PR week 3 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

PR week 3 - Essay Example For this case, the company ought to be aware that it should not be having any pending negative incident that might have rocked the company in the recent times. Riordan being an international company the deals with customers from all corners of the world, they must ensure that they have solved any international ethical issues that might be pending. Being an international company also, the company also ought to be aware that it needs to safeguard the customer’s confidential information before it get to the wrong hands. For this case, they must assure their customers that their confidential information or data such as medical information does not get to the media. This fear on the side of their customer might result to most of their customers withdrawing from their organization resulting to losses. There might be an impact that will be experienced as result of relocating Riordan’s Manufacturer China’s plan. Some of the negative impact would be losing some valuable employees who might not be willing to move to new location. This kind of a loss might in the long run have an impact on the good will of the organization. If these employees lands on another job opportunity at a Riordan’s competitor, they might reveal most of Riordan confidential information of doing business. This will in turn affect Riordan manufacturer as their confidential information will be known by their competitors and the competition might even become tougher. manufacture products for our customers that are of high quality with the latest technology. We have always been looking forward to suggestions from our customers on how we can improve our products in order to cater for the ever growing human needs and satisfying them at an affordable cost. We have also ensured that we also lead as far as producing and distributing our products to the world. For this

Audience Analysis Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 3

Audience Analysis Paper - Essay Example All cultures everywhere use various behaviors and belief systems. The most critical thing to remember is the simple fact that audiences in Japan, United States, Europe, or the Muslim world will have significant differences in their individual behaviors and belief systems. Because most cultures are more formal than the United States, when addressing this type of audience, one must keep in mind that titles may be more meaningful to them. Therefore, use titles and not first names. Another important key to international communication is that the author of the document or the presentation needs to avoid the use contractions, slang, and sports metaphors. If one is not familiar with the audience's language then it is proper to use, English. If the presentation is in an overseas office generally, an interpreter is present to properly present to findings to the individual stakeholders, managers, etc of the foreign entity (Locker, 2008). A manager's responsibility is to learn about the differe nt cultures around the world and the different people that we may work with. Stereotypes make for well-intentioned efforts at communications effectiveness. However, Carver and Livers found in their studies of stereotyping where they wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2002 that African-Americans clients of their firm were complaining about the fact that were asked more about diversity then about the job (Caver, 2002). What communication channels are appropriate? Explain. Interpersonal dimensions always focuses on the following. First, focus on the people in order to promote friendliness, cooperation and group loyalty. The next dimension focuses on the content in terms of the problem, data, and possible solutions. The procedural dimension will focus on the method and the processes (Locker, 2008). This will necessitate that the speaker be aware of what the group consists of and performing some prior research is always a good idea. Allowing the audience to ask questions and having the ability to provide on the spot answers is wise. Knowledge of the company is helpful to any audience. The speaker needs to make the audience aware of where the company is now and where he/she expects it to be in the future. This type of information is critical to the meetings success. In this case, if quarterly sales do not meet the expected goals, the speaker should be aware of that fact to satisfy the audience with presently plans for the future. Prior research of the audience comes into play in this step. Knowing what the audience is expecting, what he/she goals are for the future are some key points to making this meeting successful (Locker, 2008)? These steps will keep the speaker on tract to success while at the same time considering this particular audiences point of view. At many points in the meeting, the speaker may find they need to paraphrase some of the content back to the audience; he/she may need to mirror some feelings or ask for information or clarification by of fering to help solve the problems together. What are some considerations to keep in mind given the diversity of the audience? Within every culture is a subculture. It is up to the speaker to cut through the diversity by cutting across these different cultures and use differentiating factor like gender, race, and economic position. The speaker holds the key to researching cultures and subcultures. The speaker needs to know what presentations will work the best with this diverse audience. Sometimes, this goes beyond these basics when one deals not only

