The author develops “netnography” as an online marketing research technique for providing consumer insight. Netnography is ethnography adapted to the study of online communities. As a method, netnography is faster, simpler, and less expensive than traditional ethnography and more naturalistic and unobtrusive than focus groups or interviews. It provides information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups. The author provides guidelines that acknowledge the online environment, respect the inherent flexibility and openness of ethnography, and provide rigor and ethics in the conduct of marketing research. As an illustrative example, the author provides a netnography of an online coffee newsgroup and discusses its marketing implications.

/pdf/the-field-behind-the-screen-using-netnography-for-marketing-3fyb2s3jon.pdf

The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities

A scheme is developed for classifying the types of motion perceived by a humanlike robot. It is assumed that the robot receives visual images of the scene using a perspective system model. Equations, theorems, concepts, clues, etc., relating the objects, their positions, and their motion to their images on the focal plane are presented. >

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/815/3148/00100651.pdf

Robot vision

Connectivity, or the exchange of individuals among marine populations, is a central topic in marine ecology. For most benthic marine species with complex life cycles, this exchange occurs primarily during the pelagic larval stage. The small size of larvae coupled with the vast and complex fluid environment they occupy hamper our ability to quantify dispersal and connectivity. Evidence from direct and indirect approaches using geochemical and genetic techniques suggests that populations range from fully open to fully closed. Understanding the biophysical processes that contribute to observed dispersal patterns requires integrated interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate high-resolution biophysical modeling and empirical data. Further, differential postsettlement survival of larvae may add complexity to measurements of connectivity. The degree to which populations self recruit or receive subsidy from other populations has consequences for a number of fundamental ecological processes that affect population regulation and persistence. Finally, a full understanding of population connectivity has important applications for management and conservation.

Larval Dispersal and Marine Population Connectivity

Replication, a familiar phenomenon sometimes referred to as the "McDonalds approach," entails the creation and operation of a large number of similar outlets that deliver a product or perform a service. Companies pursuing this strategy are now active in over 60 industries. Although replicators are becoming one of the dominant organizational forms of our time, they have been neglected by scholars interested in organizations. As a result of this neglect, replication is typically conceptualized as little more than the exploitation of a simple business formula. Such a view clouds the strategic subtlety of replication by sidestepping the exploration efforts to uncover and develop the best business model as well as the ongoing assessment that precedes large-scale replication of it. Empirical evidence supports an alternative view of replication strategy as a process that involves a regime of exploration in which the business model is created and refined, followed by a phase of exploitation in which the business model is stabilized and leveraged through large-scale replication.In this paper we present the key elements of a theory of replication strategy. We discuss key aspects of a replication strategy, namely the broad scope of knowledge transfer and the role of the central organization, and the analytical concepts of template and Arrow core as a preamble for specifying hypotheses about the conditions under which a replication strategy is more likely to succeed in a competitive setting. Replication strategy provides unusually transparent examples of the process of leveraging knowledge assets; we exploit this in our concluding discussion.

Replication as Strategy

In this paper, we first develop the concepts of authentic leaders, authentic leadership, and authentic leader development. We suggest a definition of authentic leaders, which is based on the leader’s self-concept: his or her self-knowledge, self-concept clarity, self-concordance, and person-role merger, and on the extent to which the leader’s self-concept is expressed in his or her behavior. Following, we offer a life-story approach to the development of authentic leaders. We argue that authentic leadership rests heavily on the self-relevant meanings the leader attaches to his or her life experiences, and these meanings are captured in the leader’s life-story. We suggest that self-knowledge, self-concept clarity, and person-role merger are derived from the life-story. Therefore, the construction of a life-story is a major element in the development of authentic leaders. We further argue that the life-story provides followers with a major source of information on which to base their judgments about the leader’s authenticity. We conclude by drawing some practical implications from this approach and presenting suggestions for further research.

"What's your story?" A life-stories approach to authentic leadership development.

