The digital surgeon\u27s warning: Do disclaimers have a place in beauty and fashion advertising?

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of disclaimers of photogenic manipulation, models’ body types, and the interaction between the two through the theoretical lenses of social comparison theory and priming effects. In an online experiment, this study employs a 3 (no disclaimer, presence of digital enhancement disclaimer, absence of digital enhancement disclaimer) by 2 (thin model body type and average model body type) factorial analysis to tease apart the effects of disclaimers on consumers (social comparison, self-esteem, and wishful identification) and the organizations that are compelled or choose to employ them (brand attitudes and perceptions of credibility, perceived organizational morality, purchasing intention, and loyalty). The results of this study highlight the implications and considerations for advertisements in the beauty and fashion industries as well as any company that uses digital manipulation on physically attractive models in their advertisements

Did Bacillus megaterium pick up plasmid virulence genes?

Plasmids are known to carry genes that allow bacteria to survive in different environments. Virulence genes that cause bacteria to be pathogenic are also found on plasmids. Bacillus megaterium is a non-pathogenic, spore-forming bacteria that is found in soil, but recently a strain of B. megaterium was reported to cause a mild case of diarrhea in an infant. This appears to be the first case of infection caused by B. megaterium (CHI). Bacillus cereus is a related species and a known gastroenteric pathogen. Research has shown that the pathogenicity in some strains of B. cereus is caused by either an operon containing four genes, hblA/B/C/D, or by a single gene, bceT. The pathogenic strain of B. megaterium, (CHI), was tested by PCR and hybridization, to see if it picked up either of these two factors that cause pathogenicity in B. cereus by plasmid exchange. PCR products were obtained in CHI for the genes hblA and bceT using specific primers suggesting that such genes are present in the B. megaterium (CHI) strain. However, a hybridization experiment using bceT product as a probe for CHI failed to show a signal

Catalysts for Portable, Solid State Hydrogen Genration Systems

Hydrogen and air powered proton exchange membrane fuel cells are a potential alternative to batteries. In portable power systems, the design requirements often focus on cost efficiency, energy density, storability, as well as safety. Ammonia borane (AB), a chemical hydride containing 19.6 wt. % hydrogen, has a high hydrogen capacity and is a stable and non-toxic candidate for storing hydrogen in portable systems. Throughout this work, Department of Energy guidelines for low power portable hydrogen power systems were used as a baseline and comparison with commercially available systems. In order to make this comparison, the system parameters of a system using AB hydrolysis were estimated by developing capacity and cost correlations from the commercial systems and applying them to this work. Supporting experiments were designed to evaluate a system that would use a premixed solid storage bed of AB and a catalyst. This configuration would only require a user input of water in order to initiate the hydrogen production. Using ammonia borane hydrolysis, the hydrogen yield is ∼9 wt. %, when all reactants are considered. In addition to the simplicity of initiating the reaction, hydrolysis of AB has the advantage of suppressing the production of some toxic borazines that are present when AB is thermally decomposed. However, ammonia gas will be formed and this problem must be addressed, as ammonia is damaging to PEM fuel cells. The catalyst focused on throughout this work was Amberlyst - 15; an ion exchange resin with an acid capacity of 4.7 eq/kg and ammonia adsorbent. At less than $0.30/g, this is a cost effective alternative to precious metal catalysts. The testing with this catalyst was compared to a traditional catalyst in literature, 20$40/g. The Amberlyst catalyst was found to reduce the formation of ammonia in the gas products from ∼3.71 wt. % with the Pt/C catalyst to90 % to \u3c 30 % over a 70 day aging study. This results implies the need for a systems scale solution, such as mechanical separation, or a material scale solution, such as coating the Amberlyst or AB in a water soluble coating. It was found that ammonia borane catalyzed hydrolysis, using Amberlyst - 15 as a catalyst, has potential to be a cost effective, energy dense, and safe option for generating hydrogen for a portable fuel cell system