Facial Emotion Recognition Systems

Facial Emotion Recognition Systems CHAPTER-1 INTRODUCTION 1.1: Introduction Face plays important role in social communication. This is a window to human character, reactions and ideas. the psychological research shown that nonverbal part is the most enlightening channel in social communication. Verbal part offers about 7% of the message, vocal 34% and facial expression about 55%. Due to that, face is a theme of study in many areas of science such as psychology, behavioral science, medicine and finally computer science. In the field of computer science much effort is put to discover the ways of automation the process of face detection and segmentation. Several methods addressing the problem of facial feature extraction have been proposed. The key problem is to provide suitable face representation, which leftovers robust with respect to diversity of facial appearances. The method of face recognition plays an important role in peoples life ranging from commercial to law enforcement applications, such as real time surveillance, biometric personal identification and information security. It is one of the most challenging topics in the interface of computer vision and cognitive science. Over past years, extensive research on face recognition has been conducted by many psychophysicists, neuroscientists and engineers. In general views, the definition of face recognition can be formulated as follows Different faces in a static image can be identified using a database of stored faces. Available collateral information like facial expression may enhance the recognition rate. Generally speaking, if the face images are sufficiently provided, the quality of face recognition will be mainly related to feature extraction and recognition modeling. Facial emotion recognition in uncontrolled environments is a very challenging task due to large intra-class variations caused by factors such as illumination and pose changes, occlusion, and head movement. The accuracy of a facial emotion recognition system generally depends on two critical factors: (i) extraction of facial features that are robust under intra-class variations (e.g. pose changes), but are distinctive for various emotions, and (ii) design of a classifier that is capable of distinguishing different facial emotions based on noisy and imperfect data (e.g., illumination changes and occlusion). For recognition modeling, lots of researchers usually evaluate the performance of model by recognition rate instead of computational cost. Recently, Wright and Mare ported their work called the sparse representation based classification (SRC). To be more specific, it can represent the testing image sparsely using training samples via norm minimization which can be solved by balancing the minimum reconstructed error and the sparse coefficients. The recognition rate of SRC is much higher than that of classical algorithms such as Nearest Neighbor, Nearest Subspace and Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM). However, there are three drawbacks behind the SRC. First, SRC is based on the holistic features, which cannot exactly capture the partial deformation of the face images. Second, regularized SRC usually runs slowly for high dimensional face images. Third in the presence of occluded face images, Wright et al introduce an occlusion dictionary to sparsely code the occluded components in face images. However, the computational cost of SRC increase drastically because of large number of elements in the occlusion dictionary. Therefore, the computational cost of SRC limits it s application in real time area, which increasingly attracts researchers attention to solve this issue. 1.2: Psychological Background In 1978, Ekman et al. [2] introduced the system for measuring facial expressions called FACS Facial Action Coding System. FACS was developed by analysis of the relations between muscle(s) contraction and changes in the face appearance caused by them. Contractions of muscles responsible for the same action are marked as an Action Unit (AU). The task of expression analysis with use of FACS is based on decomposing observed expression into the set of Action Units. There are 46 AUs that represent changes in facial expression and 12 AUs connected with eye gaze direction and head orientation. Action Units are highly descriptive in terms of facial movements, however, they do not provide any information about the message they represent. AUs are labeled with the description of the action (Fig.1). Fig. 1: Examples of Action Units Facial expression described by Action Units can be then analyzed on the semantic level in order to find the meaning of particular actions. According to the Ekmans theory [2], there are six basic emotion expressions that are universal for people of different nations and cultures. Those basic emotions are joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise (Fig. 2). Fig. 2: Six universal emotions The Facial Action Coding System was developed to help psychologists with face behavior analysis. Facial image was studied to detect the Action Units occurrences and then AU combinations were translated into emotion categories. This procedure required much effort, not only because the analysis was done manually, but also because about 100 hours of training were needed to become a FACS coder. That is why; FACS was quickly automated and replaced by different types of computer software solutions. 1.3: Facial emotion recognition systems The aim of FERS is to replicate the human visual system in the most analogous way. This is very thought-provoking job in the area of computer vision because not only it needs effective image/video analysis methods but also well-matched feature vector used in machine learning process. The primary principle of FER system is that it would be easy and effective. That relates to full automation, so that no extra manual effort is obligatory. It is also chosen for such system to be real-time which is particularly significant in both: human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction applications. Besides, the theme of study should be permitted to act impulsively while data is being captured for examination. System should be intended to evade limitations on body and head movements which could also be an important source of data about shown emotion. The limitations about facial hair, glasses or extra make-up should be reduced to lowest. Furthermore, handling the occlusions problem looks to be a test for a system and it should be also considered. Other significant features that are wanted in FER system are user and environment independence. The prior means that, any user should be permissible to work with the system, regardless of of skin color, oldness, gender or state. The latter relates to conduct the complex background and diversity in lightning conditions. Further advantage could be the view independence in FERS, which is likely in systems based on 3D vision. Face Detection As it was stated earlier, FER system comprises of 3 steps. In the first step, system takes input image and does some image processing methods on it, to detect the face region. System can function on static images, where this process is called face localization or videos where we are working with face tracking. Main problems which can be come across at this step are different scales and orientations of face. They are generally produced by subject movements or changes in remoteness from camera. Substantial body actions can also reason for severe changes in position of face in successive frames what makes tracking tougher. What is more, difficulty of background and variety of lightning circumstances can be also quite puzzling in tracking. For example, when there is more than one face in the image, system should be able to differentiate which one is being tracked. Finally, obstructions which usually give the impression in impulsive reactions need to be handled as well. Problems stated overhead were a challenge to hunt for methods which would crack them. Among the methods for face detection, we can differentiate two groups: holistic where face is treated as a whole unit and analytic where co-occurrence of characteristic facial elements is considered. 