A time for heroes? Conceptualization, development and validation of the brand hero scale

Purpose: Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings. Findings: This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts. Research limitations/implications: This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors. Practical implications: The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors. Originality/value: Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research

Polaronic effect in the x-ray absorption spectra of La1-x Ca x MnO3 manganites.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is performed to study changes in the electronic structures of colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) and charged ordered (CO) La1-x Ca x MnO3 manganites with respect to temperature. The pre-edge features in O and Mn K-edge XAS spectra, which are highly sensitive to the local distortion of MnO6 octahedral, exhibit contrasting temperature dependence between CMR and CO samples. The seemingly counter-intuitive XAS temperature dependence can be reconciled in the context of polarons. These results help identify the most relevant orbital states associated with polarons and highlight the crucial role played by polarons in understanding the electronic structures of manganites

Enhancing resilience by reducing critical load loss via an emergent trading framework considering possible resources isolation under typhoon

Leveraging distributed resources to enhance distribution network (DN) resilience is an effective measure in response to natural disasters. However, the willingness and economy of distributed resources are typically ignored. To address this issue, this paper proposes an emergent trading framework that uses parking lots (PLs) as resources to provide power support to critical loads (CLs) in a blackout due to typhoons. In this trading framework, an evolutionary Stackelberg game-based trading model is established to consider maximizing all stakeholders' economic benefits, considering possible resources isolation under typical fault scenarios caused by typhoons, and a benefit allocation mechanism is proposed for all stakeholders to motivate all stakeholders to participate in the trading. This framework allows that critical loads could reduce their load loss, parking lots could receive adequate compensation to stimulate them to participate in the trading, and distribution utility could ensure its economic benefits. Furthermore, an iterative evolutionary-Stackelberg solution set-up is applied to obtain the equilibria of the proposed framework. Simulation results on the modified IEEE 69-bus test system and IEEE 123-bus test system reveal the validity of the proposed method

Fuzzy Integral with Particle Swarm Optimization for a Motor-Imagery-Based Brain-Computer Interface

© 2016 IEEE. A brain-computer interface (BCI) system using electroencephalography signals provides a convenient means of communication between the human brain and a computer. Motor imagery (MI), in which motor actions are mentally rehearsed without engaging in actual physical execution, has been widely used as a major BCI approach. One robust algorithm that can successfully cope with the individual differences in MI-related rhythmic patterns is to create diverse ensemble classifiers using the subband common spatial pattern (SBCSP) method. To aggregate outputs of ensemble members, this study uses fuzzy integral with particle swarm optimization (PSO), which can regulate subject-specific parameters for the assignment of optimal confidence levels for classifiers. The proposed system combining SBCSP, fuzzy integral, and PSO exhibits robust performance for offline single-trial classification of MI and real-time control of a robotic arm using MI. This paper represents the first attempt to utilize fuzzy fusion technique to attack the individual differences problem of MI applications in real-world noisy environments. The results of this study demonstrate the practical feasibility of implementing the proposed method for real-world applications

Fuzzy decision-making fuser (FDMF) for integrating human-machine autonomous (HMA) systems with adaptive evidence sources

© 2017 Liu, Pal, Marathe, Wang and Lin. A brain-computer interface (BCI) creates a direct communication pathway between the human brain and an external device or system. In contrast to patient-oriented BCIs, which are intended to restore inoperative or malfunctioning aspects of the nervous system, a growing number of BCI studies focus on designing auxiliary systems that are intended for everyday use. The goal of building these BCIs is to provide capabilities that augment existing intact physical and mental capabilities. However, a key challenge to BCI research is human variability; factors such as fatigue, inattention, and stress vary both across different individuals and for the same individual over time. If these issues are addressed, autonomous systems may provide additional benefits that enhance system performance and prevent problems introduced by individual human variability. This study proposes a human-machine autonomous (HMA) system that simultaneously aggregates human and machine knowledge to recognize targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The HMA focuses on integrating an RSVP BCI with computer vision techniques in an image-labeling domain. A fuzzy decision-making fuser (FDMF) is then applied in the HMA system to provide a natural adaptive framework for evidence-based inference by incorporating an integrated summary of the available evidence (i.e., human and machine decisions) and associated uncertainty. Consequently, the HMA system dynamically aggregates decisions involving uncertainties from both human and autonomous agents. The collaborative decisions made by an HMA system can achieve and maintain superior performance more efficiently than either the human or autonomous agents can achieve independently. The experimental results shown in this study suggest that the proposed HMA system with the FDMF can effectively fuse decisions from human brain activities and the computer vision techniques to improve overall performance on the RSVP recognition task. This conclusion demonstrates the potential benefits of integrating autonomous systems with BCI systems

