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.

The temperature (T) and entropy (S) fields of baryonic gas, or intergalactic medium (IGM), in the ACDM cosmology are analyzed using simulation samples produced by a hybrid cosmological hydrodynamic/N-body code based on the weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme. We demonstrate that, in the nonlinear regime, the dynamical similarity between the IGM and dark matter will be broken in the presence of strong shocks in the IGM. The heating and entropy production by the shocks breaks the IGM into multiple phases. The multiphase and non-Gaussianity of the IGM field would be helpful to account for the high-temperature and high-entropy gas observed in groups and clusters with low-temperature IGM observed by Lyα forest lines and the intermittency observed by the spikes of quasi-stellar object's absorption spectrum.

The surface treatment of C-type isotropic pitch-based carbon fiber was carried out by anodic oxidation in 5 wt% NH4NO3 electrolyte. The changes of fiber surface and carbon fiber/ABS resin composites were characterized by SEM, XPS and mechanical properties test. The oxygen functional groups on the surface, such as hydroxyl (-C-OH), carboxyl (-COOH) groups etc., increased after oxidation. Tensile strength, flexural strength and modulus of carbon fiber/ABS composites were also enhanced. However, the impact strength decreased with the improvement of the surface adhesion between CF and matrix.

The C-type mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber (C-MPCF) was prepared throuch C-type spinnerette and compared the mechanical properties to those of round type mesophase pitch fiber (R-MPCF) and C-type isotropic pitch fiber (C-iPCF). The tensile strength and modulus of C-MPCF were about 18.6% and 35.7% higher than those of R-MPCF. The tensile strength of C-MPCF was 62% higher than that of C-iPCF of the same 8μm thickness because of more linear transverse texture, which could be easily converted to graphitic crystallinity during heat treatment. The torsional rigidity of C-MPCF was 2.37 times higher than that of R-MPCF. The electrical resistivity of C-MPCF was 8μΩ·m. The C-iPCF shows far lower electrical resistivity than R-iPCF as well as the mesophase carbon fiber because of better alignment of texture to the fiber axis.

Background : Invitro antioxidant activity, polyphenol and flavonoid aglycone contents in black and green tea products of balloon flower leaves were investigated to provide valuable information for the further development and utilization of resources of Platycodon grandiflorum. Methods and Results : Flavonoid aglycone contents were investigated using HPLC (SHIMADZU, Japan) with a hypersil ODS column (125 mm × 4 mm, 5-μm particle, HP). DPPH and ABTS radical scavenging activities were measured by method of Lee & Lee (2004) with slight modification. Antioxidant activity, polyphenol and flavonoid contents in green tea were significantly higher than these in black tea. PC analysis indicated that first principal components explained 79.9% of the total variability for five traits investigated. PC2 explained 19.7% of the variation. Conclusion : It can be concluded from these results that these characteristics can reveal the active compound variation of black and green tea products of balloon flower leaves. These results provide scientific evidence for the utilization of balloon flower leaves.