Understanding Contraflow Pop-Culture Tourism: The Case of Transnational Fandom of South Korean Pop-Culture and the “Hallyu” Tourism

Pop-culture tourism has continuously grown its market among those who are fanatic of pop-culture, and destination marketers have noticed pop-culture as an effective marketing tool to attract more visitors. Pop-culture has been dominant by the US, but interestingly, a recent phenomenon sees a contra-cultural flow. This paper explores contraflow pop-culture tourism and guides the reader to how to understand this new tourism niche. Reviewing the case of transnational fandom of South Korean pop-culture, so called “Korean Wave” or “Hallyu” and its impact on inbound tourism, this paper suggests digital mediation as a key driver of contraflow pop-culture and transnational fandom, pop-culture as a vehicle for change destination image, and pop-culture tourism as a driving force of creative economy

Is Scissoring a Metaphor for Disconnecting a Relationship?

A great deal of attention has surrounded the role of embodied cognition in human judgments; however, it has received very little research attention, especially in the marketing field. This research is based on the idea that the act of cutting can activate perceptions of severing relationships, as well as eliciting a sense of independence. Study 1 showed that consumers are less likely to adopt a close friend’s opinion when they engage in the act of cutting an object with scissors. Study 2 demonstrated that people are less likely to trust the reviews of online communities while cutting a piece of string with scissors. These lowered intentions to adopt others’ opinions appeared to be mediated by increased psychological distances between the self and the information provider. In other words, people who engage in the act of scissoring unconsciously weaken or disconnect themselves from the information providers, thereby choosing not to adopt others’ opinions. This research identifies the link between the physical activity of cutting and the mental disconnection concerning social relationships. The results provide implications in setting up an integrative framework of the consumer decision-making process involving embodied cognition.      

Atypical occurrence of anti-Ma2-associated encephalitis after breast cancer surgery and COVID-19

In this report, we present a rare case of anti-Ma2-associated encephalitis concurrent with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) following breast cancer surgery. The patient exhibited minimal clinical symptoms of COVID-19 infection but developed seizures and altered mental status after surgery, leading to diagnosis of a classic paraneoplastic syndrome. This case highlights the possibility of paraneoplastic neurological syndrome even after cancer surgery and the need for careful consideration of post-acute infection syndromes when neurological symptoms occur following an infection

An Efficient Trigram Model for Speech Act Analysis in Small Training Corpus

Speech act analysis is essential to a dialogue understanding system because a speech act of an utterance is closely tied with the user's intention in the utterance. However, it has been difficult how to analyze a speech act of an utterance since it highly depends on the context of the utterance. For that matter, statistical approaches seem a promising direction although traditional statistical models usually require large corpus to train probability distributions. It is also not an easy job to collect dialogue corpus and annotating them with speech acts. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy trigram model as an alternative. The trigram model uses a membership function in fuzzy set theory instead of conversational probability distributions to alleviate sparse data problems. In the experiments, the trigram model performed better than a traditional statistical trigram model although the scale of training data was as small as 300 dialogues. The result showed that the fuzzy trigram model is an appropriate alternative for a traditional statistical models when training data is small

Characterization and regulation of human Stearoyl-CoA Desaturase 5

Saturated (SFA) and monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) are among the most abundant fatty acids in mammalian organisms. These fatty acids are fundamental components of structural, energetic, and signaling lipids; hence their levels have to be tightly regulated by the cell. The abundance of SFA and MUFA is determined by the rate of activity of Stearoyl-CoA Desaturase (SCD), an enzyme responsible for biosynthesis of MUFA by inserting a double bond of a saturated acyl-CoA. To date, four isoforms of SCD have been described in murine, and two isoforms in humans. Unlike ubiquitously expressed SCD1, human SCD5 is predominantly expressed in brains and pancreas. SCD1 is a critical factor of the control of cell lipogenesis, as well as cell proliferation and differentiation. Importantly, dysfunctional SCD1 is linked to the onset of several widespread diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Despite considerable amount of research devoted to unravel the mechanisms of SCD1 regulation, the role and regulation of SCD5 is virtually unknown. In the present study, we determined the abundance of SCD5 protein in human cell lines including normal, transformed, and lung cancer cell lines. Further, we examined the role of insulin and epidermal growth factor in the regulation of SCD5 levels in normal and neoplastic human cells. Finally, since the high levels of SCD5 found in the brain suggest a possible function of this enzyme in neuronal differentiation, we examined the effect of retinoic acid on the content of SCD5 in human neuroblastoma cells. Here, we report that SCD5 is abundantly expressed in different human cell types and cell lines, and that SCD5 levels are increased by insulin, likely through the activation of the PI3K/Akt pathway, a signaling cascade that controls lipid synthesis, mitogenesis and tumorigenesis. In addition, we found a slight increased SCD5 during the process of neuronal differentiation. Thus, our findings demonstrate that the levels of SCD5 are modulated by critical factors that control cell growth, survival and differentiation in human cells. Taken together, these data suggests SCD as potential target for pharmacological and nutritional interventions in a number of human diseases and conditions.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Gretchun Jungyun Ki