How to promote bike tourism globally

Purpose – The main purpose of this study is to find ways on how to promote bike tourism globally, and use Taiwan as a model to explore this aspect. Design – The development of the study structure involved brainstorming and the assistance of an expert panel. The study framework is composed of 7 aspects with 8-12 subitems each. Methodology – The opinions of experts were gathered through a questionnaire survey. Afterwards, the CLPEM (Control Limits Performance Evaluation Method) was adopted to determine the means to promote bike tourism. Findings – The results show how the government and operators could prioritize service enhancements and improvements such as "bike rental at one station with drop off at another designated location, nanny vans to accommodate bike tourists, bike tourist information center, training for bike tour guides who can provide practical and historical knowledge for tourists, creative bike touring routes depending on the rider’s abilities, local friendly hospitality for riders, and comprehensive travel insurance policies". Originality of the research – This study has constructed a framework to promote bike tourism

Observation of intervalley biexcitonic optical Stark effect in monolayer WS2

Coherent optical dressing of quantum materials offers technological advantages to control their electronic properties, such as the electronic valley degree of freedom in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Here, we observe a new type of optical Stark effect in monolayer WS2, one that is mediated by intervalley biexcitons under the blue-detuned driving with circularly polarized light. We found that such helical optical driving not only induces an exciton energy downshift at the excitation valley, but also causes an anomalous energy upshift at the opposite valley, which is normally forbidden by the exciton selection rules but now made accessible through the intervalley biexcitons. These findings reveal the critical, but hitherto neglected, role of biexcitons to couple the two seemingly independent valleys, and to enhance the optical control in valleytronics

Trapping effects on inflation

We develop a Lagrangian approach based on the influence functional method so as to derive self-consistently the Langevin equation for the inflaton field in the presence of trapping points along the inflaton trajectory. The Langevin equation exhibits the backreaction and the fluctuation-dissipation relation of the trapping. The fluctuation is induced by a multiplicative colored noise that can be identified as the the particle number density fluctuations and the dissipation is a new effect that may play a role in the trapping with a strong coupling. In the weak coupling regime, we calculate the power spectrum of the noise-driven inflaton fluctuations for a single trapping point and studied its variation with the trapping location. We also consider a case with closely spaced trapping points and find that the resulting power spectrum is blue.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

The feedback consistency effect in Chinese character recognition:evidence from a psycholinguistic norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition

Large, valley-exclusive Bloch-Siegert shift in monolayer WS2

Coherent interaction with off-resonance light can be used to shift the energy levels of atoms, molecules, and solids. The dominant effect is the optical Stark shift, but there is an additional contribution from the so-called Bloch-Siegert shift that has eluded direct and exclusive observation in solids. We observed an exceptionally large Bloch-Siegert shift in monolayer tungsten disulfide (WS[subscript 2]) under infrared optical driving. By controlling the light helicity, we could confine the Bloch-Siegert shift to occur only at one valley, and the optical Stark shift at the other valley, because the two effects obey opposite selection rules at different valleys. Such a large and valley-exclusive Bloch-Siegert shift allows for enhanced control over the valleytronic properties of two-dimensional materials.United States. Department of EnergyUnited States. Dept. of Energy. Division of Materials Sciences and EngineeringGordon and Betty Moore Foundation (EPiQS Initiative Grant GBMF4540)Harvard University. Center for Integrated Quantum Materials (Grant DMR-1231319

Dynamic Correlations and Volatility Spillovers between Crude Oil and Stock Index Returns: The Implications for Optimal Portfolio Construction

This paper researches the portfolio construction between stock price of group of seven (G7) and West Texas Intermediate crude oil from January 2, 1998 to March 1, 2012. We investigate the volatility spillover between stock price and oil price with the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC), constant conditional correlation (CCC) and BEKK models, and also analyze their optimal hedge ratio and portfolio weights. The empirical result is that the hedge effectiveness of DCC model is better than the CCC model and BEKK models. The hedge effectiveness (HE) in Canada is the highest but Japan is the lowest. Moreover, the results show that Japan has the biggest optimal portfolio weight and the lowest hedge ratio. We do this research with expectation of providing investors information to increase the basis of investing. Keywords: Crude oil; DCC model; Hedge effectiveness; Optimal portfolio JEL Classifications: C22; G1; N

Conditional Jump Dynamics in the Stock Prices of Alternative Energy Companies

This paper researches the abnormal information in the WilderHill Clean Energy Index (ECO) and NYSE Arca Technology Index (PSE) by using an autoregressive conditional jump intensity model in Skew Generalized Error Distribution (ARJI-SGED). The research period is from 3 January 2001 to 31 January 2011. We also test the diffusion-jump variance on the PSE and ECO. The empirical result indicates that there are jump phenomena in clean energy and technology companies. The oil price impacts on clean energy and technology companies. Moreover, the PSE has higher levels of volatility clustering than the ECO. These results show that the distributions of PSE return are skewed slightly to the left and fat-tailed. These also mean that jump variance plays a crucial role in market volatility indices. Keywords: Clean Energy; Abnormal Information; ARJI-SGED Model JEL Classifications: C2; G1; Q4

Substance abuse in adolescence in Taiwan Focus on ketamine

Ketamine is an anesthetic and analgesic agent but has been identified to have abuse potential in recent years. Ketamine abuse is found to be rapidly increasing especially among adolescents and early adults for its relative low cost and lack of immediate severe side effects. Ketamine is a NMDA antagonist and has acute antidepressant effects from recent pharmacological research. The association between abuse potential and antidepressant effects is still uncertain. Though there are no obvious physical withdrawal symptoms of ketamine, strong cravings were noted from chronic ketamine abusers. On the other hand, ketamine can cause severe damage to the urinary system. “Ketamine-induced uropathy” was proposed in recent years, with presentation of severe lower tract urinary symptoms (LUTS; including frequency, urgency, dysuria and hematuria) and urinary system damage. Similar to patients with other substance abuse, ketamine abusers have higher incidence of co-morbid psychiatric diseases. Currently there is still lack of specific medical treatment for managing ketamine abuse, but psychosocial intervention plays an important role especially for adolescents. In this brief review, we hope to call more attention to this emerging problem