Despite the hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI), the potential of AI in customer relationship management (CRM) remains underexplored in academia. A between-subjects experiment examined the ...effects of the type of relationship (virtual assistantship versus virtual friendship) consumers build with AI-enabled chatbots on brand personality perception, parasocial interaction (PSI), and CRM. The main effects of the relationship type on brand personality perception appeared for competent brand personality, but not for sincere brand personality. The consumer-chatbot relationship type had effects on CRM-related outcomes (behavioral intention, satisfaction, and trust) through competent brand personality. Consumers who interacted with a friend chatbot experienced stronger PSI with the chatbot, and the relationship type had an influence on brand personality perception through PSI. This mediating effect of PSI was observed for both brand personalities - competence and sincerity. The moderating role of ideological views (technopians versus luddites) in explaining the effect of the relationship type on brand personality perception was detected for sincere brand personality. AI designers and marketers need to develop AI user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) along with marketing strategies that not only can appeal to technopians ready to adopt innovative AI customer representatives but also can ultimately help alleviate luddites’ AI anxiety in the emerging “feeling economy” envisioned by Rust and Huang.
•Chatbots can form virtual assistantship versus virtual friendship with customers.•Chatbots can represent a brand in customer relationship management (CRM).•Brand personality perception and parasocial interaction (PSI) affect CRM.•Virtual friend chatbots induce stronger PSI than virtual assistant chatbots.•Technopians and luddites respond differently to AI-manifested brand personality.
Why do people give and help others in face of their own mortality salience? The existential struggle with the awareness of death impacts the gamut of human cognition, emotion, and behavior. This ...multi‐method research (∑N = 1,219) explains the psychosocial impact of COVID‐19‐related mortality salience on altruism. Drawing from terror management theory, two studies tested death‐thought accessibility, mortality salience, and anxiety buffer hypotheses. Study 1 (cross‐sectional survey), using structural equation modeling, confirms death anxiety and fear are predictors of powerlessness and materialism which, in turn, predict charitable donations. Study 2 (between‐subjects experiment) confirms the causal effects of COVID‐19‐induced mortality salience on altruism. Controlling income and socioeconomic status, people in the mortality salience treatment condition indicate greater monetary donations ($), ratio of prosocial (altruistic) to proself (egocentric) spending (%), donation of time (hour), monetary valuation of time (hourly rate = $/hour), and economic value of donated time (hourly rate*hour) than the controls. These effects are mediated by powerlessness. Moderating effects of relevant individual difference factors are significant: the greedier, more selfish, narcissistic, materialistic, and system‐justifying the donor is, the higher monetary donations, volunteer time, and perceived value of donated time are, only when the COVID‐19‐induced mortality is made salient but not in the controls. Environmental and dispositional factors jointly influence vulnerability to mortality salience. The paradox of egocentrism and altruism, as an evolutionarily adaptive protective buffer against existential insecurity for social and cultural animals, can help revitalize resilience, thus shedding some lights on the sociopsychological mechanism of consumers' subjective well‐being. Implications for consumer affairs, social marketers, and policymakers are discussed.
The differential code bias (DCB) of global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) affects precise ionospheric modeling and applications. In this paper, daily DCBs of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite ...System (BDS) are estimated and investigated from 2-year multi-GNSS network observations (2013–2014) based on global ionospheric maps (GIMs) from the Center for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE), which are compared with Global Positioning System (GPS) results. The DCB of BDS satellites is a little less stable than GPS solutions, especially for geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites. The BDS GEO observations decrease the precision of inclined geosynchronous satellite orbit (IGSO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) DCB estimations. The RMS of BDS satellites DCB decreases to about 0.2 ns when we remove BDS GEO observations. Zero-mean condition effects are not the dominant factor for the higher RMS of BDS satellites DCB. Although there are no obvious secular variations in the DCB time series, sub-nanosecond variations are visible for both BDS and GPS satellites DCBs during 2013–2014. For satellites in the same orbital plane, their DCB variations have similar characteristics. In addition, variations in receivers DCB in the same region are found with a similar pattern between BDS and GPS. These variations in both GPS and BDS DCBs are mainly related to the estimated error from ionospheric variability, while the BDS DCB intrinsic variation is in sub-nanoseconds.
Compared to atoms, molecules possess additional degrees of freedom that can be exploited in fundamental tests, ultracold chemistry, and engineering new quantum phases in many-body systems. Here, we ...review the recent progress in creating and manipulating ultracold bialkali molecules to study quantum gases of polar molecules.
Alectinib, a potent ALK tyrosine kinase inhibitor, was more effective and somewhat less toxic than crizotinib when used as primary therapy in patients with
ALK
-positive non–small-cell lung cancer. ...Importantly, it reduced the risk of CNS relapse.
Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disorder that affects ~2%–3% of the worldwide population. Inappropriate and excessive activation of endosomal Toll-like receptors 7, 8, and 9 (TLRs 7–9) at ...the psoriatic site has been shown to play a pathogenic role in the onset of psoriasis. Macrophage is a major inflammatory cell type that can be differentiated into phenotypes M1 and M2. M1 macrophages produce proinflammatory cytokines, and M2 macrophages produce anti-inflammatory cytokines. The balance between these two types of macrophages determines the progression of various inflammatory diseases; however, whether macrophage polarization plays a role in psoriatic inflammation activated by endosomal TLRs has not been investigated. In this study, we investigated the function and mechanism of macrophages related to the pathogenic role of TLRs 7–9 in the progression of psoriasis. Analysis of clinical data in database revealed significantly increased expression of macrophage markers and inflammatory cytokines in psoriatic tissues over those in normal tissues. In animal studies, depletion of macrophages in mice ameliorated imiquimod, a TLR 7 agonist-induced psoriatic response. Imiquimod induced expression of genes and cytokines that are signature of M1 macrophage in the psoriatic lesions. In addition, treatment with this TLR 7 agonist shifted macrophages in the psoriatic lesions to a higher M1/M2 ratio. Both of the exogenous and endogenous TLR 7–9 ligands activated M1 macrophage polarization. M1 macrophages expressed higher levels of proinflammatory cytokines and TLRs 7–9 than M2 macrophages. These results suggest that by rendering macrophages into a more inflammatory status and capable of response to their ligands in the psoriatic sites, TLR 7–9 activation drives them to participate in endosomal TLR-activated psoriatic inflammation, resulting in an amplified inflammatory response. Our results also suggest that blocking M1 macrophage polarization could be a strategy which enables inhibition of psoriatic inflammation activated by these TLRs.
We report Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observations of four high-redshift dusty star-forming galaxy candidates selected from far-infrared (FIR)/submillimeter observations in the COSMOS ...field. We securely detect all galaxies in the continuum and spectroscopically confirm them at z = 3.62-5.85 using ALMA 3 mm line scans, detecting multiple CO and/or C i transitions. This includes the most distant dusty galaxy currently known in the COSMOS field, ID85001929 at z = 5.847. These redshifts are lower than we had expected, as these galaxies have substantially colder dust temperatures (i.e., their spectral energy distributions peak at longer rest-frame wavelengths) than most literature sources at z > 4. The observed cold dust temperatures are best understood as evidence for optically thick dust continuum in the FIR, rather than the result of low star formation efficiency with rapid metal enrichment. We provide direct evidence that, given their cold spectral energy distributions, cosmic microwave background (CMB) plays a significant role in biasing their observed Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) slopes to unlikely steep values and, possibly, reducing their CO fluxes by a factor of two. We recover standard RJ slopes when the CMB contribution is taken into account. High-resolution ALMA imaging shows compact morphology and evidence for mergers. This work reveals a population of cold dusty star-forming galaxies that were underrepresented in current surveys and are even colder than typical main-sequence galaxies at the same redshift. High FIR dust optical depth might be a widespread feature of compact starbursts at any redshift.
In recent years, 3D point cloud has gained increasing attention as a new representation for objects. However, the raw point cloud is often noisy and contains outliers. Therefore, it is crucial to ...remove the noise and outliers from the point cloud while preserving the features, in particular, its fine details. This paper makes an attempt to present a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art methods for filtering point cloud. The existing methods are categorized into seven classes, which concentrate on their common and obvious traits. An experimental evaluation is also performed to demonstrate robustness, effectiveness and computational efficiency of several methods used widely in practice.
•To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review paper in the literature that focuses on the filtering algorithms for 3D point cloud at present.•A comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art filtering methods for 3D point clouds is summarized.•Experiments concerning on performance comparison of several widely used approaches are carried out.
The fermentation of xylose is essential for the bioconversion of lignocellulose to fuels and chemicals, but wild-type strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae do not metabolize xylose, so researchers have ...engineered xylose metabolism in this yeast. Glucose transporters mediate xylose uptake, but no transporter specific for xylose has yet been identified. Over-expressing genes for aldose (xylose) reductase, xylitol dehydrogenase and moderate levels of xylulokinase enable xylose assimilation and fermentation, but a balanced supply of NAD(P) and NAD(P)H must be maintained to avoid xylitol production. Reducing production of NADPH by blocking the oxidative pentose phosphate cycle can reduce xylitol formation, but this occurs at the expense of xylose assimilation. Respiration is critical for growth on xylose by both native xylose-fermenting yeasts and recombinant S, cerevisiae. Anaerobic growth by recombinant mutants has been reported. Reducing the respiration capacity of xylose-metabolizing yeasts increases ethanol production. Recently, two routes for arabinose metabolism have been engineered in S. cerevisiae and adapted strains of Pichia stipitis have been shown to ferment hydrolysates with ethanol yields of 0.45 g g(-1) sugar consumed, so commercialization seems feasible for some applications.
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