Country Image, e-WOM and Purchase Intention of Korean Products in China——With Korean Cosmetic Products as an Example

Country image is viewed as the overall perception of consumers from a particular country, based on their prior perception of the country’s production and marketing strengths and weaknesses and this image affect customer attitudes like purchase intention. The purpose of our study was to develop and validate the relationship among country image, e-WOM and purchase intention of foreign products. Based on literatures, a comprehensive set of constructs and hypotheses was compiled with a methodology for testing them. A questionnaire was constructed and data were collected from 255 customers in Beijing and Shanghai. The results indicated that country image affect purchase intention of Korean Cosmetic products through e-WOM

The Akebia Genus as a Novel Forest Crop: A Review of Its Genetic Resources, Nutritional Components, Biosynthesis, and Biological Studies

The genus Akebia belongs to the Lardizabalaceae family and comprises five species that are primarily distributed in East Asia. Plants of the Akebia genus comprise deciduous and semi-evergreen perennial twining vines that have been used in Chinese herbal medicine for at least 2000 years. The plants of this genus have the potential to form a novel forest crop with high nutritional and economic value because their fruit has a delicious sweet taste and rich nutrient components. In this study, we organized, analyzed, and evaluated the available published scientific literature on the botanical, ecological, and phytochemical characteristics of Akebia plants. Based on these studies, we briefly introduced botanical and ecological characteristics and focused on reviewing the development and utilization of wild genetic resources in the genus Akebia. We further explored the genus' rich nutritional components, such as triterpenes, flavonoids, polyphenols, polysaccharides, and fatty acids, and their potential use in food and health improvement applications. In addition, several papers describing advances in biotechnological research focusing on micropropagation, nutrient biosynthesis, and fruit ripeness were also included. This review provides comprehensive knowledge of the Akebia genus as a new forest crop for food and fruit utilization, and we also discuss future breeding and research prospects

The mechanism of hydrogen donation by bio-acids over metal supported on nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes

Biomass-derived carboxylic acids (e.g. acetic acid AcOH and formic acid FA) are a green and low-cost hydrogen source to replace hazardous H2 gas in in-situ hydrogenation processes. To date, bio-acids dehydrogenation has been mainly conducted using noble metal catalysts which would negatively impact the process economy, thus development of efficient non-noble metal catalysts for this purpose is highly desirable. In this study, the performance of transition metals supported on nitrogen doped carbon nanotubes was thoroughly evaluated by computational modelling based on Density Functional Theory (DFT). Results revealed that, out of the 10 selected transition metal candidates, molybdenum (Mo) was most active for binding AcOH and a combination of Mo and nitrogen doping significantly enhanced binding to the carboxylic acid molecules compared to pristine carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The newly designed Mo/N-CNT catalysts considerably facilitated the bio-acids decomposition compared to the non-catalytic scenarios by lowering energy barriers. FA distinctly outperformed AcOH in hydrogen donation over Mo/N-CNT catalysts, through its spontaneous cleavage leading to facile hydrogen donation

Depolarization Characteristics of Different Reflective Interfaces Indicated by Indices of Polarimetric Purity (IPPs)

Compared with the standard depolarization index, indices of polarimetric purity (IPPs) have better performances to describe depolarization characteristics of targets with different roughnesses of interfaces under different incident angles, which allow us a further analysis of the depolarizing properties of samples. Here, we use IPPs obtained from different reflective interfaces as a criterion of depolarization property to characterize and classify targets covered by organic paint layers with different roughness. We select point-light source as radiation source with wavelength as 632.8 nm, and four samples, including Cu, Au, Al and Al2O3, covered by an organic paint layer with refractive index of n = 1.46 and Gaussian roughness of α = 0.05~0.25. Under different incident angles, the values of P1, P2, P3 at divided 90 × 360 grid points and their mean values in upper hemisphere have been obtained and discussed in the IPPs space. The results show that the depolarization performances of the different reflective interfaces (materials, incident angles and surface roughness) are unique in IPPs space, providing us with a new avenue to analyze and characterize different targets

Finite-Time Generalized Synchronization and Parameter Identification of Chaotic Systems with Different Dimensions

Finite-time generalized synchronization and parameter identification of chaotic systems with different dimensions are studied in this paper. Based on finite-time stability theory, adaptive controllers and parameter identification rules are proposed to realize generalized synchronization of chaotic systems and identify accurately all their unknown parameters in finite time. At the same time, the obtained synchronization time formula can estimate the required longest time for realizing the generalized synchronization of chaotic systems, which solely depends on the initial values of chaotic systems and is easily calculated in numerical simulation. At the last, some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and correctness of the obtained conclusions

(Comparison of delayed passenger flow forecasting methods for urban rail transit based on ARIMA and LSTM)

