Loyalty of Web 2.0 Sites: The Role of Sense of Belonging

The research investigates the factors leading to user loyalty of Web 2.0 sites. Survey of users in a popular Web 2.0 site in Taiwan was conducted. Results show that sense of belonging and service quality have direct effect while trust affects loyalty indirectly via sense of belonging. In addition, service quality also affects loyalty through trust and sense of belonging. One surprising finding is that trust has non-significant direct effect on loyalty as originally proposed. Another interesting finding comes from light user group. Among light users, service quality has no direct effect on loyalty, making sense of belonging the only direct impact on loyalty

Mathematical Methods Applied to Digital Image Processing

Introduction: Digital image processing (DIP) is an important research area since it spans a variety of applications. Although over the past few decades there has been a rapid rise in this field, there still remain issues to address. Examples include image coding, image restoration, 3D image processing, feature extraction and analysis, moving object detection, and face recognition. To deal with these issues, the use of sophisticated and robust mathematical algorithms plays a crucial role. The aim of this special issue is to provide an opportunity for researchers to publish their latest theoretical and technological achievements in mathematical methods and their various applications related to DIP. This special issue covers topics related to the development of mathematical methods and their applications. It has a total of twenty-four high-quality papers covering various important topics in DIP, including image preprocessing, image encoding/decoding, stereo image reconstruction, dimensionality and data size reduction, and applications

Effect of diabetes on mortality and length of hospital stay in patients with renal or perinephric abscess

OBJECTIVES: We compared the risk of in-hospital mortality and the length of hospital stay between diabetic and non-diabetic patients hospitalized for renal or perinephric abscess. METHOD: The data analyzed in this study were retrieved from Taiwan's National Health Insurance claims. The risk of in-hospital mortality and the length of hospital stay were compared between 1,715 diabetic patients, hospitalized because of renal or perinephric abscess in Taiwan between 1997 and 2007, and a random sample of 477 non-diabetes patients with renal or perinephric abscess. RESULTS: The in-hospital mortality rates from renal or perinephric abscess for the diabetic patients and the non-diabetic patients were not different, at 2.3% and 3.4%, respectively. However, diabetes was significantly associated with a longer length of hospital stay among patients with renal abscess, by 3.38 days (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.59-5.17). CONCLUSIONS: Diabetes does not increase the risk of in-hospital mortality from renal or perinephric abscess. Nevertheless, appropriate management of patients with diabetes and concurrent renal or perinephric abscess is essential to reduce the length of hospital stay

Neuroprotective Effect of Uncaria rhynchophylla in Kainic Acid-Induced Epileptic Seizures by Modulating Hippocampal Mossy Fiber Sprouting, Neuron Survival, Astrocyte Proliferation, and S100B Expression

Uncaria rhynchophylla (UR), which is a traditional Chinese medicine, has anticonvulsive effect in our previous studies, and the cellular mechanisms behind this are still little known. Because of this, we wanted to determine the importance of the role of UR on kainic acid- (KA-) induced epilepsy. Oral UR for 6 weeks can successfully attenuate the onset of epileptic seizure in animal tests. Hippocampal mossy fiber sprouting dramatically decreased, while neuronal survival increased with UR treatment in hippocampal CA1 and CA3 areas. Furthermore, oral UR for 6 weeks significantly attenuated the overexpression of astrocyte proliferation and S100B proteins but not γ-aminobutyric acid A (GABAA) receptors. These results indicate that oral UR for 6 weeks can successfully attenuate mossy fiber sprouting, astrocyte proliferation, and S100B protein overexpression and increase neuronal survival in KA-induced epileptic rat hippocampu

Psychological Pathway from Obesity-Related Stigma to Anxiety via Internalized Stigma and Self-Esteem among Adolescents in Taiwan

The objective of this research was to examine the pathway from public stigma, to perceived stigma, to depression in adolescents via internalized stigma. Adolescents in grade 7 through 9 from a junior high school in Changhua County in Taiwan completed self-administered surveys from March to July in 2018. Adolescents were asked questions regarding depressive symptoms, obesity-related perceived stigma, and internalized stigma. Structural equation modeling was used to fit the pathway model. The pathway was first analyzed with the full sample and then stratified by actual and perceived weight status. Our final analytic sample consisted of 464 adolescents. The pathway model suggested an acceptable model fit. Perceived weight stigma (PWS) was significantly associated with internalized stigma regardless of actual or self-perceived weight status. Internalized stigma was significantly associated with anxiety for both actual (β = 0.186) and self-perceived nonoverweight (non-OW) participants (β = 0.170) but not for overweight (OW) participants (neither actual nor self-perceived). For OW adolescents, perceived weight stigma was associated with anxiety. However, the internalization process did not exist. It may be that the influence of perceived weight stigma is larger than internalized stigma on anxiety. It may also be that the level of internalization was not yet high enough to result in anxiet

Enhanced Ant Colony Optimization with Dynamic Mutation and Ad Hoc Initialization for Improving the Design of TSK-Type Fuzzy System

This paper proposes an enhanced ant colony optimization with dynamic mutation and ad hoc initialization, ACODM-I, for improving the accuracy of Takagi-Sugeno-Kang- (TSK-) type fuzzy systems design. Instead of the generic initialization usually used in most population-based algorithms, ACODM-I proposes an ad hoc application-specific initialization for generating the initial ant solutions to improve the accuracy of fuzzy system design. The generated initial ant solutions are iteratively improved by a new approach incorporating the dynamic mutation into the existing continuous ACO (ACOR). The introduced dynamic mutation balances the exploration ability and convergence rate by providing more diverse search directions in the early stage of optimization process. Application examples of two zero-order TSK-type fuzzy systems for dynamic plant tracking control and one first-order TSK-type fuzzy system for the prediction of the chaotic time series have been simulated to validate the proposed algorithm. Performance comparisons with ACOR and different advanced algorithms or neural-fuzzy models verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm. The effects on the design accuracy and convergence rate yielded by the proposed initialization and introduced dynamic mutation have also been discussed and verified in the simulations

Ample Pairs

We show that the ample degree of a stable theory with trivial forking is preserved when we consider the corresponding theory of belles paires, if it exists. This result also applies to the theory of $H$-structures of a trivial theory of rank $1$.Comment: Research partially supported by the program MTM2014-59178-P. The second author conducted research with support of the programme ANR-13-BS01-0006 Valcomo. The third author would like to thank the European Research Council grant 33882