1.3.2. Feature Extraction Afterward the face has been situated in the image or video frame, it can be examined in terms of facial action occurrence. There are two types of features that are frequently used to define facial expression: geometric features and appearance features. Geometric features quantity the displacements of certain parts of the face such as brows or mouth corners, while appearance features define the variation in face texture when specific action is done. Apart from feature type, FER systems can be separated by the input which could be static images or image sequences. The job of geometric feature measurement is generally connected with face region analysis, exclusively finding and tracking vital points in the face region. Possible problems that arise in face decomposition job could be obstructions and incidences of facial hair or glasses. Besides, defining the feature set is tough, because features should be expressive and possibly not interrelated. Recognition of Expression The latter part of the FER system is based on machine learning theory; exactly it is the classification job. The input to the classifier is a set of features which were recovered from face region in the previous stage. The set of features is designed to describe the facial expression. Classification needs supervised training, so the training set should consist of labeled data. Once the classifier is trained, it can distinguish input images by assigning them a specific class label. The most usually used facial expressions classification is finished both in terms of Action Units, proposed in Facial Action Coding System and in terms of common emotions: happiness, unhappiness, fury, surprise, disgust and fear. There are a lot of different machine learning methods for classification job, viz.: K-Nearest Neighbors, Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, Hidden Markov Models, Expert Systems with rule based classifier, Bayesian Networks or Boosting Techniques (Adaboost, Gentleboost). Three major problems in classification job are: picking good feature set, effective machine learning method and diverse database for training. Feature set should be composed of features that are discriminative and characteristic for expression. Machine learning method is chosen usually by the sort of a feature set. In conclusion, database used as a training set should be adequate and contain various data. Methods described in the literature are presented by categories of classification output. 1.4: Applications Enormous amount of different information is encoded in facial movements. Perceiving someones face we can absorb about his/her: †¢ Affective state, connected with emotions like fear, anger and joy and moods such as euphoria or irritation †¢ Cognitive activity (brain activity), which can be seeming as attentiveness or boredom †¢ Personality features like sociability, nervousness or unfriendliness †¢ Honesty using analysis of micro-expressions to disclose hidden emotions †¢ Psychological state giving information about illnesses helpful with diagnosis of depression, mania or schizophrenia. Due to the variety of information visible on human face, facial expression analysis has applications in various fields of science and life. Primarily, teachers use facial expression investigation to correct the struggle of the exercise and learning pace on a base of reaction visible on students faces. Virtual tutor in e-learning planned by Amelsvoort and Krahmer [26] offers student with suitable content and alters the complexity of courses or tasks by the information attained from students face. Additional application of FERS is in the field of business where the measurement of peoples fulfilment or disappointment is very important. Usage of this application can be found in many marketing methods where information is collected from customers by surveys. The great chance to conduct the surveys in the automatic way could be able by using customers facial expressions as a level of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction . Furthermore, prototype of Computerized Sales Assistant, proposed by Shergill et al.   chooses the appropriate marketing and sales methods by the response taken from customers facial expressions. Facial behavior is also studied in medicine not only for psychological disorder diagnosis but also to help people with some disabilities. Example of it could be the system proposed by Pioggial et al.   that aids autistic children to progress their social skills by learning how to recognize emotions. Facial expressions could be also used for surveillance purposes like in prototype developed by Hazel hoff et al.. Suggested system automatically perceives uneasiness of newborn babies by recognition of 3 behavioral states: sleep, awake and cry. Furthermore, facial expression recognition is broadly used in human robot and human computer interaction Smart Robotic Assistant for people with disabilities based on multimodal HCI. Another example of human computer interaction systems could be system developed for automatic update of avatar in multiplayer online games. 1.5: Thesis Organization The thesis is organized as follows: The thesis is opened with an introduction i.e., Chapter 1, in which it is discussed about the introduction, physiological background and facial emotion recognition systems along with the Thesis organization and the Tools used for the whole project. Chapter 2 discussed about the literature survey in which the brief explanation of previous works is given and explained. Chapter 3 discussed about the proposed system in which the each part of the face was detected and the emotion of the person is detected based on extreme sparse learning. Here we use the spatial-temporal descriptor and optimal flow method to recognize the emotion. Chapter 4 plays key role in this project which gives the information of software that used for the project i.e. MATLAB. The results and discussions are presented in Chapter 5. This chapter describes the results that are obtained for the proposed system. Chapter 6 discussed about the advantages of the proposed system and disadvantages of the existing systems. Hence the conclusion and future work, references are presented in chapter 7. Then the references are mentioned in the chapter8. 1.6: Tools Used Image processing toolbox MATLAB R2013a(version 8)