With the transition of the development of the urban rail transit from expansion stage to operation stage in many Chinese cities,improving the operational efficiency has been considered as the development theme of the next stage.With the increasing demand for extending operation time in Chinese first-tier cities such as Beijing,Shanghai,Guangzhou and Shenzhen,how to balance the duration,cost and operational efficiency of time-extended operation of the urban rail transit has become a great challenge to refined operation.By using the data from Shanghai Metro and pre-processing the metro card data,delayed passenger flow forecast models for urban rail transit based on ARIMA and LSTM are developed.After conducting the predictive analysis for the 5 minutes intervals and 15 minute intervals by using full-day data and half-day data separately,this research finds that:1)the half-day data generally has a smaller root mean square deviation than the full-day data,which indicates that the model has a high fitting degree;2)LSTM has a smaller root mean square deviation than the ARIMA method and LSTM has a better prediction effect.The findings of this research can provide technical support for passenger flow prediction in the time extended operation of urban rail transit

High-Performance Polarization Imaging Reconstruction in Scattering System under Natural Light Conditions with an Improved U-Net

Imaging through scattering media faces great challenges. Object information will be seriously degraded by scattering media, and the final imaging quality will be poor. In order to improve imaging quality, we propose using the transmitting characteristics of an object’s polarization information, to achieve imaging through scattering media under natural light using an improved U-net. In this paper, we choose ground glass as the scattering medium and capture the polarization images of targets through the scattering medium by a polarization camera. Experimental results show that the proposed model can reconstruct target information from highly damaged images, and for the same material object, the trained network model has a superior generalization without considering its structural shapes. Meanwhile, we have also investigated the effect of the distance between the target and the ground glass on the reconstructing performance, in which, and although the mismatch distance between the training set and the testing sample expands to 1 cm, the modified U-net can also efficaciously reconstruct the targets

Financial planning ability, risk perception and household portfolio choice

Using data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies survey (CFPS), we investigate the effects of financial planning ability and risk perception on household portfolio choice. Our findings show that households with greater financial planning ability are more likely to invest in financial markets and hold a larger proportion of risky financial assets. The empirical results suggest that a higher level of risk perception leads to more market participation and risky assets holding. Compared with the insignificant effect of financial literacy, we find that financial planning ability significantly affects household investment earnings, and high financial planning ability tends to contribute to a positive investment return

Facile Synthesis of Multi-Emission Nitrogen/Boron Co-Doped Carbon Dots from Lignin for Anti-Counterfeiting Printing

The transformation of lignin with natural aromatic structure into value-added carbon dots (CDs) achieves a win-win situation for low-cost production of novel nanomaterials and reasonable disposal of biomass waste. However, it remains challenging to produce multi-emission CDs from biomass for advanced applications. Herein, a green and facile approach to preparing multi-emission CDs from alkali lignin via N and B co-doping is developed. The obtained N and B co-doped CDs (NB-CDs) show multi-emission fluorescence centers at 346, 428 and 514 nm under different excitations. As the doping amount of N and B increases, the fluorescence emission band gradually shifts to 428 and 514 nm, while that at 346 nm decreases. The fluorescence mechanism is explored through the research of the structure, composition and optical performance of NB-CDs in combination with density functional theory (DFT) calculations. It demonstrates that the effect of doping with B-containing functional groups on the fluorescence emission behavior is multivariate, which may be the crucial contribution to the unique multi-emission fluorescence of CDs. The multi-emission NB-CDs with prominent stability are applied for multilevel anti-counterfeiting printing. It provides a promising direction for the sustainable and advanced application of biomass-derived CDs, and the theoretical results highlight a new insight into the deep understanding of the multi-emission fluorescence mechanism

(Thermal and humidity feature extraction in metro station based on data mining)

Aiming at reducing the high proportion of energy consumption for environment control system (ECS) in urban rail transit system (UTS), the energy efficiency improvement strategy of ECS operation is explored from the perspective of thermal and humid environment of subway stations. K-means was adopted to cluster the annual average daily temperature and humidity data in each station of the metro company, and then the influence of physical attributes such as spatiotemporal distribution and burial depth of each clustered station were analysed. The results show as follows. The temperature and humidity curves of the same line and adjacent stations are quite different. The second-class temperature clustering of the stations is colder in winter and hotter in summer, and the comfort is the worst. The southwest monsoon from November to December cause the fourth temperature clustering stations to be relatively low, which can be adjusted strategically. After conducting the standard deviation analysis on the indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity differences, it is found that the curve fluctuation is related to physical characteristics such as burial depth and azimuth, and showed strong correlation. The ECS of different stations should be operated in a differentiated manner due to differences in physical characteristics, and different environmental control energy consumption quota standards should be set for different station categories. This research provides a basis for the subway stations design and the power selection of ECS, it has positive environmental significance for the dark green operation of UTS and the construction of low-carbon cities