Impacts of WeChat on Millennials’ Perceptions and Consumption Behaviors in the Hotel Industry

Social media, known as interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications, has deeply changed and reformed interpersonal communication and business operation with the wide spread of Internet and the development of technology. In the past few years, since mobile apps are becoming more and more popular, the access of social media is not limited to tablet computers only, but is also available for almost all kinds of smart phone devices, such as iPhone, Android, Symbian and so on. The function of social media is not confined to real- time message transmission or information sharing any more. It has expanded to a widely range of features, such as online purchase and payment, e-commerce business, and service for different types of social events. Social media plays an increasingly important role in daily personal life as well as in business activities. People are not merely considered as social media users, but also the component of social media itself. As a result, it is very crucial for people to realize the importance and impacts of social media, especially for those business operators. WeChat (Weixin in Chinses, literally “micro message”) is a cross-platform instant text and voice messaging communication service for multiple mobile devices, developed by Tecent in China, first released in the January of 2011. It is claimed to provide “the new way to connect” and create “a way of life”. It is free to download, install and register, and support all kinds of smart phone platforms with multiple language versions, such as Chinese, English, Japanese, French, and Spanish. WeChat provides its users different ways to communicate and interact with friends innovatively through instant text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, group messaging, lively video sharing, location sharing, money transferring, and contact information sharing. Among all the WeChat users, Millennials is the majority. With the growing-up of Millennials, they are becoming more and more powerful and important to the society and will be the next target segmentation for most of the industries in the very near future. Especially for the hotel industry, the industry that urges to attract Millennials patrons for further substantial development, how to attract Millennials is becoming a critical issue for those hotel operators

Driving improvements in emerging disease surveillance through locally-relevant capacity strengthening

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) threaten the health of people, animals, and crops globally, but our ability to predict their occurrence is limited. Current public health capacity and ability to detect and respond to EIDs is typically weakest in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Many known drivers of EID emergence also converge in LMICs. Strengthening capacity for surveillance of diseases of relevance to local populations can provide a mechanism for building the cross-cutting and flexible capacities needed to tackle both the burden of existing diseases and EID threats. A focus on locally relevant diseases in LMICs and the economic, social, and cultural contexts of surveillance can help address existing inequalities in health systems, improve the capacity to detect and contain EIDs, and contribute to broader global goals for development

Detecting Incentivized Review Groups With Co-Review Graph

Online reviews play a crucial role in the ecosystem of nowadays business (especially e-commerce platforms), and have become the primary source of consumer opinions. To manipulate consumers’ opinions, some sellers of e-commerce platforms outsource opinion spamming with incentives (e.g., free products) in exchange for incentivized reviews. As incentives, by nature, are likely to drive more biased reviews or even fake reviews. Despite e-commerce platforms such as Amazon have taken initiatives to squash the incentivized review practice, sellers turn to various social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook) to outsource the incentivized reviews. The aggregation of sellers who request incentivized reviews and reviewers who seek incentives forms incentivized review groups. In this paper, we focus on the incentivized review groups in e-commerce platforms. We perform the data collections from various social networking platforms, including Facebook, WeChat, and Douban. A measurement study of incentivized review groups is conducted with regards to group members, group activities, and products. To identify the incentivized review groups, we propose a new detection approach based on co-review graphs. Specifically, we employ the community detection method to find the suspicious communities from co-review graphs. We also build a “gold standard” dataset from the data we collected, which contains the information of reviewers who belong to incentivized review groups. We utilize the “gold standard” dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our detection approach

Optimizing Public-Private Partnerships: A Case Study in U.S. Transportation Infrastructure

Public-Private Partnerships have emerged as one of the most common models for generating private investment in infrastructure. However, there is still significant debate surrounding which factors drive P3 project results. While many P3 deals have proven to be a success and generated numerous benefits, others have resulted in failure and bankruptcy. This paper analyzes one such case, the 2006 Indiana Toll Road Concession. Celebrated as a landmark deal that would serve as a model for future P3 deals, the project resulted in a 2014 bankruptcy filing. The project suffered from the broader economic impact of the Great Recession, but the project ultimately failed because of deal-specific flaws. Analysis of the deal and its impact shows that (1) P3’s can generate social welfare so long as the public allocates sufficient risk to the private partner and (2) private parties suffer when they overbid for projects, despite many incentives to do so

Collusion in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer systems have reached a widespread use, ranging from academic and industrial applications to home entertainment. The key advantage of this paradigm lies in its scalability and flexibility, consequences of the participants sharing their resources for the common welfare. Security in such systems is a desirable goal. For example, when mission-critical operations or bank transactions are involved, their effectiveness strongly depends on the perception that users have about the system dependability and trustworthiness. A major threat to the security of these systems is the phenomenon of collusion. Peers can be selfish colluders, when they try to fool the system to gain unfair advantages over other peers, or malicious, when their purpose is to subvert the system or disturb other users. The problem, however, has received so far only a marginal attention by the research community. While several solutions exist to counter attacks in peer-to-peer systems, very few of them are meant to directly counter colluders and their attacks. Reputation, micro-payments, and concepts of game theory are currently used as the main means to obtain fairness in the usage of the resources. Our goal is to provide an overview of the topic by examining the key issues involved. We measure the relevance of the problem in the current literature and the effectiveness of existing philosophies against it, to suggest fruitful directions in the further development of the field

Early Childhood Social Skills Development Through Hyflex Learning (Flexible Hybrid)

Social skills need to be familiarized from an early age because children will carry these habits into adulthood. This study aims to find a learning model to develop social-emotional skills through hyflex learning. Face-to-face, hybrid (blended) learning should give early childhood flexibility to learn. HyFlex learning gives students choices about how they attend class through face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous technology. An alternative to achieving this goal is to develop a hybrid learning model that can be used to teach these early childhood social skills. The HyFlex Learning Model is a new form of learning in early childhood education. The selection of the model is based on the initial needs analysis in DKI Jakarta, where most ECCE educators need a learning model to develop children's social performance that can be applied during the Face-to-Face Meeting period to learning activities in PAUD which is limited in nature can be done optimally. The method used is research and development (Research and Development) which includes activities (1) researching and collecting information, including reading literature, observing classes, and preparing reports on development needs, (2) planning prototype components to be developed, (3) developing initial prototypes; (4) conduct limited trials, (5) revise, (6) test results, (7) revise product designs, (8) conduct field trials operationally, (9) make final revisions to the media, and (10) disseminate to various parties. The results of the model trial conducted obtained an assessment percentage of 83% with a decent assessment category, so this model is suitable for teaching Social Skills