An environmentally friendly and low-cost chitosan-containing polysaccharide (CP) composite ZIF-8/CP was designed and prepared based on the difficulty of separating the traditional adsorbent from the water phase. ZIF-8/CP was synthesized through in-situ growth approach. The physical, chemical and structure properties of ZIF-8/CP were determined through a series of characterization methods, including SEM, FT-IR and PXRD. The effects of touch time, pH, temperature, and coexisting ions on adsorption were assessed. In addition, kinetics, isotherms of adsorption and thermodynamics were examined. The data of isotherms for adsorption indicated that the adsorption of ZIF-8/CP on MG was similar to the Langmuir model, with a maximum adsorption capacity of 1428.57 mg/g. Moreover, the kinetic parameters were consistent with the pseudo- 2nd-order equation. Thermodynamic studies (ΔG < 0, ΔH > 0) demonstrated a heat-absorbing and spontaneous adsorption process. Our study reveals that ZIF-8/CP has good adsorption properties and environmental properties.

This study aimed to prepare kombucha, a fermented tea beverage, containing Dendropanax morbiferus (DM) leaves and roots, and analyze its antioxidant and intracellular activities. We compared the pH change, total acidity, radical scavenging activity, and oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) of kombucha fermented with black tea alone and that with added DM leaves or roots during fermentation. Using RAW 264.7, we evaluated the effects of kombucha containing different DM parts on nitric oxide (NO) production and inflammation-related cytokine content in cells. Kombucha containing ethanol extracts of DM leaves (BTK-E-DML) and roots (BTK-E-DMR) showed higher radical scavenging activity and ORAC 3 d after fermentation than that prepared from black tea alone (BTK-Ori). In an in vitro experiment using RAW 264.7, samples were treated with 8 mg/mL kombucha considering cytotoxicity; the lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced NO content significantly reduced after BTK-E-DML and BTK-EDMR treatments compared with that after BTK-Ori treatment. Additionally, the levels of interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha, which were LPS-stimulated inflammatory cytokines, significantly decreased in cells treated with BTK-E-DML and BTK-E-DMR 15 d after fermentation compared with those treated with BTK-Ori. In conclusion, these results demonstrate that kombucha fermented with the leaves and roots of DM increases antioxidant activity and can significantly regulate inflammatory responses at the cellular level.

The original third places concept conveyed the offering of much-needed settings for social comfort, thereby complementing the absence of equal opportunities at home (1st place) or in the workplace (2nd place). 3rd place is a crucial term to connect customers’ social needs, perception of service encounters, and the service provider’s managerial operation. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, various distancing forces have impeded previously intense social interactions featuring human-human contact. The increased use of contactless services and social distancing measures has impacted these. Such measurements refer to mandatory actions to maintain a fixed physical distance from others (i.e., two meters or six feet) via seating arrangements or suggested signage. While such compliance practices successfully limited the spread of Covid-19, they were also a signal of regulated behaviors and acceptable personal boundaries. The current study addressed this question by conducting experiments in three scenarios: a café, restaurant, and sports stadium. Following Pine and Gilmore’s experience typology, the three represent a passive absorptive experience, an active absorptive experience, and an immersive experience.

Webpage cookies collect and authorize access to users’ online footprints and regulate the data authorization for access, sharing, and usage. Data authorization, which is built based on, but exceeding cookies protocol, enables personalized recommendations under the framework of data-driven content-user matching in a way against customer privacy invasiveness and data breaches. However, gaps exist in how users’ desire for a personalized experience and the site’s perceived ethics contribute to the site-trust and cookies acceptance of categories at each type of site and how businesses’ reward incentives and cookie-based controls may intensify the willingness to contribute to the user data donation continuously.

The purpose of this study was to examine job competencies for sales training program development to maximize profits in fashion retailing. An empirical online survey was conducted from September to December 2019, and data was collected from 200 salespeople and store managers working in fashion stores. Results were analyzed using frequency analysis, factor analysis, variance analysis, and regression analysis with SPSS 25.0. The major findings of this study were as follows. First, the most important job competencies identified by fashion store managers were: sales sense know-how, customer service skills, and sales person’s fashion style sense, product knowledge, fashion marketing and customer management. The job competency factors for sales training programs included empathy with the customer, product knowledge, communications and networking, basic job requirement, and sales skills. These five factors positively influenced the employment intentions and expectations of work performance of graduates. These factors also had a positive influence on the need of sales training program and intention to participate in retraining. Store managers in fashion retail thought the most appropriate period for on-the-job training was either 2-4 days or more than 1 week. The results of this study can be used as a base to develop training programs for job efficiency for salespeople in fashion retailing.