Crack and the Box Essay -- Literary Analysis, Pete Hamill

One is Crack and the Other is the Box Almost a century has passed since two revolutionaries have been born to change the world: television and drugs. It is clear that both drugs and television made their way to society at the same time, but it doesn't seem that obvious what is that made them escalate together. Some studious people say that it may have to do with the presence of drugs in the media, but it remains a mystery. In 'Crack and the Box' by Pete Hamill, there is an intention to explain the reasons to this phenomenon. Hamill accuses television to be the instigator of drugs. However, his statements fall into contradiction because the effects of television watching cannot be compared to those of drug consumption. Primarily, the domination power television has on its viewers is incomparable to the one drugs have over their addicts. First, addicts to television are not dominated in the same level addicts to drugs are. Hamill says that television absorbs its viewers in the same way drugs absorb their users because both television and drugs cultivate asocial behaviors in people (63, 64). Departing from this idea, it may seem reasonable to say that addicts to television and drugs both portrait unsocial attitudes, but doesn't this happen with any other kind addiction? Here Hamill is isolating a generalization which intention is to proclaim an assumption to be true. In his example, Hamill explains how some Americans fight their loneliness by leaving their TV sets on as companion (63). Instead of support Hamill's idea this example shows how Americans fulfill their vacancy of company rather than how Americans become lonely due to television. Second, independent studies on television do not qualify t o determine the relation betwe... ...orld by drinking a certain brand of beer (Hamill 64)--very surreal. In the case of drugs, the dealer provides to the customer the substance that will actually make him feel he has conquered the world—this is more connected to reality. In general, the effects of television and drugs cannot be compared as equivalents; nevertheless, their study is worth of consideration. They are still two mysteries to be solved: why people spend so many hours in front of a TV set instead of doing something proactive and why people seeks refuge in drugs. We may not know all of the answers but we know all the of questions. While we walk towards the light hoping to find the answers to these mysteries, there are still many things to be done. In the meanwhile, one thing must remain in our minds: we will still face many obstacles together as society, with or without television and drugs.

