Internet dependency and psychosocial maturity among college students

 One salient impact of information technology on students' lives is the ever-increasing use of the Internet. Although there exist many reports in the media regarding the unhealthy Internet use among students, research is still limited and has mainly relied upon on-line self-selected reports on Internet dependency or “Internet addiction”. This paper attempts to look into the alleged Internet dependency within the Eriksonian psychosocial development framework. The results of a survey of the Internet use among 217 students in an Australian regional university are reported. The measures of patterns of the Internet use were correlated with that of psychosocial maturity and self-efficacy. The results showed that the Internet dependency seemed to be independent of the psychosocial maturity and the general perceived self-efficacy. A factor analysis extracted six factors from a set of 28 Internet experience-related questions and indicated that the Internet dependency could be of a multifaceted nature. The findings and their implications were discussed and a contextual perspective was proposed. </p

Investigations with various inner shielding distance tests for a novel coupler-based CPT system applied for electric vehicles using electromagnetic resonant coupling and aluminium shielding material

Contactless power transfer (CPT) technology development has been driven rapidly over the past decade by the world-wide trends towards new energy explorations, and numerous reports have been presented in this area. This paper focuses on passive magnetic shielding, which acts as one of the major factors mainly determining the overall CPT system performance when discussing electromagnetic field flux distribution and its real-time effects on magnetic resonant coupling. As a well performance conductive metallic material, aluminium has been adopted to be a passive shielding material in the designed novel H-shape coupler CPT system in this paper, in order to evaluate and find out the optimal inner shielding distance in between the coil and the inner shielding shell. Three inner shielding distances are applied and analyzed across a critical range of system operating frequency, by which the actual CPT system performance differences from perspectives of electromagnetics and power electronics have been illustrated and compared. As a result, it can be noticed that the 15-mm inner shielding gap CPT model is able to yield an optimal system performance with a maximum system efficiency, peak system output RMS power of over 36% and 22 kW, respectively, which also shows an optimal capability to address major concerns over electric vehicle contactless charging. Besides, along with the electromagnetic field parameters generated in the model, such as actual real-time values of flux linkage, magnetic flux density and field strength, it can be found that the 15-mm inner shielding gap prototype is able to achieve better overall magnetic field performance than 5-mm and 25-mm inner shielding distance CPT models

Diversity and Economic Performance in a Model with Progressive Taxation

Is a more heterogeneous population beneficial or harmful to long-term economic performance? This article addresses this and other questions in a dynamic general equilibrium model where consumers differ in their labour productivity and time preference. We show how differences in the cross-sectional distribution of these characteristics can affect the economy via two channels. The first one involves changing the composition of the labour force; and the second one involves changing the cross-sectional distribution of the marginal tax rate. We show how these channels are, respectively, determined by the shape of the labour supply function and the curvature of the marginal tax function

Diversity and Economic Performance in a Model with Progressive Taxation

Is a more heterogeneous population beneficial or harmful to long-term economic performance? This article addresses this and other questions in a dynamic general equilibrium model where consumers differ in their labour productivity and time preference. We show how differences in the cross-sectional distribution of these characteristics can affect the economy via two channels. The first one involves changing the composition of the labour force; and the second one involves changing the cross-sectional distribution of the marginal tax rate. We show how these channels are, respectively, determined by the shape of the labour supply function and the curvature of the marginal tax function

Genome-Wide Association Study on Two Immune-Related Traits in Jinghai Yellow Chicken

ABSTRACT This study was designed to discover molecular marker associated with the interferon INF-γ and avian influenza (AI) antibody titer traits in Jinghai Yellow chicken (Gallus gallus). Serum samples were taken from 400 female chickens and the INF-γ concentrations and AI antibody titer levels were measured. A genome-wide association study was carried out using specific-locus amplified fragment (SLAF) sequencing. Bioinformatics analysis was applied to detect single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with the two traits. After sequencing and quality control, 103,680 SLAFs and 90,961 SNPs were obtained. The 400 samples were divided into 10 subgroups to reduce the effects of group stratification. The Bonferroni adjusted P-value of genome-wide significance was set at 1.87E−06 according to the number of independent SNP markers and linkage disequilibrium blocks. A SNP that was significantly associated with INF-γ concentration was detected in the myomesin 1 (MYOM1) gene on chromosome 2, and another SNPthat was significantly associated with the AI antibody titer level was detected in an RNA methyltransferase gene (Nsun7), which was found to have an important biological function. We propose that MYOM1 and Nsun7 are valuable candidate genes that influence the disease resistance characters of chicken. However, in-depth investigations are needed to determine the essential roles of these genes in poultry disease resistance and their possible application in breeding disease resistant poultry.</div

