Online vs. Traditional Travel Agency: What influence travel consumers choices?

The tourism industry is constantly growing. It has provided millions of people worldwide with jobs and careers opportunities and it has been shown in many studies that people travel much more these days than ever before (Doswell, 1997, p. 4-5). Furthermore, the entry and rise of Internet and the e-commerce have made it possible for today’s generation to book their trip online. However, there exist some doubts among many researchers of whether the survival and the growth of traditional travel agency have been threatened by the upcoming of online retailer businesses. This study emphasize to investigate the role of different travel agencies in tourism industry and it tries to show how marketing mix approaches used by many travel agencies influences the consumer decision making of purchasing trips and accommodation from either online or traditional travel agency. The main focus of this study lies on different marketing mix approaches, and the findings indicate to which degree the marketing mix affects decision-making. In addition quantitative method in form of a questionnaire was conducted by the authors to investigate the type of travel agency that is most common and more preferable by the targeted audience. In conclusion, the online travel agency among the targeted audience is more preferable, for its accessibility effectiveness, convenience, wider choices of products and services and available, etc. For those who preferred the services of traditional travel agency, our findings indicate that the most attractive elements are: the opportunity of physical interaction during business transaction, the chance of getting tailor-made products and services, and trustworthiness in personal information security

Global dynamics of a fourth-order parabolic equation describing crystal surface growth

In this paper, we study the global dynamics for the solution semiflow of a fourth-order parabolic equation describing crystal surface growth. We show that the equation has a global attractor in H4per(Ω) when the initial value belongs to H1per(Ω)

Planktonic Rotifers in a Subtropical Shallow Lake: Succession, Relationship to Environmental Factors, and Use as Bioindicators

Changes in the density and species composition of planktonic rotifers as well as their relationship to several environmental variables were studied at Dadian Lake, a shallow subtropical lake, which was completely dredged and reconstructed. Samples were taken monthly (2006–2009) at five stations. The total rotifer abundance exponentially declined and reached a relatively stable stage in 2009. Polyarthra dolichoptera and Trichocerca pusilla dominated the rotifer community in most seasons. TN, TP, and CODMn went down at the beginning of the monitoring period, rebounded in the second winter, and then decreased and reached a stable state in 2009. CCA showed that the most significant variations were caused by fluctuations in temperature, CODMn, SRP, and NO2-N. The rotifer community experienced a two-stage succession and the difference of species between the stages was exhibited during warm seasons. GAMs indicated that the selected factors were responsible for 64.8% of the total rotifer abundance variance and 16.5~64.3% of the variances of individual species abundance. Most of the environmental parameters had effects on rotifer abundance that could only be described by complicated curves, characterised by unimodality and bimodality instead of linearity. Our study highlighted the temperature influence on rotifer species composition and total abundance in subtropical lakes

Modeling sediment dynamics in the Zhujiang (Pearl River) Basin, China

Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Single-molecule real-time sequencing of the full-length transcriptome of Portunus pelagicus

Reconstruction and annotation of transcripts, particularly for a species without reference genome, plays a critical role in gene discovery, investigation of genomic signatures, and genome annotation in the pre-genomic era. This is the first study to use Single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing for reporting the full-length transcriptome of Portunus pelagicus. Overall, 16.26 Gb of raw reads were obtained, including 7,068,387 subreads, with average length of 2,300 bp and N50 length of 3,594 bp. In total, 351,870 circular consensus sequences (CCS) reads were extracted, including 255,378 full-length non-chimeric (FLNC) reads with mean length of 3,423 bp.70,407 genes were obtained after eliminating redundant sequences, and 56,557 (80.33%) genes were annotated in at least one database, 17,267 (24.52%) genes were annotated in all of the seven databases. Further, 68,797 coding sequences (CDS) were identified, including 36,848 complete CDS. A total of 1,730 unigenes were predicted to be transcription factors (TFs). Finally, 11,894 long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) transcripts were predicted by different computational approaches and 147,262 single sequence repeat (SSR)s were obtained. The transcriptome data reported herein are bound to serve as a basis for future studies on P. pelagicus

