Coalescence times for critical Galton-Watson processes with immigration

Let $X^I_n$ be the coalescence time of two particles picked at random from the $n$th generation of a critical Galton-Watson process with immigration, and let $A^I_n$ be the coalescence time of the whole population in the $n$th generation. In this paper, we study the limiting behaviors of $X^I_n$ and $A^I_n$ as $n\to\infty$

The Application of New Media in Brand Communication: The Impact of Brand's Visual Image on Consumer Purchase Intentions

The objective of this paper is to investigate whether visual technologies can influence consumer brand purchase intentions by altering the forms of consumer association, attention, and emotion. The research employs traditional quantitative research methods and collected a total of 156 valid questionnaires from Chinese consumers. The study findings indicate that association, attention, and emotion all positively influence consumer purchase intent. These results suggest that brands can enhance their brand communication by investing in visual marketing, thereby winning higher purchase intent from consumers. It confirmed the impact of corporate visual brand communication based on new media forms on Chinese consumers' purchase intentions and established that association, attention, and emotion are the key influencing factors. It enriched the research on brand communication in China and provided a brand communication lean management approac

SNP detection for massively parallel whole-genome resequencing

Next-generation massively parallel sequencing technologies provide ultrahigh throughput at two orders of magnitude lower unit cost than capillary Sanger sequencing technology. One of the key applications of next-generation sequencing is studying genetic variation between individuals using whole-genome or target region resequencing. Here, we have developed a consensus-calling and SNP-detection method for sequencing-by-synthesis Illumina Genome Analyzer technology. We designed this method by carefully considering the data quality, alignment, and experimental errors common to this technology. All of this information was integrated into a single quality score for each base under Bayesian theory to measure the accuracy of consensus calling. We tested this methodology using a large-scale human resequencing data set of 363coverage and assembled a high-quality nonrepetitive consensus sequence for 92.25% of the diploid autosomes and 88.07% of the haploid X chromosome. Comparison of the consensus sequence with Illumina human 1M BeadChip genotyped alleles from the same DNA sample showed that 98.6% of the 37,933 genotyped alleles on the X chromosome and 98% of 999,981 genotyped alleles on autosomes were covered at 99.97% and 99.84% consistency, respectively. At a low sequencing depth, we used prior probability of dbSNP alleles and were able to improve coverage of the dbSNP sites significantly as compared to that obtained using a nonimputation model. Our analyses demonstrate that our method has a very low false call rate at any sequencing depth and excellent genome coverage at a high sequencing depth

Modeling Link-level Road Traffic Resilience to Extreme Weather Events Using Crowdsourced Data

Climate changes lead to more frequent and intense weather events, posing escalating risks to road traffic. Crowdsourced data offer new opportunities to monitor and investigate changes in road traffic flow during extreme weather. This study utilizes diverse crowdsourced data from mobile devices and the community-driven navigation app, Waze, to examine the impact of three weather events (i.e., floods, winter storms, and fog) on road traffic. Three metrics, speed change, event duration, and area under the curve (AUC), are employed to assess link-level traffic change and recovery. In addition, a user's perceived severity is computed to evaluate link-level weather impact based on crowdsourced reports. This study evaluates a range of new data sources, and provides insights into the resilience of road traffic to extreme weather, which are crucial for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery in road transportation systems

Vertical-supercooling-controlled interfacial instability for a spreading liquid film

Thermal effect is essential to regulate the interfacial instabilities for diverse technology applications. Here we report the fingering instability at the propagation front for a spreading liquid film subjected to the supercooling at the vertical direction. We find the onset timescale of hydrodynamic instability is strongly correlated with that of the vertical solidification process. This correlation is further validated in a non-uniform geometry, demonstrating the capability of controlling fingering instability by structure design. Moreover, based on the experimental observations, we propose a physical mechanism by considering thermal Marangoni effect at the spreading front, and the predicted wavelength from the linear stability analysis agrees with experiments excellently. This work offers another valuable dimension by gating the vertical temperature to exploit the interfacial stabilities and steer liquid flow, consequently shedding light on the microfluidic cooling for electronics, and the advanced functional fibers and fabrics