This study empirically investigates the dimensions of destination authenticity from the perspectives of outbound travelers from the United States. East Asian countries have invited Western tourists ...to their destinations by offering authentic, unique experiences of local life and culture. In response to this trend, this study examines the influences of destination authenticity on international tourists’ place attachment, destination satisfaction, and engagement on social media. Based on the literature, three facets of destination authenticity are investigated: conformity, realness, and transformation. The empirical findings indicate that conformity and realness lead tourists not only to be emotionally attached to a destination but, in social media, to also click the “like” buttons and leave comments on the postings about destinations. With the empirical results, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed with an emphasis on tourists’ perception of destination authenticity and online behaviors.
The BBBV theorem is known to largely prohibit exponential speedup of quantum search over classical search, though not entirely, with potential loopholes such as adiabatic quantum computing. Recently, ...Chen-Huang-Preskill-Zhou (CHPZ) quantum (thermal) gradient descent proposal suggested another potential way to go around the BBBV theorem. We simplify the heavily complicated CHPZ analysis by focusing on the final equilibrium in the quantum thermal operation framework that has already been rigorously formulated in quantum thermodynamics, resulting in quantum thermal search. In particular, repeated applications of an identical quantum mixing thermal operation result in exponential convergence (in the number of repeated applications) of the system state to the equilibrium Gibbs state for the given system Hamiltonian at initial bath temperature. This allows for an efficient computation of the system ground state. Quantum mixing thermal operations evade the BBBV theorem by transferring initial system state information to the bath. Despite computational advantage of CHPZ and quantum thermal search for computing the ground state, it is also noted that some ground state computations corresponding to NP decision problems may require bath states that are exponentially close to the bath ground state, which translates to polynomially-scaling inverse bath temperature, potentially limiting usefulness of quantum thermal search. Potential implications for black hole physics, in light of pure to mixed and back to pure state evolution, are briefly noted.
This study explores the psychological motivations that drive ChatGPT users to embrace and sustain the use of such technology based on the fundamental notion of the environmental psychology theory, ...including servicescapes. To do so, this study delves into the influence of ChatGPT’s e-servicescapes on users’ emotional states and intention to engage with ChatGPT for decision-making processes. This study conducted an online survey among ChatGPT users in the United States. Structural equation modeling revealed that negative emotions were significantly influenced by various e-servicescape sub-dimensions, including security, visual appeal, entertainment value, originality of design, and social factors. Positive emotions, on the other hand, were influenced by factors such as visual appeal, customization, interactivity, and relevance of information. Both positive and negative emotions significantly affected user satisfaction, which, in turn, shaped their behavioral intention to engage with ChatGPT. This study contributes to the understanding of digital environmental psychology and chatbots by extending the notion of e-servicescapes to the context of AI-based services. It underscores the significance of e-servicescapes in shaping user experiences and provides valuable insights for business scholars and marketing practitioners.
This study investigates the use of live streaming as a strategic tool in the tourism industry, with a focus on the attributes of live streamers that influence viewer engagement, particularly in the ...context of South Korea’s digital landscape. The purpose of this research is to understand how the attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise of live streamers can affect the parasocial relationships—characterized by perceived friendship and trust—between viewers and streamers and how these relationships subsequently influence viewer loyalty and cooperation intentions. A quantitative research methodology was employed, utilizing a structured online survey distributed by a leading market research agency in South Korea. The survey targeted a diverse demographic to ensure a comprehensive analysis of digital consumer behavior in the tourism sector. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 28.0 and IBM SPSS Amos 28.0, employing structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized relationships. The results revealed that while attractiveness and trustworthiness impact perceived friendship, only expertise significantly affects trust for a travel live streamer. Furthermore, perceived friendship plays a crucial role in fostering loyalty to and cooperation with the streamer, having practical implications for the tourism industry in terms of crafting marketing strategies and training digital ambassadors. Th study extends parasocial interaction theory to the digital travel domain, providing original insights into virtual tourist behavior and highlighting live streaming’s significant contribution to viewer engagement. This research has limitations in its geographical focus on South Korea, suggesting the need for cross-cultural studies to validate the findings. Overall, this study offers valuable contributions to the academic literature and practical guidance for the tourism industry, emphasizing the importance of digital personalities in post-pandemic tourism recovery strategies.
In the human body, microfibril structures can be found in several types of tissue, such as muscles, nerves, and even tendons. However, most micropatterned fabrication methods have focused on 2D ...surface patterned configurations, which imitate the alignment and fusion of cardiac and skeletal muscle cells. Despite the development of these 2D methods, it has continued to be a challenge to fabricate realistic 3D microfibril structures. The goal of this study is to develop a micropatterned polycaprolactone (PCL) microfiber strut. This process uses a microfibrillation/leaching process of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) from a PVA/PCL mixture to imitate skeletal muscle cell alignment and fusion in vitro. To attain the optimal processing conditions, a variety of parameters—including a mixture ratio, processing temperature, and pneumatic pressure—are considered. To increase biocompatibility of a microfibrous PCL bundle, the fabricated structure is supplemented with type‐I collagen. The myoblasts (C2C12 cells) are used to determine the cellular responses of the fabricated structure. By analyzing cell proliferation and myogenic differentiation, it can be confirmed that the hybrid microfibrillated structure can be an important potential platform to obtain efficient regeneration of muscle cells.
