I worship, so I download? Idol worship, music purchase and piracy by young consumers in Taiwan

Design/methodology/approach – A stratified, two-stage, cluster sampling procedure was applied to a list of high schools obtained from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. A return rate of 80 per cent yielded 723 usable questionnaires, the data from which were analysed by the LISREL structural equation modelling software. Findings – The results suggest that both social worship and personal worship have a significant and positive impact on the intention to purchase music. However, personal worship has a negative impact on the intention to pirate music while social worship appears to strengthen it. Research limitations/implications – The findings suggest that idol worship is more complex than previously understood. The constructs chosen in this research should be seen only as a snapshot but other variables such as vanity trait, autonomy, romanticism or involvement are not taken into account. Future studies would benefit from inclusion of these variables and a wider geographical scope. Practical implications – The findings contain many implications to help marketing executives and planners better revise their existing marketing and communication strategies to increase their revenue. Originality/value – Existing research has tended to examine the impact of idol worship as a whole on the reduction of music piracy, but overlook the two-dimensional aspects of idol worship, hence ignoring the fact that many music firms have not properly utilised idol worship to deal with the challenges associated with music piracy. The findings broaden existing understanding about the causes of two different dimensions of idol worship and their different impacts on the intention to music piracy

Band Structure Mapping of Bilayer Graphene via Quasiparticle Scattering

A perpendicular electric field breaks the layer symmetry of Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene, resulting in the opening of a band gap and a modification of the effective mass of the charge carriers. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, we examine standing waves in the local density of states of bilayer graphene formed by scattering from a bilayer/trilayer boundary. The quasiparticle interference properties are controlled by the bilayer graphene band structure, allowing a direct local probe of the evolution of the band structure of bilayer graphene as a function of electric field. We extract the Slonczewski-Weiss-McClure model tight binding parameters as $\gamma_0 = 3.1$ eV, $\gamma_1 = 0.39$ eV, and $\gamma_4 = 0.22$ eV.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

MAAIG: Motion Analysis And Instruction Generation

Many people engage in self-directed sports training at home but lack the real-time guidance of professional coaches, making them susceptible to injuries or the development of incorrect habits. In this paper, we propose a novel application framework called MAAIG(Motion Analysis And Instruction Generation). It can generate embedding vectors for each frame based on user-provided sports action videos. These embedding vectors are associated with the 3D skeleton of each frame and are further input into a pretrained T5 model. Ultimately, our model utilizes this information to generate specific sports instructions. It has the capability to identify potential issues and provide real-time guidance in a manner akin to professional coaches, helping users improve their sports skills and avoid injuries.Comment: Accepted to the ACM Multimedia Asia 2023 Workshop on Intelligent Sports Technologies (WIST

Dynamical study on polaron formation in a metal/polymer/metal structure

By considering a metal/polymer/metal structure within a tight-binding one-dimensional model, we have investigated the polaron formation in the presence of an electric field. When a sufficient voltage bias is applied to one of the metal electrodes, an electron is injected into the polymer chain, then a self-trapped polaron is formed at a few hundreds of femtoseconds while it moves slowly under a weak electric field (not larger than $$ V/cm). At an electric field between $1.0\times 10^4$ V/cm and $$ V/cm, the polaron is still formed, since the injected electron is bounded between the interface barriers for quite a long time. It is shown that the electric field applied at the polymer chain reduces effectively the potential barrier in the metal/polymer interface