An Empirical Study of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty on Health Websites

Numerous health websites are developing rapidly in China and the competition is fierce between these websites. In order to win the competition, the websites operators need to satisfy their customers to attain more market shares. But few attention has been paid to factors affecting customer satisfaction and loyalty on these websites. As a result, the paper aims to empirically explore the factors affecting customer satisfaction and loyalty on health websites based on perceived service quality (responsiveness, empathy and reliability), perceived risk (financial risk and time risk) and trust, and then to propose some targeted measures. A survey was conducted to collect data by means of questionnaires, and a total of 231 usable responses were gathered. Then the hypothesis model was tested using the Structural Equation Modeling(SEM). Results revealed that responsiveness, empathy, time risk and trust had significant impacts on customer satisfaction, whereas reliability and financial risk showed no effects on customer satisfaction. In addition, customer satisfaction and trust significantly influenced customer loyalty. The implications and limitations were discussed

Synthesis, Properties, and Their Potential Application of Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs)

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) represent an emerging class of crystalline porous polymers, which are ingeniously assembled with organic building blocks through reversible covalent bonds. The well-defined crystalline porous structures, easy functional modification, high surface area, together with structural designability and diversity have offered the COFs superior potential in various applications, such as catalysis, gas adsorption and separation, and optoelectricity. Since the pioneer work of Omar Yaghi in 2005, this field has developed rapidly and attracted much attention from researchers with diverse expertise. In this chapter, we describe the basic design concepts, the recent synthetic advancements, and the frontiers of functional exploration in gas adsorption and storage. Special emphasis is placed on their potential application in heterogeneous catalysis field. Finally, the prospects of COFs and remaining issues in these fields are indicated

Neural Architecture Search Using Genetic Algorithm for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression is one of the most powerful, natural, and universal signals for human beings to express emotional states and intentions. Thus, it is evident the importance of correct and innovative facial expression recognition (FER) approaches in Artificial Intelligence. The current common practice for FER is to correctly design convolutional neural networks' architectures (CNNs) using human expertise. However, finding a well-performing architecture is often a very tedious and error-prone process for deep learning researchers. Neural architecture search (NAS) is an area of growing interest as demonstrated by the large number of scientific works published in recent years thanks to the impressive results achieved in recent years. We propose a genetic algorithm approach that uses an ingenious encoding-decoding mechanism that allows to automatically evolve CNNs on FER tasks attaining high accuracy classification rates. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the best-known results on the CK+ and FERG datasets as well as competitive results on the JAFFE dataset

Printing surface charge as a new paradigm to program droplet transport

Directed, long-range and self-propelled transport of droplets on solid surfaces, especially on water repellent surfaces, is crucial for many applications from water harvesting to bio-analytical devices. One appealing strategy to achieve the preferential transport is to passively control the surface wetting gradients, topological or chemical, to break the asymmetric contact line and overcome the resistance force. Despite extensive progress, the directional droplet transport is limited to small transport velocity and short transport distance due to the fundamental trade-off: rapid transport of droplet demands a large wetting gradient, whereas long-range transport necessitates a relatively small wetting gradient. Here, we report a radically new strategy that resolves the bottleneck through the creation of an unexplored gradient in surface charge density (SCD). By leveraging on a facile droplet printing on superamphiphobic surfaces as well as the fundamental understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the creation of the preferential SCD, we demonstrate the self-propulsion of droplets with a record-high velocity over an ultra-long distance without the need for additional energy input. Such a Leidenfrost-like droplet transport, manifested at ambient condition, is also genetic, which can occur on a variety of substrates such as flexible and vertically placed surfaces. Moreover, distinct from conventional physical and chemical gradients, the new dimension of gradient in SCD can be programmed in a rewritable fashion. We envision that our work enriches and extends our capability in the manipulation of droplet transport and would find numerous potential applications otherwise impossible.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Preventive Effects of a Chinese Herbal Formula, Shengjiang Xiexin Decoction, on Irinotecan-Induced Delayed-Onset Diarrhea in Rats

Irinotecan is a well-known chemotherapy drug for the treatment of various cancers. However, delayed-onset diarrhea is a common adverse reaction, limiting the application of the drug. The study presented was designed to evaluate the preventive effects of Shengjiang Xiexin decoction (SXD) on irinotecan-induced diarrhea and to explore the possible mechanisms of this action. We established a diarrhea rat model. The condition of the rats was observed. The proliferation and apoptosis of intestinal cells were measured using immunohistochemical assays and a caspase-3 activity assay, respectively. The expression of Lgr5 and CD44 staining were used to observe intestinal stem cells (ISCs). In addition, the activity of β-glucuronidase in the rats’ feces was measured. Our results showed that the number of proliferating intestinal cells in the SXD groups was obviously higher, while the activity of caspase-3 was lower. The expression of Lgr5 and the integrated option density (IOD) of CD44 stain were increased significantly by SXD. Additionally, SXD decreased the activity of β-glucuronidase after irinotecan administration. In conclusion, SXD exhibited preventive effects on irinotecan-induced diarrhea, and this action was associated with an inhibitory effect on intestinal apoptosis and β-glucuronidase and a promotive effect on intestinal cell proliferation due to increased maintenance of ISCs

Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation

Dense retrieval is widely used for entity linking to retrieve entities from large-scale knowledge bases. Mainstream techniques are based on a dual-encoder framework, which encodes mentions and entities independently and calculates their relevances via rough interaction metrics, resulting in difficulty in explicitly modeling multiple mention-relevant parts within entities to match divergent mentions. Aiming at learning entity representations that can match divergent mentions, this paper proposes a Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (MVD) framework, which can effectively transfer knowledge of multiple fine-grained and mention-relevant parts within entities from cross-encoders to dual-encoders. Each entity is split into multiple views to avoid irrelevant information being over-squashed into the mention-relevant view. We further design cross-alignment and self-alignment mechanisms for this framework to facilitate fine-grained knowledge distillation from the teacher model to the student model. Meanwhile, we reserve a global-view that embeds the entity as a whole to prevent dispersal of uniform information. Experiments show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several entity linking benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2023 Main Conferenc

Lopinavir/Ritonavir Impairs Physical Strength in Association with Reduced Igf1 Expression in Skeletal Muscle of Older Mice

Background: Late-middle age HIV patients are prone to fatigue despite effective viral control by antiretroviral therapies. Rodent models to recapitulate this phenotype are still not available. Hypothesis Drug treatment may compromise muscle strength and physical performance more in older individuals with pre-existing metabolic disorders than normal young ones. Methods: Kaletra was given to overweight male mice at late-middle age and normal young adults; both on a rodent diet containing 30% fat calorie. Body composition and grip strength were measured at baseline and after drug treatment. Rota-rod running, insulin and glucose tolerance were measured at the end of the experiment. Drug effect on metabolic activity and spontaneous movements were assessed using the metabolic cage system. Representative muscle and fat tissue were analyzed for protein and mRNA expression. Selected findings were tested using murine C2C12 myotubes. Results: Kaletra reduced grip strength in both young and older mice but impaired rotarod performance only in the old. Spontaneous movements were also reduced in Kaletra-treated old mice. Kaletra reduced IGF-1 expression in all muscle groups tested for the old and in cultured myotubes but to a less extent in the muscle of young animals. Reduced IGF-1 expression correlated with increased expression of muscle-specific atrogene MAFbx and MuRF1. Kaletra also increased abdominal fat mass markedly in the old animals and to a less extend in the young. Conclusion: Long-term Kaletra intake aggravated abdominal obesity and impaired muscle strength. This effect was worse in older animals than in normal young adults