One does not simply meme about organizations: Exploring the content creation strategies of user-generated memes on Imgur

This study explores how online publics are engaging with organizations by creating and sharing brand-related content online, outside corporate-controlled communication environments. This research employs a quantitative content analysis of memes shared on the social networking site Imgur to reveal how user-generated content conveys meaning about organizations. The analysis reveals brand-centric memes are generally classified as orphan memes, or memes that have distinct textual and visual characteristics separating them from established or emerging meme families. Memes about organizations are neither an overwhelming reflection of biting criticism or support, but rather a reflection of online public engagement with organizations that primarily use humor and textual brand features (or quiddities) to convey their commitment and satisfaction with the organization and unite meme families.     

Rebates, inventories, and intertemporal price discrimination

We demonstrate that universally redeemed rebates can increase manufacturer profits by reducing the incentives of downstream retailers to hoard inventories when optimal wholesale prices vary predictably over time. By bypassing retailers and making direct contracts with buyers, the manufacturer can increase the variations in effective prices paid by consumers without concomitantly creating larger incentives for retailers to hold inventories. During profitable, high-demand periods, manufacturer revenues are ordinarily constrained by'competition'from retailer inventories, thus limiting profits. However, by selectively offering rebates to consumers while maintaining high wholesale prices, low-demand periods can be accommodated without inducing retailer hoarding.     

What’s a Parent to Do? How Parents Respond to Notification of a Child’s Police Detention

The current qualitative study involved in-depth semistructured interviews with parents whose children had been taken into custody. Their initial emotional reactions, cognitive processing, and behavioral responses to their child’s detention were examined. Five themes emerged from the data: (1) Parents try to defer immediate interactions with the child rather than react out of emotion; (2) Parents feel anger toward their child, but disappointment and shock are more strongly expressed emotional responses; (3) Parents do not accept the behavior but do not reject their child; (4) Police behaviors communicate the seriousness of the act; and (5) The entire family suffers consequences from the child’s act. Findings highlight the experiences of the parents as they interacted with the juvenile justice system.     

Say it Loud: The Obama Effect and Racial/Ethnic Identification of Adolescents

The current study examined how self-reported racial/ethnic identification of adolescents living in poverty may be related to significant societal events and seminal public figures. Data from a multiple cohort longitudinal study, conducted in Mobile, Alabama between 1998 and 2011, were used to examine the impact of Barack Obama's nomination and presidency on racial/ethnic identification. The results show that significantly more adolescents changed their self-reported racial/ethnic identification from White or Mixed-Race to Black or Mixed Race after the election than before. These results suggest that a distant public figure can serve as a role model with observable effects for adolescents.     

Teaching Note—Integrating Theory and Research Methods in a First-Year Doctoral Sequence or Program

This teaching note describes an innovative process in which faculty members worked collaboratively to create an integrated three-course sequence of requisite course content in a PhD program, developed complementary assignments, and coordinated a classroom experience that led to the creation of an individualized area statement and eventual integrated literature review. Lessons learned from this experience are discussed.     

Gesture in Instruction: Evidence from Live and Video Lessons

Previous studies have shown that teachers’ gestures are beneficial for student learning. In this research, we investigate whether teachers’ gestures have comparable effects in face-to-face live instruction and video-based instruction. We provided sixty-three 7–10 year old students with instruction about mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 3 + 4 + 5 = __ + 5). Students were assigned to one of four experimental conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design that varied (1) instruction medium (video vs. live), and (2) instruction modality (speech vs. speech + gesture). There was no main effect of medium: The same amount of learning occurred whether instruction was done live or on video. There was a main effect of modality: Speech instruction accompanied by gesture resulted in significantly more learning and transfer than instruction conveyed through speech only. Gesture’s effect on instruction was stronger for video instruction than live instruction. These findings suggest that there may be a limit to gesture’s role in communication that results in student learning.     

What Do You Mean My Child Is in Custody? A Qualitative Study of Parental Response to the Detention of Their Child

This qualitative study involved in-depth interviews with 11 parents whose children had been taken into custody. The initial reactions and responses of the parents to the detention of their children were examined, as well as these parents' thoughts and feelings about theprocess and their involvement in the juvenile justice system. The following major themes emerged from the data analysis: (a) feeling frustrated and confused, (b) a perception of the system as being fair, (c) the juvenile system assuming a parental role, and (d) the influence of detention on family dynamics. Findings highlight the personal experiences of the parents as they attempted to navigate the juvenile justice system.     

Probability scoring for spelling correction

This paper describes a new program, CORRECT, which takes words rejected by the Unix^® SPELL program, proposes a list of candidate corrections, and sorts them by probability score. The probability scores are the novel contribution of this work. They are based on a noisy channel model. It is assumed that the typist knows what words he or she wants to type but some noise is added on the way to the keyboard (in the form of typos and spelling errors). Using a classic Bayesian argument of the kind that is popular in recognition applications, especially speech recognition (Jelinek, 1985), one can often recover the intended correction,c, from a typo,t, by finding the correctionc that maximizesPr(c) Pr(t/c). The first factor,Pr(c), is a prior model of word probabilities; the second factor,Pr(t/c), is a model of the noisy channel that accounts for spelling transformations on letter sequences (insertions, deletions, substitutions and reversals). Both sets of probabilities were estimated using data collected from the Associated Press (AP) newswire over 1988 and 1989 as a training set. The AP generates about 1 million words and 500 typos per week.In evaluating the program, we found that human judges were extremely reluctant to cast a vote given only the information available to the program, and that they were much more comfortable when they could see a concordance line or two. The second half of this paper discusses some very simple methods of modeling the context usingn-gram statistics. Althoughn-gram methods are much too simple (compared with much more sophisticated methods used in artificial intelligence and natural language processing), we have found that even these very simple methods illustrate some very interesting estimation problems that will almost certainly come up when we consider more sophisticated models of contexts. The problem is how to estimate the probability of a context that we have not seen. We compare several estimation techniques and find that some are useless. Fortunately, we have found that the Good-Turing method provides an estimate of contextual probabilities that produces a significant improvement in program performance. Context is helpful in this application, but only if it is estimated very carefully.At this point, we have a number of different knowledge sources—the prior, the channel and the context—and there will certainly be more in the future. In general, performance will be improved as more and more knowledge sources are added to the system, as long as each additional knowledge source provides some new (independent) information. As we shall see, it is important to think more carefully about combination rules, especially when there are a large number of different knowledge sources.