DO HEALTH CLAIMS MATTER FOR CONSUMER PREFERENCE ON TEA BEVERAGE? EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM TAIWAN

This paper aims to identify consumer preference for tea drinking products in Taiwan by applying conjoint analysis and investigate whether health claims as attributes would influence consumer’s choice behavior. From 1 July to 31 August 2005, 620 consumers of tea drinking products participated in the choice-based conjoint experiment, which conducted in the city of Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung in Taiwan. The data were collected in supermarket using questionnaire for personal interviews. Overall, the estimated individual models fit the data well using Conditional Logit Model. Regarding the result of “Original Tea”, consumer’s order ranking of tea category is green tea, oolong tea, and black tea. The most importance on the standard that health claims have positive influence on higher likelihood of purchasing tea drinks. In addition, consumer prefers to tea drinks with Catechins, processing technology using cold extraction, and paper package. However, it could be seen that as the price increases the utility for the consumer decreases. Also, we report the negative relationship between price and purchasing intention. It is found that respondents preferred to tea drinking products with health claims. This result stands for consumer’s concern on their health status by intaking additives like Catechins. Our results also suggest that respondents prefer that tea drinks include less sugar that implies that the product is produced “light”.Tea Drinking Products, Consumer Preference, Health Claims, Conjoint Analysis, Conditional Logit Model, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Health Economics and Policy,

Angular Reconstruction of a Lead Scintillating-Fiber Sandwiched Electromagnetic Calorimeter

A new method called Neighbor Cell Deposited Energy Ratio (NCDER) is proposed to reconstruct incidence position in a single layer for a 3-dimensional imaging electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL).This method was applied to reconstruct the ECAL test beam data for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 (AMS-02). The results show that this method can achieve an angular resolution of 7.36\pm 0.08 / \sqrt(E) \oplus 0.28 \pm 0.02 degree in the determination of the photons direction, which is much more precise than that obtained with the commonly-adopted Center of Gravity(COG) method (8.4 \pm 0.1 /sqrt(E) \oplus 0.8\pm0.3 degree). Furthermore, since it uses only the properties of electromagnetic showers, this new method could also be used for other type of fine grain sampling calorimeters.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

SK channels and ventricular arrhythmias in heart failure

Small-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ (SK) currents are important in the repolarization of normal atrial (but not ventricular) cardiomyocytes. However, recent studies showed that the SK currents are upregulated in failing ventricular cardiomyocytes, along with increased SK channel protein expression and enhanced sensitivity to intracellular Ca2+. The SK channel activation may be either antiarrhythmic or proarrhythmic, depending on the underlying clinical situations. While the SK channel is a new target of antiarrhythmic therapy, drug safety is still one of the major concerns