Connectedness of planar self-affine sets associated with non-consecutive collinear digit sets

In the paper, we focus on the connectedness of planar self-affine sets $T(A,{\mathcal{D}})$ generated by an integer expanding matrix $A$ with $|\det (A)|=3$ and a collinear digit set ${\mathcal{D}}=\{0,1,b\}v$, where $b>1$ and $v\in {\mathbb{R}}^2$ such that $\{v, Av\}$ is linearly independent. We discuss the domain of the digit $b$ to determine the connectedness of $T(A,{\mathcal{D}})$. Especially, a complete characterization is obtained when we restrict $b$ to be an integer. Some results on the general case of $|\det (A)|> 3$ are obtained as well.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

THE EFFECTS OF WEBPAGE COLOR ON LENDERS’ DECISIONS IN ONLINE P2P LENDING: A CONSTRUAL LEVEL THEORY PERSPECTIV

In recent years, P2P (peer-to-peer) lending as the most popular innovative business model of Internet finance, has received wide attentions from government, industry, and researchers. Prior academic attention has been devoted to the investigation of factors that may affect lenders’ bidding strategies. In this study, based on the construal level theory, we examine the effect of webpage color (warm vs. cool) on lenders’ preference between acceptable benefit and risk when they decide to make a bid. A series of laboratory experiments are designed to test our proposed hypotheses

Beam Squint Assisted User Localization in Near-Field Integrated Sensing and Communications Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been regarded as a key technology for 6G wireless communications, in which large-scale multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) array with higher and wider frequency bands will be adopted. However, recent studies show that the beam squint phenomenon can not be ignored in wideband MIMO system, which generally deteriorates the communications performance. In this paper, we find that with the aid of true-time-delay lines (TTDs), the range and trajectory of the beam squint in near-field communications systems can be freely controlled, and hence it is possible to reversely utilize the beam squint for user localization. We derive the trajectory equation for near-field beam squint points and design a way to control such trajectory. With the proposed design, beamforming from different subcarriers would purposely point to different angles and different distances, such that users from different positions would receive the maximum power at different subcarriers. Hence, one can simply localize multiple users from the beam squint effect in frequency domain, and thus reduce the beam sweeping overhead as compared to the conventional time domain beam search based approach. Furthermore, we utilize the phase difference of the maximum power subcarriers received by the user at different frequencies in several times beam sweeping to obtain a more accurate distance estimation result, ultimately realizing high accuracy and low beam sweeping overhead user localization. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC) on 18 September 202

What Motivates People to Purchase NFTs? A Self-Discrepancy Perspective

Non-fungible token (NFT) sales change unpredictably and trend downward, which motivates us to explore the determinants of why people purchase NFTs. To answer this question, we develop a model based on the self-discrepancy theory and symbolic self-completion theory. The model proposes that the desire for self-completion is a key driver for such purchases, and functional properties of attractiveness, price utility, emotional properties of aesthetics and playfulness, and social properties of parasocial interaction and social relationship support are antecedents of the desire for self-completion. We also hypothesize that psychological ownership moderates the relationship between the desire for symbolic self-completion and purchase intention. The model will be validated using survey data collected from some popular NFT platforms. The results are expected to support our hypothesis, which contributes to the understanding of the purchase of NFTs by extending the theory of self-discrepancy and adds a new perspective to research on NFTs

Paying for Knowledge: Why People Paying for Live Broadcasts in Online Knowledge Sharing Community?

Powered by the proliferation of social computing and user-generated content, new knowledge sharing platforms in China, including Q&A communities and live broadcasting, were launched and received widely attentions recently. This research is motivated by the tremendous growth of an online knowledge sharing platform, Zhihu Live (www.zhihu.com/lives). Built upon Zhihu community, the usability and functionality of Zhihu Live makes it easy for user to create their own broadcasting lives that can be shared in the community to a wide range of audiences, making this an attractive platform to content creators (speakers) and knowledge consumers (audiences). We therefore propose a two-phase model to investigate the daily sales of Zhihu lives. Hierarchical Linear model was employed to test our hypotheses. Our preliminary results suggest that number of “like” positively affects daily sales before a live starts (phase 1), whereas “like” number, audience review score, and interactions between speakers and audiences during the broadcasting process have significant effects on live’s daily sales after the live starts (phase 2). Implications are discussed and limitations are noted

Embodied Scene-aware Human Pose Estimation

We propose embodied scene-aware human pose estimation where we estimate 3D poses based on a simulated agent's proprioception and scene awareness, along with external third-person observations. Unlike prior methods that often resort to multistage optimization, non-causal inference, and complex contact modeling to estimate human pose and human scene interactions, our method is one stage, causal, and recovers global 3D human poses in a simulated environment. Since 2D third-person observations are coupled with the camera pose, we propose to disentangle the camera pose and use a multi-step projection gradient defined in the global coordinate frame as the movement cue for our embodied agent. Leveraging a physics simulation and prescanned scenes (e.g., 3D mesh), we simulate our agent in everyday environments (libraries, offices, bedrooms, etc.) and equip our agent with environmental sensors to intelligently navigate and interact with scene geometries. Our method also relies only on 2D keypoints and can be trained on synthetic datasets derived from popular human motion databases. To evaluate, we use the popular H36M and PROX datasets and, for the first time, achieve a success rate of 96.7% on the challenging PROX dataset without ever using PROX motion sequences for training.Comment: Project website: https://embodiedscene.github.io/embodiedpose/ Zhengyi Luo and Shun Iwase contributed equall