How Visual Communication Strategies, Brand Familiarity, And Personal Relevance Influence Instagram Users’ Responses To Brand Content

This study comprehensively investigated the effects of visual themes, visual perspective, personal relevance, and brand familiarity on brand constructions (attitude-toward-brand, brand love, brand respect, and three dimensions of brand image) on Instagram. The study consists of two parts. In Study 1, the main and interaction effects of visual design elements on individuals’ visual attentions, brand recognition, and attitude toward brands were examined by using a 4 (visual theme: customer-centric, employee-centric, product-centric, and non-branded) × 2 (view perspective: first-person view vs. third-person view) between-subject eye-tracking test. In Study 2, a 4 (visual theme: customer-centric, employee-centric, non-brand, and product-centric) ×2 (brand familiarity: familiar vs. unfamiliar) × 2 (view perspective: first-person view vs. third-person view) × 2 (personal relevance: high vs. low) mixed between- and within-factorial design was used to test the influences of visual and intellectual content on participants’ reactions to brand constructions on Instagram. The roles of two moderators, personal relevance and brand familiarity, were also tested. Results in Study 1 showed that, overall, participants spent the longest time viewing and paid the most visual attention to Instagram posts with customer-centric images from a first-person perspective. In terms of pictures using the third-person view, posts with product-centric images received the longest fixation duration and the most fixation frequency. Moreover, participants’ brand recognition performances were positively influenced by fixation frequency but not by total fixation duration. Findings from Study 2 indicated that high relevance Instagram posts with the first-person angle and customer-centric images to promote a familiar brand received the most favorable attitude, strongest brand respect, and strongest feeling of sensuality toward the brand in all experimental conditions. Limitations and future directions in visual branding on Instagram were also discussed

A Study of the Impact of Infrastructures on Public Bicycle-Sharing System Demand

A bicycle-sharing system (public bicycle system, or bike-share scheme) is a service in which bicycles are made available for shared use to individuals on a short-term basis for a price or free. To study the impacts of bike infrastructures (particularly bike lanes and bike paths) on bicycle sharing system demand, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models with exogenous factors are proposed to capture the relationships among the variables in a longitudinal analysis. The results show that every mile of bike lane added to the Houston bike share system will result in 38 average daily ridership increase in seven days of a week, 37 average daily ridership increase in weekdays (5 days of a week), and 82 average daily ridership increase on weekends. By adding every station to the public bikeshare system, the average daily ridership will increase by 16. The increase of average daily ridership will be 17 for weekdays, and 34 on weekends. It means that adding one bike station have less impact on average daily ridership of seven days of a week or five weekdays compared to the weekends. The impact of built environment on average daily ridership of weekends are almost two times more when compared to its impact on the average weekday ridership, resulting in more demand during weekends. Regarding the influence of the weather variables, temperature and wind speed had no impact on the average daily trip counts in Houston. However, precipitation displayed a significant negative impact on the average daily ridership

In-Feed Native Advertisement on News Websites: Effects of Advertising Format, Website Reputation, and Product Involvement

Focusing on two popular types of native advertising, endemic in-feed advertisements and linked in-feed advertisements, the current study examined the effects of advertising format, website reputation, and product involvement on perceived advertising credibility (trustworthiness and expertise), attitude toward the advertisement, brand interest, and purchase intention. In general, endemic in-feed advertisements were rated more favorably on source expertise and brand interest, while linked in-feed advertisements scored higher on attitude toward the advertisement. Three-way interaction effects were found for source trustworthiness, attitude toward the advertisement, brand interest, and purchase intention. Endemic in-feed advertisements showed stronger impact for the high-involvement product on a high-reputable website, while linked in-feed advertisements appeared to work better for the low-involvement product on a low-reputable website

Asymptotic analysis on charging dynamics for stack-electrode model of supercapacitors

Supercapacitors are promising electrochemical energy storage devices due to their prominent performance in rapid charging/discharging rates, long cycle life, stability, etc. Experimental measurement and theoretical prediction on charging timescale for supercapacitors often have large difference. This work develops a matched asymptotic expansion method to derive the charging dynamics of supercapacitors with porous electrodes, in which the supercapacitors are described by the stack-electrode model. Coupling leading-order solutions between every two stacks by continuity of ionic concentration and fluxes leads to an ODE system, which is a generalized equivalent circuit model for zeta potentials, with the potential-dependent nonlinear capacitance and resistance determined by physical parameters of electrolytes, e.g., specific counterion valences for asymmetric electrolytes. Linearized stability analysis on the ODE system after projection is developed to theoretically characterize the charging timescale. The derived asymptotic solutions are numerically verified. Further numerical investigations on the biexponential charging timescales demonstrate that the proposed generalized equivalent circuit model, as well as companion linearized stability analysis, can faithfully capture the charging dynamics of symmetric/asymmetric electrolytes in supercapacitors with porous electrodes.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure

