36,657 research outputs found
Evaluating service marketing in airline industry and its influence on student passengers' purchasing behaviour-using Taipei-London route as an example.
This paper reports an empirical study into airline consumer purchase behaviour on a major global route, that between the United Kingdom and Taipei. It focuses on the factors influencing airline choice for a sample of 60 Taiwanese students based at UK Universities and travelling on five airlines: British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, China Airlines, EVA Airways and Royal Dutch Airways. Several stages of data-gathering were undertaken and a well-established analytical framework for services marketing was used to identify gaps between the desired and received service. The main findings suggest that service quality, including in-flight entertainment, cabin crew attitude and seating comfort, can be as important as, or more important than, price in student purchase decisions for long-haul flights. Other important factors in carrier choice included student discounts, baggage allowances and airline safety record.
Key Words: Service Marketing, Airline Industry, Consumer Behaviour, Taiwan, Touris
Political advertising in democratic Taiwan: audiences' perspectives on political figures through image-building advertisements
One can gain important insights into the effects of political advertising by looking at decoding and interpretation in audience perception studies. This essay considers two genres of political advertisement-celebrity endorsement and emotional appeal-through six focus groups formed by either Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) or Kuomintang (KMT) identifiers. It focuses on three key themes for comparison: the participants’ involvement, their interpretations of the key messages, and opinions that were important to them. This study aims to further the understanding of how political advertisements are interpreted and to bring some practical knowledge to the field by comparing the perspectives of audiences of differing political orientations
The scattering of a cylindrical invisibility cloak: reduced parameters and optimization
We investigate the scattering of 2D cylindrical invisibility cloaks with
simplified constitutive parameters with the assistance of scattering
coefficients. We show that the scattering of the cloaks originates not only
from the boundary conditions but also from the spatial variation of the
component of permittivity/permeability. According to our formulation, we
propose some restrictions to the invisibility cloak in order to minimize its
scattering after the simplification has taken place. With our theoretical
analysis, it is possible to design a simplified cloak by using some peculiar
composites like photonic crystals (PCs) which mimic an effective refractive
index landscape rather than offering effective constitutives, meanwhile
canceling the scattering from the inner and outer boundaries.Comment: Accepted for J. Phys.
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Dynamic Patterns of Transcript Abundance of Transposable Element Families in Maize.
Transposable Elements (TEs) are mobile elements that contribute the majority of DNA sequences in the maize genome. Due to their repetitive nature, genomic studies of TEs are complicated by the difficulty of properly attributing multi-mapped short reads to specific genomic loci. Here, we utilize a method to attribute RNA-seq reads to TE families rather than particular loci in order to characterize transcript abundance for TE families in the maize genome. We applied this method to assess per-family expression of transposable elements in >800 published RNA-seq libraries representing a range of maize development, genotypes, and hybrids. While a relatively small proportion of TE families are transcribed, expression is highly dynamic with most families exhibiting tissue-specific expression. A large number of TE families were specifically detected in pollen and endosperm, consistent with reproductive dynamics that maintain silencing of TEs in the germ line. We find that B73 transcript abundance is a poor predictor of TE expression in other genotypes and that transcript levels can differ even for shared TEs. Finally, by assessing recombinant inbred line and hybrid transcriptomes, complex patterns of TE transcript abundance across genotypes emerged. Taken together, this study reveals a dynamic contribution of TEs to maize transcriptomes
Quantum vortices and trajectories in particle diffraction
We investigate the phenomenon of the diffraction of charged particles by thin
material targets using the method of the de Broglie-Bohm quantum trajectories.
The particle wave function can be modeled as a sum of two terms
. A thin separator exists between the
domains of prevalence of the ingoing and outgoing wavefunction terms. The
structure of the quantum-mechanical currents in the neighborhood of the
separator implies the formation of an array of \emph{quantum vortices}. The
flow structure around each vortex displays a characteristic pattern called
`nodal point - X point complex'. The X point gives rise to stable and unstable
manifolds. We find the scaling laws characterizing a nodal point-X point
complex by a local perturbation theory around the nodal point. We then analyze
the dynamical role of vortices in the emergence of the diffraction pattern. In
particular, we demonstrate the abrupt deflections, along the direction of the
unstable manifold, of the quantum trajectories approaching an X-point along its
stable manifold. Theoretical results are compared to numerical simulations of
quantum trajectories. We finally calculate the {\it times of flight} of
particles following quantum trajectories from the source to detectors placed at
various scattering angles , and thereby propose an experimental test of
the de Broglie - Bohm formalism.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, accepted by IJB
On Markovian solutions to Markov Chain BSDEs
We study (backward) stochastic differential equations with noise coming from
a finite state Markov chain. We show that, for the solutions of these equations
to be `Markovian', in the sense that they are deterministic functions of the
state of the underlying chain, the integrand must be of a specific form. This
allows us to connect these equations to coupled systems of ODEs, and hence to
give fast numerical methods for the evaluation of Markov-Chain BSDEs
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