Proprietary brands are a major vehicle for producer profits: consumers have been shown willing to pay a considerable “brand premium” for a branded product over an otherwise identical unbranded product. Prior literature has implicitly assumed that only producers develop brands. In this paper, we report that user communities also can and do develop strong proprietary brands capable of commanding ...

Free acidity of aqueous solutions was initially defined in 1909 by Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen as pH = −lgcH+ (c/mol·dm−3 or m/mol·kg−1 of the free hydrogen ions in solution, H+) soon (1910) was changed to pH = paH+ = −lgaH+, integrating the new concepts of activity, ai and activity coefficient γi, for the ionic species i under concern, H+ in this case; it is ai = −lg(miγi). Since individual i...

Concern for the suffering of others is central to moral decision making. How humans evaluate others' suffering, relative to their own suffering, is unknown. We investigated this question by inviting subjects to trade off profits for themselves against pain experienced either by themselves or an anonymous other person. Subjects made choices between different amounts of money and different number...

Anaesthetists use specific drugs peri-operatively to try to decrease the incidence and severity of postoperative pain and of postoperative nausea and vomiting. These drugs are usually administered pre-operatively with the premedication, or intra-operatively when the patient is still anaesthetised. The aim of this approach is to prevent the occurrence of intolerable pain or to avoid any nausea o...

The Sun provides approximately 100,000 terawatts to the Earth which is about 10000 times more than the present rate of the world's present energy consumption. Photovoltaic cells are being increasingly used to tap into this huge resource and will play a key role in future sustainable energy systems. So far, solid-state junction devices, usually made of silicon, crystalline or amorphous, and prof...

Tlie vast amount of money invested in school properties and annual budgets, cannot be well expended unless the children are in a proper physical condition to receive instruction. Unless children receive and absorb the instruction presented they cannot; be properly educated. Unless children are properly educated they do not become useful citizens; instead they, are apt to develop idle and crimin...

The last few years have witnessed the emergence of electronic marketplaces as players that leverage new technologies to facilitate B2B internet-mediated collaborative business. Nowadays these players are enlarging their services, from simple intermediation to include new inter-organizational relationships. The interest of this paper is to investigate the shift in the role and evolution of servi...

A summary definition of some 70 descriptions of intelligence provides a definition for all other organisms including plants that stresses fitness. Barbara McClintock, a plant biologist, posed the notion of the 'thoughtful cell' in her Nobel prize address. The systems structure necessary for a thoughtful cell is revealed by comparison of the interactome and connectome. The plant root cap, a grou...

Adding nanoparticles to a host polymer can lead performance improvements that be twice as beneficial the environment: first, sustainable nanocomposites based on bioplastics or recycled plastics could replace ubiquitous petroleum-based polymers; second, substantial plastic saving achieved by profiting from superior specific properties of nanocomposites. Nevertheless, inherent environmental burde...

Profiting from the powerful feature extraction and representation capabilities of deep learning (DL), aerial image semantic segmentation based on neural networks (DNNs) has achieved remarkable success in recent years. Nevertheless, security robustness DNNs deserve attention when dealing with safety-critical earth observation tasks. As a typical attack pattern adversarial machine (AML), backdoor...