Insurance and unit trust (also known as mutual funds) are high-involvement financial products that require investors to hold for long term to gain desired returns. These financial products are also considered unsought products, which require salespeople’s personal touch with their potential customers to make sales. Therefore, the relationship between salespeople and their potential or existing customers becomes crucial in the sales of insurance and unit trust. In theoretical terms, this relationship represents business ties. A strong business ties between the salespeople and the customers enable them to exchange resources and knowledge, and co-create values in their business relationships. Such exchange and co-creation of values are desirable in a business network. Weak ties are irregular and infrequent exchanges, creating structural holes that bring about an opportunity for bridging but have not yet been capitalized.
We review the observational evidence for the existence of a warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). We expect that the morphology of this material is similar to that of cosmic rays and magnetic fields in large-scale structure, i.e., filaments connecting clusters of galaxies. Direct evidence for the WHIM, either in emission or absorption, is weak.