Symmetric mean curvature flow on the n-sphere

In this article, we generalize our previous results joint with Pedro Gaspar to higher dimensions, prove the existence of (infinitely many) eternal weak mean curvature flows in $S^{n+1}$ (for all $n \geq 2$) connecting a Clifford hypersurface $S^1(\sqrt{\frac{1}{n}}) \times S^{n-1} (\sqrt{\frac{n-1}{n}})$ to the equatorial spheres $S^n$.Comment: 17 pages. Comments are welcome

A Corpus-Based Analysis of although Errors in Chinese EFL Learners’ Written Output

The subordinating conjunction although is frequently used in English and is considered easy for students to master by many Chinese English teachers. However, errors are often found in Chinese EFL learners although output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims to explore and analyze common errors of although in Chinese EFL learners writing. The study is a corpus-based analysis launched under the computer-aided error analysis framework which is a new practice developed from the error analysis hypothesis. Errors of although found in texts from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) are extracted and analyzed. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted in the study. According to the findings, there are four major types of although errors found in Chinese EFL learners writing but/yet addition, punctuation errors, although misuse, and omissions and blends. Factors such as interlingual difference between English and Mandarin Chinese, intralingual interference within the English language system, pedagogical neglect in English classrooms and different cognitive styles are potential causes of Chinese EFL learners although errors

The Influencing Factors of Online Consumers’ Return Satisfaction

With the development of the Internet, the transactions of the commodities turned out to be digitized, however, the non face-to-face transactions led to one main problem that commodities possibly do not meet the expectation of consumers’, and will then inevitably result the return problem. How to improve the consumers’ return experience and build their trust has become the focus of business considerations. Based on the research model of the influencing factors of online consumers’ return satisfaction, the author studied 1002 after-sales review samples. Through compiling and labeling the sample data, the author quantifies the consumers’ emotion by emotion analysis and then analysis by multiple linear regressions, the paper provides a base for businesses to improve the quality of return service by validating and explaining the research model

Morse theory for the Allen-Cahn functional

In this article, we use Morse-theoretic techniques to construct connections between low energy critical submanifolds of the Allen-Cahn energy functional in the 3-sphere via the negative gradient flow.Comment: 23 pages. All comments welcom

Temporal Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks for Video Captioning

It is well believed that video captioning is a fundamental but challenging task in both computer vision and artificial intelligence fields. The prevalent approach is to map an input video to a variable-length output sentence in a sequence to sequence manner via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Nevertheless, the training of RNN still suffers to some degree from vanishing/exploding gradient problem, making the optimization difficult. Moreover, the inherently recurrent dependency in RNN prevents parallelization within a sequence during training and therefore limits the computations. In this paper, we present a novel design --- Temporal Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks (dubbed as TDConvED) that fully employ convolutions in both encoder and decoder networks for video captioning. Technically, we exploit convolutional block structures that compute intermediate states of a fixed number of inputs and stack several blocks to capture long-term relationships. The structure in encoder is further equipped with temporal deformable convolution to enable free-form deformation of temporal sampling. Our model also capitalizes on temporal attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on both MSVD and MSR-VTT video captioning datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing to conventional RNN-based encoder-decoder techniques. More remarkably, TDConvED increases CIDEr-D performance from 58.8% to 67.2% on MSVD.Comment: AAAI 201

Assessing Customer-Based Brand Equity of E-Commerce Platform Based on Promotion Benefits

The prosperity of e-commerce in China leads to large amount of businesses venturing into this marketplace. Sales promotion has been widely used to improve their advantage, while platform-based sales promotion has been confirmed more successful. This research examines the impacts of the benefits of sales promotions based on electronic commerce platforms on customer-based brand equity (platform brand awareness and platform brand association) and how their relationships are moderated by the promotion type (pre- and post-purchase promotion). Based on the two functions of sales promotions (stimulation vs. maintaining), we propose a five-benefit framework including exploration, convenience, savings, social bonds and structural bonds. We suggested that both the two types of sales promotion could provide the five benefits of sales promotions and the positive effects of the benefits on consumer-based brand equity might be significant, while the differences between pre- and post-purchase sales promotions could be also significant

The Impacts of Environmental Cues and Browsing Experience on Impulse Buying on Social Shopping Website

Based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) paradigm, this study develops a model to theorize how environmental cues on social shopping website affect impulse buying behavior from the perspective of browsing experience. Social shopping websites bring a novel online browsing experience for customers. However, how browsing experience on this platform affect customers impulsively have received insufficient academic attention. The results reveal that the unique factors of social shopping website, namely the quality of user-generated content and social presence are critical for facilitating customers’ browsing experiences. The results also show that both utilitarian browsing and hedonic browsing experience have a positive impact on customers’ urge to buy impulsively. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed

Analyze the Trend of Post Replies Based on Linear Regression Model-----take Tianyawebsiteas examples

In recent years, users spend more time on surfing the social networking than ever before. How to make the information spread rapidlywhen facing vast amounts of information?Scholars have conducted information dissemination in social networking. On the basis of previous research, the authors divide posts into popular posts and ordinary posts and then use the linear regression model to predict the replies at specified time. After comparing the difference between two types of posts, the authors concludethat ordinary posts could become popular posts if the posts could maintain a large number of replies within former five hours and increase replies by making use of community mechanism. This conclusion provides a reasonable proposal for enterprises and administrators to identify andrecommendpopular posts

A Penny for Your Words: The Effect of Online Review Reward on Information Richness and Sentiment Expression

Since online customer review has significant impacts on customer\u27s purchase decision and product sales, it has been regarded as a new marketing tool nowadays. Moreover, some online transactional platforms and sellers are trying to encourage customers to provide reviews of high-quality by offering a reward. With the empirical analysis of 1044 samples from a famous C2C e-platform website, results show that reward can significantly improve the information richness of online customer reviews. However, the sentiment customer expressed remains unchanged. More specifically, customers are inclined to provide more information, specially opinionated and positive information. But customers are unlikely to conceal negative information or change their sentiment polarity and intensity