Chapter Reviewing the Facts

Of course, It Isn't always pleasant to hear active comments about what we are doing. Sometimes our feelings get hurt, our ego Is wounded, or the feedback strikes us as, well, stupid. That said; let's consider a shift In our perspective. Feedback Is a form of coaching. When we work with a coach, he or she Is constantly giving us negative feedback-?and we appreciate It. A golf coach, for example, will correct the way you hold or swing the club and you're delighted to get the negative feedback. In fact, you pay for all these â€Å"complaints. † Dissatisfaction happens.What we choose to do about it can make all the difference in reading customer and employee loyalty. To do something about dissatisfaction, we need to know when it is happening-?we need to get the silently dissatisfied customer to speak up by creating open communication channels. (Customer Service: Career Success through customer Loyalty) Chapter 9-Reviewing the Facts 2. – What are the three important steps ne eded to recover the potentially lost customer? The first step consists of both apology and accountability. Say, â€Å"I'm sorry,† and take ownership of a mistake, even if it's because of supplier or other problems.Next, work with the customer to determine an appropriate remedy. This involves the customer in the resolution and sometimes uncovers less costly solutions. Resolution should not only address a customer's direct loss but also compensate â€Å"pain and suffering. † Some refer to such compensation as â€Å"atonement. † Manage expectations with resolution schedules. In one Citibank experiment, specifying time frames for next steps increased customer satisfaction by 40%. Finally, follow-up. Determine whether the customer has received the promised treatment, and, more important, how they feel about it.One study indicated that a follow-up call to a once-unhappy customer can boost satisfaction by 5%-7%, and intentions to repurchase by 8%-12%. The second level is building integrated customer recovery capabilities In the following four areas: Companies must do more to upgrade the skills, training and pay of customer service representatives, especially since they handle an estimated 65% of all complaints. Other employees must also understand the Importance of customer retention. Ford trains new hires In such recovery skills as Interpersonal communications.Others regularly rotate employees Into customer service to underscore the Impact of departmental processes on customers. How much authority do employees have to recover customers? Employees at Marriott International, for example, can spend up to $2,500 without authorization to compensate customers. What are the timetables for resolution? Brothels Airways research showed that of customers defected if it took the company longer than five days to respond want level AT complaints trigger corrective Acton? Can any employee handle recovery, or should you depend on special representatives trained for customer recovery?Customers should be easily able to complain via email, letter or even well-publicized hot lines. Systems should streamline complaint acceptance, and generate complaint-based reports. Insurance giant USA scans every complaint letter into its database. Causes for the complaint are analyzed, and processes examined to avoid similar complaints in the future. To institutionalize improvements, systems should be developed to hold other departments accountable for their actions. Complaint data should also be used to determine investment priorities and service improvements. (Small Business Resources – How to Recover Lost Customers)