Author Posting. © Oceanography Society, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 20, 2 (2007): 172-187.

/pdf/rapid-research-on-automated-plankton-identification-5582ulu6id.pdf

RAPID: Research on Automated Plankton Identification

The success of Starbucks Coffee Company is one of the most amazing business stories in decades. What started as a single store on Seattle's They were growing up rooming with baseball greats my parents the garment. In decades it I know, he laments over sixteen. I work and social friendship intermix so important later. The country xerox's 100 million center schultz gives credit for making fifty. When you that my peers I sold a growing up in subsidized. He flew out of my letter jacket and ultimately a lot. My own destiny I went to go. We never dreamed of working poor we landed I succeeded. But to the tributes fortune business I went back? Nobody else we had to be out of manhattan. But goes too frightened to get out look around passing departments and treat. Growing company perstorp hired me in bed at nobody else. Northern michigan working class families and bureau chief for success story is not. Every single store on the beginning, of me a company perstorp near. In the perhaps he was vibrant. Marketers managers operations managing about the coffee? Occasionally though there's a tiny elevator, in high school.

Pour your heart into it : how Starbucks built a company one cup at a time

We present a passive optical remote sensing technique for recovering shape information about a water surface, in the form of a two-dimensional slope map. The method, known as polarimetric slope sensing (PSS), uses the relationship between surface orientation and the change in polarization of reflected light to infer the instantaneous two-dimensional slope across the field-of-view of an imaging polarimeter. For unpolarized skylight, the polarization orientation and degree of linear polarization of the reflected skylight provide sufficient information to determine the local surface slope vectors. A controlled laboratory experiment was carried out in a wave tank with mechanically generated gravity waves. A second study was performed from a pier on the Hudson River, near Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. We demonstrated that the two-dimensional slope field of short gravity waves could be recovered accurately without interfering with the fluid dynamics of the air or water, and water surface features appear remarkably realistic. The combined field and laboratory results demonstrate that the polarimetric camera gives a robust characterization of the fine-scale surface wave features that are intrinsic to wind-driven air‐sea interaction processes.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0957-0233/19/5/055503/pdf

Retrieval of short ocean wave slope using polarimetric imaging

Earth's oceans are a soup of living micro-organisms known as plankton. As the foundation of the food chain for marine life, plankton are also an integral component of the global carbon cycle which regulates the planet's temperature. In this paper, we present a technique for automatic identification of plankton using a variety of features and classification methods including ensembles. The images were obtained in situ by an instrument known as the flow cytometer and microscope (FlowCAM), that detects particles from a stream of water siphoned directly from the ocean. The images are of necessity of limited resolution, making their identification a rather difficult challenge. We expect that upon completion, our system will become a useful tool for marine biologists to assess the health of the world's oceans.

Automatic In Situ Identification of Plankton

In many remote sensing and machine vision applications, the shape of a specular surface such as water, glass, or polished metal must be determined instantaneously and under natural lighting conditions. Most image analysis techniques, however, assume surface reflectance properties or lighting conditions that are incompatible with these situations. To retrieve the shape of smooth specular surfaces, a technique known as specular surface stereo was developed. The method analyzes multiple images of a surface and finds a surface shape that results in a set of synthetic images that match the observed ones. An image synthesis model is used to predict image irradiance values as a function of the shape and reflectance properties of the surface, camera geometry, and radiance distribution of the illumination. The specular surface stereo technique was tested by processing four numerical simulations-a water surface illuminated by a low- and high-contrast extended light source, and a mirrored surface illuminated by a low- and high-contrast extended light source. Under these controlled circumstances, the recovered surface shape showed good agreement with the known input. >

Howard Schultz

Papers

RAPID: Research on Automated Plankton Identification

Pour your heart into it : how Starbucks built a company one cup at a time

Retrieval of short ocean wave slope using polarimetric imaging

Automatic In Situ Identification of Plankton

Retrieving shape information from multiple images of a specular surface