Adaptive subspace sampling for class imbalance processing

© 2016 IEEE. This paper presents a novel oversampling technique that addresses highly imbalanced data distribution. At present, the imbalanced data that have anomalous class distribution and underrepresented data are difficult to deal with through a variety of conventional machine learning technologies. In order to balance class distributions, an adaptive subspace self-organizing map (ASSOM) that combines the local mapping scheme and globally competitive rule is proposed to artificially generate synthetic samples focusing on minority class samples. The ASSOM is conformed with feature-invariant characteristics, including translation, scaling and rotation, and it retains the independence of basis vectors in each module. Specifically, basis vectors generated via each ASSOM module can avoid generating repeated representative features that offer nothing but heavy computational load. Several experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ASSOM method with supervised learning manner is superior to other existing oversampling techniques

Diallyl Disulfide (DADS) Induces Apoptosis in Human Cervical Cancer Ca Ski Cells via Reactive Oxygen Species and Ca2+-dependent Mitochondria-dependent Pathway

[[abstract]]The mechanisms of apoptosis induced by diallyl disulfide (DADS) were explored in human cervical cancer Ca Ski cells. Flow cytometric analysis, DNA gel electrophoresis and DAPI staining demonstrated that DADS induced apoptosis in Ca Ski cells. DADS induced apoptosis through the production of reactive oxygen species and Ca2+, and induced abrogation of mitochondrial membrane potential (Delta psi m) and cleavage of Bid protein (t-Bid). DADS increased the levels of p53, p21 and Bax, but caused a decrease in the level of Bcl-2. DADS also promoted the activities of caspase-3 leading to DNA fragmentation, thus indicating that DADS-induced apoptosis is caspase-3 dependent. In addition, DADS induced an increase in the level of cytochrome c in the cytoplasm, which was released from mitochondria. BAPTA attenuated the Delta psi m abrogation and significantly diminished the occurrence of DADS-induced apoptosis in Ca Ski cells. In conclusion, DADS-induced apoptosis occurs via production of ROS and caspase-3 and a mitochondria-dependent pathway in Ca Ski cells

A motor imagery based brain-computer interface system via swarm-optimized fuzzy integral and its application

© 2016 IEEE. A brain-computer interface (BCI) system provides a convenient means of communication between the human brain and a computer, which is applied not only to healthy people but also for people that suffer from motor neuron diseases (MNDs). Motor imagery (MI) is one well-known basis for designing Electroencephalography (EEG)-based real-life BCI systems. However, EEG signals are often contaminated with severe noise and various uncertainties, imprecise and incomplete information streams. Therefore, this study proposes spectrum ensemble based on swam-optimized fuzzy integral for integrating decisions from sub-band classifiers that are established by a sub-band common spatial pattern (SBCSP) method. Firstly, the SBCSP effectively extracts features from EEG signals, and thereby the multiple linear discriminant analysis (MLDA) is employed during a MI classification task. Subsequently, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to regulate the subject-specific parameters for assigning optimal confidence levels for classifiers used in the fuzzy integral during the fuzzy fusion stage of the proposed system. Moreover, BCI systems usually tend to have complex architectures, be bulky in size, and require time-consuming processing. To overcome this drawback, a wireless and wearable EEG measurement system is investigated in this study. Finally, in our experimental result, the proposed system is found to produce significant improvement in terms of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a robotic arm can be reliably controlled using the proposed BCI system. This paper presents novel insights regarding the possibility of using the proposed MI-based BCI system in real-life applications

Biomineralization mediated by anaerobic methane-consuming cell consortia

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