A nonlocal timoshenko beam theory for vibration analysis of thick nanobeams using differential transform method

This article presents the solution for free vibration of nanobeams based on Eringen nonlocal elasticity theory and Timoshenko beam theory. The small scale effect is considered in the first theory, and the transverse shear deformation effects as well as rotary inertia are taken into account in the latter one. Through variational formulation and the Hamilton principle, the governing differential equations of free vibration of the nonlocal Timoshenko beam and the boundary conditions are derived. The obtained equations are solved by the differential transformation method (DTM) for various frequency modes of the beams with different end conditions. In addition, the effects of slenderness and on vibration behavior are presented. It is revealed that the slenderness affects the vibration characteristics slightly whilst the small scale plays a significant role in the vibration behavior of the nanobeam

Investigating Customer Club as a Marketing Activities (Case Study: Asia Insurance)

Customer clubs are assumed to create loyalty from the company perspective (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990). However, they seem to have attained a position of their own in many companies, and to have an institution-like function (Butscher, 2002). Such a position supports the alienation between the customer club and other parts of the business. As a consequence, many club programs still offer their customers the same kinds of benefits as they did when the club was launched, even if the competitive situation has changed considerably and having a customer club has become almost a standard feature. The fact that many customers are members of several clubs, even in the same industry, is seen as a sign of diffuse customer perceptions of the loyalty concept. The changing competitive situation for most companies, in turn, means that the reasons for joining a club have changed considerably: we thus define the customer club as it was perceived by most customers in Gustafsson et al. (2004): “A membership related to the specific company including benefits that are mostly apparent in customers’ relationships as repayment formed in different ways and initiated by the company”. So, in this article we investigate the customer club concept and represent a model for it. Keywords: customer club, customer satisfactio

Creating an Empirical Model of the Effect of Relationship Marketing Strategy on Customer Loyalty (Case Study: Insurance Firms in Iran)

To understand the mechanism of how loyalty programs can work effectively, this paper creating an empirical model of the effect of relationship marketing strategy on customer loyalty. The findings indicated that the relationship marketing positively related to the customer loyalty both toward the programs themselves and the stores. So, our population statistical is customer of insurance firm in Iran and the amount of sample according to Cochran formula is 140 person. For testing the data, we use from SPSS 19 with correlation and regression, according to finding all of the hypothesis are accepted

From Interaction to Independence: zkSNARKs for Transparent and Non-Interactive Remote Attestation

Remote attestation (RA) protocols have been widely used to evaluate the integrity of software on remote devices. Currently, the state-of-the-art RA protocols lack a crucial feature: transparency. This means that the details of the final attestation verification are not openly accessible or verifiable by the public. Furthermore, the interactivity of these protocols often limits attestation to trusted parties who possess privileged access to confidential device data, such as pre-shared keys and initial measurements. These constraints impede the widespread adoption of these protocols in various applications. In this paper, we introduce zRA, a non-interactive, transparent, and publicly provable RA protocol based on zkSNARKs. zRA enables verification of device attestations without the need for pre-shared keys or access to confidential data, ensuring a trustless and open attestation process. This eliminates the reliance on online services or secure storage on the verifier side. Moreover, zRA does not impose any additional security assumptions beyond the fundamental cryptographic schemes and the essential trust anchor components on the prover side (i.e., ROM and MPU). The zero-knowledge attestation proofs generated by devices have constant size regardless of the network complexity and number of attestations. Moreover, these proofs do not reveal sensitive information regarding internal states of the device, allowing verification by anyone in a public and auditable manner. We conduct an extensive security analysis and demonstrate scalability of zRA compared to prior work. Our analysis suggests that zRA excels especially in peer-to-peer and Pub/Sub network structures. To validate the practicality, we implement an open-source prototype of zRA using the Circom language. We show that zRA can be securely deployed on public permissionless blockchains, serving as an archival platform for attestation data to achieve resilience against DoS attacks

Diatomite chemical activation for effective adsorption of methylene blue dye from model textile wastewater

Dye wastewater produced in textile industries is a warning issue that threatens the environment due to discharge into the waterway. This study reviewed the adsorption of Methylene Blue (MB), as a toxic dye, onto diatomite adsorbent. A series of chemical modifications were examined by impregnating diatomite into various acidic and basic solutions to obtain the most active sample with the highest capacity. Both raw diatomite (RD) and modified diatomite (MD) were analyzed under different experimental conditions, such as PH, contact time, the dose of adsorbent to attain the optimum quantities of each in which adsorption capacity and removal percentage were in their highest amount. FESEM analysis indicated the surface characterization and the morphology of both adsorbents. The results of batch experiments showed that the equilibration removal capacities of MB under the optimum condition were 72 mg/g for RD and 127 mg/g for MD. Overall results suggested that due to the low-cost, naturally available, simple treatment methods and materials, and sustainability, the modified adsorbent has the potential for dye removal in the practical process.Parisa Ebrahimi would like to acknowledge the support from Graduate Teaching/Research Assistantship (GTRA) from Qatar University. The help from Dr. Ebrahim Najafi Kani from Semnan University, Iran in early stages of the research is also greatly appreciated.Scopu

¿Cómo el género y la edad pueden afectar el comportamiento de compra del consumidor? Evidencia desde una perspectiva microeconómica de Hungría

