Animosity within borders: The mediating roles of regional identification and perceived discrimination on regional media preference

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of parental and peer norms on idol worship as well as the effect of idol worship on the intention to purchase and obtain the idol’s music products legally and illegally. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and examine the antecedents and consequence of regional animosity and their impacts on regional media preference. Design/methodology/approach – Computer-assisted telephone interviews were conducted with randomly selected adult residents in Northern (206) and Southern (201) Taiwan. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in LISERAL and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Findings – The findings reveal that perceived economic threat, economic hardship and dissatisfaction with government economic policy increase home region identification and perceived discrimination, which in turn lead to heightened animosity toward the opposite foreign region. This increasing animosity then affects consumer choice over home region media compared to media originated from the other region. Research limitations/implications – The findings suggest that military and political tensions alone cannot explain why consumers would harbor animosity between one region and another within the same country due to social and economic reasons. The constructs chosen in this research should be seen only as a snapshot but other variables such as a region’s natural environment and its human factors are not taken into account. Future studies would benefit from inclusion of these variables and a wider geographical scope. Practical implications – Several implications are extracted to help marketing and branding personnel better shape their marketing, communication and media strategies, as well as to help government policy makers and political parties revise existing policy to reduce the animosity. Originality/value – By investigating animosity within borders, this study provides fresh insights to help explain how economic factors contribute to increased regional animosity through the mediating effect of regional identification and perceived discrimination. The findings broaden existing understanding about the concept of animosity and its impact on consumer behavior

MinVIS: A Minimal Video Instance Segmentation Framework without Video-based Training

We propose MinVIS, a minimal video instance segmentation (VIS) framework that achieves state-of-the-art VIS performance with neither video-based architectures nor training procedures. By only training a query-based image instance segmentation model, MinVIS outperforms the previous best result on the challenging Occluded VIS dataset by over 10% AP. Since MinVIS treats frames in training videos as independent images, we can drastically sub-sample the annotated frames in training videos without any modifications. With only 1% of labeled frames, MinVIS outperforms or is comparable to fully-supervised state-of-the-art approaches on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021. Our key observation is that queries trained to be discriminative between intra-frame object instances are temporally consistent and can be used to track instances without any manually designed heuristics. MinVIS thus has the following inference pipeline: we first apply the trained query-based image instance segmentation to video frames independently. The segmented instances are then tracked by bipartite matching of the corresponding queries. This inference is done in an online fashion and does not need to process the whole video at once. MinVIS thus has the practical advantages of reducing both the labeling costs and the memory requirements, while not sacrificing the VIS performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/MinVI

How Do Virtual Teams Work- A Social Relationship Model By SEM

Virtual teams have been brought the need for organizations to improve the performance of virtual teams. Among these key issues to be successful, social dimensions have been catching researchers and mangers’ attentions. Hence, this study derives a preliminary social relationship model from Powell et al’s (2004) virtual team framework and conduct an experiment to validate it by SEM. The results reveal: (1) Communication has a positive impact on relationship building; (2) Relationship building has a positive impact on cohesion; (3) Relationship building has a positive impact on trust; (4) cohesion and trust have positive impacts on performance

MPFEM Modeling on the Compaction of Al/SiC Composite Powders with Core/Shell Structure

Uniaxial die compaction of two-dimensional (2D) Al/SiC core/shell (core: SiC; shell: Al) composite powders with different initial packing structures was numerically reproduced using DEM-FEM coupled MPFEM modeling from particulate scale. The effects of external pressure, initial packing structure, and SiC content on the packing densification were systematically presented. Various macro and micro properties such as relative density and distribution, stress and distribution, particle rearrangement (e.g. sliding and rolling), deformation and mass transfer, and interfacial behavior within composite particles were characterized and analyzed. The results show that by properly controlling the initial packing structure, pressure, and SiC content, various anisotropic and isotropic Al/SiC particulate composites with high relative densities and uniform density/stress distributions can be obtained. At early stage of the compaction, the densification mechanism mainly lies in the particle rearrangement driven by the low interparticle forces. In addition to sliding, accompanied particle rolling also plays an important role. With the increase of the compaction pressure, the force network based on SiC cores leads to extrusion on Al shells between two cores, contributing to mass transfer and pore filling. During compaction, the debonding between the core and shell of each composite particle appears and then disappears gradually in the final compact

BIOMECHANICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TAI-CHI PRACTICING AND ACTIVE ELDERLY DURING THE STAIR-TO-FLOOR TRANSITION

Long-term Tai-Chi practitioners tend to have similar movement to healthy adults and exhibit movement strategies that reduce fall risk during stair-to-floor transition. We aimed to assess the differences during stair descent to ground in Tai-Chi elderly practitioners and active elderly. Fourteen regular Tai-Chi practitioners and fourteen active elderly participated. Whole-body kinematics and ground reaction forces (GRFs) were recorded synchronously by using motion analysis and a force platform. A t-test was used to test the differences between the groups. Both descent and forward walking step length and center of mass (COM) velocity, both horizontal braking and propulsive force and impulse, ankle range of motion (ROM) and total work in the sagittal plane, and maximum hip moment in the frontal plane had significant differences. Our results appear to support the benefits of long-term Tai-Chi training during the stair-to-floor transition

Local Discontinuous Galerkin Methods Coupled with Implicit Integration Factor Methods for Solving Reaction-Cross-Diffusion Systems

We present a new numerical method for solving nonlinear reaction-diffusion systems with cross-diffusion which are often taken as mathematical models for many applications in the biological, physical, and chemical sciences. The two-dimensional system is discretized by the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method on unstructured triangular meshes associated with the piecewise linear finite element spaces, which can derive not only numerical solutions but also approximations for fluxes at the same time comparing with most of study work up to now which has derived numerical solutions only. Considering the stability requirement for the explicit scheme with strict time step restriction (Δt=O(hmin2)), the implicit integration factor (IIF) method is employed for the temporal discretization so that the time step can be relaxed as Δt=O(hmin). Moreover, the method allows us to compute element by element and avoids solving a global system of nonlinear algebraic equations as the standard implicit schemes do, which can reduce the computational cost greatly. Numerical simulations about the system with exact solution and the Brusselator model, which is a theoretical model for a type of autocatalytic chemical reaction, are conducted to confirm the expected accuracy, efficiency, and advantages of the proposed schemes