Innovative product and customer retention: Strategies in the music business ‐ An analysis of Santana's enhanced album “Shaman”;

Abstract

The music business is facing hard times with declining CD sales and increasing piracy. Whereas the economic downturn is one reason for lower sales, the industry has decided to target the second factor, the fast diffusion of technologies such as CD burners and peer‐to‐peer networks like KaZaA allowing massive illegal distribution of music. Some labels focused on an offensive strategy to promote their artists. New services are being added to so called Enhanced CDs that create a new user experience. These CDs offer bonus content (i.e. videos, additional songs, pictures, or lyrics) stored directly on the CD that can be accessed on the PC. Other CDs offer (additionally) online access to actual bonus content or services (i.e. tour dates or news) if the CD is entered in the FC. The impact of these services on consumer experience has not yet been researched in depth and it remains unclear if consumers actually use the offered services on Enhanced CDs. The music label Arista has introduced several new albums on Enhanced CDs to the market providing more value to the user instead of reducing the utility by focusing only on copy protection. This article analyzes the usage of such services provided by Arista and focuses on Santana's new album “Shaman”;. Using a unique data set provided byfavakitty Media (Bandlirik) and Arista, we show for the first time what services are actually used by Santana fans and compare the results to albums of other artists such as TIC or Toni Braxton. Our results indicate that Enhanced CDs are used frequently by a relatively small group of fans, providing more value to the customer and creating a stronger relation between fans and artists.     

Buttercups and daisies: building a community of practice amongst teachers in a Brazilian university

This article examines the promotion and adoption of action research as an instrument of institutional change by academic staff in a Brazilian rural university. The results of the research are presented showing the mobilisation of a group of volunteers, the implementation of their action research projects and the sustainability of the process. Particular attention is drawn to the significance of an insider change agent/facilitator as the initiator of the action research process and how his role became superfluous as the networks evolved into true communities of practice. On reflection the original composite daisy model of Melrose and Reid has been discarded in favour of a simpler buttercup‐type flower model of analysis to describe the process.     

Un profil de compétences pour les professeurs d’informatique de l’enseignement secondaire camerounais

A competency profile for teachers of Computer Science in Cameroonian secondary education – In 1998, the Cameroonian government decided to introduce Computer Science as a school subject. To implement this decision, it began to train teachers of Computer Science according to the same training model used for teachers of other disciplines. Despite the consensus that seems to be emerging from the scientific community regarding the need to give priority to a cross-disciplinary use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in primary and secondary education, some countries, such as Cameroon, have opted to teach Computer Science. While such a political choice might in principle appear to be inappropriate for the development of students’ ICT skills, the article shows that it nevertheless introduces teachers into the system who have a predisposition to act as catalysts for the pedagogical integration of ICT. Such a development could occur provided these teachers are trained in a range of additional skills – those proposed in the article – which would enable them to contribute effectively. If this approach were implemented, sub-Saharan countries such as Cameroon would, in their Computer Science teachers, have access to human resources capable of quickly generalising the cross-disciplinary use of ICT in the education system.     

Effects of Ventilation on Segmental Bioimpedance Spectroscopy Measures Using Generalizability Theory

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of three ventilation conditions (i.e., normal, regimented, and no-ventilation) on the reproducibility of bioimpedance scores in humans for the forearm and trunk segments. One hundred able-bodied North American men and women, from 18 to 71 years of age, volunteered as participants. The experimenters used a Xitron Bio-Impedance Analyzer System model 4200 instrument with Hydra software (Xitron Technologies, San Diego, California, USA) to collect bioimpedance data on extracellular fluid and intracellular fluid scores. The experimenters analyzed the data using the generalizability theory,with persons as the facet of differentiation and time as the facet of generalization. The major findings were (a) ventilation conditions did not have a significant impact on the reproducibility of the test scores, (b) the forearm segment produced consistently higher intracellular fluid generalizability coefficients across three ventilation conditions for both gender groups when compared to the trunk segment, (c) the trunk segment produced intracellular fluid generalizability coefficients that were higher for the male group, and (d) the measurement error affected extracellular fluid scores less than segmental intracellular fluid scores.     

How to evaluate rankings of academic entities using test data

In the field of scientometrics, impact indicators and ranking algorithms are frequently evaluated using unlabelled test data comprising relevant entities (e.g., papers, authors, or institutions) that are considered important. The rationale is that the higher some algorithm ranks these entities, the better its performance. To compute a performance score for an algorithm, an evaluation measure is required to translate the rank distribution of the relevant entities into a single-value performance score. Until recently, it was simply assumed that taking the average rank (of the relevant entities) is an appropriate evaluation measure when comparing ranking algorithms or fine-tuning algorithm parameters.With this paper we propose a framework for evaluating the evaluation measures themselves. Using this framework the following questions can now be answered: (1) which evaluation measure should be chosen for an experiment, and (2) given an evaluation measure and corresponding performance scores for the algorithms under investigation, how significant are the observed performance differences?Using two publication databases and four test data sets we demonstrate the functionality of the framework and analyse the stability and discriminative power of the most common information retrieval evaluation measures. We find that there is no clear winner and that the performance of the evaluation measures is highly dependent on the underlying data. Our results show that the average rank is indeed an adequate and stable measure. However, we also show that relatively large performance differences are required to confidently determine if one ranking algorithm is significantly superior to another. Lastly, we list alternative measures that also yield stable results and highlight measures that should not be used in this context.     

Traceless enzymatic protein synthesis without ligation sites constraint

Protein synthesis and semisynthesis offer immense promise for life sciences and have impacted pharmaceutical innovation. The absence of a generally applicable method for traceless peptide conjugation with a flexible choice of junction sites remains a bottleneck for accessing many important synthetic targets, however. Here we introduce the PALME (protein activation and ligation with multiple enzymes) platform designed for sequence-unconstrained synthesis and modification of biomacromolecules. The upstream activating modules accept and process easily accessible synthetic peptides and recombinant proteins, avoiding the challenges associated with preparation and manipulation of activated peptide substrates. Cooperatively, the downstream coupling module provides comprehensive solutions for sequential peptide condensation, cyclization and protein N/C-terminal or internal functionalization. The practical utility of this methodology is demonstrated by synthesizing a series of bioactive targets ranging from pharmaceutical ingredients to synthetically challenging proteins. The modular PALME platform exhibits unprecedentedly broad accessibility for traceless protein synthesis and functionalization, and holds enormous potential to extend the scope of protein chemistry and synthetic biology.