In this paper, graphene-coated Al powders prepared by in situ reduction method were directly used for cold spraying, obtaining a graphene-reinforced Al matrix composite coating with more compact structure and better performance. Cross-sectional analysis revealed that compared with the pure Al powders, the graphene-coated Al powders were more severely deformed, and the resulting coating was denser and its porosity was reduced by over 80%. The hardness of the graphene-coated Al coating was increased by 40%, and its brine immersion time was prolonged by nearly three times. However, the graphene increases the pitting sensitivity of the Al coating; so, the enhanced corrosion resistance of the graphene-coated Al coating is mainly attributed to the improvement of its structure densification.

In aluminum electrolysis, sodium penetration into carbon cathodes is considered as the main cause of cell failure and efficiency loss, but the detailed mechanism is still not definitely clear. Since the macroscopic properties of material depend on the microscopic structures, a large-scale atomistic model of anthracite cathodes was constructed to represent several important structural characteristics. Combined with Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations, the adsorption and diffusion behaviors of sodium were investigated, respectively. The results suggest that sodium adsorption mainly occurs in the larger micro-pores with the range of 10–19 Å, while it accords well with to type-I Langmuir adsorption model. The sodium is found to be preferentially adsorbed in arch-like structures with 5- or 7-membered rings or around heteroatom, especially oxygen. Moreover, the movements of sodium through carbon matrix mainly depend on the continuous diffusive motion while most sodium particles tend to be trapped in voids with small mobility. The calculated transport diffusion coefficient is equal to 6.132 × 10− 10 m2/ s, which is in outstanding agreement with experimental results. This fundamental research would contribute to the understanding of sodium penetration mechanism and the optimization of cathode industry in the future.

The US has huge interests in Hong Kong. In 1992, a few years before China resumed its sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, the US adopted the U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992. The keynote of the Act is to enhance the cooperation with and maintain the treatment to Hong Kong. This tune has changed in the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, which is obviously the response of the US to widespread protests in Hong Kong arising from the Extradition Bill proposed by the Government of Hong Kong SAR. The new law includes several negative elements. It marks a change in the US policy towards Hong Kong and furthermore represents a change in the US policy towards China. The new law should not merely be understood as the US’s support for democracy and human rights in Hong Kong. Instead, it should be considered as a major leverage which the US may maneuver to engage a rising China.

Arthrospira platensis has been reported to contain a variety of substances such as phycocyanin, β-carotene, vitamin E and other carotenoids. In this study, zebrafish were treated with indoor cultivation spirulina ethanol extracts(ICAE) to determine toxicity(coagulation rate, hatching rate, heart rate). We used the DCFH-DA staining method to detect the effect of reactive oxygen species(ROS) generation on lipopolysaccharide(LPS)-induced zebrafish embryos ROS various concentrations(0.01, 0.05, 0.1, 0.5mg/ml) of ICAE. Cell toxicity was measured by WST-1 assay on RAW 264.7 macrophage cell line. Also, measured the inhibitory effect of nitric oxide(NO) and prostaglandin E₂(PGE₂) production in RAW264.7 macrophages induced by LPS at various concentrations of ICAE. The results of embryo coagulation rate, hatching rate, heart rate of zebrafish at various(0.01, 0.05, 0.1mg/ml) of ICAE was no toxicity. The ICAE treated group had an inhibitory effect on NO and PGE₂ production compared and decreased with concentration. The results of this study ethanol extract of Arthrospira platensis has an anti-inflammatory effect and suggest that is worthy of use cosmetics for skin protection.

