Could social media improve New Save Supermarket’s Asian market segment?

Social media has become a part of people’s daily life. It is a multi-functional tool for people, who use social media to communicate with others, share content, and consume information in real time. Social media can be used not only by ordinary people but is also a useful marketing tool for businesses, according to previous research. New Save Supermarket is in the city centre, Hamilton. It is the oldest of Hamilton’s large-scale Asian grocery shops. The Asian community is New Save’s target market. This research is to investigate the possibility of using social media to attract more Asian consumers to shop at New Save. In this research, online questionnaires are used to collect data and the thoughts of the customers. The findings of this study indicate that WeChat and Facebook are the primary social media platforms that most customers use. Currently, there are few customers who know of and follow New Save’s WeChat account and Facebook page. Respondents think New Save’s social media do not convey enough information or update regularly enough. They agree that social media advertisements will attract regular shopping. This research suggests that New Save should create a strong social media presence, posting more and useful information for customers, updating regularly, and interacting with customers via social media

Determinants of institutional misconduct by juvenile offenders: gang affiliation and protective factors

This study investigated the determinants of assaultive misconduct within juvenile correctional settings by examining whether gang membership increases the likelihood of misconduct above the background factors measured by a commonly used risk assessment tool [i.e., Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY)], in a sample of 135 male youths admitted to the Singapore Boys' Home (SBH) and the Singapore Boys' Hostel (SBHL) between 2010 and 2011. Overall, the results suggest that protective factors and gang status add incremental value to the SAVRY risk factors in predicting assaultive institutional misconduct. Strong social support and resilient personality traits were also found to be negatively and significantly correlated with assaultive institutional misconduct

LaunchpadGPT: Language Model as Music Visualization Designer on Launchpad

Launchpad is a musical instrument that allows users to create and perform music by pressing illuminated buttons. To assist and inspire the design of the Launchpad light effect, and provide a more accessible approach for beginners to create music visualization with this instrument, we proposed the LaunchpadGPT model to generate music visualization designs on Launchpad automatically. Based on the language model with excellent generation ability, our proposed LaunchpadGPT takes an audio piece of music as input and outputs the lighting effects of Launchpad-playing in the form of a video (Launchpad-playing video). We collect Launchpad-playing videos and process them to obtain music and corresponding video frame of Launchpad-playing as prompt-completion pairs, to train the language model. The experiment result shows the proposed method can create better music visualization than random generation methods and hold the potential for a broader range of music visualization applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunlong10/LaunchpadGPT/.Comment: Accepted by International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 202

Charging facility allocation in smart cities

The raising concerns of energy consumption and air pollution advance the development of electric vehicle technologies and promote the increased deployment of Electric Vehicles (EVs) towards electric transportation. The increasing number of EVs on the road network leads to a growing challenge of electricity management for the power grid to promptly supply electricity to EVs. In order to address this challenge, we need to carefully plan the energy sources and energy delivery via charging facilities to EVs, taking into consideration interdependencies between roads/transportation and electric grid. In this thesis, we focus on studying the placement of energy sources and their charging facilities for EVs by developing: 1) an extended Flow Refueling Location model which finds optimal locations for charging stations as well as dynamic wireless charging pads, and 2) a 2-stage planning process for placement of charging station. The first stage of the planning process is to determine the optimal locations for placing the charging stations to serve the maximum amount of EVs on the road network. Given the selected optimal locations, the second stage determines the capacity of the charging service locations with the purpose of minimizing the total waiting time of EV drivers across the road network to charge their EVs. We show the effectiveness of these two planning models on a sample road network during our performance evaluation

An empirical analysis of herd behavior in the Singapore stock market

1 online resource ( v, 30 p.) : col. ill.Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 27-30).This paper examines herd behavior in the Singapore markets by using daily data from January 2002 to December 2012. Evidence of herd behavior is found in the Singapore market and is present in both the bull and bear markets, but it is more significant in the falling market. During periods of financial crisis, I find particularly strong evidence of herd behavior in the Singapore market. Among 10 industries, the impact of herd behavior on the financial industry is the most significant, and that on the health care and consumer services is relatively significant

Subsurface Mapping of Deserts and Polar Regions Using Radar Data on Earth and Mars

There are abundant resources buried underground that are difficult to be investigated remotely. This thesis is concerned with the development and utility of various novel processing methods for different radar instruments in the field of subsurface mapping on Earth and Mars. Firstly, advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging and Interferometric SAR (InSAR) techniques are applied to assess their potential for revealing subsurface features in the eastern Sahara Desert. The radar penetration depth at L-band (1.25 GHz) is estimated to be 1-2 m over paleochannels in the Sahara Desert, given an initial assumption that radar penetration occurs in the sand accumulation areas. The L-band frequency of previous and existing spaceborne SAR mission is shown to limit the penetration depth to a few metres below the surface. However, over the terrestrial ice-sheets, a radar instrument, the Multi-Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS) from the NASA Operation Ice Bridge (OIB) mission, can penetrate the ice sheet down to 3 km, revealing extensive englacial layers. An automated layer tracing method based on the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and Hough Transform (HT) is proposed to detect and digitise these englacial layers in Greenland. The results show that this proposed method can restore at least 72% of the isochrones when compared with previous results. Given the research interests of the department and inspired by the similarity of the layering phenomenon between the Earth and Martian polar regions, the layer tracing method is adjusted and applied to SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) radargrams from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This method is demonstrated on the SHARAD data in Promethei Lingula as this 6 is the only region with coherent subsurface echo returns near the south pole, resulting in the extraction of six distinct subsurface interfaces, which record past depositional and erosional history and may be associated with past climate change on Mars

The effect of mindfulness and job demands on motivation and performance trajectories across the workweek: an entrainment theory perspective

Employee performance is commonly investigated as a static, one-time snapshot of prior employee behaviors. For the studies that do acknowledge that performance fluctuates over time, the timeframe decision is disconnected from theoretical underpinnings. To make this connection clearer, we draw on entrainment theory and investigate trajectories in motivation and performance across the 5-day workweek. We hypothesize that both motivational control (i.e., staying on course and sustaining effort in pursuit of goals through the redirection of attention) and performance have a declining trajectory across the workweek. Drawing on self-determination theory, we also hypothesize that trait-based mindfulness (i.e., nonjudgmental present moment attention and awareness) negatively relates to the downward trajectory in performance across the workweek via its effect on the trajectory of motivational control. Finally, we take a trait activation theory perspective, hypothesizing that mindfulness is relevant as an indirect influence on performance trajectories through motivational control trajectories only when job demands are high. We test our model using 151 full-time employees in a medical device company. We collected data from participants twice daily across the 5-day workweek. We then use these daily scores to create between-person (e.g., person-centric) trajectories to investigate the proposed relationships. The hypotheses are generally supported. There is a downward trajectory of both motivational control and performance across the workweek. Furthermore, job demands conditionally moderate the indirect effect of mindfulness on performance trajectories through motivational control trajectories. Theoretical and practical implications specific to dynamic motivation and performance, entrainment, and mindfulness literature are discussed