How Social Anxiety and Social Factors Influence and Moderate Social Commerce

Following the fast growth of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in the cyber world recently, social commerce has become an important emerging issue on the Internet. Researchers have studied not only online factors but also offline factors, according to the offline-to-online consumer-behavior model. Hence, this study applied approaches to social anxiety, online social interaction and online social support to comprehend the influences of social commerce intentions. After the research survey collected data from SNS (Facebook) users for one month, the researcher analyzed the data and made several findings. First, social anxiety positively moderates the relationship between online social support and social commerce intention. Second, online social interaction directly and indirectly affects social commerce intention through online social support. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are also discussed, providing several future research directions and suggestions for scholars and SNS operators, respectively

The Effects of Social Anxiety Moderating Social Factors for Influencing Social Commerce

Social commerce has become an important emerging issue on the Internet. Researchers have studied not only online factors but also offline factors. Hence, this study investigated the effect of social anxiety, an offline psychological characteristic, on online users’ behavior. Online social interactions are hypothesized to influence social commerce intention directly or indirectly through online social support. Online social support is divided into two forms, informational and emotional. Social commerce intention is also decomposed into receiving and giving resulting in eight causal relationships. 427 effective samples are collected from Facebook users, and the results confirmed most of the causal effects of the research model. The Study also tested the moderating effect of social anxiety on all of the causal effects. Out of the eight relationships, social anxiety significantly moderates four of them. Findings of the results lead to significant theoretical contributions and managerial implications. Limitation and future research directions are also discussed

Improve Production Process Performance By Using Lean Management －A Case Study of Lady Underwear

People around the world work every year to improve the requirement standards of various commodities. Product life cycles are getting shorter, replaced by a number of innovative products; thus, in order to adapt to social changes, companies must develop a number of innovative products to attract consumers to buy. In Taiwan, most development occurs in small and medium traditional industries. Women’s underwear is a personal privacy product. As women are gradually being taken more seriously, women’s underwear products are gradually increasing in value, but the women’s underwear and underwear fabric design process is quite complex and time-consuming. To help enterprises improve production performance, this study introduces lean enterprise management, using IE tools for program analysis, which provides time to study the law, and 7S management practices, identifies problems, and proposes ways to improve in order to verify the practices and analysis of results. Research pointed out that introducing lean management for enterprises to improve process performance, so that women’s underwear product processes achieve significant improvement, improved results as follows: Before and after the improvement, GAP reached 23.83%; product production time was reduced; employee take line operation time reduced; quantization benefits of $1,909,425 improved the efficiency to$1,023,225, putting the cost at $106,200; and table bad rate increased the cost by$780,000. These results show that in the present study, lean management practices successfully improved the production performance of the women’s underwear industry included in this study. It is expected that the process improvements can provide a method for the lingerie industry to continuously improve and succeed in raising the performance feedback of employees to increase cohesion so that the company reaps more profits and benefits

Attractive or Faithful? Popularity-Reinforced Learning for Inspired Headline Generation

With the rapid proliferation of online media sources and published news, headlines have become increasingly important for attracting readers to news articles, since users may be overwhelmed with the massive information. In this paper, we generate inspired headlines that preserve the nature of news articles and catch the eye of the reader simultaneously. The task of inspired headline generation can be viewed as a specific form of Headline Generation (HG) task, with the emphasis on creating an attractive headline from a given news article. To generate inspired headlines, we propose a novel framework called POpularity-Reinforced Learning for inspired Headline Generation (PORL-HG). PORL-HG exploits the extractive-abstractive architecture with 1) Popular Topic Attention (PTA) for guiding the extractor to select the attractive sentence from the article and 2) a popularity predictor for guiding the abstractor to rewrite the attractive sentence. Moreover, since the sentence selection of the extractor is not differentiable, techniques of reinforcement learning (RL) are utilized to bridge the gap with rewards obtained from a popularity score predictor. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that the proposed PORL-HG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art headline generation models in terms of attractiveness evaluated by both human (71.03%) and the predictor (at least 27.60%), while the faithfulness of PORL-HG is also comparable to the state-of-the-art generation model.Comment: AAAI 202

Inhibition of NKCC1 Modulates Alveolar Fluid Clearance and Inflammation in Ischemia-Reperfusion Lung Injury via TRAF6-Mediated Pathways