Theoretical Background Online tribalism is an unofficial network in virtual community due to common interests and affiliation to a topic, a belief, a figure, a ritual, or a culture (A. Taute and Sierra 2014, Badrinarayanan, Sierra and Taute 2014, Hamilton and Hewer 2010). In an interconnected world, consumers influence each other by initiating, spreading, appraising, receiving and internalising beliefs via social network and shape self - attitude and information status (Hilder 2004). These widely-existing phenomena suggest more efforts to be completed to address the gaps in knowledge in the following aspects: First, the information dissemination process should be understood with a stronger support of quantifying approaches to bring forward a systematic understanding to accommodate a wide range of drives for the complex social learning and assimilating procedure (Feliciani, Flache and Tolsma 2017, Macy et al. 2003, Huet, Deffuant and Jager 2008). For example, many qualitative research such as digital anthropology and netnography abound to explain the motivations, process, and outcomes of disseminating messages in the texture of social group (Flache and Macy 2011, Granovetter 1977). As the consequence, many tentative explanations have attempted to focus on the utilities of information circulation (Dupor, Kitamura and Tsuruga 2010, Gruhl et al. 2004, Kim and Baek 2014) and social influences (Gupta and Kim 2004, Kim and Baek 2014) but ended up with only incapability of modelling and quantifying the process. Within this trend, notably, two factors underpinning the changes in virtual community, i.e., individual’s information utility, motivation of seeking for conformity, remains a secret. In addition, it’s unclear that why and how active customers behave different from inactive ones from a perspective of information flow and social learning. Second, there is a lack of knowledge of how the intrinsic connections and dialectical dynamic between self-solicited individuals take place and adapt in the growth and evolution. With the tool of digitals, paradoxically, the essential ambiguity of digital openness and closure (Phelps et al. 2004), viability and tribalism (A. Taute and Sierra 2014, Badrinarayanan et al. 2014, Hamilton, Schlosser and Chen 2017), enculturation and acculturation, devastatingly remains under-investigated. Among these various perspectives to explain and model the dynamics of online community and social learning, there should exist a general framework that combines decisive bases of recipients and senders with various motives and constraints, with both subjectivity and objectivity. Opinion dissemination can therefore be understood not only as an objective procedure, but also with subjective intervention of participants where cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural factors intertwine to influence the collective learning pattern. Thirdly, some contextual findings are to be tested how the conditional relations may be established under different social settings. For example, theories show that engaged consumers usually exhibit enhanced consumer loyalty, satisfaction, empowerment, connection, emotional bonding, trust and commitment. However, literature rarely provide an answer that within a social group, how are traditions, patterns, communications, rewards, and punishments formed and evolved to lead to either conformity or dispute. To address the above gaps, this research adopts an interactive approach to deconstruct information into inputs (motivation, potential), action (interpersonal connection), and output (utility and identity). This research delivers several simulated experiments to identify how the evolution of customer opinions evolves out various patterns of self-efficacy and social recognition. The author assembles four aspects of input variables, including information utility, accordance utility, self-efficacy, and social status of consumers, and test the overall information prosperity and propensity of the social earning with different activeness levels. Findings The analytical firstly results show that active individuals exist in social group as the information hubs to dismiss the information and share a higher level of delight of owning knowledge and over time, become similar in knowledge standard. Consequently, a wider connection with and influence on mass audience of active members usually lead to a higher psychographic gain of attitudinal accordance compared with inactive and isolated ones in group. Secondly, at the individual level, the author found that the activeness in tribal group obviously result in a higher level of both self-recognition and social recognition on average. This pattern is consistent with vast literature in ethnography. And the relation between the activeness level and the self- and social-recognition level is positive. While at the aggregate level, it’s investigated that active individuals of online tribes have a stronger inclination, evidenced by a stronger propensity of spreading message, to further generate messages to impact other more profoundly when compared with inactive ones. The simulation experiment also indicated that a few contextual relations between variables, e.g., information-based and accordance -based delights, self-recognition and social recognition, information prosperity and transmission propensity, etc., moderated by the member activeness. It’s also found that extreme active individuals have a much higher marginal increase in accordance originated from the growing information volume owned in the process of influencing the society. Not coincidentally, their overall social recognition and attitudinal accordance from the group are significantly higher by the growth of personal knowledge. Conclusions This research contributes to the literature on the drives of tribal dynamics and its’ consequences on the changes of information valence and attitudinal changes and further to this, how the engagement level of individuals will influence these micro and macro outcomes. Notably, by adopting a self-reasoning method, the motives and outcomes are incorporated in a simulated method to develop not only the individual and the aggregate level of outcomes. This study also bears methodological significance by examining a series of hypotheses under the setting of a simulated online community. These findings suggest a series of contextual causality moderated between the characteristics, intentions and actions.

On June 27, 2013, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled in its efforts to resolve the global book famine of visually impaired persons by providing a series of copyright exceptions that facilitate access of the visually impaired to copyright works. As a member country of the WIPO, China signed but has not ratified the Marrakesh Treaty. However, it is important that China implement the treaty provisions into its copyright law before submitting ratification to the WIPO. Chinese lawmakers are thus advised to incorporate provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty into the national copyright legislations. This article analyzes the reasons for the global book famine of the visually impaired, examines the key provisions in the Marrakesh Treaty, and provides recommendations to incorporate the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty into the Chinese copyright laws and regulations.