. Los cronistas y biógrafos católicos castellanos parecen inseguros del estado preciso de los moros en Iberia. Todos estaban de acuerdo con el control político o el señorío de los cristianos castellanos, pero pocos tenían una idea clara de las implicaciones de ese señorío para los moros. ¿Debería permitirse a los moros permanecer como parte de la comunidad una vez que un monarca cristiano castellano tomara el control de su ciudad, región o reino, o no había posibilidad de que pertenecieran? Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (1404-1470), Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (c. 1377-c. 1460), Alonso Fernández de Palencia (1423-1492), Hernando de Pulgar (1436-c. 1492), y Mosén Diego de Valera (1412-1488) dieron diferentes respuestas. Todos coincidieron en que la comunidad castellano-leonesa existía antes de al-Andalus y, por lo tanto, era la comunidad política legítima de Hispania. La mayoría de ellos aceptaron la presencia de Granada de facto pero no de jure. Sin embargo, Arévalo, Valera y Pulgar sugieren la posibilidad de una comunidad política musulmana de jure bajo dominio castellano; Palencia y Guzmán no.

The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) was the first Islamic dynasty. Muʿawiya ibn Abi Sufyan established himself as caliph in Damascus after his victory over ʿAli ibn Abi Talib in the civil war that followed the murder of ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan in Medina. Muʿawiya and his successors expanded the territory under Muslim rule dramatically. At their peak, the Umayyads ruled an empire stretching from Spain to the frontiers of China and India. The Umayyads made significant contributions to the development of the Islamic faith and to the spread of the Arabic language throughout the region. Dynastic crises, revenue shortfalls, and the limitations of an empire based on conquest ultimately led to their demise at the hands of the Abbasids in 750.

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses.  Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods.  In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.   Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.