A Study on the Forms and User's Behaviors of the Public Seats in National Taipei University of Technology

AbstractTo the students, school is the main living and activity space in the school semester, however, it was found that students only stay in the classroom to communicate with others using 3C hardware, students rarely go to outdoor space to have exchange with peers or teachers. In this study, starting from student's point of view, appropriateness and form of user's experience are used to investigate the form and user's demand and interactive behavior of outdoor public seat in the campus of National Taipei University of Technology. The implementation way can be divided into three stages: (1) Analyze the present public seats in the campus. (2) Questionnaire is used to investigate the form of the public seats in the campus and user's experience. (3) Through workshop, QFD method is used to investigate important design factors of user's demand and seat function. The main issuance targets of the questionnaires are students teaching staff of National Taipei University of Technology, and it comes to a total of 30 copies. The participating targets of the workshop are mainly five graduate students of the graduate institute of innovative design. Finally, the following research results are achieved: (1) Seat surrounding a tree is the most popular type of seat, people is willing to use it, the next is seat of single-person form. (2) Seat of multi-person form is the most comfort type of seat. It is including table and seats, people able to work comfortably and hands are gotten supporting. (3) User's demand perspective: Currently, important demand factors recognized by users are easy-to-clean, changeable user's scenario and easy-to-move, the next are appearance, shape, color, fun and interactivity, etc. (4) Product's function perspective: Currently, the first priority considering design factors in functionality are lighting function, easy-to-maintain, can-be-assembled and light weight material, the next is charging function and weather resistant material

The Optimal Pricing Strategy of a Mobile Payment Service in a Two-sided Market

Acknowledging the high penetration rate of mobile devices, mobile payment is currently a hot topic and is expected to reach the tipping point of rapid growth. For such a nascent market, how to run a successful mobile payment platform remains unanswered. Therefore, we devote this study to investigate the pricing strategy of proximity mobile payment. Mobile payment serves as a two-sided platform connecting merchants and customers. By leveraging the emergent mobile payment knowledge, we present a game-theoretic model featuring network externality. In the short run, we find the platform will have incentives to apply “divide and conquer” strategy by subsidizing customers to adopt the mobile payment service at the beginning of the business. After the ignition, the platform then becomes profitable by charging per transaction fee from the merchants. In the long run, the subsidization strategy is suggested to be applied when the bank is not taking too much processing fee and leaves sufficient market share to the mobile payment platform. In terms of contributions to practice, this study offers a step forward of method to identify this promising market for mobile payment executives, financial institutes and all others ecosystem

MECHANISM OF LANDING STRATERGY DURING STEP AEROBICS WITH DIFFERENT BENCH HEIGHTS AND LOADS

The purpose of this study was to investigate effects of different heights (6inch, 8inch, 10inch) and external loads (0% BW, 10% BW, 15% BW) on lower extremity during step aerobics. Ten college physical education students (age: 23.8 ± 2.1 years, height: 173.5 ± 6.1 cm, weight: 68.5 ± 8.0 kg) participated in this study. A Mega high-speed camera (100 Hz) and an ATMI force plate (1000Hz) were used to record kinematic and kinetic data respectively during step aerobics. Increased vertical ground reaction force, ankle movement, and decreased leg stiffness and ankle joint stiffness were found as the bench height increased to 10 inches which were considered to a high loading rates and shock to the lower extremity, especially at ankle joint. Therefore, people should avoid doing step aerobics at 10-inch bench height for a long time to protect ankle joint and soft tissue from injury

Multicriteria Resource Brokering in Cloud Computing for Streaming Service

By leveraging cloud computing such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the outsourcing of computing resources used to support operations, including servers, storage, and networking components, is quite beneficial for various providers of Internet application. With this increasing trend, resource allocation that both assures QoS via Service Level Agreement (SLA) and avoids overprovisioning in order to reduce cost becomes a crucial priority and challenge in the design and operation of complex service-based platforms such as streaming service. On the other hand, providers of IaaS also concern their profit performance and energy consumption while offering these virtualized resources. In this paper, considering both service-oriented and infrastructure-oriented criteria, we regard this resource allocation problem as Multicriteria Decision Making problem and propose an effective trade-off approach based on goal programming model. To validate its effectiveness, a cloud architecture for streaming application is addressed and extensive analysis is performed for related criteria. The results of numerical simulations show that the proposed approach strikes a balance between these conflicting criteria commendably and achieves high cost efficiency