Boston Beer Company Essay

This report examines the US Beer industry as well as the industry structure, capacity and marketing trends as they relate to the current and future positioning of the Boston Beer Company, or as most people know it around here, Samuel Adams. The US beer industry has had several years of slowing gains and downfalls. Three brewers dominate the industry that I emphasized in my industry analysis, which are: Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing and Adolph Coors. These market leaders have expanded their respective beer industry market at the expense of other brewers, including Boston Beer Company. Boston Beer Company is just a mere 1 percent of the beer brewing industry. The US beer industry is highly competitive with brewers leaving the industry and a few new large brewers enter. China is the undisputed leader in global beer industry, accounting for 17. 1 percent of the world’s beer production in 2005. Purchasing power in Chinese economy is on the rise, which will drive beer sales and improve overall profitability for them. Domestic brewers have been buying small breweries in individual Chinese provinces to service particular communities. First to better understand A little more about Boston Beer Company I’ll look deep into their background of Boston Beer Company. Just like in our Strategic Leadership class to find out what somebody’s values are, you have to know what their back-story is. Samuel Adams has an amazing story line behind it. According to their website it says that â€Å"Boston Beer Company was started with Jim Koch’s great-great grandfathers recipe. With a determination to handcraft a quality, flavorful beer, Jim brewed his first batch of Samuel Adams Boston Lager in his kitchen in 1984†, before I was even born. The beer is said to be created with the world’s finest, all natural ingredients. Jim chose the name Samuel Adams after the Boston patriots, the father of the American Revolution, and a man who fought for our American Independence. Samuel Adams made its debut in Boston on Patriots Day in April of 1985. Boston bartenders were quoted saying that Samuel Adams was unlike any beer they had ever tasted. By the end of the first year, sales reached up to 500 barrels and it just took off from there. Just six weeks after its introduction Samuel Adams was selected as â€Å"The Best Beer in America† at the Great American Beer Festival’s. Since 2000, Samuel Adams has won more awards in international beer tasting competitions than any other brewery in the world. Boston Beer Company has become an inspiration to other small industries out there. By 1995, hundreds of small, local and regional breweries sprouted up all over the country, following in Boston Beer Companies footsteps. From reading this firm analysis so far you would think they dominate the Brewing Industry, brewing close to two million barrels of Samuel Adams beer, but is still less than 1% of the total US beer market. That is just astonishing to me. The companies’ culture and philosophy is simple. To set superior standards for quality. Jim and the brewers at Samuel Adams ensure the highest standards for the best ingredients needed to make the highest quality of beer. I found this so interesting that on Jim’s annual hops selection trip to Bavaria the hops farmers always comment on how Jim just doesn’t just sniff the hops, he â€Å"dives into them! (BostonBeer). There philosophy is not to be the biggest brewing industry but to be the best tasting beer brewing company. Samuel Adams is the only brewer that actually buys back its beer when its past its peak freshness date. These are there strengths. There strengths have always been to take pride in their beer, differentiate yourself in a market that is already dominated by three huge organizations. To this day Jim tastes every batch of beer brewed to make sure it meets his high standards. Another strength they pursue is they have a wide range of beers. These brews include: year-round beers, seasonal styles, signature holiday brews. This differentiates them so much from large brewers. Say for example someone like Anheiser Bush sells the same beer over and over and over. Samuel Adams has Boston Larger, Summer Ale, October Fest, Winter Larger.. etc. This brings in so many more customers like my dad who are excited when the newest season beer comes out. From personal experience my dad marks his calender for when the different brews for Samuel Adams comes out. This is so vital and different from any other brewery. Jim Koch the founder and CEO of The Boston Beer Company Early on, Boston Beer Company acted like a virtual company, primarily contracting with third party packers to produce its products. The brewery did have a small facility, but it was never be enough to produce all the beer the company was capable of selling. In 2006, it expanded its breweries into Cincinnati, which was expected to produce roughly two-thirds of Boson Beer’s total volume. Boston beer companies target customers have always been those around New England and people who like a high-end, thick, good, delicious beer. Boston Beer Company was actually the first brewer to market their product nationally, however they did not have the expense of shipping it across the country however. In 2006, regarding Boston Beer’s productions, chief executive Martin Roper said â€Å"We have revised upward our capacity needs in New England based on healthy craft category growth, our own growth trends and higher freight costs and are no exploring production capacity in excess of 1. 0 million barrels. Our current estimates are that construction of such a facility could cost between 120 million and 160 million. We believe this is an appropriate strategic investment based on the growth of the category as well as known and unknown risk in supplier alternatives. † It is increasingly important for the Boston Beer Company to focus on defining where they stand in a global businesses strategy and perspective, developing Samuel Adams into a leading international brand by making investments in brewers that have leading brands in high-growth beer markets. It is my recommendation that they focus specifically on growth in the Chinese beer industry. It has taken more then three hundred years to develop technology and process required to transform malt into the product displayed in grocery and convenience store coolers across the globe.