Marketing images and consumers' experiences in selling environments

In a well-functioning market, consumers exert choices not just in purchases of products but also in selections of locations to enjoy shopping. Scholarly research has demonstrated that retail atmospheres impact on shoppers’ pleasurable shopping experiences. Demonstrating the marketing concept in action, shoppers consistently respond to this empowerment by for example, spending more time shopping and spending more money in retail facilities that are perceived to offer a pleasanter atmosphere and experience. This research pivots round an in-depth qualitative study that evaluated the impact of a plasma screens and specific informational content on shopping centre user behaviour. A phenomenological study of the effects of the medium, and the way in which these systems influence behaviour, permitted a far deeper investigation of our sample group vis-àvis increased browsing time and the propensity to spend. A series of eight focus discussions were conducted with local user groups of varying age and gender. Key themes drawn from the group discussions using axial coding indicated that the influence created by the images varied with subjects and settings. The general consensus was that such ‘screens’ created a certain ambience that influenced the way our subjects felt about the selling environment under study. Moreover, for our sample groups, there was clearly a link between the screened images and modern expectations of a selling environment. The plasma screens provided added enjoyment to shoppers’ experiences, providing them with more information enabling more informed shopping choices. The research concludes with implications for strategic marketing, theory and practice

Body mass index dependent metabolic syndrome in severe mental illness patients

The aim of this study was to evaluate the body mass index dependent metabolic syndrome in severe mental illness patients in Gorgan. A total of 267 severe mental illness patients took part in this study. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome in severe mental illness patients in different body mass index were 6.67, 24.09 and 53.06. There were significant differences in the mean of waist circumference, HDL-cholesterol, triglyceride and fasting blood glucose in subjects with metabolic syndrome in different body mass index when compared with subjects without metabolic syndrome (p<0.05). The prevalence of high fasting glucose, low high density lipoprotein-cholesterol, high triglyceride levels, high waist circumference and high blood pressure were 14.23, 38.57, 41.57, 32.96 and 5.24, respectively. It shows that high triglyceride levels (41.57) and Low HDL-cholesterol levels (38.57) were the most frequent characteristics in comparison to other metabolic components. Our results show that, 26.96, 31.08, 21.35, 15.35 and 5.25 of subjects had zero, one, two, three and four criteria for metabolic syndrome, respectively. These results show that the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in severe mental illness patients in Gorgan is increased with elevated body mass index. The results of this study suggest that mental illness patients are at risk of metabolic syndrome, when the rate of body mass index increases. Risk factors such as high triglyceride level and low HDL-cholesterol may play an important role in the occurrence of metabolic syndrome in severe mental illness patients. © 2015, Asian Network for Scientific Information. All rights reserved

Adaptive feed array compensation system for reflector antenna surface distortion

The feasibility of a closed loop adaptive feed array system for compensating reflector surface deformations has been investigated. The performance characteristics (gain, sidelobe level, pointing, etc.) of large communication antenna systems degrade as the reflector surface distorts mainly due to thermal effects from a varying solar flux. The compensating systems described in this report can be used to maintain the design performance characteristics independent of thermal effects on the reflector surface. The proposed compensating system employs the concept of conjugate field matching to adjust the feed array complex excitation coefficients

Effects of skewness and kurtosis on model selection criteria

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We consider the behavior of model selection criteria in AR models where the error terms are not normal by varying skewness and kurtosis. The probability of estimating the true lag order for varying degrees of freedom (k) is the interest. For both small and large samples skewness does not effect the performance of criteria under consideration. On the other hand, kurtosis does effect some of the criteria considerably. In large samples and for large values of k the usual asymptotic theory results for normal models are confirmed. Moreover, we showed that for small sample sizes performance of some newly introduced criteria which were not considered in Monte Carlo studies before are better. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A

Analytical approximation of a distorted reflector surface defined by a discrete set of points

Reflector antennas on Earth orbiting spacecrafts generally cannot be described analytically. The reflector surface is subjected to a large temperature fluctuation and gradients, and is thus warped from its true geometrical shape. Aside from distortion by thermal stresses, reflector surfaces are often purposely shaped to minimize phase aberrations and scanning losses. To analyze distorted reflector antennas defined by discrete surface points, a numerical technique must be applied to compute an interpolatory surface passing through a grid of discrete points. In this paper, the distorted reflector surface points are approximated by two analytical components: an undistorted surface component and a surface error component. The undistorted surface component is a best fit paraboloid polynomial for the given set of points and the surface error component is a Fourier series expansion of the deviation of the actual surface points, from the best fit paraboloid. By applying the numerical technique to approximate the surface normals of the distorted reflector surface, the induced surface current can be obtained using physical optics technique. These surface currents are integrated to find the far field radiation pattern

Bis(guanidinium) cyananilate

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, 2CH6N3 +·C8N2O4 2−, contains one half of a centrosymmetric 2,5-di­cyano-3,6-dioxocyclo­hexa-1,4-diene-1,4-diolate (cyananil­ate) anion and one guanidinium cation, which are connected by N—H⋯O and N—H⋯N hydrogen bonds into a three-dimensional network