The Impact of Experience in Service Virtualization on Travel Intention - The Case of Forbidden City Tour

The advent of Internet and home shopping economy in the recent years has reduced the intention of people to leave home for sightseeing. This has significantly impacted the growth of physical tourism industry. This paper utilizes the virtual tour of Forbidden City to conduct a sequence of experiments in tourism experience. Before using the system, Theory of Planned Behavior and Involvement are employed to measure the intention of traveling. After then, two constructs, emotion and system, are adopted to explore how the experiential value of virtual tourism impacts the intention of travelling. The experience of tour virtualization allows customers to create unforgettable feelings in the virtual world. It can affect not only the customer’s experiential value of virtual tourism, but also intention of traveling in the future

On the Mass-Period Distributions and Correlations of Extrasolar Planets

In addition to fitting the data of 233 extra-solar planets with power laws, we construct a correlated mass-period distribution function of extrasolar planets, as the first time in this field. The algorithm to generate a pair of positively correlated beta-distributed random variables is introduced and used for the construction of correlated distribution functions. We investigate the mass-period correlations of extrasolar planets both in the linear and logarithm spaces, determine the confidence intervals of the correlation coefficients, and confirm that there is a positive mass-period correlation for the extrasolar planets. In addition to the paucity of massive close-in planets, which makes the main contribution on this correlation, there are other fine structures for the data in the mass-period plane.Comment: to be published in AJ, tentatively in December 200

Escalation of Commiement in Software Projects: An Examination of Two Theories

Escalation of commitment is common in many software projects. It stands for the situation where managers decide to continue investing in or supporting a prior decision despite new evidence suggesting the original outcome expectation will be missed. Escalation of commitment is generally considered to be irrational. Past literature has proposed several theories to explain the behaviour. Two commonly used interpretations are self-justification and the framing effect. While both theories have been found effective in causing the escalation of commitment, their relative effect is less studied. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the primary factor that causes the escalation of commitment in software project related decisions. An experiment was designed to examine whether the escalation of commitment exists in different decision contingencies and which theories play a more important role in the escalation. One hundred and sixty two subjects participated in the experiment. The results indicate that both self-justification and problem framing have effects on commitment escalation in software projects but the effect of self-justification is stronger. Significant interaction effect is also found. A commitment is more likely to escalate if the problem is framed positively

Muckenhoupt-type weights and the intrinsic structure in Bessel Setting

Fix $\lambda>-1/2$ and $\lambda \not=0$. Consider the Bessel operator (introduced by Muckenhoupt--Stein) $\triangle_\lambda:=-\frac{d^2}{dx^2}-\frac{2\lambda}{x} \frac d{dx}$ on $\mathbb{R_+}:=(0,\infty)$ with $dm_\lambda(x):=x^{2\lambda}dx$ and $dx$ the Lebesgue measure on $\mathbb{R_+}$. In this paper, we study the Muckenhoupt-type weights which reveal the intrinsic structure in this Bessel setting along the line of Muckenhoupt--Stein and Andersen--Kerman. Besides, exploiting more properties of the weights $A_{p,\lambda}$ introduced by Andersen--Kerman, we introduce a new class $\widetilde{A}_{p,\lambda}$ such that the Hardy--Littlewood maximal function is bounded on the weighted $L^p_w$ space if and only if $w$ is in $\widetilde A_{p,\lambda}$. Moreover, along the line of Coifman--Rochberg--Weiss, we investigate the commutator $[b,R_\lambda]$ with $R_\lambda:=\frac{d}{dx}(\triangle_\lambda)^{-\frac{1}{2}}$ to be the Bessel Riesz transform. We show that for $w\in A_{p,\lambda}$, the commutator $[b, R_\lambda]$ is bounded on weighted $L^p_w$ if and only if $b$ is in the BMO space associated with $\triangle_\lambda$.Comment: 30 page

MARS: Message Passing for Antenna and RF Chain Selection for Hybrid Beamforming in MIMO Communication Systems

In this paper, we consider a prospective receiving hybrid beamforming structure consisting of several radio frequency (RF) chains and abundant antenna elements in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. Due to conventional costly full connections, we design an enhanced partially-connected beamformer employing low-density parity-check (LDPC) based structure. As a benefit of LDPC-based structure, information can be exchanged among clustered RF/antenna groups, which results in a low computational complexity order. Advanced message passing (MP) capable of inferring and transferring data among different paths is designed to support LDPC-based hybrid beamformer. We propose a message passing enhanced antenna and RF chain selection (MARS) scheme to minimize the operational power of antennas and RF chains of the receiver. Furthermore, sequential and parallel MP for MARS are respectively designed as MARS-S and MARS-P schemes to address convergence speed issue. Simulations have validated the convergence of both the MARS-P and the MARS-S algorithms. Owing to asynchronous information transfer of MARS-P, it reveals that higher power is required than that of MARS-S, which strikes a compelling balance between power consumption, convergence, and computational complexity. It is also demonstrated that the proposed MARS scheme outperforms the existing benchmarks using heuristic method of fully-/partially-connected architectures in open literature in terms of the lowest power and highest energy efficiency

The role of nitric oxide in the outgrowth of trophoblast cells on human umbilical vein endothelial cells

AbstractObjectiveEmbryo implantation is a complex process that requires coordinated trophoblast–endometrial interactions. Previous studies demonstrated that the identification of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) in trophoblast cells and the remodeling of the implantation process by nitric oxide (NO) support the important role of NO during implantation. However, the role of NO in trophoblast–endometrial interactions is unclear and is therefore examined in this study.Materials and methodsWe cocultured BeWo trophoblast spheroids with human umbilical vein endothelial cell (HUVEC) monolayers to mimic the trophoblast–endometrial interaction. Nω-Nitro-l-arginine methyl ester hydrochloride (l-NAME), a competitive inhibitor of NOS, and sodium nitroprusside (SNP), an NO donor, were used to test the role of NO in the trophoblast–endometrial interaction.Resultsl-NAME diminished spheroid expansion on HUVEC monolayers in a concentration-dependent manner (p < 0.05). However, trophoblast spreading on HUVEC-free culture surfaces was unaffected by l-NAME treatment (p > 0.05). Significant suppression of spheroid expansion was found at the higher dose (1mM) of SNP (p < 0.05).ConclusionNO may be needed in the process of implantation, and an adequate but not overly NO-containing environment might be an important factor for successful implantation. This finding is worthy of further investigation