The impact of gamification elements on the evaluation of marketing activities

Recently, gamification obtains increasingly attention in marketing. Based on the S-O-R model, this research applied gamification to marketing and examined two important gamification elements (external reward and interactive competition) on evaluation of marketing activity. It was found that external reward and interactive competition have positive impacts on evaluation of marketing activity, and perceived enjoyment and immersion mediate the effects of external reward and interactive competition on such evaluation. This research contributes to gamification literature by examining the impact of different gamification elements (external reward vs interactive competition) on the evaluation of marketing activity. Further, this study contributes to marketing literature by exploring the impact of the perceived enjoyment and immersion. This research also provides insights for firms and game administrators on how to encourage customers to generate purchase intention and purchase behavior by designing appropriate gamification elements

Effect of hydrophobic interactions on lower critical solution temperature for poly(N-isopropylacrylamide-co-dopamine methacrylamide) copolymers

For the preparation of thermoresponsive copolymers, for e.g., tissue engineering scaffolds or drug carriers, a precise control of the synthesis parameters to set the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) is required. However, the correlations between molecular parameters and LCST are partially unknown and, furthermore, LCST is defined as an exact temperature, which oversimplifies the real situation. Here, random N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM)/dopamine methacrylamide (DMA) copolymers were prepared under a systematical variation of molecular weight and comonomer amount and their LCST in water studied by calorimetry, turbidimetry, and rheology. Structural information was deduced from observed transitions clarifying the contributions of molecular weight, comonomer content, end-group effect or polymerization degree on LCST, which were then statistically modeled. This proved that the LCST can be predicted through molecular structure and conditions of the solutions. While the hydrophobic DMA lowers the LCST especially the onset, polymerization degree has an important but smaller influence over all the whole LCST range.This research was funded by Shenzhen Fundamental Research Funds number KC2014ZDZJ0001A, the Shenzhen Sci & Tech research grant number ZDSYS201507141105130, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Grant number 2018M633119

Elevated temperature and browning increase dietary methylmercury, but decrease essential fatty acids at the base of lake food webs

Climate change scenarios predict increases in temperature and organic matter supply from land to water, which affect trophic transfer of nutrients and contaminants in aquatic food webs. How essential nutrients, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), and potentially toxic contaminants, such as methylmercury (MeHg), at the base of aquatic food webs will be affected under climate change scenarios, remains unclear. The objective of this outdoor mesocosm study was to examine how increased water temperature and terrestrially-derived dissolved organic matter supply (tDOM; i.e., lake browning), and the interaction of both, will influence MeHg and PUFA in organisms at the base of food webs (i.e. seston; the most edible plankton size for zooplankton) in subalpine lake ecosystems. The interaction of higher temperature and tDOM increased the burden of MeHg in seston (\u3c 40 μm) and larger sized plankton (microplankton; 40–200 μm), while the MeHg content per unit biomass remained stable. However, PUFA decreased in seston, but increased in microplankton, consisting mainly of filamentous algae, which are less readily bioavailable to zooplankton. We revealed elevated dietary exposure to MeHg, yet decreased supply of dietary PUFA to aquatic consumers with increasing temperature and tDOM supply. This experimental study provides evidence that the overall food quality at the base of aquatic food webs deteriorates during ongoing climate change scenarios by increasing the supply of toxic MeHg and lowering the dietary access to essential nutrients of consumers at higher trophic levels

Elevated temperature and browning increase dietary methylmercury, but decrease essential fatty acids at the base of lake food webs

Climate change scenarios predict increases in temperature and organic matter supply from land to water, which affect trophic transfer of nutrients and contaminants in aquatic food webs. How essential nutrients, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), and potentially toxic contaminants, such as methylmercury (MeHg), at the base of aquatic food webs will be affected under climate change scenarios, remains unclear. The objective of this outdoor mesocosm study was to examine how increased water temperature and terrestrially-derived dissolved organic matter supply (tDOM; i.e., lake browning), and the interaction of both, will influence MeHg and PUFA in organisms at the base of food webs (i.e. seston; the most edible plankton size for zooplankton) in subalpine lake ecosystems. The interaction of higher temperature and tDOM increased the burden of MeHg in seston (< 40 mu m) and larger sized plankton (microplankton; 40-200 mu m), while the MeHg content per unit biomass remained stable. However, PUFA decreased in seston, but increased in microplankton, consisting mainly of filamentous algae, which are less readily bioavailable to zooplankton. We revealed elevated dietary exposure to MeHg, yet decreased supply of dietary PUFA to aquatic consumers with increasing temperature and tDOM supply. This experimental study provides evidence that the overall food quality at the base of aquatic food webs deteriorates during ongoing climate change scenarios by increasing the supply of toxic MeHg and lowering the dietary access to essential nutrients of consumers at higher trophic levels

Assessing Environmental Governance of the Hudson River Valley: Application of an IPPEP Model

