3,955 research outputs found
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 customerâs experiential value of virtual tourism, but also intention of traveling in the future
Epidemiology of digital amputation and replantation in Taiwan: A population-based study
AbstractBackgroundPublications on digital amputation and replantation have been mostly derived from case series in high-volume hand surgery practices, and epidemiological studies are few. This study used a population-based dataset to illustrate the incidence of digital amputation, patient and hospital characteristics, and their relationships with replantation.MethodsA claim for reimbursement dataset (2008) was provided as a research database by the Bureau of National Health Insurance, Taiwan. Patients with ICD-9-CM coded as digital amputation (885 and 886) were included. These were cross-referenced with procedure codes for replantation procedures (84.21 and 84.22). We defined the patients who underwent thumb replantation (84.21) and thumb amputation (84.01) during a single hospitalization as replantation failure. Patient and hospital characteristics were studied with statistical analysis.ResultsIn total, 2358 patients with digital amputation were admitted (1859 male, 499 female), mean age 39.2 ± 15.5 years. The incidence was 10.2/100,000 personâyears. The highest incidence was 14.7/100,000 personâyears in the age group 45â54 years. Machinery and powered hand tools caused 68.8% of digital amputations. Thumb amputation [odds ratio (OR): 1.35, p = 0.01], private hospital (OR: 1.40, p = 0.01), medical center (OR: 2.38, p < 0.001), regional hospital (OR: 2.41, p < 0.001) and hospitals with an annual volume >20 digital amputations (OR: 4.23, p < 0.001) were associated with higher attempt rates for replantation. Elderly patients (age >65 years) had higher risk of thumb replantation failure (OR: 32.30, p = 0.045), while hospitals with >20 annual replantations had lower risk (OR: 0.11, p = 0.02).ConclusionOur study of the National Health Insurance database characterized the epidemiology of digital amputation patients undergoing replantation and the facilities in Taiwan where these procedures are performed. The hospitals treating more digital amputation patients had higher attempt rates and lower thumb failure rates
Shape restricted regression with random Bernstein polynomials
Shape restricted regressions, including isotonic regression and concave
regression as special cases, are studied using priors on Bernstein polynomials
and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. These priors have large supports, select
only smooth functions, can easily incorporate geometric information into the
prior, and can be generated without computational difficulty. Algorithms
generating priors and posteriors are proposed, and simulation studies are
conducted to illustrate the performance of this approach. Comparisons with the
density-regression method of Dette et al. (2006) are included.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921707000000157 in the IMS
Lecture Notes Monograph Series
(http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Water Management Strategies on Campus: An integrated approach
Water resource management strategies at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology (NPUST) are orientated towards water conservation, efficient water use and wastewater reuse. Ground water is the main water source on the university campus and the affiliated Tajen and Baoli experimental forest farms. To promote ground water collection from surface runoff water, permeable pavement, and multiple ponds have been installed. To achieve efficient water use, less efficient appliances have incrementally been replaced by more water-efficient ones. This has proven to be a feasible and effective way to achieve goals without bringing about inconveniences to campus users. Drought-tolerant trees have been planted and drip irrigation systems utilized on campus farms to save water. Our water reuse strategies aim to achieve a fully-recycling, zero emission water treatment system. Treated domestic sewage, swimming pool water and harvested rainwater are reused for flushing toilets or watering plants. Many facilities on campus, such as the Laifu Garden, Jingsi Lake, Green Park, Yingxia Lake, and Tajen Forest Farm, are more than just beautiful scenic spots; they all play major parts in the circular water ecosystem.Keyword: Water management, water conservation, water recycling, wastewater treatmen
Mixed Fault Tolerance Protocols with Trusted Execution Environment
Blockchain systems are designed, built and operated in the presence of
failures. There are two dominant failure models, namely crash fault and
Byzantine fault. Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols offer stronger
security guarantees, and thus are widely used in blockchain systems. However,
their security guarantees come at a dear cost to their performance and
scalability. Several works have improved BFT protocols, and Trusted Execution
Environment (TEE) has been shown to be an effective solution. However, existing
such works typically assume that each participating node is equipped with TEE.
For blockchain systems wherein participants typically have different hardware
configurations, i.e., some nodes feature TEE while others do not, existing
TEE-based BFT protocols are not applicable.
This work studies the setting wherein not all participating nodes feature
TEE, under which we propose a new fault model called mixed fault. We explore a
new approach to designing efficient distributed fault-tolerant protocols under
the mixed fault model. In general, mixed fault tolerance (MFT) protocols assume
a network of nodes, among which up to can be subject to
mixed faults. We identify two key principles for designing efficient MFT
protocols, namely, (i) prioritizing non-equivocating nodes in leading the
protocol, and (ii) advocating the use of public-key cryptographic primitives
that allow authenticated messages to be aggregated. We showcase these design
principles by prescribing an MFT protocol, namely MRaft.
We implemented a prototype of MRaft using Intel SGX, integrated it into the
CCF blockchain framework, conducted experiments, and showed that MFT protocols
can obtain the same security guarantees as their BFT counterparts while still
providing better performance (both transaction throughput and latency) and
scalability.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
Pain and Suffering Damages in Personal Injury Cases: An Empirical Study
Many jurisdictions award pain and suffering damages, yet it is difficult for judges or juries to quantify pain. Several jurisdictions, such as California, cap pain and suffering damages or other noneconomic damages, and legal scholars have proposed ways to control such damages. Reforms and proposals, however, have been based on limited empirical evidence. It remains an open question whether components of economic damages explain pain and suffering damages. This study employs a unique dataset of Taiwan district court cases and uses detailed information on the components of pecuniary damages. Pain and suffering damages highly correlate with the plaintiffâs medical expenses, level of injury, and the amount requested by the plaintiff. The association with the amount requested by the plaintiff persists when one accounts for the likely quantifiable influences on pain and suffering damages, evidence of a possible anchoring effect. The strong correlation between economic damages and noneconomic damages persists in a large U.S. dataset of judge and jury trials, in which the noneconomic fraction of total damages is no greater than the pain and suffering fraction of total damages in Taiwan. Judges and juries consistently produce coherent patterns of noneconomic damages
Profiling time course expression of virus genes---an illustration of Bayesian inference under shape restrictions
There have been several studies of the genome-wide temporal transcriptional
program of viruses, based on microarray experiments, which are generally useful
in the construction of gene regulation network. It seems that biological
interpretations in these studies are directly based on the normalized data and
some crude statistics, which provide rough estimates of limited features of the
profile and may incur biases. This paper introduces a hierarchical Bayesian
shape restricted regression method for making inference on the time course
expression of virus genes. Estimates of many salient features of the expression
profile like onset time, inflection point, maximum value, time to maximum
value, area under curve, etc. can be obtained immediately by this method.
Applying this method to a baculovirus microarray time course expression data
set, we indicate that many biological questions can be formulated
quantitatively and we are able to offer insights into the baculovirus biology.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS258 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- âŠ