Correction for Wang et al., Heterogeneous preferences, decision-making capacity, and phase transitions in a complex adaptive system (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2009) 106, 21, (8423-8428) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811782106)

APPLIED PHYSICAL SCIENCES, ECONOMIC SCIENCES Correction for ‘‘Heterogeneous preferences, decision-making capacity, and phase transitions in a complex adaptive system,’’ by Wei Wang, Yu Chen, and Jiping Huang, which appeared in issue 21, May 26, 2009, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (106:8423–8428; first published May 12, 2009; 10.1073/pnas.0811782106)

How story works in mobile app stores? Exploring the same-side effect from the storytelling perspective

The growing number of mobile apps has contributed to an innovation diffusion paradox whereby the accelerated pace with which mobile apps are being developed and updated has stymied their own diffusion. Due to consumers' limited personal involvement with mobile apps, storytelling, as an emerging and novel product recommendation format, is gaining traction as a promotional mechanism for diffusing mobile apps within the ecosystem. Storytelling is particularly amenable to the context of mobile app stores by giving affective meaning to the focal app being promoted and strengthening its association with other apps available from these stores. To this end, we construct a research model to illustrate how consumers' demand for related mobile apps is shaped by similarity in functional and visual attributes between these apps and the focal app being promoted via storytelling. Our model also sheds light on how the preceding effects could be mitigated by within-developer influence

Heterogeneous preferences, decision-making capacity, and phase transitions in a complex adaptive system

There has been a belief that with the directing power of the market, the efficient state of a resource-allocating system can eventually be reached even in a case where the resource is distributed in a biased way. To mimic the realistic huge system for the resource allocation, we designed and conducted a series of economic experiments. From the experiments we found that efficient allocation can be realized despite a lack of communications among the participants or any instructions to them. To explain the underlying mechanism, an extended minority game model called the market-directed resource allocation game (MDRAG) is constructed by introducing heterogeneous preferences into the strategy-building procedures. MDRAG can produce results in good agreement with the experiments. We investigated the influence of agents' decision-making capacity on the system behavior and the phase structure of the MDRAG model as well. A number of phase transitions are identified in the system. In the critical region, we found that the overall system will behave in an efficient, stable, and unpredictable mode in which the market's invisible hand can fully play its role

Covid-19 Detection by Wavelet Entropy and Self-adaptive PSO

The rapid global spread of COVID-19 disease poses a huge threat to human health and the global economy. The rapid increase in the number of patients diagnosed has strained already scarce healthcare resources to track and treat Covid-19 patients in a timely and effective manner. The search for a fast and accurate way to diagnose Covid-19 has attracted the attention of many researchers. In our study, a deep learning framework for the Covid-19 diagnosis task was constructed using wavelet entropy as a feature extraction method and a feedforward neural network classifier, which was trained using an adaptive particle swarm algorithm. The model achieved an average sensitivity of 85.14% ± 2.74%, specificity of 86.76% ± 1.75%, precision of 86.57% ± 1.36%, accuracy of 85.95% ± 1.14%, and F1 score of 85.82% ± 1.30%, Matthews correlation coefficient of 71.95 ± 2.26%, and Fowlkes-Mallows Index of 85.83% ± 1.30%. Our experiments validate the usability of wavelet entropy-based feature extraction methods in the medical image domain and show the non-negligible impact of different optimisation algorithms on the models by comparing them with other models

Pollution Reduction, Informatization and Sustainable Urban Development—Evidence from the Smart City Projects in China

China’s modernization endeavors to advance both material and spiritual civilization concomitantly; nevertheless, the nation presently faces a pressing issue of urban pollution. This research examines how the introduction of information technology has affected environmental pollution in Chinese cities. By utilizing a panel dataset consisting of 214 prefecture-level cities in China spanning from 2005 to 2017, we employed a time-varying DID model with smart city pilot projects serving as a quasi-natural experiment to assess the impact of informatization on environmental pollution. The establishment of smart cities has remarkably elevated the information quotient of urban areas. Additionally, the results indicate a significant reduction in pollution levels in urban areas as a result of informatization, which remained robust even after conducting a series of rigorous tests to ensure the reliability of the findings. Mechanism analysis shows that informatization of smart cities affects the environmental governance behavior of enterprises and governments. Consequently, the implementation of informatization in smart cities can effectively alleviate environmental pollution by means of both the technique effect and structure effect. This finding calls for the Chinese government to improve informatization by promoting smart city pilot projects to build sustainable cities