AUTOMATIC POST-ADOPTIVE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY USE: THE ROLE OF INNOVATIVENESS GOAL

The business value of information technology (IT) is realized through the continuous use of IT subsequent to users’ adoption. Understanding post-adoptive IT usage is useful in realizing potential IT business value. Most previous research on post-adoptive IT usage, however, dismisses the unintentional and unconscious aspects of usage behavior. This paper advances understanding of the unintentional, unconscious, and thereby automatic usage of IT features during the post-adoptive stage. Drawing from Social Psychology literature, we argue human behaviors can be triggered by environmental cues and directed by the person’s mental goals, thereby operating without a person’s consciousness and intentional will. On this basis, we theorize the role of a user’s innovativeness goal, as the desired state of an act to innovate, in directing the user’s unintentional, unconscious, and automatic post-adoptive IT feature usage behavior. To test the hypothesized mechanisms, a human experiment employing a priming technique, is described

Optimization under uncertainty and risk: Quadratic and copositive approaches

Robust optimization and stochastic optimization are the two main paradigms for dealing with the uncertainty inherent in almost all real-world optimization problems. The core principle of robust optimization is the introduction of parameterized families of constraints. Sometimes, these complicated semi-infinite constraints can be reduced to finitely many convex constraints, so that the resulting optimization problem can be solved using standard procedures. Hence flexibility of robust optimization is limited by certain convexity requirements on various objects. However, a recent strain of literature has sought to expand applicability of robust optimization by lifting variables to a properly chosen matrix space. Doing so allows to handle situations where convexity requirements are not met immediately, but rather intermediately. In the domain of (possibly nonconvex) quadratic optimization, the principles of copositive optimization act as a bridge leading to recovery of the desired convex structures. Copositive optimization has established itself as a powerful paradigm for tackling a wide range of quadratically constrained quadratic optimization problems, reformulating them into linear convex-conic optimization problems involving only linear constraints and objective, plus constraints forcing membership to some matrix cones, which can be thought of as generalizations of the positive-semidefinite matrix cone. These reformulations enable application of powerful optimization techniques, most notably convex duality, to problems which, in their original form, are highly nonconvex. In this text we want to offer readers an introduction and tutorial on these principles of copositive optimization, and to provide a review and outlook of the literature that applies these to optimization problems involving uncertainty

Roll Motion of a Water Filled Floating Cylinder—Additional Experimental Verification

Understanding the behaviour of water filled bodies is important from an applied engineering perspective when understanding the sea-keeping performance of certain floating platforms and vessels. Even by assuming that the deformation is negligible small in relation to the motion of the structure, these fluid-structure-fluid interactions are challenging to model, both physically and numerically, and there is a notable lack of reference data sets and studies to support the validation of this work. Most of the existing information is highly specific to certain hulls forms, or is limited to small motions. A previous study addressed this by modelling a floating cylinder (giving a more generic case) with roll and pitch motions in excess of 20°. The presented experiment expands on that work to further investigate the previously observed switch between pitch and roll in the cylinder under wave action as induced by the sloshing of the internal water volume. An additional experimental investigation, focused on a single draft, was conducted to test open research questions from the previous study. Here we show that the roll response of the water filled cylinder is repeatable, independent of the tank position and wave amplitude, provided the observation time is long enough to capture the fully developed motion response of the floating object. The mooring system used comprised four soft lines connected on two points on the cylinder. This arrangement resulted in slightly different restoring forces in different wave directions. A relative change of the wave direction by 90° led to a larger wave frequency band in which the roll motion occurred. These cases were, again, also conducted with the solid ballast. Both sets of data provide an interesting validation case for future work on water ballast inside a floating object

Additional Experimental Data of a Floating Cylinder in a Wave Tank - Verification Experiments

The presented experimental results provide additional data to a previously published investigation of a floating cylinder under regular wave conditions (https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/2627). Three test series are added to investigate the roll response of the water filled structure. This includes a change of the initial position of the cylinder in the wave tank as well as a rotation of the wave direction. The latter was also conducted for the solid ballast option to provide a direct comparison with the water filled cylinder. This research was carried out at the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility of the Institute for Energy Systems, University of Edinburgh