Online brands: Branding, possible worlds, and interactive grammars

This paper proposes to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the transformation that brands have undergone since the rise of the Internet. After a brief theoretical introduction to digital communication and the semiotics of brands, the case of the Google brand is analyzed by applying concepts of generative and interpretive semiotics. The paper holds that the iconic and linguistic enunciations are secondary with respect to interaction. In digital media interaction — the interactive experience that the Internet user lives — is a fundamental component of the hypermedia cocktail and occupies a central position in the brand building process. The article concludes with some of the questions and special characteristics raised by so-called eBranding.

The Benefits of building barrier-free: a contingent valuation of accessibilty as an attribute of housing

Estimating the social benefits of barrier-free building has always required indirect solutions, such as calculating the savings in social services, hospitalisation or adaptations made possible by the increase in accessibility. This research uses the Contingent Valuation Method to gain a direct appraisal of the benefits from barrier-free housing. When comparing two similar dwellings, with the only difference being their accessibility conditions, the 1,007 randomly chosen households that answered the direct survey would pay, on average 12.5 per cent more for being barrier-free. None of the different appraisals made on accessibility costs reaches 5 per cent. This confirms the social profitability of building without barriers and shows the potential size of the private market for those housing developers that meet the demand. Accessibility is a general concern, an economic good or attribute that most households value, irrespective of the physical conditions of their members.

Hispanic population in the USA: the opportunity to create a shared brand

El tema d’aquest treball de recerca ha nascut gràcies a l’experiència viscuda a Carolina del Sud (EEUU) com estudiant i treballador. És un fet que la població hispana als Estats Units és cada cop mes important, el que ha provocat un canvi en la mentalitat de les empreses del lloc. S’han adonat que no és suficient amb seguir l’estratègia de comunicació que tenien anteriorment, i ara han de fer mes cas a un nou públic objectiu. Saber com han de fer-ho es la fita d’aquest treball.

Brand Entertainment y nuevas vías de construcción de marcas

Aquest treball pretén analitzar la situació actual del món publicitari on les noves vies de comunicació, especialment el Brand Entertainment, són cada vegada més nombroses i diverses per fer front al declivi de l'era convencional en un nou entorn i amb un consumidor evolucionat. La segona part consta d'un apartat pràctic en el qual es realitza una enquesta per veure en quin grau afecta i és efectiva la publicitat tradicional així com les noves formes de publicitat. A més de l'opinió de gent del carrer, s'han realitzat diverses entrevistes a professionals de l'entorn publicitari que han aprofundit en aquest tema.

Building Capacity in Developing Countries : OER for Food Safety

The Food Safety Knowledge Network (FSKN) was developed through the collaboration of Michigan State University and a professional network of international food industry retailers and manufacturers. The key objective of the FSKN project is to provide technical resources, in a cost effective way, in order to promote food safety in developing countries and for small and less developed companies. FSKN uses a competency based model including a framework, OERs, and assessments. These tools are being used to support face-to-face training, fully online training, and to gauge the learning outcomes of a series of pilot groups which were held in India, Egypt, and China.

AgShare : Building Community and Content with Multiple Partners

Michigan State University and OER Africa are creating a win-win collaboration of existing organizations for African publishing, localizing, and sharing of teaching and learning materials that fill critical resource gaps in African MSc agriculture curriculum. By the end of the 18-month planning and pilot initiative, African agriculture universities, faculty, students, researchers, NGO leaders, extension staff, and farmers will participate in building AgShare by demonstrating its benefits and outcomes and by building momentum and support for growth.

Building a Manifesto for OER sustainability : UK experiences

Evidence of sustainability, or the potential to achieve this, is increasingly a pre-requisite for OER activity, whether imposed by funders, by institutions requiring a 'business case' for OER, or practitioners themselves - academics, educational technologists and librarians, concerned about how to justify engagement with a unfamiliar, and unproven practices, in today's climate of limited resource. However, it is not clear what is meant by 'sustainability' in relation to OER, what will be needed to achieve or demonstrate this, nor who the expectation of sustainability relates to. This paper draws on experiences of UK OER projects to identify aspirations that those involved in delivering OER activity have for OER sustainability ¿ what a 'manifesto' for OER sustainability beyond project funding, based on OER use, might look like.