The process of obtaining effective implementation of environmental laws is a process of “environmental governance.” Law, including environmental law and other fields of law related to environmental law, is essential to frame, facilitate, and foster the major parties to correctly play their roles. This thesis has been articulated through a Model of Interactions of Parties in the Process of Environmental Protection (IPPEP Model), which has been developed by Professor Wang Xi of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in the context of the People’s Republic of China. The IPPEP Model is a tool for observing and accessing environmental governance at work. It is being tested by regional studies in various locations, such as the United States, the State of New York, and in this IPPEP case study of New York’s Hudson River Valley. The IPPEP model being examined, however, has universal applicability. Use of this model can predict that environmental standards will fail to be observed when necessary “Third Parties” are weak or absent. A nation with a commitment to the “rule of law” will enact and apply necessary legal procedures to ensure that each party can take part in the system and perform their role effectively. Part I of this paper describes the IPPEP Model. Part II is a brief introduction to the history of Hudson River Valley. Part III introduces the major parties or players in the process of protecting Hudson River Valley. Part IV consists of five case studies applying the IPPEP Model in cases of Hudson River Valley conservation. Part V concludes the paper

Cancer Communication and User Engagement on Chinese Social Media: Content Analysis and Topic Modeling Study

BackgroundCancer ranks among the most serious public health challenges worldwide. In China—the world’s most populous country—about one-quarter of the population consists of people with cancer. Social media has become an important platform that the Chinese public uses to express opinions. ObjectiveWe investigated cancer-related discussions on the Chinese social media platform Weibo (Sina Corporation) to identify cancer topics that generate the highest levels of user engagement. MethodsWe conducted topic modeling and regression analyses to analyze and visualize cancer-related messages on Weibo and to examine the relationships between different cancer topics and user engagement (ie, the number of retweets, comments, and likes). ResultsOur results revealed that cancer communication on Weibo has generally focused on the following six topics: social support, cancer treatment, cancer prevention, women’s cancers, smoking and skin cancer, and other topics. Discussions about social support and cancer treatment attracted the highest number of users and received the greatest numbers of retweets, comments, and likes. ConclusionsOur investigation of cancer-related communication on Weibo provides valuable insights into public concerns about cancer and can help guide the development of health campaigns in social media

Options for Adaption to Climate Change

In order to tackle climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) provided a portfolio of measures: mitigation, adaptation and constant research. Although Article 10 of the Kyoto Protocol underlined the importance of adaptation, adaptation to climate change had been obtained limited attention in the early negotiations of climate talks. In 2010, Cancun Session of Conference of Parties (“COP”) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”) highlighted the equal importance of adaptation just as mitigation. Since then, increasing attention has been drawn to adaptation practice by the international society. Typically, adaptation can be broken down into three steps: (1) realizing the effects of climate change; (2) designing the activity for remediation of climate change consequences; and (3) implementing the adaptation measures. The most important “adaptive step” is the decision-making and the way in which the activity is designed. Developing countries have already realized how climate change affects them. Change of temperature, precipitation and extreme events such as superstorms and sea level rise already have threatened them, in particular their water, agriculture and coastal zones. Their adaption programs “must be an integral part of a development policy process that ensures mainstreaming of climate adaptation in all relevant sectors of society while not forgetting the other multiple drivers (social, economic, and environmental problems)”. In other words, the ultimate goal of the adaption program design should create a link between the adaptation measures and overall sustainable development. The measures will need to be different for each country since “adaptation needs to be context specific and dependent on the resources available to the impacted domain.” However, adaptation cost and adaptive capacity are two barriers in developing countries. On a regional basis, the East Asia and Pacific Region bears the highest adaptation cost according to some economic analyses. With regard to adaptive capacity, developed countries have more strengths on adaptation development than developing countries because of their greater resources and often better governance systems, technical support and quality of national institutions. Various partnerships that aim to improve adaptive capacity and resilience have been carried out in developing countries. However, it is a long-term process and takes substantial time to see the results. Under the pressure of climate change, instantly effective adaptation measures would be helpful to developing countries. This paper proposes a series of adaptation paths that can be promoted and replicated under different circumstances regardless of different governance structures

Spectrum Sharing Based on a Bertrand Game in Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks

In the study of power control and allocation based on pricing, the utility of secondary users is usually studied from the perspective of the signal to noise ratio. The study of secondary user utility from the perspective of communication demand can not only promote the secondary users to meet the maximum communication needs, but also to maximize the utilization of spectrum resources, however, research in this area is lacking, so from the viewpoint of meeting the demand of network communication, this paper designs a two stage model to solve spectrum leasing and allocation problem in cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs). In the first stage, the secondary base station collects the secondary network communication requirements, and rents spectrum resources from several primary base stations using the Bertrand game to model the transaction behavior of the primary base station and secondary base station. The second stage, the subcarriers and power allocation problem of secondary base stations is defined as a nonlinear programming problem to be solved based on Nash bargaining. The simulation results show that the proposed model can satisfy the communication requirements of each user in a fair and efficient way compared to other spectrum sharing schemes

Fast Image Retrieval Based on Color, Texture and Shape of MPEG-7

Conference Name:IEEE International Symposium on IT in Medicine and Education. Conference Address: Xiamen, PEOPLES R CHINA. Time:DEC 12-14, 2008.Color, texture and shape are three basic visual features in content-based image retrieval, Descriptors based on only one of them could just express pat-is of characteristics of images. This paper proposes a method that comprehensively utilizes domain color descriptor, edge histogram descriptor and shape feature descriptor in MPEG-7 standards, and evaluates the result according to the evaluation standards provided by MPEG-7. The experiment result shows that the method combining three features does more in line with the requirements of human visual experience, and obtains better retrieval result