Refining and Extending the Business Model With Information Technology: Dell Computer Corporation

The exceptional performance of Dell Computer in recent years illustrates an innovative response to a fundamental competitive factor in the personal computer industry - the value of time. This article shows how Dell's strategies of direct sales and build-to-order production have proven successful in minimizing inventory and bringing new products to market quickly, enabling it to increase market share and achieve high returns on investment. The Dell case illustrates how one business model may have inherent advantages under particular market conditions, but it also shows the importance of execution in exploiting those advantages. In particular, Dell's use of information technology (IT) has been vital to executing both elements of its business model - direct sales and build-to-order - and provides valuable insights into how IT can be applied to achieve speed and flexibility in an industry in which time is critical. Many of the insights gained from this case can be applied more generally to other time-dependent industries, suggesting that the findings from the Dell case will have implications for a growing number of companies and industries in the future.     

The biomechanical effect of warm-up stretching strategies on landing mechanics in female volleyball athletes

ABSTRACT

Female volleyball athletes incorporate dynamic and static stretching into a warm-up, with evidence generally supporting dynamic stretching to improve performance. However, the effects of these stretching practices on injury risk during subsequent volleyball manoeuvres have yet to be fully elucidated in the warm-up literature. Three-dimensional kinematic data associated with non-contact, lower extremity injury were recorded on 12 female collegiate club volleyball athletes during unilateral landing tasks on the dominant and non-dominant limb. Participants performed landings as part of a volleyball-simulated manoeuvre prior to and post-dynamic (DWU) and combined dynamic-static (CDS) warm-ups. A significant reduction in non-dominant hip adduction angle was found at 15 min post CDS warm-up (p = 0.016; d = 0.38), however, no other warm-up differences were detected. The non-dominant limb demonstrated greater knee abduction (p = 0.006; d = 0.69) and internal rotation angle (p = 0.004; d = 0.88), suggesting that this limb demonstrates more risky landing patterns that are potentially due to altered trunk positioning upon landing. The results show that the majority of selected landing kinematics are unaffected by additional static stretching to a dynamic warm-up and that the non-dominant limb may be at a higher injury risk in female volleyball athletes.     

Criterion Referencd Testing 30 Yeam Later: Promise Broken, Promise Kept

What promises has CRT kept or broken? Why do we need denser tests to make good, criterion-referenced interpretations? What wisdom has grown from experience with CRTs?     

Perceived News Media Importance: Developing and Validating a Measure for Personal Valuations of Normative Journalistic Functions

This study features the development and validation of a multidimensional scale for Perceived News Media Importance (PNMI), a concept pertaining to how much individuals personally value normative functions of political/public affairs journalism. Comprised of six different dimensions that represent the weight of what citizens deem to be desirable about news work, the PNMI concept exhibits the capacity to strengthen scholarly explanations about the public’s perceptions of the news media and related democratic outcomes. More specifically this research, which employs three data sets, is designed to (1) explicate the PNMI concept, (2) develop and validate a PNMI scale, (3) and explore PNMI’s predictive value relative to news media use and support for freedom of the press. Evidence of validity is confirmed with media trust, political media use, political interest, and ideology. Furthermore, PNMI is shown to be predictive of (a) mainstream and social media-based news use, as conditioned by perceptions of the press satisfactory performing normative functions, and (b) support for press freedoms. While the hypothesized PNMI model (as a higher order latent construct with six lower order dimensions) exhibits a sound model fit, a combined data set (total N=912) reveals that PNMI could also be treated as a multi-factor, lower-order latent construct.     

Social media listening and Title IX training crisis: Implications for discourse of renewal

Courses: Undergraduate or graduate organizational/crisis communication or public relations courses

Objective: The goal for this single class activity is for students to apply discourse of renewal to an organizational crisis fueled through social media.     

E-books for the Classroom and Open Access Textbooks: Two Ways to Help Students Save Money on Textbooks

ABSTRACT

To help students withstand the rising cost of textbooks and in turn support the mission of student success, the University of South Florida (USF) has implemented two electronic resources–based initiatives as part of the Tampa Library’s Textbook Affordability Project. Through the E-books for the Classroom program, the library purchases electronic versions of texts required for coursework, providing equitable access to needed materials at no cost to the students. For the past 5 years, this program has evolved into a highly successful textbook affordability measure, acquiring hundreds of e-books and serving thousands of students. Additionally, the library, with the support of the Office of the Provost and in collaboration with Innovative Education, is publishing a faculty-authored multimedia Open Access textbook to be used by hundreds of students each semester in USF’s children’s literature courses. The USF institutional repository, Scholar Commons, will host the textbook, making it freely available on a global scale. This program effectively uses library expertise and skills, coordinating university-wide faculty, professional, and technical resources, to create library-as-publisher for the benefit of the students and textbook affordability.     

How Young,Uninsured Americans Respond to News Coverage of Obamacare: An Experimental Test of an Affective Mediation Model

This experiment integrated theory from multiple domains to examine how aspects of news coverage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and differences in participants’ cognitive and emotional contingent conditions interact to shape attitudes and behavioral intentions toward health care legislation. Using a sample of uninsured young adults (N = 1,056), we tested an affective mediation model, which assessed the mechanisms through which media frames, exemplar case studies, and individual predispositions affect this type of news consumer. Results demonstrate the complicated pathways through which emotions mediate the effects of news coverage of ACA based on political predispositions, the need for orientation toward the health care issue, and the influence of equivalency framing in the form of example cases. These findings contribute to a more nuanced explanation of the causal mechanisms underpinning framing effects of public policy news coverage on an understudied population. The need for further examination of emotion along with cognition when investigating framing effects of public policy news is discussed, and the importance of exemplar cases as a significant manifestation of the effects equivalence framing is highlighted.