Impacts of Fat and Cholesterol Information On Consumer Demand: Application of New Indexes

Consumers' beliefs in the benefits of reducing fat intakes, especially saturated fat, and of increasing calcium intake from such foods as dairy products, depend upon the acquired information related to diet and health. This study develops new health information measures from different sources. The monthly information indexes, constructed for 1980-93, show that the amount of consumer information related to fat and cholesterol in circulation reached the highest levels during 1989-90. The results from an empirical application show that these new indexes of consumer health information about fats and cholesterol could explain the changing patterns of consumer choice for whole milk vs. lower fat milk in the United States.Demand and Price Analysis,

ACQR: A Novel Framework to Identify and Predict Influential Users in Micro-Blogging

As key roles of online social networks, influential users in micro-blogging have the ability to influence the attitudes or behaviour of others. When it comes to marketing, the users’ influence should be associated with a certain topic or field on which people have different levels of preference and expertise. In order to identify and predict influential users in a specific topic more effectively, users’ actual influential capability on a certain topic and potential influence unlimited by topics is combined into a novel comprehensive framework named “ACQR” in this research. ACQR framework depicts the attributes of the influentials from four aspects, including activeness (A), centrality (C), quality of post (Q) and reputation (R). Based on this framework, a data mining method is developed for discovering and forecasting the top influentials. Empirical results reveal that our ACQR framework and the data mining method by TOPSIS and SVMs (with polynomial and RBF kernels) can perform very well in identifying and predicting influential users in a certain topic (such as iPhone 5). Furthermore, the dynamic change processes of users’ influence from longitudinal perspective are analysed and suggestions to the sales managers are provided

Single and double pi^{-}/pi^{+} ratios in heavy-ion reactions as probes of the high-density behavior of the nuclear symmetry energy

Based on an isospin- and momentum-dependent hadronic transport model IBUU04, effects of the nuclear symmetry energy on the single and double pi^{-}/pi^{+}ratios in central reactions of ^{132}Sn+^{124}Sn and ^{112}Sn+^{112}Sn at a beam energy of 400 MeV/nucleon are studied. It is found that around the Coulomb peak of the single pi^{-}/pi^{+} ratio the double pi^{-}/pi^{+} ratio taken from the two isotopic reactions retains about the same sensitivity to the density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy. Because the double pi^{-}/pi^{+}ratio can reduce significantly the systematic errors, it is thus a more effective probe for the high-density behavior of the nuclear symmetry energy.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Physics Review

Effects of Marangoni numbers on thermocapillary drop migration: constant for quasi-steady state?

The overall {\it steady}-state energy balance with two phases in a flow domain requires that the change in energy of the domain is equal to the difference between the total energy entering the domain and that leaving the domain. From the condition, the integral thermal flux across the surface is studied for a {\it steady} thermocapillary drop migration in a flow field with uniform temperature gradient at small and large Marangoni (Reynolds) numbers. The drop is assumed to have only a slight axisymmetric deformation from a sphere. It is identified that a conservative/nonconservative integral thermal flux across the surface in the {\it steady} thermocapillary drop migration at small/large Marangoni (Reynolds) numbers. The conservative flux confirms the assumption of {\it quasi-steady} state in the thermocapillary drop migration at small Marangoni (Reynolds) numbers. The nonconservative flux may well result from the invalid assumption of {\it quasi-steady} state, which indicates that the thermocapillary drop migration at large Marangoni (Reynolds) numbers cannot reach {\it steady} state and is thus a {\it unsteady} process.Comment: 21 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1112.276

Performance evaluation and optimization of reliable multicast

Many multicast applications require reliable delivery of data packets to multiple receivers. Scalability is one of the key challenges in the design of reliable multicast. The major obstacles of the scalability are feedback implosion and retransmissions. Furthermore, a real network changes with time. A reliable multicast protocol must adapt to such dynamic change of multicast sessions. Thus, it is necessary to design an efficient and adaptive loss recovery scheme for reliable multicast. In this thesis, we present an efficient and adaptive loss recovery scheme, which is based on the performance evaluation of reliable multicast. The multicast performance depends on the loss recovery mechanism, the underlying tree topology, the loss characteristics, and the locations of repair servers. We present an efficient performance evaluation of these basic performance parameters, which is useful for adequate determination of the locations of repair server

The Mediating Role of Cognitive Flexibility in the Influence of Counter-Stereotypes on Creativity

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between counter-stereotypes and creativity, and further explore the mechanism underlying the impact of priming counter-stereotypic information on individual creativity. More importantly, here we have proposed cognitive and emotional dual processing pathways, which may mediate the influences of counter-stereotypes on creativity. Two experiments examined how counter-stereotypes impacted creativity through the dual processing pathways. A total of 152 university students were recruited to test their creativity performance. In Experiment 1, we replicated results of past studies. Participants were randomly allocated to different priming conditions (stereotype or counter-stereotype), in which descriptions of male governors and female nurses served as priming of stereotypes, whereas descriptions of male nurses and female governors served as priming of counter-stereotypes. Measurements of creativity were based on the poster paradigm. The poster paradigm required participants to design a poster for a college fellowship party. In Experiment 2, we recruited 104 participants to examine the mediating roles of emotions and cognitive flexibility. The procedure of Experiment 2 was similar to that of Experiment 1, except for the measurement of creativity, which was Chinese idiom riddle test. Participants who selected more creative answers were more creative, based on the criteria of our experimental design. Also, we included measurements of emotions (i.e., surprise and delight) and cognitive flexibility (using the Cognitive Flexibility Scale) after priming of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes in Experiment 2. We also verified the credibility of our counter-stereotype measurements. The results of Experiment 1—which replicated previous studies—demonstrated that priming of counter-stereotypes promoted creative performance compared with priming of stereotypes in the poster paradigm. However, our proposed dual processing pathways were not fully verified by Experiment 2. The results of this experiment showed that neither surprising nor delighted emotion mediated the influence of counter-stereotypes on creativity, whereas cognitive flexibility did. In conclusion, our current study reveals a mechanism of creative performance in terms of cognitive flexibility, and further inspires us to focus on the positive influence of counter-stereotypes on creativity