Effect of Trust in Metaverse on Usage Intention through Technology Readiness and Technology Acceptance Model

The fourth industrial revolution enhanced the development of information technology in all fields and opened up possibilities. A lot of attention is focused on the future possibilities opened up by the metaverse, the core of information technology. Metaverse will have a big impact on reality and the near future. Metaverse is a virtual world that fuses physical and digital reality. Various commerce such as healthcare, instruction, business, and land are foundation to utilize metaverse knowledge in their regular work. There is a series of processes in the stage where newly developed technology is introduced to general users. In order for a new technology to become a user-friendly technology, it is necessary to verify the technology. It can be said that it is hard to derive the operator\u27s usage intention in a state where user trust for new technology is not verified. In the metaverse environment, it is necessary to first verify the trust for new technologies. This study is expected to understand usage intention through the process of checking trust in metaverse, and to become basic data for the popularization of metaverse knowledge. The meaning of this research is to inspect the influence relationship of trust in metaverse on usage intention through Technology Readiness (TR) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Statistical package (SPSS23.0) was used for basic numerical examination of the questionnaire. Hypothesis test was performed using the structural equation package Smart PLS 3.0. Discriminant validity and concentration validity of the questionnaire were verified. As parameters that trust in metaverse effects, TR and TAM were set. As factors constituting TR, it was separated into optimism, innovativeness, discomfort, and insecurity. The TAM is separated into perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. The outcomes of the study are as follows. First, trust in metaverse had a significant effect on TR. Second, TR was partially adopted in the TAM. Innovativeness and perceived usefulness had no significant effect. Third, TAM significantly influences usage intention. Fourth, perceived ease of use did not significantly influence perceived usefulness

A study on the changes in gait characteristics by applying sub-threshold vibration stimulus in the ankle

This study was conducted to suggest the potential use of a mechanical vibration stimulus in the ankle to correct gait abnormalities. As for the mechanical vibration stimulus, different locations and durations are suggested based on the detection results of real-time gait patterns. 5 young males participated in this study. They were asked to perform assigned gait tasks when either a threshold or sub-threshold stimulus was applied in the tibialis anterior and Achilles tendon. The analysis results of gait cycle and muscle activity showed the changes on gait cycle, the activity pattern of used muscle for gait and the movement pattern of the ankle were observed based on the applied locations of vibration stimulus. Also, the result of sub-threshold stimulus showed similar effects as that of threshold stimulus. As such, the mechanical vibration stimulus was considered to affect gait by being adjusted its characteristics and local stimulus also would affect human body systemically. The result of this study can be used as basic data for the correction of individual’s specific gait abnormality and rehabilitation using vibration stimulus

Effects of muscular response for the intensity of vibratory stimulus applied on the ankle tendon

The present study was conducted to measure the individual threshold value for the somatosensory system of the human body, the thresholds value of vibratory stimulus were assessed through the ascent and descent methods. In the interests of the attainment of this study`s goal, comparing the thresholds value measured and change of state of the muscles when applied on the ankle tendon connected to muscles, changes in threshold measurement accuracy due to the differences in measuring methods were discussed. The experiment was conducted by constructing systems to stimulate somethetic sensibility by vibratory stimulus, ultrasound imaging system and EMG system. Five adult males were involved in this experiment. According to the results of experiments, the threshold value of somatosensory stimulation measured by the ascent method was greater than the threshold values measured by the descent method. And the muscular response to the somatosensory stimulation applied to the tibialis anterior tendon showed a larger rate of change with the ascending stimulus than with the descending stimulus. The results of this study could serve as a basis to discuss the reliability of the measurement method of the human body’s individual threshold value for the somatosensory system through the ascent and descent methods and can be used as reference data for the integration and performance threshold measurement methods

Entropic, electrostatic, and interfacial regimes in concentrated disordered ionic emulsions

We develop a free energy model that describes two key thermodynamic properties, the osmotic pressure Π and the linear elastic shear modulus G′p (i.e. plateau storage modulus), of concentrated monodisperse emulsions which have isotropic, disordered, droplet structures, and are stabilized using ionic surfactants. This model effectively incorporates the concept of random close packing or jamming of repulsive spheres into a free energy F that depends on droplet volume fraction ϕ and shear strain γ both below and above the a critical jamming point ϕc ≈ 0.646. This free energy has three terms: entropic, electrostatic, and interfacial (EEI). By minimizing F with respect to an average droplet deformation parameter that links all three terms, we show that the entropic term is dominant for ϕ well below ϕc, the electrostatic term is dominant for ϕ near but below ϕc, and the interfacial term dominates for larger ϕ. This EEI model describes measurements of G′p(ϕ) for charge-stabilized uniform emulsions having a wide range of droplet sizes, ranging from nanoscale to microscale, and it also is consistent with measurements of Π(ϕ). Moreover, it describes G′p(ϕ) for similar nanoemulsions after adding non-amphiphilic salt, when changes in the interfacial tension and the Debye screening length are properly taken into account. By unifying existing approaches, the EEI model predicts constitutive properties of concentrated ionic emulsions that have disordered, out-of-equilibrium structures through near- equilibrium free energy minimization, consistent with random driving Brownian excitations

