EXPLORING THE EXPENDITURES OF FOREIGN TOURISTS IN TAIWAN ON LOCAL SPECIALTY PRODUCTS AND TEA

In order to understand the expenditures of tourists in Taiwan regarding tea and local famous specialty products, it is essential to examine the demographic nature of the inbound tourists. In this study, information was gathered from the 2015 Annual Survey Report on Visitors’ Expenditures and Trends in Taiwan of the Tourism Bureau, Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC), which included 6277 respondents, and analyzed by using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression methods. The analysis shows that gender, age, education, income, country of origin, travel purpose, travel type, and number of days stayed in Taiwan were the most significant factors to forecast the level of purchasing of tea and specialty products. With a greater understanding of these factors, the tourism industry in Taiwan will be able to increase revenue and improve their products and services. Meanwhile, as a reference for Taiwanese government can re-examine its tourism market to establish new policies and marketing plans to boost local economy

Older People's Usage Pattern, Satisfaction with Community Facility and Well-Being in Urban Old Districts

Community facilities are an important element that supports older people's daily life and promotes their well-being. However, there is a dearth of comprehensive studies on the effect of planning and design of different types of community facilities on older people's usage patterns and satisfaction. This study aims to provide a framework to explore the relationship among the planning of community facilities, older people's usage and satisfaction level and well-being for different types of community facilities. Both spatial analysis and questionnaire survey (n = 497) methods are employed in this study. This study finds that commercial (89.34%), municipal (83.10%) and leisure (88.13%) facilities are most commonly used by older people. This study suggests that older people's frequency of visiting community facilities is mainly affected by the purpose of visiting a community facility. Planning and design quality of the community facility are found to be significantly associated with older people's satisfaction level with using a community facility. In addition, older people's higher satisfaction level and usage level of community facilities could increase their physical and psychological well-being. The findings of this study not only contribute to the knowledge gap of older people's usage and satisfaction with using community facilities but also suggest that planners should aim toward a better distribution of community facilities to improve older adults' well-being

Modality-Independent Teachers Meet Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Event Parser

Audio-visual learning has been a major pillar of multi-modal machine learning, where the community mostly focused on its modality-aligned setting, i.e., the audio and visual modality are both assumed to signal the prediction target. With the Look, Listen, and Parse dataset (LLP), we investigate the under-explored unaligned setting, where the goal is to recognize audio and visual events in a video with only weak labels observed. Such weak video-level labels only tell what events happen without knowing the modality they are perceived (audio, visual, or both). To enhance learning in this challenging setting, we incorporate large-scale contrastively pre-trained models as the modality teachers. A simple, effective, and generic method, termed Visual-Audio Label Elaboration (VALOR), is innovated to harvest modality labels for the training events. Empirical studies show that the harvested labels significantly improve an attentional baseline by 8.0 in average F-score (Type@AV). Surprisingly, we found that modality-independent teachers outperform their modality-fused counterparts since they are noise-proof from the other potentially unaligned modality. Moreover, our best model achieves the new state-of-the-art on all metrics of LLP by a substantial margin (+5.4 F-score for Type@AV). VALOR is further generalized to Audio-Visual Event Localization and achieves the new state-of-the-art as well. Code is available at: https://github.com/Franklin905/VALOR

Nocturnal CPAP improves walking capacity in COPD patients with obstructive sleep apnoea

BACKGROUND: Exercise limitation is an important issue in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and it often co-exists with obstructive sleep apnoea (overlap syndrome). This study examined the effects of nocturnal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment on walking capacity in COPD patients with or without obstructive sleep apnoea. METHODS: Forty-four stable moderate-to-severe COPD patients were recruited and completed this study. They all underwent polysomnography, CPAP titration, accommodation, and treatment with adequate pressure. The incremental shuttle walking test was used to measure walking capacity at baseline and after two nights of CPAP treatment. Urinary catecholamine and heart rate variability were measured before and after CPAP treatment. RESULTS: After two nights of CPAP treatment, the apnoea-hypopnoea index and oxygen desaturation index significantly improved in both overlap syndrome and COPD patients, however these changes were significantly greater in the overlap syndrome than in the COPD group. Sleep architecture and autonomic dysfunction significantly improved in the overlap syndrome group but not in the COPD group. CPAP treatment was associated with an increased walking capacity from baseline from 226.4 ± 95.3 m to 288.6 ± 94.6 m (P < 0.05), and decreased urinary catecholamine levels, pre-exercise heart rate, oxygenation, and Borg scale in the overlap syndrome group. An improvement in the apnoea-hypopnoea index was an independent factor associated with the increase in walking distance (r = 0.564). CONCLUSION: Nocturnal CPAP may improve walking capacity in COPD patients with overlap syndrome. TRIAL REGISTRATION: NCT0091426

Understanding the antecedents of consumer brand engagement by managing brand communities on social media

As social media provide companies with opportunities to create touch-points by enabling consumers to interact with brands in new ways, a key issue for organizations is how to use brand communities to engage customers and enhance their relationships with brands. Brand community interactivity is one of the latest developments to engage consumers in online brand communities. The objective of brand communities is not only to attract potential customers, but also to retain loyal consumers and gain advocates. Thus, brands and companies’ social media activity should be appropriately organized and managed for high-level consumer brand engagement (CBE), which is a comprehensive construct that allow companies to examine the bond between their brands and consumers. The essence of this CBE bond is related to the involvement of consumers, as it increases the touch-points between them and the brand. This study examined perceived interactivity as a driving factor in the context of a brand community on social media with the purpose of encouraging consumer community engagement, community satisfaction, and consumer brand engagement (CBE). Two second-order constructs were operationalized in the research model. Communication, responsiveness, and control were treated as reflective factors to create the second-order construct “perceived interactivity,” while the other second-order construct “CBE” comprised cognitive processing, affection, and activation as reflective indicators. The results, based on data collected from 328 social media users who are followers of a smartphone brand’s Facebook page, indicated that perceived interactivity is likely to significantly affect consumer community engagement and community satisfaction, which in turn foster brand engagement. Successful social media marketing practices for companies should take responsibility for transforming consumer community engagement into CBE, as it is imperative for organizations building brand communities to enhance their consumer community satisfaction through proper community management to achieve high CBE