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of demographic variables of gender and age on online consumer purchase behavior (CPB) on Facebook in Hungary. The statistical population of the present study consists of Facebook users in Hungary, including Hungarian natives, foreigners residing in this country including students. A sample of 433 online consumers in different age groups was surveyed. The questionnaire was shared via an online link on the Facebook platform and also on various channels. Welch’s t-test was used to examine the gender variable, and Welch and Brown-Forsythe test was used to examine the age variable. The results showed that there was a significant difference between CPB in all age groups and the age group of over 50 years on Facebook. This important result emphasized the importance and impact of social networks as marketing channels on young people. Another important point was the difference between the purchase behaviors of male and female consumers. The results from this research can have implications for businesses in developing their competitive advantages and adopting proper approaches in advertising and marketing campaigns based on the socio-demographic characteristics of people.El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo investigar el efecto de las variables demográficas de género y edad en el comportamiento de compra del consumidor on-line (CPB, por sus siglas en inglés) en Facebook en Hungría. La población estadística del presente estudio consiste en usuarios de Facebook en Hungría, incluidos los nativos húngaros y los extranjeros que residen en este país, incluidos los estudiantes. Se encuestó a una muestra de 433 consumidores en línea en diferentes grupos de edad. El cuestionario se compartió a través de un enlace en línea en la plataforma de Facebook y también en varios canales. Se utilizó la prueba t de Welch para examinar la variable de género, y la prueba de Welch y Brown-Forsythe, para examinar la variable de edad. Los resultados mostraron que hubo una diferencia significativa entre el CPB en todos los grupos de edad y el grupo de más de 50 años en Facebook. Este importante resultado enfatizó la importancia y el impacto de las redes sociales como canales de comercialización en los jóvenes. Otro punto importante fue la diferencia entre los comportamientos de compra de los consumidores masculinos y femeninos. Los resultados de esta investigación pueden tener implicaciones para que las empresas desarrollen sus ventajas competitivas y adopten enfoques adecuados en las campañas de publicidad y marketing en función de las características sociodemográficas de las personas

VIMz: Verifiable Image Manipulation using Folding-based zkSNARKs

With the rise of generative AI technology, the media\u27s credibility as a source of truth has been significantly compromised. This highlights the need to verify the authenticity of media and its originality. Ensuring the integrity of media during capture using the device itself presents a straightforward solution to this challenge. However, raw captured media often require certain refinements or redactions before publication. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) offer a solution by allowing attestation of the correctness of specific transformations applied to an authorized image. While shown to be feasible, previous approaches faced challenges in practice due to their high prover complexity. In this paper, we aim to develop a practical framework for efficiently proving the authenticity of HD and 4K images on commodity hardware. Our goal is to minimize prover complexity by utilizing the folding-based zkSNARKs technique, resulting in VIMz, the first practical verifiable image manipulation system of this kind. VIMz leverages Nova\u27s folding scheme to achieve low complexity recursive zkSNARK proofs of authentic image manipulation. Our implementation results demonstrate a substantial reduction in prover complexity—up to a 3$\times$ speedup in time and a 96$\times$ reduction in memory (from 309 GB in [Kang et al., arXiv 2022] to only 3.2 GB). Moreover, the low memory consumption allows VIMz to prove the correctness of multiple chained transformations simultaneously, further increasing the performance (up to 3.5$\times$). Additionally, we propose a trustless smart contract system that autonomously verifies the proofs of media authenticity, achieving trustless copyright and ownership management, aligning with the standards of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Such a system serves as a foundational infrastructure for constructing trustless media marketplaces with diverse applications

Forecasting of Bitcoin Illiquidity Using High-Dimensional and Textual Features

Liquidity is the ease of converting an asset (physical/digital) into cash or another asset without loss and is shown by the relationship between the time scale and the price scale of an investment. This article examines the illiquidity of Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin hash rate information was collected at three different time intervals; parallel to these data, textual information related to these intervals was collected from Twitter for each day. Due to the regression nature of illiquidity prediction, approaches based on recurrent networks were suggested. Seven approaches: ANN, SVM, SANN, LSTM, Simple RNN, GRU, and IndRNN, were tested on these data. To evaluate these approaches, three evaluation methods were used: random split (paper), random split (run) and linear split (run). The research results indicate that the IndRNN approach provided better results.Peer Reviewe

Extraction and characterization of oligosaccharides from palm kernel cake as prebiotic

The main objective of the present study was to extract and characterize oligosaccharides from palm kernel cake (OligoPKC) to be used as a prebiotic. Up to 16.81% of oligosaccharides were extracted from PKC using neutral detergent solution with two to eight degrees of polymerization. Molecular weights of seven fractions of OligoPKC were estimated using a mass spectrophotometer procedure resembling those of mannobiose, mannotriose, mannotetraose, mannopentaose, and mannohexaose standards, while those of two unknown components resembled those of heptasaccharide and octasaccharide. Enzymatic hydrolysis of OligoPKC using 11 enzymes showed that β-mannosidase and β-mannanase had the highest effects. OligoPKC fractions were potential substrates for growth of four species of Lactobacillus. Supplementation of OligoPKC in the diet of broiler chickens increased the population of beneficial microbes. However, it reduced the populations of pathogenic bacteria in the cecum. Hence, OligoPKC can be considered a potential prebiotic supplement in the feed and food industry