Background: The expression of Na-K-2Cl cotransporter 1 (NKCC1) in the alveolar epithelium is responsible for fluid homeostasis in acute lung injury (ALI). Increasing evidence suggests that NKCC1 is associated with inflammation in ALI. We hypothesized that inhibiting NKCC1 would attenuate ALI after ischemia-reperfusion (IR) by modulating pathways that are mediated by tumor necrosis-associated factor 6 (TRAF6).Methods: IR-ALI was induced by producing 30 min of ischemia followed by 90 min of reperfusion in situ in an isolated and perfused rat lung model. The rats were randomly allotted into four groups comprising two control groups and two IR groups with and without bumetanide. Alveolar fluid clearance (AFC) was measured for each group. Mouse alveolar MLE-12 cells were cultured in control and hypoxia-reoxygenation (HR) conditions with or without bumetanide. Flow cytometry and transwell monolayer permeability assay were carried out for each group.Results: Bumetanide attenuated the activation of p-NKCC1 and lung edema after IR. In the HR model, bumetanide decreased the cellular volume and increased the transwell permeability. In contrast, bumetanide increased the expression of epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) via p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38 MAPK), which attenuated the reduction of AFC after IR. Bumetanide also modulated lung inflammation via nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB). TRAF6, which is upstream of p38 MAPK and NF-κB, was attenuated by bumetanide after IR and HR.Conclusions: Inhibition of NKCC1 by bumetanide reciprocally modulated epithelial p38 MAPK and NF-κB via TRAF6 in IR-ALI. This interaction attenuated the reduction of AFC via upregulating ENaC expression and reduced lung inflammation

Clinical meaning of age-related expression of fecal cytokeratin 19 in colorectal malignancy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of malignant death worldwide. Because young age of onset is often considered a poor prognostic factor for CRC, it is important to identify the poor outcomes of CRC in a younger population and to consider an aggressive approach by implementing early treatment. Our aim was to specifically quantify the fecal cytokeratin 19 (CK19) transcript from CRC patients and investigate its correlation with clinical stage, tumor malignancy, and age.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The quantitation of fecal CK19 transcript was determined by a quantitative real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain in 129 CRC patients (45 younger than 60 years at diagnosis) and 85 healthy controls. The levels of CK19 protein were examined both in colonic cell lines and tissues.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The analysis of 45 younger CRC patients (age ≤ 60 years) revealed that patients at the M1 stage had significantly higher expression levels of fecal CK19 mRNA when compared with healthy controls (<it>p </it>< 0.001) and patients at the M0 stage (<it>p </it>= 0.004). Additionally, the degree of consistency between the mean level of fecal CK19 mRNA and the distant metastatic rate in each age interval was up to 89% (<it>p </it>= 0.042).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results indicate that high levels of fecal CK19 mRNA represent a potential marker for colorectal malignancy and for aggressive treatment of younger CRC patients.</p

Influences of Stacking Architectures of TiO 2

We investigated the influences of stacking architectures of the TiO2 nanoparticle layers on characteristics and performances of DSSCs. TiO2 nanoparticles of different sizes and compositions were characterized for their morphological and optical/scattering properties in thin films. They were used to construct different stacking architectures of the TiO2 nanoparticle layers for use as working electrodes of DSSCs. Characteristics and performances of DSSCs were examined to establish correlation of the stacking architectures of TiO2 nanoparticle layers with characteristics of DSSCs. The results suggest that the three-layer DSSC architecture, with sandwiching a 20 nm TiO2 nanoparticle layer between a 37 nm TiO2 nanoparticle layer and a hundred nm sized TiO2 back scattering/reflection layer, is effective in enhancing DSSC efficiencies. The high-total-transmittance 37 nm TiO2 nanoparticle layer with a larger haze can serve as an effective front scattering layer to scatter a portion of the incident light into larger oblique angles and therefore increase optical paths and absorption

Hospital Mortality of Septic Acute Kidney Injury Requiring Renal Replacement Therapy in the Postoperative Elderly

SummaryBackgroundSeptic acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common complication in intensive care units (ICU), it and portends a higher risk of morbidity and death than nonseptic AKI. However, its outcome and prognostic factors among elderly postoperative patients remain unknown. We aimed to determine the risk factors and predictors of mortality among postoperative elderly patients (≥ 65 years) with septic AKI requiring acute dialysis.MethodsThe study protocol was based on that of a clinical cohort study of renal failure patients in the database of the National Taiwan University Surgical ICU Acute Renal Failure (NSARF) Study Group. From January 2002 to July 2009, patients (aged > 18 years) with postoperative AKI requiring renal replacement therapy (RRT) were recruited for this study. Each case of septic AKI before operation was identified and patients with end-stage renal disease were excluded.ResultsA total of 292 postoperative patients with septic AKI requiring dialysis were identified during the study period. The mean (SD) age was 65.9 (11.9) years and 68.2% were men. Abdominal surgery was the most common type of surgery (42.8%), followed by cardiovascular (28.8%) and chest surgery (15.4%). The most common indications for RRT in this study cohort were azotemia in 223 patients (76.4%) and fluid overload in 62 patients (21.2%); 92 (31.5%) patients had one indication, 170 (58.2%) had two indications, and 30 (10.3%) had more than three indications. The elderly patients (those ≥ 65 years) had anemia, underwent abdominal surgery, and received dialysis for fluid overload more frequently than the young adults. By contrast, the young adults were more likely to present with shock requiring vasopressor use and have abnormal liver functions. In the elderly subgroup, the outcome was found to be associated with mechanical ventilator use, but not with disease severity, comorbidities, types of surgery and the indication for dialysis.ConclusionsThe hospital mortality of postoperative elderly patients with septic AKI was more than 60% and was not affected by age. Mechanical ventilator use was the major risk factor and prognostic factor for elderly patients in this clinical setting