Monitorización de estructuras y gestión de edificios: Building Management

El objetivo del proyecto es realizar un sistema de monitorizacion de estructuras y gestión de edificios para controlar en todo momento el estado de los mismos. Se controlará cualquier aspecto que pueda afectar al edificio, como es la temperatura, la humedad, la oscilación del edificio; además de otros aspectos que ayuden a que el edificio se mantenga seguro y en perfecto estado como alarmas de seguridad, luminosidad, etc.

The building blocks of international ecological footprint inequality: a regression-based decomposition

This paper performs an empirical Decomposition of International Inequality in Ecological Footprint in order to quantify to what extent explanatory variables such as a country’s affluence, economic structure, demographic characteristics, climate and technology contributed to international differences in terms of natural resource consumption during the period 1993-2007. We use a Regression-Based Inequality Decomposition approach. As a result, the methodology extends qualitatively the results obtained in standard environmental impact regressions as it comprehends further social dimensions of the Sustainable Development concept, i.e. equity within generations. The results obtained point to prioritizing policies that take into account both future and present generations.

The Building Blocks of International Ecological Footprint inequality: A Regression-Base Decomposition

This paper performs an empirical Decomposition of International Inequality in Ecological Footprint in order to quantify to what extent explanatory variables such as a country’s affluence, economic structure, demographic characteristics, climate and technology contributed to international differences in terms of natural resource consumption during the period 1993-2007. We use a Regression- Based Inequality Decomposition approach. As a result, the methodology extends qualitatively the results obtained in standard environmental impact regressions as it comprehends further social dimensions of the Sustainable Development concept, i.e. equity within generations. The results obtained point to prioritizing policies that take into account both future and present generations. Keywords: Ecological Footprint Inequality, Regression-Based Inequality Decomposition, Intragenerational equity, Sustainable development.

Towards a User-Friendly Platform for Building Language Resources based on Web Services

This paper presents the platform developed in the PANACEA project, a distributed factory that automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of Language Resources required by Machine Translation and other Language Technologies. We adopt a set of tools that have been successfully used in the Bioinformatics field, they are adapted to the needs of our field and used to deploy web services, which can be combined to build more complex processing chains (workflows). This paper describes the platform and its different components (web services, registry, workflows, social network and interoperability). We demonstrate the scalability of the platform by carrying out a set of massive data experiments. Finally, a validation of the platform across a set of required criteria proves its usability for different types of users (non-technical users and providers).

Immigration and contested nation-building : explaining the political salience of immigration in multi-national societies

Multi-national societies present a complex setting for the politics of immigration, as migration’s linguistic, economic and cultural effects may coincide with existing contestation over nationhood between sub-units and the central state. Empirically, though, political actors only sometimes, and in some places, explicitly connect the politics of immigration to the stakes of multi-level politics. With reference to Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom, this paper examines the conditions under which political leaders link immigration to ongoing debate about governance in multi-national societies. The paper argues that the distribution of policy competencies in the multi-level system is less important for shaping immigration and integration politics than is the perceived impact (positive or negative) on the sub-unit’s societal culture or its power relationship with the center. Immigration and integration are more often politicized where center and sub-unit hold divergent views on migration and its place in national identity.

Symbolic meaning of local identity – A case study on Barcelona place brand representation

The core objective of this research process was to design an operational tool for place brand analysis. By modelling the emotional significance and the deeper-lying symbols associated to a specific place identity I expected to create a semiotic tool that could be applied, mutatis mutandis, on other similar place brands. As a field case study to develop the instrument, my choice of the research arena was Barcelona city, the capital of Catalonia Autonomous Community, Spain. Barcelona brand identity was approached in the line of the Chicago Urban Anthropology School. The research methods were designed according to the prescriptions of the urban anthropology, namely qualitative methods: in-depth interviews and discourse analysis. The final research outcome was a model summarizing a range of specific emotional values that support a place brand to position in the collective mindset and to assume a positively valued status and identity in the world order.

The interaction of ownership structure and customer satisfaction as determinants of brand equity

In this paper we study the interaction between ownership structure and customer satisfaction, and their impact on a firm's brand equity. We find that customer satisfaction has a positive direct effect on brand equity but an indirect negative one, through reductions in ownership concentration. This latter effect emerges when managers are focused mainly on satisfying customers. It gives out a warning signal that highlights the perverse effect of implementing policies focused excessively on satisfying customers at the expense of shareholders, on a firm's brand equity. We demonstrate our theoretical contention, empirically, making use of an incomplete panel data comprising 69 firms from 11 different nations for the period 2002-2005.