39,177 research outputs found
Ergonomics of the Operative Field in Paediatric Minimal Access Surgery
Imperial Users onl
E-word of mouth: building sustainable and trustworthy relationships with customers in a highly regulated on-line environment
With the increasing popularity of social media, consumers now turn to different online
discussion forums, consumer review sites, weblogs, social network sites and so on to seek
product information and share their own experiences (Cheung and Thadani, 2010; Davies,
2008). Consequently, companies today face an increasingly difficult challenge: how to
communicate with consumers online in a way that encourages trust and engagement? What
may make things even more complicated is that many companies are now operating in a
highly regulated environment, with the healthcare industry a typical example of this (Choi
and Lee, 2007; Huh and Langteau, 2007; Nielson, 2008; von Knoop et al., 2003). Thus,
pharmaceutical marketers and brand managers must understand how to communicate
effectively in a highly regulated online environment.
This short report aims to help such companies to build a sustainable and trustworthy
relationship with their customers online. To do so, the report considers the subject from the
perspective of a pharmaceutical company. It will first discuss the current regulations around
the healthcare industry, highlighting the constraints pharmaceutical marketers need to face.
Then, it will review current literature discussing healthcare consumers’ online behaviour. In
particular, it will focus on consumers’ negative comments and their possible impact on the
business. Finally, the report concludes with some suggestions about how to cope with
negative comments online and build a reliable relationship with customers
-index formula for proper cocompact group actions
We study the index of the -invariant elliptic pseudo-differential operator
acting on a complete Riemannian manifold, where a unimodular, locally compact
group acts properly and cocompactly. An -index formula was obtained
using the heat kernel method.Comment: This is the final version (34 pages
On Monotone Sequences of Directed Flips, Triangulations of Polyhedra, and Structural Properties of a Directed Flip Graph
This paper studied the geometric and combinatorial aspects of the classical
Lawson's flip algorithm in 1972. Let A be a finite set of points in R2, omega
be a height function which lifts the vertices of A into R3. Every flip in
triangulations of A can be associated with a direction. We first established a
relatively obvious relation between monotone sequences of directed flips
between triangulations of A and triangulations of the lifted point set of A in
R3. We then studied the structural properties of a directed flip graph (a
poset) on the set of all triangulations of A. We proved several general
properties of this poset which clearly explain when Lawson's algorithm works
and why it may fail in general. We further characterised the triangulations
which cause failure of Lawson's algorithm, and showed that they must contain
redundant interior vertices which are not removable by directed flips. A
special case if this result in 3d has been shown by B.Joe in 1989. As an
application, we described a simple algorithm to triangulate a special class of
3d non-convex polyhedra. We proved sufficient conditions for the termination of
this algorithm and show that it runs in O(n3) time.Comment: 40 pages, 35 figure
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