The Influence of Mathematics Attitude on Academic Achievement: Intermediary Role of Mathematics Learning Engagement

Mathematics is one of the most important courses in junior high school. Students' attitude and engagement in mathematics learning will affect their good habits of mathematics learning, and further affect their mathematics academic performance. The method used in this research is quantitative regression method. In this study, 317 students from Guangxi Yulin No.3 junior high school were tested on their mathematical learning engagement, attitude and academic achievement. The relationship between students’ mathematical attitude and their mathematical academic achievement as well as the role of mathematical learning engagement are explored in this research. The results show that mathematics attitude has a positive and direct impact on students’ mathematics academic performance and mathematics learning engagement plays an important role in the relationship between mathematics attitude and academic performance as their intermediary role

An Adaptive Scheduling Algorithm for Dynamic Jobs for Dealing with the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Modern manufacturing systems build on an effective scheduling scheme that makes full use of the system resource to increase the production, in which an important aspect is how to minimize the makespan for a certain production task (i.e., the time that elapses from the start of work to the end) in order to achieve the economic profit. This can be a difficult problem, especially when the production flow is complicated and production tasks may suddenly change. As a consequence, exact approaches are not able to schedule the production in a short time. In this paper, an adaptive scheduling algorithm is proposed to address the makespan minimization in the dynamic job shop scheduling problem. Instead of a linear order, the directed acyclic graph is used to represent the complex precedence constraints among operations in jobs. Inspired by the heterogeneous earliest finish time (HEFT) algorithm, the adaptive scheduling algorithm can make some fast adaptations on the fly to accommodate new jobs which continuously arrive in a manufacturing system. The performance of the proposed adaptive HEFT algorithm is compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms and further heuristic methods for minimizing the makespan. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed approach

Nanogenerator-based self-powered sensors for data collection

Self-powered sensors can provide energy and environmental data for applications regarding the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence. Nanogenerators provide excellent material compatibility, which also leads to a rich variety of nanogenerator-based self-powered sensors. This article reviews the development of nanogenerator-based self-powered sensors for the collection of human physiological data and external environmental data. Nanogenerator-based self-powered sensors can be designed to detect physiological data as wearable and implantable devices. Nanogenerator-based self-powered sensors are a solution for collecting data and expanding data dimensions in a future intelligent society. The future key challenges and potential solutions regarding nanogenerator-based self-powered sensors are discussed

Replication of the Association of a MET Variant with Autism in a Chinese Han Population

Background: Autism is a common, severe and highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorder in children, affecting up to 100 children per 10,000. The MET gene has been regarded as a promising candidate gene for this disorder because it is located within a replicated linkage interval, is involved in pathways affecting the development of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum in ways relevant to autism patients, and has shown significant association signals in previous studies. Principal Findings: Here, we present new ASD patient and control samples from Heilongjiang, China and use them in a case-control and family-based replication study of two MET variants. One SNP, rs38845, was successfully replicated in a case-control association study, but failed to replicate in a family-based study, possibly due to small sample size. The other SNP, rs1858830, failed to replicate in both case-control and family-based studies. Conclusions: This is the first attempt to replicate associations in Chinese autism samples, and our result provides evidence that MET variants may be relevant to autism susceptibility in the Chinese Han population

Investigation into the Influence of Physician for Treatment Based on Syndrome Differentiation

Background. The characteristics of treatment based on syndrome differentiation (TBSD) cause great challenges to evaluate the effectiveness of the clinical methods. Objectives. This paper aims to evaluate the influence of physician to personalized medicine in the process of TBSD. Methods. We performed a randomized, triple-blind trial involving patients of primary insomnia treated by 3 physicians individually and independently. The patients (n=30) were randomly assigned to receive treatments by the 3 physicians for every visit. However, they always received the treatment, respectively, prescribed by the physician at the first visit. The primary outcome was evaluated, respectively, by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and the TCM symptoms measuring scale. The clinical practices of the physicians were recorded at every visit including diagnostic information, syndrome differentiation, treating principles, and prescriptions. Results. All patients in the 3 groups (30 patients) showed significant improvements (>66%) according to the PSQI and TCM symptoms measuring scale. Conclusion. The results indicate that although with comparable effectiveness, there exist significant differences in syndrome differentiation, the treating principles, and the prescriptions of the approaches used by the 3 physicians. This means that the physician should be considered as an important factor for individualized medicine and the related TCM clinical research