The Fruit Hull of Gleditsia sinensis

Lung cancer has substantial mortality worldwide, and chemotherapy is a routine regimen for the treatment of patients with lung cancer, despite undesirable effects such as drug resistance and chemotoxicity. Here, given a possible antitumor effect of the fruit hull of Gleditsia sinensis (FGS), we tested whether FGS enhances the effectiveness of cis-diammine dichloridoplatinum (II) (CDDP), a chemotherapeutic drug. We found that CDDP, when administered with FGS, significantly decreased the viability and increased the apoptosis and cell cycle arrest of Lewis lung carcinoma (LLC) cells, which were associated with the increase of p21 and decreases of cyclin D1 and CDK4. Concordantly, when combined with FGS, CDDP significantly reduced the volume and weight of tumors derived from LLC subcutaneously injected into C57BL/6 mice, with concomitant increases of phosphor-p53 and p21 in tumor tissue. Together, these results show that FGS could enhance the antitumor activity of CDDP, suggesting that FGS can be used as a complementary measure to enhance the efficacy of a chemotherapeutic agent such as CDDP

HierSpeech++: Bridging the Gap between Semantic and Acoustic Representation of Speech by Hierarchical Variational Inference for Zero-shot Speech Synthesis

Large language models (LLM)-based speech synthesis has been widely adopted in zero-shot speech synthesis. However, they require a large-scale data and possess the same limitations as previous autoregressive speech models, including slow inference speed and lack of robustness. This paper proposes HierSpeech++, a fast and strong zero-shot speech synthesizer for text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC). We verified that hierarchical speech synthesis frameworks could significantly improve the robustness and expressiveness of the synthetic speech. Furthermore, we significantly improve the naturalness and speaker similarity of synthetic speech even in zero-shot speech synthesis scenarios. For text-to-speech, we adopt the text-to-vec framework, which generates a self-supervised speech representation and an F0 representation based on text representations and prosody prompts. Then, HierSpeech++ generates speech from the generated vector, F0, and voice prompt. We further introduce a high-efficient speech super-resolution framework from 16 kHz to 48 kHz. The experimental results demonstrated that the hierarchical variational autoencoder could be a strong zero-shot speech synthesizer given that it outperforms LLM-based and diffusion-based models. Moreover, we achieved the first human-level quality zero-shot speech synthesis. Audio samples and source code are available at https://github.com/sh-lee-prml/HierSpeechpp.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 12 table

COMBUSTION CHARACTERISTICS AND EMISSION OF HAZARDOUS AIR POLLUTANTS IN COMMERCIAL FLUIDIZED BED COMBUSTORS FOR SEWAGE SLUDGE

Since the disposal of sewage sludge in ocean has been prohibited recently according to London Dumping Convention, technological need for treating sewage sludge safely and efficiently are getting increased in Korea. FBC (Fluidized Bed Combustor) technology has been selected and utilized as one of the alternatives because of combustible content in sludge, on-going process development to maintain the best combustion efficiency, and good heat recovery for energy utilization. In this paper, the process and combustion characteristics of commercially operating FBC incineration plants with the capacity ranging from 50 – 150 tons of sludge per day were investigated by comparing emission data from 4 different plants. Concentrations of hazardous gaseous pollutants (HAPs) such as fine particulate matter, heavy metals, and dioxin from sludge combustion before and after air pollution control devices were measured and analyzed at commercial operating conditions of one typical incinerator. Most of emission data at stack showed under the environmental regulatory limits. Mercury and some heavy metals emission have been reduced significantly as co-beneficial effect since the air pollution control configuration was well arranged and installed to control the regulatory gases such as NOx, SO2, particulates, and dioxin. Sludge, especially generated from industrial plants, contained measurable amounts of acidic materials and heavy metals including Hg. Therefore, such metal emission should receive an attention by monitoring them and further mass balance study for better understanding their fates in the process must proceed in future