IPA on a University’s Brand Equity and Competitors: Based on a Survey among University Freshmen

The purpose of this study is to understand freshmen’s perceptions and viewpoints on the brand equity of their university. IPA (importance-performance analysis) was used to explore the relation between perceived importance and performance of each attribute. By including competitors’ coping strategies, the relative position of each attribute of the target university’s brand equity was discussed. The data were collected from a questionnaire survey conducted among 1358 freshmen of a university at southern Taiwan, and 849 responses were returned and valid. A total of 13 attributes in the questionnaire were developed by the researchers, and these attributes covers three dimensions: brand awareness, brand association and brand loyalty. For each attribute, the level of perceived performance was lower than that of perceived importance, suggesting that brand equity should be improved. IPA results show that most of the attributes fell into “Quadrant B: Keep Up the Good Work”, and “Quadrant C: Low Priority.” When the two major competitors were included for comparison, the university should check the location of each attribute in the eight cells to identify its relative position and develop strategies accordingly. Keywords: University, Brand, Brand equity, Competitor, Importance-performance analysi

Investigating the Relationship between Dietary Sodium Intake and Severity Levels of Fluid Overload Symptoms in Patients with Heart Failure

Aim: This study aimed to investigate dietary sodium intake levels and to explore the relationship between those levels and the severity of fluid overload symptoms.Background: The management of dietary sodium is an important nursing intervention in the care of patients with heart failure stemming from fluid overload. Recommendations for the intake of dietary sodium among heart failure patients were discussed. If a heart failure patient’s dietary sodium intake habits are understood, then the relationship between this intake and fluid overload can be elucidated. This knowledge would be beneficial for nursing intervention in cases of heart failure.Methods: A total of 98 patients selected from cardiology wards who had a diagnosis of heart failure were enrolled in this study. Their dietary sodium intake level was estimated from a 24-hour urinary sodium excretion analysis. The severity of fluid overload symptoms was assessed using the fluid volume overload symptoms scale. Results: This study showed that the mean dietary sodium intake for patients with heart failure was 2.49 g/day and that this intake had no correlation with the severity levels of fluid overload symptoms. Conclusions: Using the patients’ own perceptions of the severity of fluid overload symptoms as a reference, adopting more relaxed sodium dietary intake restrictions may lead patients to have better food consumption habits

On Landau inequality via semigroup orbits

Let $\omega>0$. Given a strongly continuous semigroup $\{e^{tA}\}$ on a Banach space and an element $f\in\mathbf{D}(A^2)$ satisfying the exponential orbital estimates $$\|e^{tA}f\|\leq e^{-\omega t}\|f\| \quad\text{and}\quad \|e^{tA}A^2f\|\leq e^{-\omega t}\|A^2f\|,\quad t\geq0,$$ a dynamical inequality for $\|Af\|$ in terms of $\|f\|$ and $\|A^2f\|$ was derived by Herzog and Kunstmann (Studia Math., 223(1):19-26, 2014). In this note we provide an improvement of their result by relaxing the exponential decay to quadratic, together with a simple and direct way recovering the usual Landau inequality