Visual Realism Assessment for Face-swap Videos

Deep-learning based face-swap videos, also known as deep fakes, are becoming more and more realistic and deceiving. The malicious usage of these face-swap videos has caused wide concerns. The research community has been focusing on the automatic detection of these fake videos, but the assessment of their visual realism, as perceived by human eyes, is still an unexplored dimension. Visual realism assessment, or VRA, is essential for assessing the potential impact that may be brought by a specific face-swap video, and it is also important as a quality assessment metric to compare different face-swap methods. In this paper, we make a small step towards this new VRA direction by building a benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of different automatic VRA models, which range from using traditional hand-crafted features to different kinds of deep-learning features. The evaluations are based on a recent competition dataset named DFGC 2022, which contains 1400 diverse face-swap videos that are annotated with Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) on visual realism. Comprehensive experiment results using 11 models and 3 protocols are shown and discussed. We demonstrate the feasibility of devising effective VRA models for assessing face-swap videos and methods. The particular usefulness of existing deepfake detection features for VRA is also noted. The code can be found at https://github.com/XianyunSun/VRA.git.Comment: Accepted by ICIG 202

EXPLORATION AND EVALUATION OF SHORT-TERM RAINFALL FORECASTING BY FRICS DATA

Rainfall is the most important and direct agent that causes flood disaster. It is therefore the flood forecasting essentially depends on forecasting of rainfall. With radar rainfall data remotely observed by the Foundation of River & Basin Integrated Communications, i. e. FRICS, a new methodology is developed for accomplishing short-term rainfall forecasting, wherein two main components are included : (1) settlement of rainfall vector movement with modified correlation method and Fuzzy rule, and (2) determination of spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall intensity using neural network (NN) approach. Reasonable results have been derived with a high accuracy through rainfall data on a real time basis

Modulation of the extracellular matrix patterning of thrombospondins by actin dynamics and thrombospondin oligomer state

Thrombospondins (TSPs) are evolutionarily-conserved, secreted glycoproteins that interact with cell surfaces and extracellular matrix (ECM) and have complex roles in cell interactions. Unlike the structural components of the ECM that form networks or fibrils, TSPs are deposited into ECM as arrays of nanoscale puncta. The cellular and molecular mechanisms for the patterning of TSPs in ECM are poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated whether the mechanisms of TSP patterning in cell-derived ECM involves actin cytoskeletal pathways or TSP oligomer state. From tests of a suite of pharmacological inhibitors of small GTPases, actomyosin-based contractility, or actin microfilament integrity and dynamics, cytochalasin D and jasplakinolide treatment of cells were identified to result in altered ECM patterning of a model TSP1 trimer. The strong effect of cytochalasin D indicated that mechanisms controlling puncta patterning depend on global F-actin dynamics. Similar spatial changes were obtained with endogenous TSPs after cytochalasin D treatment, implicating physiological relevance. Under matched experimental conditions with ectopically-expressed TSPs, the magnitude of the effect was markedly lower for pentameric TSP5 and Drosophila TSP, than for trimeric TSP1 or dimeric Ciona TSPA. To distinguish between the variables of protein sequence or oligomer state, we generated novel, chimeric pentamers of TSP1. These proteins accumulated within ECM at higher levels than TSP1 trimers, yet the effect of cytochalasin D on the spatial distribution of puncta was reduced. These findings introduce a novel concept that F-actin dynamics modulate the patterning of TSPs in ECM and that TSP oligomer state is a key determinant of this process

CO2 reduction over Cu-ZnGaMO (M = Al, Zr) catalysts prepared by a sol-gel method: Unique performance for the RWGS reaction

Cu-ZnGaMO (M = Al, Zr) catalysts prepared by a surfactant-free sol-gel method were characterized and tested in the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction. Their catalytic behavior was analyzed under 0.1–3 MPa at 250–325 °C and using a reactant mixture of CO2/H2 = 1/3. The catalytic results are analyzed in the light of the characteristics of the catalysts. The Cu-ZnGaZrO catalysts were highly selective for the RWGS reaction; a major role of surface copper and interface oxygen vacancies is proposed. CO2 conversion and CO selectivity increased on increasing the reaction temperature. CO2 conversion reaches 16.8% with 99.7% selectivity for CO under 0.1 MPa at 325 °C over the Cu-ZnGaZrO1 catalyst. It is suggested that CO and methanol production proceed via independent reaction pathways