A biomimetic scaffold simulating microfibril muscle structure is fabricated using a 3D printing process supplemented with a microfibrillation/leaching process of poly(vinyl alcohol) and coating process of collagen. The synergistic combination of the aligned microfibril structure inducing topological cue and considerably biocompatible collagen component induces the high proliferation and alignment of myoblasts, resulting in the high degree of myotube formation.
Recent image-style transfer methods use the structure of a VGG feature network to encode and decode the feature map of the image. Since the network is designed for the general image-classification ...task, it has a number of channels and, accordingly, requires a huge amount of memory and high computational power, which is not mandatory for such a relatively simple task as image-style transfer. In this paper, we propose a new technique to size down the previously used style transfer network for eliminating the redundancy of the VGG feature network in memory consumption and computational cost. Our method automatically finds a number of consistently inactive convolution channels during the network training phase by using two new losses, i.e., channel loss and xor loss. The former maximizes the number of inactive channels and the latter fixes the positions of these inactive channels to be the same for the image. Our method improves the image generation speed to be up to 49% faster and reduces the number of parameters by 20% while maintaining style transferring performance. Additionally, our losses are also effective in pruning the VGG16 classifier network, i.e., parameter reduction by 26% and top-1 accuracy improvement by 0.16% on CIFAR-10.
As nature-based tourism has recognized the seriousness of environmental issues, tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors have gained the attention of scholars and practitioners. However, previous ...empirical studies have not considered motivational factors and destination-related constructs within the tourism context. With the data collected from nature-based tourists, the findings of this study reveal the significant association between personal values and motivations and the significant impact of anticipated positive affect on pro-environmental behavior among nature-based tourists. Also, the findings address that the impact of empathetic concern on pro-environmental behavior is moderated by a level of place attachment to a nature-based destination.
•Explored the causal relationships between three aspects of personal values and two dimensions of motivations.•Confirmed tourists have experienced dual concern about helping nature while and/or after visiting a nature-based destination.•Explored the moderating role of place attachment by expanding attachment theory in the nature-based tourism context.
Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using liquid-phase precursors has emerged as a viable technique for synthesizing uniform large-area transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) thin films. However, the ...liquid-phase precursor-assisted growth process typically suffers from small-sized grains and unreacted transition metal precursor remainders, resulting in lower-quality TMDs. Moreover, synthesizing large-area TMD films with a monolayer thickness is also quite challenging. Herein, we successfully synthesized high-quality large-area monolayer molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2) with good uniformity via promoter-assisted liquid-phase CVD process using the transition metal-containing precursor homogeneously modified with an alkali metal halide. The formation of a reactive transition metal oxyhalide and reduction of the energy barrier of chalcogenization by the alkali metal promoted the growth rate of the TMDs along the in-plane direction, enabling the full coverage of the monolayer MoSe2 film with negligible few-layer regions. Note that the fully selenized monolayer MoSe2 with high crystallinity exhibited superior electrical transport characteristics compared with those reported in previous works using liquid-phase precursors. We further synthesized various other monolayer TMD films, including molybdenum disulfide, tungsten disulfide, and tungsten diselenide, to demonstrate the broad applicability of the proposed approach.
Photoplethysmography (PPG) is an easy and convenient method by which to measure heart rate (HR). However, PPG signals that optically measure volumetric changes in blood are not robust to motion ...artifacts. In this paper, we develop a PPG measuring system based on multi-channel sensors with multiple wavelengths and propose a motion artifact reduction algorithm using independent component analysis (ICA). We also propose a truncated singular value decomposition for 12-channel PPG signals, which contain direction and depth information measured using the developed multi-channel PPG measurement system. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated against the R-peaks of an electrocardiogram in terms of sensitivity (Se), positive predictive value (PPV), and failed detection rate (FDR). The experimental results show that Se, PPV, and FDR were 99%, 99.55%, and 0.45% for walking, 96.28%, 99.24%, and 0.77% for fast walking, and 82.49%, 99.83%, and 0.17% for running, respectively. The evaluation shows that the proposed method is effective in reducing errors in HR estimation from PPG signals with motion artifacts in intensive motion situations such as fast walking and running.
Zinc and ring finger 3 (ZNRF3) is a transmembrane E3 ubiquitin ligase that targets Wnt receptors for ubiquitination and lysosomal degradation. Previously, we showed that dephosphorylation of an ...endocytic tyrosine motif (4Y motif) in ZNRF3 by protein tyrosine phosphatase receptor-type kappa (PTPRK) promotes ZNRF3 internalization and Wnt receptor degradation (Chang et al 2020). However, a responsible protein tyrosine kinase(s) (PTK) phosphorylating the 4Y motif remained elusive. Here we identify the proto-oncogene MET (mesenchymal-epithelial transition factor) as a 4Y kinase. MET binds to ZNRF3 and induces 4Y phosphorylation, stimulated by the MET ligand HGF (hepatocyte growth factor, scatter factor). HGF-MET signaling reduces ZNRF3-dependent Wnt receptor degradation thereby enhancing Wnt/β-catenin signaling. Conversely, depletion or pharmacological inhibition of MET promotes the internalization of ZNRF3 and Wnt receptor degradation. We conclude that HGF-MET signaling phosphorylates- and PTPRK dephosphorylates ZNRF3 to regulate ZNRF3 internalization, functioning as a rheostat for Wnt signaling that may offer novel opportunities for therapeutic intervention.
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