Bilateral retinal pigment epithelial rips in hypertensive choroidopathy

AbstractSevere systemic hypertension can cause significant damage to the eye. Although hypertensive retinopathy is a well-known complication, hypertensive optic neuropathy and hypertensive choroidopathy are much less common. The aim of this article is to report an unusual case of hypertensive choroidopathy with bullous exudative retinal detachments in both eyes. The retinal detachments spontaneously resolved after blood pressure was controlled. However, multiple large retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) rips were found in both eyes. These RPE rips may be related to severe choroidal ischemia, and their locations may be compatible with the watershed zones of the choroidal perfusions

Analysis of Agreement on Traditional Chinese Medical Diagnostics for Many Practitioners

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnostics, it is an important issue to study the degree of agreement among several distinct practitioners. In order to study the reliability of TCM diagnostics, we have to design an experiment to simultaneously deal with both of the cases when the data is ordinal and when there are many TCM practitioners. In this study, we consider a reliability measure called “Krippendorff's alpha” to investigate the agreement of tongue diagnostics in TCM. Besides, since it is not easy to obtain a large data set with patients rated simultaneously by many TCM practitioners, we use the renowned “bootstrapping” to obtain a 95% confidence interval for the Krippendorff's alpha. The estimated Krippendorff's alpha for the agreement among ten physicians that discerned fifteen randomly chosen patients is 0.7343, and the 95% bootstrapping confidence interval for the true alpha coefficient is [0.6570, 0.7349]. The data was collected and analyzed at the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Changhua Christian Hospital (CCH) in Taiwan

An Outbreak of Coxsackievirus A16 Infection: Comparison With Other Enteroviruses in a Preschool in Taipei

Background/PurposeThe transmission rate of enteroviruses in young children remains unclear. Therefore, we carried out active surveillance in preschool children to investigate the transmission rate and clinical manifestation of enteroviruses.MethodsFrom September 2006 to December 2008, we monitored infectious diseases in children 2(–3 years of age) in a preschool in Taipei. If any child had a febrile illness or symptoms/signs of enteroviral infection [e.g. herpangina or hand-foot-and-mouth disease (HFMD)], we performed viral isolation and enterovirus polymerase chain reaction. VP1 sequencing was performed to define their serotypes. We also collected clinical data and analyzed transmission rates.ResultsThere were eight episodes of enterovirus infection during the study period. The serotypes included coxsackievirus A4 (CA4), CA2 and CA16. The transmission rates of CA4 and CA2 among children in same class were 26% and 35%, respectively. Between November 28 and December 12, 2008, 13/21 (61.9%) children contracted herpangina and/or HFMD. The average age was 2.82 (range, 2.43–3.39) years. CA16 was detected in 10/13 (76.9%) of the throat swabs by polymerase chain reaction VP1 genotyping. Compared with previous CA2 and CA4 outbreaks, CA16 had a significantly higher transmission rate (p = 0.035) and resulted in more cases of HFMD (p < 0.001). The transmission duration of coxsackie A viruses within the same class ranged from 12 to 40 days.ConclusionCompared with CA2 and CA4, CA16 infections resulted in more cases of HFMD and had significantly higher transmission rates in preschoolers

Clerodendrum inerme

Previously, we found a patient with intractable motor tic disorder, a spectrum of Tourette syndrome (TS), responsive to the ground leaf juice of Clerodendrum inerme (CI). Here, we examined the effect of the ethanol extract of CI leaves (CI extract) on animal behaviors mimicking TS, hyperlocomotion, and sensorimotor gating deficit. The latter is also observed in schizophrenic patients and can be reflected by a disruption of prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle response (PPI) in animal models induced by methamphetamine and NMDA channel blockers (ketamine or MK-801), based on hyperdopaminergic and hypoglutamatergic hypotheses, respectively. CI extract (10–300 mg/kg, i.p.) dose-dependently inhibited hyperlocomotion induced by methamphetamine (2 mg/kg, i.p.) and PPI disruptions induced by methamphetamine, ketamine (30 mg/kg, i.p.), and MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg, i.p.) but did not affect spontaneous locomotor activity, rotarod performance, and grip force. These results suggest that CI extract can relieve hyperlocomotion and improve sensorimotor gating deficit, supporting the therapeutic potential of CI for TS and schizophrenia