Research Picks Extra -July 2015

Geotagging photos

New information and communications technology and in particular the advent of Web 2.0 and the smart phone during the last decade or so has led to vast numbers of digital artefacts online. Many of these digital entities are uncategorised, randomly annotated and lack any kind of useful tagging. Researchers in India hope to remedy this situation for at least one class of digital artefacts – photographs – by developing a computer algorithm that can exploit metadata that might be present in an image, such as geographical positioning, or geotagging, to associate photographs with a specific event. They have demonstrated a preliminary proof of principle for photos of sports events and political protests. The work could lead to a novel approach to classifying vast repositories of photos, such as those uploaded to Flickr, Google Photos, Facebook and other services by their users in their millions every year.

Sheba, S., Ramadoss, B. and Balasundaram, S.R. (2015) ‘Geo distance-based event detection in social media’, Int. J. Computational Intelligence Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.87–101.

 

Glass ceilings

While the feminist movement and equal rights legislation have pushed back the boundaries for many women in many walks of life there remain glass ceilings in the workplace yet to be smashed. Researchers in Lithuania have surveyed female entrepreneurs and found that many hope for a balance between personal life and career. However, stereotypes, negative attitudes, gender roles, patriarchal attitudes, discrimination and social perception still lead to problems for many women. Their findings suggest that women’s careers are influenced by psychological and social factors, which are the most difficult to predict.

Adamoniene, R. and Marengolcaite, E. (2015) ‘Women’s career development directions and possibilities’, Int. J. Business and Emerging Markets, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp.237–250.

 

Stakeholders in the New World

It might be said that the discovery of the Americas marked a division between the mediaeval and the modern world as it radically reinvented the Eurocentric conception of the globe. Now, researchers in Spain have used this geopolitical pivot point as the archetypal historical example of stakeholder management and applied the putative lessons that might be learned from its study in this context to the business world.

Montero, G., Lopez-Paredes, A., Pajares, J. and Onieva, L. (2015) ‘Brief analysis of the discovery of America as a success case for the project stakeholder management’, Int. J. Engineering Management and Economics, Vol. 5, Nos. 1/2, pp.104–113.

 

Luxury…

With the idea of luxury goods inevitably comes the counterfeit item that fills the market for those who cannot afford the genuine article and dupes the unwary who can. German researchers have investigated the demand for luxury goods and their counterfeit counterparts in Germany and South Korea. There is they say an obvious trade-off between the genuine and the fake but the European and the Asian socio-economic context provides useful insight into how people shop in those two regions. The team found from their small-scale study that South Koreans and Germans alike enjoy the idea of owning luxury goods and in both countries those who can afford them will buy the genuine article. In contrast, people surveyed in South Korea will only buy a counterfeit item if it is exceedingly difficult to discern it from the genuine item whereas German respondents showed greater risk averseness when offered a counterfeit, imagining (perhaps correctly) that its functionality and quality might be sub-standard and so not be a tenable choice. The study adds useful data to international studies aimed at stifling the black-market for counterfeit goods.

Hennigs, N., Wiedmann, K-P., Klarmann, C., Behrens, S., Jung, J. and Hwang, C.S. (2015) ‘When the original is beyond reach: consumer perception and demand for counterfeit luxury goods in Germany and South Korea’, Luxury Research J., Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.58–75. Free full text paper.

Research Picks Extra -July 2015 is a post from: David Bradley's Science Spot

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