Corporate Brand Image and Customer Satisfaction on Loyalty: An Empirical Study of Starbucks Coffee in Taiwan

Corporate image has been assessed as an important antecedent of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Corporate brand is vital because positive corporate brands help companies achieving higher performance, such as sales. Marketing exists to deliver more value to satisfy customers as well as build a long-term and mutually profitability relationship with customers. If a firm’s products or services do not satisfy or meet the customer’s needs and wants, all the strategies are insufficient. With loyal customers, companies can have higher market share and reduce the operating cost. An improvement of 5 percent in customer retention leads to an increase of 25 percent to 75 percent in profit. It costs more than five times as much to obtain a new customer than to keep an existing one. This initial study was from relevant literature, then set up research structure and hypotheses. Survey was employed, and respondents were from the customers of Starbucks Coffee in Taipei area. There were 199 usable questionnaires to analyze descriptive statistics, reliability, validity, and SEM model. The research found that corporate brand image significantly affects customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction has strong impact on customer loyalty for the sample. Therefore, firms have to specifically focus on these factors in order to build a long-term and mutually profitability relationship with a customer and create loyalty as competitive advantages in the market

Ultra-wideband Outdoor Communication Characteristics with and without Traffic

[[abstract]]The BER performance for ultra-wideband (UWB) outdoor communication in LOS and NLOS environments with and without traffic is investigated. We obtain the impulse responses of the UWB outdoor environment by both 2.5D SBR-Image method and inverse Fourier transform techniques. The 2.5D SBR-Image method is first considered for two-dimensional environment simulated without heights of obstacles by ray tubes. Then, heights of the obstacles are taken into consideration between the transmitters and receivers. If the height of ray is lower than that of obstacles, the ray is neglected for the receivers. This effectively reduces the simulating time. By using the impulse response of multipath channels, the BER performance for binary pulse amplitude modulation communications over the radio UWB system is evaluated. We have performed computer simulations in LOS and NLOS environments with and without traffic in dense building areas. Numerical results have shown that the multipath effect caused by moving vehicles in the outdoor LOS and NLOS environments has a great impact on BER performance. Rake receivers are used to improve the outage probability. The relationship between traffic and BER performance is investigated; meanwhile, the characteristics of LOS and NLOS outdoor UWB environments are analyzed. Our investigation results can help improve planning and design of the UWB system.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]電子

Contrastive Speaker Embedding With Sequential Disentanglement

Contrastive speaker embedding assumes that the contrast between the positive and negative pairs of speech segments is attributed to speaker identity only. However, this assumption is incorrect because speech signals contain not only speaker identity but also linguistic content. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning framework with sequential disentanglement to remove linguistic content by incorporating a disentangled sequential variational autoencoder (DSVAE) into the conventional SimCLR framework. The DSVAE aims to disentangle speaker factors from content factors in an embedding space so that only the speaker factors are used for constructing a contrastive loss objective. Because content factors have been removed from the contrastive learning, the resulting speaker embeddings will be content-invariant. Experimental results on VoxCeleb1-test show that the proposed method consistently outperforms SimCLR. This suggests that applying sequential disentanglement is beneficial to learning speaker-discriminative embeddings.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

IMMEDIATE EFFECTS OF WARM UP BY OVERWEIGHED BAT IMPLEMENT ON BAT SWING VELOCITY

The purpose of this study was to investigate the immediate effects of warming up by overweighed bat implement on bat swing velocity. Five softball players worked in this experiment and processed the following steps: swing official bat with and without overweight warm-ups (5 and 10 times). The maximal velocity of official bat swing was recorded by a 3-D cinematograph. By one-way ANOVA, the results were described as follows: the maximal velocity of official bat swing after 5-swingings of the overweight bat was greater than that without warm up (F=9.28,

THE ANALYSIS OF PULLING FORCE CURVES IN TUG-OF-WAR

The purpose of this study is to analyze the pulling force curves in DFB and AFB movements that produced by elite tug-of-war athletes. The subjects are 11 female high school athletes who have been trained more than two years for tug-of-war. Data is analyzed by paired-sample t-test. The results show that force-related parameters are all different significantly between two movements, and time-related parameters are not significant. The DFB movement has higher value in MaxF, AveF, FS and lower value in MinF. We suggest to avoid the decay of pulling force while adopting DFB movement, and increase MaxF, AveF, and FS while adopting AFB movement. Within the start of 2sec we suggest the team to take the DFB movements in order to produce powerful pulling force, then transform to the AFB movements to keep the team formation

Lowly Expressed Ribosomal Protein S19 in the Feces of Patients with Colorectal Cancer

Colorectal cancer (CRC) has become one of the most common fatal cancers. CRC tumorigenesis is a complex process involving multiple genetic changes to several sequential mutations or molecular alterations. P53 is one of the most significant genes; its mutations account for more than half of all CRC. Therefore, understanding the cellular genes that are directly or indirectly related to p53 is particularly crucial for investigating CRC tumorigenesis. In this study, a p53-related ribosomal protein, ribosomal protein S19 (RPS19), obtained from the feces of CRC patients is evaluated by using specifically quantitative real-time PCR and knocked down in the colonic cell line by gene silencing. This study found that CRC patients with higher expressions of RPS19 in their feces had a better prognosis and consistent expressions of RPS19 and BAX in their colonic cells. In conclusion, the potential mechanism of RPS19 in CRC possibly involves cellular apoptosis through the BAX/p53 pathway, and the levels of fecal RPS19 may function as a prognostic predictor for CRC patients

Coverage Probability and Ergodic Capacity of Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Enhanced Communication Systems

This paper studies the performance of a single-input single-output (SISO) system enhanced by the assistance of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which is equipped with a finite number of elements under Rayleigh fading channels. From the instantaneous channel capacity, we compute a closed-form expression of the coverage probability as a function of statistical channel information only. A scaling law of the coverage probability and the number of phase shifts is further obtained. The ergodic capacity is derived, then a simple upper bound to simplify matters of utilizing the symbolic functions and can be applied for a long period of time. Numerical results manifest the tightness and effectiveness of our closed-form expressions compared with Monte-Carlo simulations.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted by IEEE communications letter